The Mafia Bride

The air inside the Lucky Strike tastes like old beer and Pine-Sol and somebody's cheap cologne that cannot cover the fact they have been sweating fear all night. Rita sets a rocks glass on the bar without being asked, pours two fingers of the well bourbon, and waits. *Gunner.* Not a question. He has come for Danny Merrick, who was fronted forty keys, was supposed to bring back one forty, and brought back ninety-eight. Gunner has done the homework. He always does the homework. It ends with Danny sliding down a wall holding a wrist that bends wrong, and a debt that has gone from forty-two to eighty-four. Then Gunner feels the weight of someone's attention from the corner of the room. A woman is sitting alone in the back booth with a glass she is not drinking, a silver locket at her throat, and boots that cost more than Danny's whole wardrobe. She is not a regular. She is not a dealer. She is sitting in a dive bar in the industrial district at midnight watching a man collect a debt like she is waiting for her number to be called. Mia was seven the summer she learned that love was a cage with a gilded lock. She sat one floor up with her chin between the iron spindles, keeping her weight on the back edge of the third step because the middle of it creaked, and watched two of her father's men lift her mother off the marble and carry her out through the door she had never been allowed to use. *You'll never leave me.* Salvatore Costello said it the way you say the weather. Now her father has arranged a merger. Vincent Gallo runs the New York family: Costello gets connections on the East Coast, and Gallo gets a wife young enough to give him sons. Mia would rather die, and she has walked out carrying something in the hollow of that locket that judges and politicians and police would all kill her for. Gunner's president says no. Gunner takes her anyway, to a motel he bought cheap and rents by the week, after arguing about her in the cab of his truck while she sits three feet away listening to men decide her future again. The only new part is that this time the argument is about whether to keep her safe. What neither of them has worked out yet is how their two stories meet, and the answer runs through a woman named Lena and a patch of bare dirt under an oak with a river stone at the head of it. This is a dark mafia and motorcycle club romance about an enforcer who always does the homework and a woman who has been memorising which stair creaks since she was seven.