Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 77205 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77205 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Silvano got the call in the middle of the night.
Another set of bodies he needed to pick up and get rid of.
As the mafia’s one-man crime scene clean-up crew, he was used to the long hours in the woods, digging graves for bodies that would never be found.
What he wasn’t used to was being caught doing it.
But this woman in the woods, she had her own demons she was running from, hiding away in a hunting cabin to stay safe.
Only, she wasn’t safe enough.
When Silvano comes back to investigate the mysterious woman, he finds her brutally beaten at the edge of the woods.
Instincts he didn’t know he possessed kicked in, telling him to pick her up, to take her back to the city with him, to protect her, and to figure out what kind of trouble she’d gotten herself into…
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER ONE
Silvano
Someone was dead.
That was the only explanation for a call on my burner in the middle of the night.
On a sigh, I rolled up to a seated position, reaching for it, and bringing it up to my ear.
“Yeah?”
“Always the fucking charmer, eh?” a voice said as I rubbed my dry, tired eyes.
“You’re the one waking me up. Who is this?” I asked, not recognizing his voice with my brain not fully working yet.
“Miko,” he said, making me straighten.
Miko was my step-brother’s right-hand man.
“Cosimo in some shit?” I asked.
“What? No. Home with his woman, last I heard. This is… on me,” he said.
Something in his words rang false, but I honestly didn’t give a fuck. It didn’t matter. The only thing that I needed to know was where the body was, and how bad of a crime scene I needed to clean up.
“Where am I heading?” I asked, waiting for Miko to rattle off an address, then climbing out of bed. “Be there in half an hour. Don’t fucking touch anything. Anything,” I emphasized.
You’d think lifelong criminals like fucks in the mafia would know to keep their mitts off of things. But I couldn’t tell you how many times I found out that while waiting for me to show up, they’d taken a leak. In the process, touching the lid, seat, handle, faucet, and doorknob in the process, thinking nothing of it.
I was hoping Miko would be smarter than the usual, since my brother had pretty exacting tastes on who worked for him.
But you never fucking knew.
I threw on some clothes, and made sure to leave both my phones right on my nightstand where they belonged before grabbing my keys, and making my way out of the apartment.
It was annoying as fuck to have a car in the city, but given the nature of my job, I always had one at the ready. One I could easily get cleaned, scrapped, and rid of after each job.
This meant it was an ancient black sedan with over a hundred and fifty k on the odometer, a radio that only got shitty AM stations, and wheel alignment that made me have to constantly remember to overcorrect on turns just to keep the fucking thing straight.
But this would be the last time I would need to use it, so I was choosing not to harp on it as I drove a few blocks down, dropping into the cube storage facility where I rented a unit under one of the aliases the Family had drafted up for me, and opening the bright green garage-style door.
Inside was an immaculate space from the shining cement to the ribbed metal walls. It stayed that way because in between every single job, I was in there with a bottle of bleach, scrubbing down every fucking inch of it.
Overkill?
Probably.
But the fact of the matter was, if I wasn’t careful, my DNA could be traced back to dozens of bodies. Not because I’d killed any of ‘em, but because I’d hidden them in some way or another.
When you were the most powerful crime family in the country’s quicker-picker-upper, you made sure you did everything right.
Inside the unit, there were three gray plastic tubs. The kind you found stacked to the fucking ceiling after the holidays when everyone was looking for ways to store the yards and yards of Christmas decor they’d picked up while browsing around the stores, despite already having stacks of identical gray tubs in their attics and basements already.
Inside the first tub were the cleaning agents. Shit I would need to clean up blood and other bodily fluids.
The second one, smaller and lighter, held several suits. Hazmat-style, for me. Actual suits for others, since I made everyone involved in a crime strip down to nothing at the scene, changing into the often too big replacement suits, and leaving me their clothes to dispose of.
No mistakes.
No traces.
Attention to detail was the name of the game.
Then there was the third gray tub.
Longer.
Bigger.
But the lightest of them all.
Because there was nothing inside.
Not yet.
Eventually, there would be a body, stuffed inside of a cadaver bag, then shoved into the tub.
You see, people thought nothing of you moving a plastic tub around. Shit like a body bag or rolled up rugs, though, yeah, they got you some sideways looks.
And in this modern age of every fucking person on the planet having security cameras, you had to not look suspicious.
Plus, experience told me that dragging a smooth plastic container stuffed with a body was a fuckuva lot easier than trying to keep your grip on a slippery body bag.
Once all that was loaded in the backseat and trunk, I was making my way toward the scene, sure to keep a baseball cap pulled low enough to obscure my features, even though it was the middle of the night.