Page 1 of The Woman with the Handcuffs

CHAPTER ONE

Gavino

“Yo, I’m fucking talking to you.” Leondro snapped a finger in my face.

“I’m listening.” I wasn’t.

“You might be listening, but you’re not hearing me,” Leo said, pausing to wait for me to try to deny it. I didn’t. “Look, I know you’re anxious to get back to whatever anime-porn-spank-bank, Lit-RPG, boring-ass documentary, Luddite hermitage you call a life, but I need you to focus for five minutes.”

He was pretty spot-on with all those. Except the anime porn. Otherwise, it was almost alarming how well he knew how I spent my time when I was almost always doing so alone.

“These meetings could almost always be a phone call.”

“And if you were paying attention, you would know this isn’t some family update. This is about a job.”

No one would ever accuse me of being the biggest earner in the Costa Family. Whatever gene all my brothers and cousins were born with seemed to skip me.

I’d worked hard when I was younger just so I could get myself Made, get my capo status, get a crew of soldiers and associates who did all the actual work and kicked the money up to me, then be allowed to be left to my own devices the rest of the time.

Except, of course, when my family got squirrelly about my lifestyle and staged makeshift interventions talking about shit like depression and being worried about me.

But I wasn’t depressed.

I just liked what I liked. And I liked my low-tech home, my boring-ass documentaries, my books, delivery food, and being left the fuck alone.

Try telling that to a deeply enmeshed mafia family, though.

That said, I did care about jobs. Because those going smoothly were what allowed me to continue life on my terms.

I glanced back toward the coffee house we were meeting at. Bustling, even in the off-hours, with a rack of every single kind of syrup known to mankind and two colored-haired, tattooed, pierced baristas handling the rush with a calm, practiced sort of grace.

It was the kind of place my brother knew I hated. Trendy and too bright with coffee prices you’d need to take a second mortgage out on your house to afford a yearly habit.

Though, to be fair, meeting at my preferred coffee place—a dark, dirty, run-down bodega on the corner near my house, who sold coffee so strong it was almost thick—wasn’t conducive to a private conversation.

“Alright,” I said, exhaling, “I’m listening.”

“One of your associates went missing.”

“Who?”

Associates were a dime a dozen. Low-level guys who wanted to be in the mob, so they were willing to do whatever grunt work you threw at them. They took most of the risk with the lowest amount of reward. It wouldn’t be surprising if someone had enough of it and wanted to walk away.

“Daniel Hall.”

“I’m gonna need more than that.”

“One of the long-haul truckers.”

“Fuck.”

Any other associate and I would have brushed it off. But the long-haul trucker scheme was my most profitable one. Even the loss of one trucker could mean hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in profits lost.

“When did he run off?”

“No, Gav. He’s missing,” Leo explained. “There’s a missing person’s report and everything.”

That was even weirder.