The Mafia Boss Said Bring Her to Me When He Saw Me Beaten on His Marble Floor — Then He Made Me His Queen

Part 1

Blood from my split lip dripped onto the most expensive marble floor I had ever stood on, and the man in the charcoal suit upstairs did not even glance at the stain.

He was looking at me.

I had walked into that Tribeca restaurant because Gary swore he just needed to talk to some people, and I had been stupid enough to believe a man I had already tried to leave twice.

Gary owed sixty thousand dollars he would never have, and that night I finally understood what he had brought me there to be.

Collateral.

His fist was already wound into my hair when the words left his mouth.

“Move, you fat bitch,” he hissed, and he yanked me sideways into a mahogany podium.

I tasted copper and saw white, but I did not cry, and I did not go limp.

I dropped my weight low and anchored myself to that floor like a stone, because I have spent twenty-six years being told I take up too much room, and that night my size was the only thing keeping me alive.

“I’m not going anywhere with you, Gary,” I said through the blood.

“You owe them.”

“Not me.”

He raised his hand and slapped me hard enough that the whole dining room heard it.

Nobody moved.

The waiters froze with their silver trays, and the rich people at their candlelit tables found very interesting things to study in their wine glasses.

Everyone in that neighborhood knew whose restaurant this was, and nobody was foolish enough to step between a debt and the family that owned it.

Then a voice came down from the mezzanine, quiet, almost bored, and somehow it cut through everything.

“Bring her to me.”

I did not see the giant move.

One second Gary was drawing his foot back to kick me in the ribs, and the next a hand the size of a dinner plate had closed around the back of his neck.

“You’re disrupting the dinner service,” the giant said, almost kindly, and then he introduced Gary’s face to a marble pillar.

The crunch turned my stomach.

Two more men in dark suits appeared from nowhere and dragged Gary’s limp body out the back like a bag of trash, and just like that he was gone.

I scrambled backward across the floor, certain I was next.

The giant crouched in front of me, reached into his jacket, and I threw my arms over my head and waited for the gunshot.

Instead he held out a folded white handkerchief.

“Miss,” he said, gentle as a priest.

“The boss would like a word.”

I looked up at the shadow leaning on the brass railing above me, and my heart slammed against my aching ribs.

I am a bakery assistant from Brooklyn.

I bake muffins for the old woman down the hall and I volunteer at the animal shelter on Sundays and I have eighty dollars in my checking account.

I do not get summoned by men who can make a person vanish between two courses of dinner.

But I looked at the blood on the marble where Gary had been, and I understood that I no longer had a choice.

So I pressed the stranger’s handkerchief to my lip, and I let the giant walk me up a winding staircase into a soundproofed office that smelled of leather and cigar smoke.

He sat behind a desk that cost more than my building, and for a long time he said nothing at all.

He just looked at me.

His eyes moved over my torn dress and my bruised cheek and my body that I had spent my whole life trying to fold into something smaller, and it was not disgust on his face, and it was not pity.

It was something I had no name for.

“Sit,” he said.

I sat, knees pressed together, making myself small the way I always did.

He poured two glasses of whiskey, came around the desk with the silence of a big cat, and pressed one into my shaking hand.

“What do you want with me?” I whispered.

“If Gary promised you money, I don’t have it.”

He crouched down until his stormy eyes were level with mine, and he wiped a tear from my bruised cheek with his thumb as gently as if I were made of glass.

“Because, Donna Pratt,” he said, “you are exactly what I have been looking for.”

I came into that restaurant expecting a coffin.

And the most dangerous man in New York leaned in close, learned my name before I had ever told it to him, and made the beating feel like the safest part of my night.