“Quiet.”
I looked around quickly, forcing myself not to shrink even though every instinct in me wanted to make myself smaller. The men had gone back to watching me rather than the game. One was smiling in a way that made me want to claw his face. Another had picked his cards back up but wasn’t looking at them. The man who had slapped me stood off to the side, still glaring as if he hadn’t enjoyed being corrected in front of the others.
Good.
Let him be angry.
Anger made men careless.
I wiped the blood from my mouth with the back of my hand and sat up straighter.
Whoever the younger one was, he mattered.
And if he mattered, then he was either my best chance of staying alive or the worst thing in the room.
Maybe both.
The warehouse door flew open so hard it slammed against the wall.
“Besnik!”
The name cracked through the room like a gunshot, loud enough that the younger man beside me sprang to his feet at once.
Besnik.
I stored it immediately.
The man who stormed in was older, broad through the shoulders, graying at the temples, his face so red that the veins in his neck looked on the verge of bursting. He strode straight toward Besnik and started shouting in Albanian, close enough to spit in his face, one hand jabbing in my direction with enough violence that I did not need to understand the words to know I was very much the subject of the argument.
Besnik looked at me once, raised an eyebrow as if this were merely inconvenient, and then turned back to the older man. He answered in a low, measured voice, the exact opposite of the other man’s fury, and that somehow made the scene more alarming, not less.
The older man broke away from him and took a step toward me.
“Tell me, doll face, are you dating his cousin?”
I recoiled so visibly that I couldn’t help it. “Are you really calling me that?”
He blinked.
No matter the situation, no matter the fact that I was very probably in serious danger, I could not quite contain the disgust on my face.
I looked back at Besnik. “Who’s your cousin?”
That made both men pause.
The older one turned toward Besnik with explosive, furious expectation.
Besnik sighed through his nose, as though the whole thing had become irritatingly beneath him.
“I can’t believe this,” the older man snapped, rounding on him again. His English was rougher than Besnik’s but still clear.
“I asked you, Alban. I promised to help him. He said his girl was dating a loser and disrespecting him. He said we needed to take her so she remembered who could actually keep her safe. You said yes.”
Alban’s expression did not change.
“I said yes,” he replied coolly, “when she was nobody. Some stupid girl your cousin got hard over. Not when she turned out to be the fucking girl of the Benetti sotto capo.” He shook his head once, finally sounding annoyed. “Boston is a bloodbath because of you.”
I forced my face blank.
