Chapter 1
Rachel
“Are you sure this is the right decision?” I said, my voice shaking down the line.
“Rachel you need to relax,” Agent Harper said. “We’ll have an agent come over right away and you’ll be safe from there. Vincent Cartello might be a scary guy, but he is just a man. Remember that. You’re in good hands now, I promise. Do you want me to stay on the phone until my colleague gets there?”
“No,” I said and shook my head. “It’s okay. I’ll pack a bag quickly. Thanks for this.”
“No problem. Call me if you need me. Make sure you get what you can. There’s no going back after this.”
The line went dead and I set my cell down on the side. I was standing in the hallway of my small apartment, staring at the terrified girl in the mirror, wondering what the hell I had just done.
I had just decided to turn on the mafia. That’s what I’d done.
“Get a hold of yourself, Rachel, everything is going to be fine now,” I told myself. The lie didn’t sit with me for even a second. The truth was that I had just changed my life forever. The FBI would come and take me into witness protection. I would tell them everything I knew about the Cartello family and spent the rest of my life in hiding.
My life had actually changed the moment I decided to get involved with organized crime. I had known the risks getting involved, but I went ahead and did it anyway. The temptation of fast cash outweighed the reality of anything bad happening to me.
If you had told the teenage version of myself that I would one day rub shoulders with organized crime, then I would have laughed in your face. Rachel Chase was a good Christian girl that got her homework done, helped out at the retirement village on the weekends and helped her mom cleanup after dinner.
But here I was.
In fear of my life.
You might wonder how a ‘good girl’ even gets involved with something like this. The answer is always money. I was a first-year associate at a prestigious law firm, I had a promising career ahead of me and no blemishes on my record.
Apart from debt.
A lot of debt.
A lot of people assume that lawyers graduate college and become millionaires overnight. Ha. Yeah, right. Maybe in New York, but out in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere you start at the nearest respectable firm and pray you can one day work your way up.
So, I’d been doing public defense work on the weekends for extra cash. A girlfriend of mine had similar money struggles and was chipping away at her debt this way, after she had recommended it, I jumped on in and got to work. I loved it, but the money barely put a dent in my debts.
Then I pulled a miracle, I got a young juvenile off a bad rap charge and bartered him down from life to six months on probation. It was a miracle turn around, thanks to me uncovering some questionable evidence practice from the prosecution.
It turned out that juvenile was connected to the Cartello crime family. That was when they approached me with the offer of some simple legal work for fast money. The work was squeaky clean, they just wanted help with paperwork to acquire some retail property, in exchange I would get enough money to blow away nearly a third of my debt.
The ‘simple’ wasn’t so simple though, and it only took me a few minutes to realize this was a massive money-laundering operation. They wanted me to smudge the paperwork to cover it up, and things got even scarier when my girlfriend from the courthouse disappeared.
She’d been working for another mafia family. How long before I ended up vanishing, just like her?
Now I was here, shoving clothes into an overnight bag. There really wasn’t much I wanted to take with me from this apartment. The only thing I truly cherished was a photograph of my grandmother. She had been the closest thing to love for me when I was a child, and after she had died my parents only got worse. I stored the photo securely in my bag and zipped it shut. With the FBI minutes away from knocking on my—
Knock knock.
I stopped and turned towards the bedroom door. Could they really have gotten here so fast? Looking down at my watch I saw that I only placed the call three minutes ago. Did they really move that quickly?
“I’m coming,” I shouted, quickly zipping my overnight bag shut. I slung it over my shoulder, left the bedroom and glanced through the peephole of my front door to see—
Nothing.
Huh.
“Hello?” I said through the door.
“Ms. Chase?” a voice said on the other side. “It’s Agent Jones. We’re here to pick you up.”
Looking back through the peephole again I saw a man in a black suit holding a badge up to the peephole. It looked official. I let out a sigh of relief, unbolted the chain and opened the door.
The man I had seen in the peephole was gone. Standing in his place was a huge man dressed in black. I was staring down the barrel end of a shotgun.
“What the hell?!” I gasped, instantly throwing my hands up in the air.
“Ms. Chase,” the thug said. “Are you going somewhere?”
“I’m—is that a gun?”
It was a stupid question, it obviously was a gun, but it’s funny how your mind works when you think you’re about to die.
“Have you heard of the expression ‘shotgun wedding?’” he said with a dark smile.
“Put it down, Wardorf,” a voice said from down the corridor. “I’ll take care of things from here.”
The thug instantly complied. He lowered the shotgun and stepped back. As he did so I saw another man standing behind him, a vicar. The vicar had a bible in one hand, and he was looking down at the floor. Footsteps echoed down the hallway and another figure came into sight.
He was…
Beautiful.
He stopped at the threshold and quickly glanced into the apartment before allowing his eyes to settle on me. He was tall with dark hair, pale skin and eyes that seemed to twinkle like rubies. He wore a simple suit and shirt without a tie, looking like a model from a high-end fashion magazine. His tussled brown hair was swept back, and I found my eyes lingering on a sharp jawline that looked like it was cut from marble.
“Do you know who I am?” he said very calmly, his voice smoother than the richest velvet.
I had never met him before, but I had heard enough about the man at the head of the Cartello Mafia to know that this was Vincent Cartello, the man that I had just tried to betray.
“Don Cartello,” I stammered, my heart beating in my temples.
“Correct, and so respectful. Well done, Rachel. Do you mind if I step inside?”
“I’m—” I stuttered again. I was shaking so badly I could barely talk. “I’m about to meet someone.”
“Oh, I know. You see, we’ve been watching you Rachel, quite closely. I’ve had my eye on you since you started working for me.”
“M—Me?”
“Invite me in please,” he said, not yet crossing the threshold.
“Come in,” I answered.
And then it was as if a weight in front of me vanished. I felt a pressure dissipate and blow past me, a gust sweeping into my apartment. The burning red eyes of my guest seemed to brighten, like coals on a fire under a firm breeze.
He stepped inside and I immediately found myself stepping back from him, like the pair of us were locked in some hypnotic dance. He flicked his hand through the air and the door closed behind him. It moved fast enough that I expected a bang, but it shut without a single sound.