Maid for the Hitman: A Steamy Standalone Instalove Romance by Flora Ferrari (lightweight ebook reader txt) 📗

without any change in his tone of voice. He’s probably around forty years old, on the heavier side, with a weighty gold chain hanging around his neck. “But maybe we should get him to do it.”

“He doesn’t do women,” one of the others says, a younger man with a broken nose.

I feel like a rat trapped between a gang of wildcats, with no escape, with no possibility of escape.

They’re discussing my murder the same way they’d discuss ordering a cappuccino.

Vito snaps his gaze to the younger man.

“He’ll do whatever the fuck I tell him to do,” he growls.

He turns back to me with an unhinged grin.

“I’ll be seeing you very soon, Rosie Smithson, very soon indeed,” he says.

They turn and begin to stride down the alleyway. I see the black car parked across the street.

How did I miss that before?

They were watching me the whole time, probably laughing their asses off.

“Wait,” I say, my voice rising despite myself.

One of the men – the younger one with the bent nose – spins before the others and shakes his head frantically at me. There’s fear in his eyes, and a message, Shut up, you idiot, or he’ll shoot you right here.

Vito turns slowly.

“Did you say something, bitch?” he says.

“I need my driver’s license,” I murmur, even as a voice inside of me screams to shut up, just shut the hell up right now. “My Mom is sick and I need to take her to her hospital appointments.”

Vito narrows his eyes at me as though he thinks I’m joking.

His hand twitches toward his jacket, as though he’s going to grab his gun and shoot me any second.

The younger man glares at me, glares hard, screaming silently at me.

“I’m sorry,” I say, somehow forcing the words past my closing throat and the panic rioting through me. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“That’s right,” Vito said. “You shouldn’t. Tell your cunt mother to get the bus.”

He turns and stalks back over to his car.

I stumble out of the alleyway, feeling as though my throat is closing up. All the air in my body feels as though it’s being sucked out of me, my belly suddenly empty, sickness churning acidly inside of me.

I move down the street, trying to make my breathing come slowly. Even as the street wavers and distorts with my tears – and seems about to fall sideways at any moment – I try to force down the rising terror inside of me.

When I finally reach my apartment building, I want to scream with all the pent-up fear bubbling up inside of me.

I stumble across the lobby and then pause, glancing at the door.

Fuck.

I’ve forgotten the lemonade.

But it’s not like I can go back now.

I keep walking.

CHAPTER FOUR

Ryland

I sit in the bar, moving my finger around the edge of the whisky glass. I haven’t taken a sip. I won’t take a sip.

I can never relax around mob guys. They’ll laugh with you one second and then go for their guns the next.

I didn’t even want to come here.

I want out of this goddamn life.

But when Vito Franzese called up with the second half of my password, I knew I had to come unless I wanted to cause problems.

I’m not scared of Vito or his family. If it came to it, I’d go to war with them and make them pay for crossing me, but that’d mean losing my home, possibly Chopper—losing everything I’ve worked so hard to build.

So I’ll keep the peace, for now.

I glance around the bar, empty in the late afternoon sun. It reeks of liquor and sweat and cigar smoke. Dust particles shift in the air.

Finally, the door to the kitchen bursts open, and Vito and his goons come stalking through. I know them all by name, but I never bother to say them or even think them. They all dress the same and act the same, completely subservient to their boss’s son, now that their boss is in the slammer.

Vito walks over, his face red, his eyes glassy. He’s almost as tall as I am and that’s saying something. My contacts on the street tell me he’s addicted to steroids, among other drugs, which accounts for his overstuffed look.

His men take up a table in the corner of the room and Vito drops into the seat next to me.

“Afternoon, Ryland,” he says.

“Vito,” I say, with a short nod.

“Lovely day, eh?”

“Sure,” I say.

“But I heard it’s supposed to rain later.”

He grins widely, flashing a gold tooth at the back of his mouth. His father would never indulge in something like that. But Vito is nothing like his old man. He’s brash and unpredictable and downright insane.

“I’ve got a package I need delivering,” he murmurs.

Package is code for a person, and deliver is code for killed.

I sigh. I don’t want to deal with this shit.

“Is that so?” I say, clenching my fist under the bar, tension moving its way up my arm and right into my damn skull, my temples pulsing.

“Yeah,” he grunts.

I really don’t like his tone. I imagine what it’d be like to smash his face against the bar, to make it explode like a watermelon.

“She’s seen too much,” he says. “Here.”

I flinch at the word she.

He knows I don’t take on contracts for women. His father understood that.

He reaches into his jacket and pulls out an envelope, laying it on the bar.

A thousand savage instincts rise in me, each of them aimed toward causing this bastard the maximum possible harm.

I open the envelope and glance inside, and then my life changes.

My world shatters.

I stare at the photos of the woman, my throat going tight as I move my callused fingers over the polaroid.

My fingers are too savage and hard-worked to touch a woman as beautiful as this, with her majestic curves and her cascading auburn hair, with her full red cheeks and her big brown eyes.

The photo was taken from across the street, as the woman was helping a