Page 71 of Body of Trust

I shook off her request. “Do you settle for everything in your life or just your drinks?”

That was when she looked up, and fuck me, I nearly gave the whole gig up, hopped across the bar, and asked her to run away with me.

A heart-shaped face and big brown eyes with lashes that curled at the end. Her lips were full and pink, and it didn’t even look like she had a stitch of lipstick on. And her hair was long and silky, the kind I could imagine running my hands through while I held her.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my entire life.

That was when I knew I wasn’t going to make it out of this job alive.

“We got him, boss.” A criminal in a leather jacket pulls me by the bicep, knocking me into shit because I have a goddamn bag over my head.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” a man’s voice echoes across the room.

The space is big. Based on the solid floor, I’m guessing it’s concrete slab, which means we’re in a warehouse or maybe an abandoned airport hangar.

“I told you to take him out to the farm and feed him to the pigs.”

“We were, but he said he had an insurance policy,” the criminal next to me says.

“Is that so?” the boss says. “What are you waiting for? Make him talk.”

I’m shoved against a wall as the bag is ripped off my head. My cheek is pressed firmly into the cold concrete. I can smell the lead paint as I inhale.

The guy holding me to the wall is monstrous, easily six foot five and three hundred pounds of muscle. I could take him though, if only he didn’t have his gun pressed to my cheek and an audience of seven other criminals, who’d love to fulfill their boss’s wish and end my life, staring at us.

Seriously, nine to one.

This sucks.

“Talk, Davenport,” the criminal says with a sneer, breathing his rancid breath in my face.

“I changed my mind.” My words have bite.

“You wanna think on that?” The gun is pushed further into my face. An intimidation technique if I ever knew one.

I spit, “Never.”

The gun is butted into my head, busting the bridge of my nose.

Fuck, that hurt. My eyes close as I centralize the pain. “Fuck you!”

He doesn’t like that answer, so he punches me in the face. The adrenaline in my body fights off any feeling as I steady my feet and land a right hook on his crooked nose. If he were going to shoot me, he would have done it when he cornered me at the meeting spot.

Ambushed was more like it.

Four men descend on me and force me to my knees, each pointing a gun to my face. I’m held down by two others like a rabid animal while staring down the steel barrels.

The criminal in leather is wiping blood from his chin. I don’t have the same luxury. I can taste my own copper tinge seeping from my lip.

Taking in my surroundings, I confirm it’s a warehouse. Something this size shouldn’t be too hard to pinpoint in this part of New York. I just wish I knew more about the geography of the Hudson Valley, as I do the hills of Kentucky.

The sound of expensive shoes hitting the polished concrete floor draws louder as they get closer. A man appears before me in all black.

I know who he is.

Carlo Lugazzi.

“You think you’re a hero, huh? Thought you were a big shot, playing undercover in the Evangelista clan. Imagine what they’re gonna think when we tell them they had a narc working for them,” the wise guy says as he walks between his guards. “Maybe we should drop him off at Villa Russo with a note attached. Here’s your FBI agent.” He laughs.