: Aimee Harding
: Caged By The Don An Age Gap Captive Dark Mafia Romance
: Publishdrive
: 9798905166303
: 1
: CHF 3.00
:
: Fantasy
: English
: 300
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

The Don thinks he caged her.


He doesn't know she's been planning this for ten years.


Mira Castellanos walks into the Adriano Imports building on a Monday morning in March as a forensic auditor. Quiet, competent, twenty-six, exactly the kind of senior associate Don Salvatore Adriano would expect.


She is not what she appears to be.


She is the daughter of Patrick Castellanos, a federal prosecutor killed in 2016, eleven days after subpoenaing seven ledgers of the Adriano family. She is the sister of Tommy, who was nineteen when he was killed on Mulberry Street by a soldier of a crew the Adrianos absorbed in 2018.


She has been preparing for this audit for two years.


Sal is forty-two. He has been the Don for seven. He has been a widower for the same seven and has not, in all that time, looked at a woman with anything but a Don's eyes.


That changes the moment Mira walks past the security desk and doesn't look at the cameras.


He sees her in the elevator. By day three she has found a discrepancy his organization was supposed to keep buried. So he does the thing he has not done in seven years.


He locks her in the residential floor of his building.


He thinks he has stopped her.


He has, instead, given her exactly what she came for.


The library on the thirty-fourth floor holds the seven ledgers her father subpoenaed eleven days before he was killed.


She came for the ledgers. She came for the chain. She came for the name of the man who closed her father's case.


She did not come for the Don.


She did not count on the eleven-year-old daughter at the breakfast counter, the matriarch in Bay Ridge with a fig-tree story and a place at the table, or him asking her, on a Thursday morning in his library,Tell me about your father.


She did not count on him.


Caged by the Don is a slow-burn dark mafia romance about a woman who walked into a cage of her own design, a man who has spent fifteen years preparing to be different, and three days that changed both their lives.

CHAPTER ONE


The Building — Mira


— ❦ —

THERE ARE FOUR cameras in the lobby.

Two at the front entrance — one over the revolving door, one above the security desk. One in the elevator bank, angled to catch faces. One in the back, near the loading dock corridor, which is the one most people miss because it is mounted inside a brass sconce and looks, from any angle, like decorative lighting.

I have known about the brass sconce for nineteen months.

I have known about the brass sconce because I have, over nineteen months, walked past the front of this building on Bowling Green four times — three times on lunch breaks I scheduled myself off-site to confirm the schedule of the building's deliveries, once on a Saturday afternoon when the lobby was nearly empty and I could stand at the bus stop across the street and watch the rotation of the security guards. The brass sconce is a Sony PTZ. The Sony PTZ has a sixty-degree blind spot to the south-southwest, which is the corner of the lobby where the freight elevator opens. The freight elevator does not go to the fourteenth floor. The freight elevator stops at twelve.

I am not going to need the freight elevator today.

I file the brass sconce anyway. I file it the way I have been filing every piece of this building for nineteen months. I mark the loading dock corridor where it ends in the unmarked door that opens to Pearl Street. I note the security guard on the morning shift, who is fifty-three and has a small tremor in his left hand that suggests early Parkinson's. I file the bagel cart on the corner of Broad Street, which sets up at six-fifteen every morning and which is run by a woman named Vasilia who has been on that corner since 2009 and who can, in one glance through the front window of this lobby, see exactly who is sitting at the security desk and whether the elevator schedule is normal.

Vasilia is not part of the project. Vasilia is just a woman who sells bagels.

The bagel I am eating is from Vasilia. I bought it on the way in. I bought it because I have, over nineteen months, learned that a forensic auditor with a bagel in her hand and a coffee from the cart on the corner reads, to a building's security, as a woman who is comfortable. I am comfortable. I am performing comfort. Both are true. I have been training the two of them to be true at the same time for two years.

I am twenty-six.

I am, as of today, two years into a project I started when I was twenty-four.

The project is twelve years old.

The project did not start when I was twenty-four. The project started when I was fourteen and my brother Tommy was nineteen and Tommy was killed on Mulberry Street at eleven-forty in the evening on the fourth of October, 2014. The official cause was a hit-and-run by an unidentified driver. The investigation closed in November. The investigation closed because the New York Police Department, in the fall of 2014, was managing a particular set of priorities, of which an unidentified driver and a dead nineteen-year-old delivery boy from Sheepshead Bay were not, in the priorities, near the top.

Tommy was a delivery boy because Tommy needed money for a community college tuition payment. Tommy did the delivery he did on the night of October fourth because Tommy was asked, by a man whose name we did not at the time know, to drop a small package at an address in Little Italy. The address was on Mott Street. The man who asked Tommy was paying him sixty dollars cash for the drop. The drop was at ten-forty. Tommy was hit by the unidentified vehicle at eleven-forty, an hour after the drop, on Mulberry Street, six blocks from where he had delivered the package.

After twelve years of work, the man who paid Tommy was a man named Bruno Russo.

Bruno Russo, in that same work, was a soldier in the Russo crew, which was, in 2014, a small outfit operating in lower Manhattan and which was, in 2018, absorbed by the Adriano family.

The Adriano family is the family whose building I am walking through this morning.

The Adriano family is the family whose audit I am here to perform.

The Adriano family is the family I have been positioning to walk into, in the small inverted way of being the person they ask in rather than the person who pushes her way in, for two years.

I am, at eight-forty-seven this morning, exactly where I have been planning to be.

The man at the securit