THE MAFIA BOSS THOUGHT HE HAD KIDNAPPED A TERRIFIED SOCIALITE OVER A $2 MILLION DEBT, BUT HE REALIZED HE HAD THE WRONG SISTER WHEN SHE STARTED GIVING ORDERS IN HIS OWN WAREHOUSE
THE MAFIA BOSS THOUGHT HE HAD KIDNAPPED A TERRIFIED SOCIALITE OVER A $2 MILLION DEBT, BUT HE REALIZED HE HAD THE WRONG SISTER WHEN SHE STARTED GIVING ORDERS IN HIS OWN WAREHOUSE
The first mistake Leo Falcone made was ordering his men to grab Chloe Montgomery.
The second was trusting them to know the difference between Chloe and her older sister.
By midnight, a woman he had never meant to kidnap was tied to a chair in one of his warehouses, staring at his men with the kind of cold contempt that could make a grown man rethink his life choices. She was not crying. She was not begging. She was not asking where she was or what they wanted.
She was criticizing their knots.
And before the night was over, Beatrice Montgomery would not only talk her way out of being a hostage.
She would take one look at the Falcones’ crumbling operation, expose a traitor hiding inside the syndicate, freeze millions in offshore money, and make one of Chicago’s most dangerous mafia bosses realize he had accidentally kidnapped the most terrifying woman in the city.
It began on a rain-soaked Tuesday night in Chicago.
The kind of rain that did not fall so much as attack. It hammered sidewalks, blurred headlights, turned the streets slick and black, and soaked through coats no matter how expensive they were.
Beatrice Montgomery was leaving work late again.
At thirty-two, she was already the youngest chief operating officer O’Leary and Croft Financials had ever seen. Her colleagues called her brilliant when they needed her, ruthless when she corrected them, and impossible when she expected them to do the jobs they were paid extremely well to do.
Her subordinates feared her calendar invitations.
Board members respected her because she made money appear where others saw waste.
She was meticulous. Controlled. Precise. She did not believe in panic, excuses, or sentimental inefficiency.
Unfortunately, that night, she was wearing her younger sister’s designer trench coat.
That one detail was the variable she had not accounted for.
Chloe Montgomery was twenty-four, beautiful, reckless, and exhausting in the particular way only a wealthy socialite with no discipline and too much access could be. She ran with Chicago’s underground elite, gambled in rooms she had no business entering, borrowed money from people nobody should borrow from, and somehow always expected Beatrice to clean up the financial wreckage afterward.
That morning, Chloe had returned the trench coat to Beatrice’s office, leaving it draped across a chair and smelling faintly of cheap gin and expensive cigars.
Beatrice had noticed.
Of course she had noticed.
She noticed everything.
But it was raining, and the coat was there, so she wore it.
That was why Leo Falcone’s men were waiting in the parking structure outside her office building on Wacker Drive.
As Beatrice approached her reserved parking space and reached for the handle of her Audi, two figures moved out from the shadows between the concrete pillars.
She saw them instantly.
Tall male. Heavy shoulders. Scar through the eyebrow. Another shorter, broader, moving from her blind side.
Her right hand shifted toward the mace in her purse.
Before she could calculate the best angle, something rough and dark dropped over her head.
A cloth sack.
Hands grabbed her wrists. Industrial zip ties bit into her skin. She was shoved hard into the back of a panel van that smelled of oil, wet rope, stale smoke, and poor maintenance.
The doors slammed.
The van moved.
Most people would have screamed.
Most people would have kicked, sobbed, prayed, or promised money.
Beatrice Montgomery did none of those things.
She lay on the ribbed metal floor and began collecting data.
The rear-left suspension was shot. The driver braked too late at intersections. Three left turns. Two right turns. One long uninterrupted stretch. The tires hit broken pavement in a rhythm she recognized from neglected highway lanes.
I-95 south.
Industrial district.
Forty-five minutes later, the van stopped.
The doors opened.
She was dragged out, her heels scraping concrete. Someone shoved her into a hard wooden chair. Rope went around her waist and locked her against the backrest. The zip ties stayed on her wrists.
Then the sack was ripped off her head.
A single incandescent bulb swung above her, bright enough to sting.
When her vision cleared, Beatrice found herself in a dilapidated warehouse that smelled of rust, mildew, stale coffee, and bad decisions.
Two men stood in front of her.
The taller one had a scar running through his left eyebrow and a matchstick clenched between his teeth. The shorter one hovered behind him, trying to look more dangerous than he was.
“Don’t try anything stupid, Blondie,” the tall one grunted. “Boss will be here in a minute. You’re gonna sit quiet.”
Beatrice looked at him.
Then she looked at the zip ties.
Then the rope.
Then the warehouse floor beyond them.
“Who secured these ties?” she asked.
The men froze.
“What?” the shorter one muttered.
“I asked who secured these zip ties,” Beatrice repeated, her tone flat and sharp enough to cut sheet metal. “They are fastened at a forty-five-degree angle over my radius bone. If I twist clockwise, the locking mechanism will snap in under ten seconds. It’s amateurish.”
The scarred man blinked.
Beatrice leaned forward as much as the rope allowed.
“And this rope is a braided nylon blend. It stretches under tension. If I actually wanted to leave, I could slide out of this chair in under a minute.”
The matchstick fell from the scarred man’s mouth.
“Hey,” he snapped. “Shut up. You don’t talk unless spoken to.”
“And another thing,” Beatrice continued, ignoring him entirely. “You have imported olive oil pallets stacked six crates high against the east wall. The bottom pallets are rated for four. With the moisture in this room, structural failure is likely within three days. You’ll lose roughly eighty thousand dollars in inventory.”
May you like
The two thugs stared at her as if the hostage had started speaking in an ancient language.
Before either could answer, the heavy iron doors at the far end of the warehouse groaned open.
