A chubby waitress opened the locked back door and found the mafia boss’s dying sister whispering one name
Part 2: The man’s smile died.
“Hand over the girl,” he said. “Maybe we let the waitress breathe.”
Mave’s stomach turned.
Landon did not look back at her.
“Take June,” he said. “Get in the car. Lock the doors. Do not look out.”
Mave wanted to argue. She wanted to demand an explanation, a police station, an ordinary world where men did not speak about letting waitresses breathe. But June’s fingers were clinging to her, and the three men were moving closer.
So Mave lifted the girl with the doctor’s help and ran.
The SUV door slammed behind them. The armored cabin swallowed the screams of the alley, but through the tinted glass, Mave saw enough.
Landon Kee moved like violence had been trained into every bone.
It was over in seconds.
When he returned to the car, his coat was still buttoned, his breathing only slightly changed.
“Drive,” he told the driver.
Mave hugged June against her chest.
“Please,” she whispered. “I helped you. I won’t say anything. Just drop me off.”
Landon looked at her as the SUV slid out of the alley.
“That is no longer possible, Miss Donnelly.”
“My name is Mave.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know they saw your face. I know the men who attacked my sister will search this city until they find the woman who kept her alive. You can’t go home tonight.”
“I have rent. I have a job.”
“You had a job,” he said. “And if you go home, by morning you’ll have a body bag.”
She stared at him.
“You’re kidnapping me.”
His mouth moved in something too grim to be a smile.
“I prefer protection.”
The Kee estate sat on the North Shore above Lake Michigan, hidden behind black gates and bare winter trees. The house was all glass, stone, and silence. It looked less like a mansion than a fortress pretending to be a home.
An older woman with silver hair met them in the foyer.
“Mrs. Pruitt,” Landon said. “June was drugged. Foss stabilized her. Prepare the east guest room for Miss Donnelly.”
Mrs. Pruitt looked at Mave’s bloodstained uniform and softened for half a second.
“Yes, Mr. Kee.”
“I’m not staying,” Mave said.
Landon turned.
“You are.”
“I didn’t agree to that.”
“By morning, you’ll understand why you should.”
She slept in a room larger than her entire apartment and woke to clean clothes folded on a chair. They fit perfectly, which frightened her more than if they had been wrong. Someone had known her size. Her shape. Her exact measurements.
Downstairs, Landon waited in a dark office lit by security screens.
“I need to call my landlord,” Mave said. “And my manager. People will worry.”
Landon turned one of the monitors toward her.
May you like
The grainy footage showed the hallway outside her Bridgeport apartment at 4:15 a.m. Three men broke down her door. They tore through her home. One carried out the old nursing school sweater she kept on the back of her chair.
Then Mr. Petrov, her landlord, stepped into the hallway.....
