The Enforcer's Captive

Dante counts twenty-three steps from the fire escape to the corner of Thirty-Fifth and Halsted. The November wind cuts through his jacket and he lets it, because the cold keeps his head clear. Clara Benson has been in her father's office for forty-seven minutes. She always takes the alley exit. She always dismisses her driver at nine-fifteen on Thursdays. She always walks the three blocks to her car alone, because she is a Benson, and Bensons do not show fear. Dante has studied the bodyguard for six weeks and knows the exact moment the man checks his phone. What he has not allowed for is that Clara bites, that her nails open three thin lines down his cheek, and that her eyes stay open three seconds longer than they should after the cloth goes over her mouth. He carries her up two flights of a walk-up in Brighton Park, to a basement with a concrete floor, a single bulb and a metal chair bolted to the ground. He prepared the room himself, three days earlier, when his father gave him the order. *"Let me go. I'll double whatever he's paying you."* *"I'm not doing this for money."* He is doing it for his sister. Celeste kept a medical school application hidden under her mattress, and Victor Morelli burned it when he found it, and Dante made her a promise he has been paying for ever since. Clara has run her father's books since she was nineteen. She graduated top of her class from Loyola. She has tried to leave the family business twice, and both times her father dragged her back. She is not a parcel — and it does not take long before Dante is saying that out loud, on the phone, to a man named Rossi, asking for protection for her, for himself, and for Celeste. That call gets recorded. His cousin Luca has the recording, an appetite for the family, and no objection at all to shooting whoever happens to be standing next to the person he actually wants. Clara's younger brother Leo has a gambling problem and is about to have a far worse one. And underneath both families sit a set of account numbers Clara's mother left behind, which are not what anybody hunting them believes they are. There is also a brother who went to Arizona three years ago and came back, and who has a very short answer about what that was. This is a Chicago mafia romance about a hostage who was never going to stay one, an enforcer who breaks his own rule in the first week, and two families with the same rot in them. The romance is closed-door.