Taken For A Debt: A Mafia Romance (The Taken Duet 1)

Devin stepped up close to me, bracing me with his body. I was trying to get my groggy body to launch a protest when he slung his jacket over my shoulders. I hadn’t even realised yet I was shivering.

“Could have just given me a proper jacket of my own,” I muttered. I was staying up now mostly through the pressure of my shoulder against his, and the warmth spreading through my body at that contact was making me feel even less able to stand up on my own. I strained to keep my head from lolling onto his chest, covered by that obnoxiously fresh-smelling shirt.

“Come on, Julia, you know by now it doesn’t work like that.” He moved back, and I thought for a second he was going to let me fall in a heap to rub in the error of my ways, but then he had an arm over my shoulders and one of my hands in his, and he walked me to the gate, where he… pulled something out of his pocket that caused the thing to make its unlocking click when he passed it over the sensor box.

“Your parents need to keep better track of what exploits are available for the security hardware they install,” he said when he took in my slack jaw. He rubbed my arm hard, sending a shiver through me that wasn’t related to the cold and was an unwelcome distraction from my sudden horror. “Now, I’m going to get you inside and then bring the car up. If we leave it out on the street there’s no saying what hoodlums will come around and mess with it.”

I didn’t want to walk up that driveway with him, but when he pushed the gate aside I had to move. What use was it indulging in fear of my own house?

I was expecting Devin to just break in once we arrived at the front door, since he’d clearly been able to deactivate the alarms, but he stepped back and said, “The code?”

“I thought you did something to the alarm,” I protested.

“I had someone come up and repair everything those buffoons did to it.” Devin shook his head. “I’m sorry, it was an offence to let anyone with such low standards onto your property. A genuine mistake on my part, and one I won’t repeat.”

He wasn’t apologising for kidnapping me, just the quality of the kidnapping job. I half-wondered if he’d pull out a feedback form at the end of this, asking me to Strongly Agree or Strongly Disagree on various elements of the experience.

I didn’t think he was spying on me when I punched my code in, but he probably didn’t need to. If he couldn’t hire another team to sidestep the protections, he was probably holding onto some other Bond-style device that was feeding the numbers directly into it as I entered them.

He left me in the foyer with his jacket while he excused himself to park the car properly inside our grounds—and I knew it was all about him wanting to piss on our territory, never mind that cute excuse about hoodlums, in this neighbourhood.

While he was gone, I could run, kick off those stupid shoes and go hide somewhere out of the house so he couldn’t find me. I could call the police, assuming he hadn’t found some way to deactivate our phone service.

But what would the point be? If he wanted to find me, he would find me eventually, and he didn’t seem inclined to hurt me unless I started something serious.

It pissed me off, but the way to solve this problem was to either go along with his plan, or tell him I wouldn’t. I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t respect my choice… I just had to make one.

I heard a light tread on the steps outside and realised I’d just been standing there for ages, sagging like I was twice as drunk as was actually the case.

I needed to get it together before he saw me like this. I put in a tremendous effort and got myself a more appropriate level of upright, but I could tell when I turned to face him coming in that he had a pretty clear idea of my mental state. It figured he would have some experience with fractured women.

He steered me into the kitchen and sat me down on one of the stools at the island bench, and prepared another tea for me, selecting something herbal from my mother’s wooden teabag box. It was unsettling watching him move with such ease around our kitchen at first, like he’d been there enough times to know where everything was, but after I’d seen enough I was certain that wasn’t the case. Devin was just very good at feeling his way around a situation, working out where everything was quickly enough that it just seemed natural.

I shouldn’t… but there I was again wondering how he would be working his hands around a woman. If it would feel different to the kids I’d had encounters with before.

That was definitely my state of inebriation talking. I was starting to slide off the edge of the stool just thinking about it.

Devin slid the steaming cup across the bench and sat down, leaving one stool between us. “It may not mean anything from me, but I am sorry you’ve been caught up in this.”

I directed my resentment at the drink. “Not enough to not kidnap me though.”

“I’m sorry you were unprepared, not for m

y part in it. Your parents should have paid their debts, and they should have been honest with you about their lives. You could have come into contact with it in a far more confronting way and you wouldn’t have had any way of defending yourself.”

I swigged the tea like it was alcoholic, and it was bitter enough that it almost worked. “Do I want to know?”

“There are plenty of ways to use a young attractive daughter to recoup a debt.” Devin’s voice was so hard it made my head hurt both hearing and processing the words. I pushed my cup away and put my head down on the bench, on his jacket I’d taken off and laid alongside me.

I stiffened at Devin’s hand on my back through my thin blouse, but probably not as much as I would have completely sober. “Your parents seem to have carelessness with precious things under their care as a primary character trait.”

“You would care more, then.” I realised my words were muffled in his jacket and I was liable to drool on it besides, so I sat up and repeated myself. “If you had a daughter like me.”

Devin’s eyes on me were a touch investigative, like usual, but in a less piercing manner than back when we’d first faced off. With him hovering over my shoulder, I felt like I was being enclosed in a soothing blanket. “I don’t want to think of you in terms of a daughter, Julia, but if I were to make you a part of my family, I would make sure you had everything you needed to feel safe.”

Boys had promised a lot of things to me back in the days when I was going around and selecting boys I knew would promise a lot of things to me. None of them had ever offered anything of this value. None of them were able to see that I needed anything, with my glamorous home life I pumped up by hardly letting them see any of it.

Finally, I stared up at Devin and realised that someone, even if it was a kneecap-smashing mafia loan shark who possibly had some personal issues of his own… someone saw past the things most people thought were all there was to see.