Ray tapped the photo, startling Ace from his daze.
“She is our person of interest,” he said firmly. “She lives in the apartment where something is being stashed. You find her, figure out what the fuck is going down.”
Ace had to peel his eyes away from the photo, his mind swimming, and his thoughts could easily be interpreted. Despite the blurry nature of the photo, he could see she had green eyes and an energy about her that he wanted to be near.
His cheetah purred inside him.
Damn, what was wrong with him?
“Can do,” Ace replied.
“Get on the case. Find any information you can. Do it quietly … don’t go around killing people. Just gather information.”
“I will get on that ASAP,” Ace replied, turning to walk away.
“Wait,” Ray said. “You need to know that even though it looks like the Fontanas did it, there is no guarantee. It could be a frame-up. So don’t make any big decisions before you talk to me, got it?”
“Yeah, boss,” Ace said casually. He turned and walked away, waving over his shoulder.
The woman in the photo was thejob. He needed to keep reminding himself of that.
Chapter3
Emma
Emma stared down the barrel of the gun as her heart leaped into her throat. Benny had the narrowed eyes of a rodent running down a tube and snarling for violence.
“Hey, hey!”
Fritz stood between Emma and the gun, giving her some space to breathe. She could no longer see Benny’s gross face, which also seemed to calm her.
“Eh, let’s take it easy,” Fritz said, twirling back and forth between them. “We don’t want nothing bad to happen here, do we, Benny? Especially to the boss's niece?”
His voice pitched high with a tinge of annoyance peppered within it. Emma watched as Benny dropped the gun, shoving it down the front of his pants.
She let her forearms fall to the floor, which felt reassuring in its coolness against her sweaty skin. Fritz turned around and crouched, glaring down at her like she was his next meal.
A vulture. That was what he looked like to her.
Her heart picked up the pace again as she tensed her muscles. Anxiety flooded her body to the point she was almost frozen in place. It always disappointed her that in a fight or flight situation, she tended to be neither of them. Her past and anxiety created a new F to that saying…frozen. That is what she usually did, freeze and pray death would come quickly. Other times she ran. Emma wondered if she would ever find the courage to fight.
“Besides,” Fritz began, cupping her chin and forcing it up to face him. “She didn’t see anything, did she?”
Emma shook her head frantically, attempting to relay not only fear but complete ignorance. Of course, she knew what a ring brick looked like. She had grown up away from her mob family, but trade secrets always managed to trickle back into the mind whether you wanted it to or not.
She’d heard family discussingbusinesshundreds of times without ever having been directly involved. Secrets whispered over phones, heard beneath doors, absorbed by curious ears that thought the particulars would remain a fantasy.
That was until she turned eighteen, of course.
“That’s a good girl,” Fritz said, letting go of her chin.
The two men picked up the remainder of the boxes and then left her lying on the kitchen floor. She stayed there, frozen in fear until she no longer heard the echo of their footfalls. Once she was sure they were gone, she whipped up and locked the door. She leaned against the door, holding her chest, trying her best to fend off a panic attack.
But the rush of a nightmarish sensation came over her anyway, and she slid against the door and curled herself into a ball. She breathed deeply, just like her therapist had taught her, trying to reassure herself the danger was no longer present.
The problem with this method was the fact that most people with anxiety feared imaginary threats. As a member of a crime family syndicate, Emma was in perpetual, palpable danger. But she still tried to tell herself that she had survived before, and if she needed to survive again, her body would know what to do.
“When the lion is in the room, you will know,” she repeated like a prayer.