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

I twitched and yelped at the unexpected scrape of stubble against my armpit. My hands were still tied above my head. The man who had stayed still to watch took a sharp step forward, but I felt the man holding me move, and he froze in place like a weird masked statue.

Masked… What I had just felt was definitely facial hair, not the wool of a balaclava. Now I could feel only a pair of lips brushing against my ear.

“So we’ve got a van to get into, and you can either walk in on your own feet or be thrown in. As you prefer.”

No sweetheart or even assurances that he didn’t care which option I went for… he just seemed to want to speak as little as possible. I knew it was a bad idea but I couldn’t help myself: I turned my head towards him, so our noses brushed, which made him start backwards. I got a

glimpse of a graceful jawline, a surprisingly round pair of eyes that were little more than dark pools in the low light—then the hand that had been on my hip grabbed my own jaw, turning my face forward again.

“Walk,” he said, “or be dragged.”

“I could scream,” I said, staring at the dark shape of my house over my back fence, holding it in my view and trying to make my intention to get back there as strong as possible. It was only a few months ago that I had realised I was no longer afraid to sleep without my bedroom lamp turned up a little.

“I could kill you,” came the reply, straight in my ear… was it my imagination, or was his tone a bit warmer than before?

It was probably my imagination. I was desperate to find any avenue for connecting with this man, but he sounded like he’d done so many kidnappings in his life already he was kind of bored with them now. I didn’t know what I could do to attract his attention as being different from all those other girls, and I didn’t dare try too many random things in case I desensitised him further.

I had no choice but to agree to go. It was a bad choice, but there was no helping that.

“I’ll walk,” I said, and he just turned me around, my house swinging out of view, and started marching me forward without any more words at all. I had to concentrate very hard to avoid putting my feet down on anything that would hurt them, and I was finding it hard to ignore how closely the man with the big eyes was holding me, so no further ideas about how to deal with this situation came to me.

Beyond an old tree at the edge of the reserve slumping sideways to provide a conveniently-shaped cover, there was a van painted black. The two men who had gone ahead opened doors so silent they had probably been oiled about five minutes prior, and my captor pushed me in so I stumbled on the way up and sprawled across the floor on my face, unable to right myself without the use of my hands.

He and the other masked man stepped in after me, and I guess the other two closed up and went around to the cabin, I was too busy squirming on the floor to keep track. I managed to roll myself onto my back at least, staring up at one balaclava-covered face and the pretty face of the man who hadn’t been the first to suggest he could kill me… but was the first I believed could do it and not think twice.

The van started up, the vibrations making my head jitter painfully against the floor.

The pretty man crouched next to my head. My eyes fixed on the crease running down the front of his nearest pant leg: they were proper suit pants, not the ratty trackpants the other man now sitting on a bench in the corner of the space was wearing. He was wearing a business shirt and jacket to match, more rumpled than his pants especially around the collar… probably because of how he’d been holding me.

I stiffened as he pulled out a knife, but I knew crying and pleading wouldn’t divert this man from his intended course of action, so I tried to stare up at him dispassionately. I couldn’t tell how well I was doing, but his lips twitched at something he saw down there.

“We’ll get you into a more dignified position,” he said, “and then we’re going to talk about what you can do to make sure you get out of this situation as quickly and safely as possible.”

That filled me with hope again. “If you want money, my parents will be able to pay. They’ll give you anything you ask for.”

“Hm.” He paused with one hand around my wrists, and his lips moved in a way that actually looked like a smile. “You seem like such a trustworthy girl, so I wonder then why they didn’t give me what I was asking for any of the other times I asked for it over the past four months.”

“I’m sorry?”

He moved the knife so fast he was pulling me to my feet through his grip on my hand by the time I was recoiling from the chill of the blade against my skin. “I’ve been more than patient, wouldn’t you think?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Now that, I believe.” He pushed me into a seat on the opposite side of the van to where the still-masked man was sitting, and sat down near enough to me that I shrank against the glass panel that divided us from the guys up in the front. “Or maybe you would have kept those lights on at night. Well, it doesn’t matter, I would have come for you one way or another. It’s clear there’s something fundamental your dear mother and father never learned: that when it comes to debts, the longer you put them off, the greater the interest… and the more likely it is that someone else will get to decide how it gets paid.”

Chapter Two

“My parents are in debt to you.”

This was a hard story to accept. Mum and Daddy weren’t the type to need to get loans from other people. They had good jobs as university academics that had them travelling to conferences all over the world, frequently funded by institutions that were desperate to have them speak. We already had a gigantic house and a holiday shack and more cars than we actually wanted to drive on a regular basis, and other than those indulgences our tastes were modest. Well maybe my long-standing interest in men wasn’t so modest, but we all have to have our little vices. I was pretty sure Daddy was far more interested in wine than he’d ever been in me, for example.

My good-looking kidnapper nodded his head at me slightly. “Devin O’Hare, a name I suspect you don’t know, but one you might have felt grateful towards, at least before tonight.”

“I’m finding it hard to imagine how.”

Devin O’Hare glanced at the other man across from us, then raised his arm over my head and banged on the glass of the divider. The van pulled over into the end of some rural driveway, the farmhouse up ahead completely darkened, too far away for anyone to notice.

“Get out,” he said. It took me a few seconds to realise he meant me, and even then I hesitated. I felt like I’d seen this in a movie somewhere: the kidnapper lets his prey think she has a chance of running for it… then he shoots her in the back as she flees.