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My vision continues to dim until I feel twitchy and out of control of my own body. I can’t even fight anymore, going limp as he throttles me with no mercy and my nervous system seems to go haywire.

This is how you die.

I’m closing my eyes. My lids can no longer stay open. They lower as I go still on the floor of the taxicab and sink into the darkness.

Then, suddenly, the hands are gone from my throat.

The man pressing me into the floor is no more. His heavy weight is lifted and I’m left lying half dead, barely conscious.

I can’t move. I can’t even think. I’m just trying to figure out how to breathe again.

“You fucking imbecile, what do you think you’re doing?!” comes the enraged voice of what I distantly recognize as Sergio Sacrimoni. “I didn’t fucking say to kill her! We need her alive… for now… at least ’til we can use her to bargain! Move out of the way!”

The fake taxicab driver is shoved aside.

A different man reaches into the backseat to scoop me up and pull me out. I’m carried limply in his arms toward a different vehicle—one of the black Escalades I had followed over to the warehouse only an hour or two ago.

I’m dumped in the back where two more men are seated. They promptly secure my wrists. I can barely sit up, let alone hold my head up like normal. It lolls onto my shoulder as I cough and my bruised throat tries to open back up.

He crushed it so much under his grip that I worry he might’ve done real damage.

Sergio has my phone. He must’ve snatched it off the floor of the taxicab. He holds it up in front of my face to unlock the screen and then starts swiping and scrolling through whatever he wants.

“So you’ve been investigating us a long time,” he says conversationally, like we’re speaking about sports or the latest episode of some sitcom. “You think we didn’t know about it, dollface? Believe me, we knew. We knew all about you sticking your nose where it didn’t belong. Why do you think we shot up that charity dinner of yours? And that boat party? We’ve tried our damnedest to get you out of the picture. Then we realized who you were dating.”

Though I’m out of it, his words set off alarm bells inside me.

I had been so confused by the shooting at the Rise and Thrive charity dinner. I hadn’t known what to think of it, or what could’ve been the cause.

Were the Tucos targeting me all along?

I had eventually concluded they’d been after Rafael…

“Anyway,” Sergio goes on, “you might be more valuable alive than dead. Your boyfriend’s no friend of the Belluccis… but he damn sure might be willing to work with us when he finds out what we’ve got. Funny how that works, huh?”

Sergio flashes me a nasty grin with his trout mouth, looking like an evil, menacing fish.

He juts his chin at the henchman on my right. “Knock her out. Don’t hurt her too much. We don’t want any damage just yet.”

I’m struck in the back of my head with what must be some kind of club or baton. It collides with my skull and the consciousness I’ve fought to regain wipes out. I slump against the men in the backseat, finally pulled under into the darkness.

28

RAFAEL

Sergio requeststhat I meet him down by the Newport docks.

“You have fifteen minutes,” he says before hanging up. The triumph was evident in his tone. He was convinced this was his best hand to play after what happened at the warehouse. He might’ve lost in the standoff against Il Diavolo and the Belluccis, but he seems determined to move onto the next best thing.

The third party who had been in attendance, and he’s using my girlfriend to do it.

I’m a man who works notoriously well under pressure. I have had guns pointed in my face and kept my cool. I have been in rooms where I was the enemy of every man around me and managed to be victorious.

When I was a kid living in the slums of Ragusa, I used to have a defeatist attitude. I looked at myself like a victim and let my emotions rule me.

The night I met the devil changed my life. I realized if I wanted to change my destiny, I was going to have to be the one to step up and do it myself.

Success would only come if I didn’t let emotions rule me. I crafted my entire Rafael Calderone persona around it.