It was Raina’s twenty-first birthday. She wanted to go out and party, dance all night, make friends, flirt, maybe take a guy home if she really felt like it. She’d never done that. Never taken a guy home before. In fact, she’d never even had sex. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to. She really, really did. But life had thrown a major curveball at her two years ago and she’d been running ever since. This time, it appeared she was running into a dead end.
Raina didn’t think she was going to get to party for her birthday. No, she was pretty sure she was going to die. She peered out into the dark night from the window of her rented room. She was on the fourth floor of a very old building. One that was sinking. But then, all the buildings in Venice were sinking.
Italy was her ninth country in two years. When she left Venezuela, leaving the mother she just met behind, she went on the run. She had to assume there were people after her, or at least watching. Sometimes she would come home from an evening out and she would have that eerie feeling that someone had been in her apartment. She suspected dear old stepdad, Isaac Sotza, the Venezuelan mob boss, had people keeping an eye on her. He probably knew where to find her from the moment she left his estate.
But did his second-in-command? Her mind flashed back to her time in Venezuela. The brief month before her mother ushered her out of the country in a daring escape. Mateo Gutierrez. Cartel to the marrow of his bones. Sotza’s right hand man and her constant shadow while she was in Sotza’s care.
Mateo was everything she hated in a man, arrogant, dangerous, rude. But he was also indecently attractive. And for some reason he’d wanted her. She wondered if the two years since she last saw him had dimmed his regard. Somehow, she doubted it. Even in her brief time observing the mafia, she noticed the guys didn’t let things go. They held onto their grudges, their obsessions. She suspected those qualities were what made the men so hard and so successful.
Raina flitted around her apartment, shoving her possessions into a small suitcase. She didn’t have much. She travelled light because she never knew when she’d have to pick up and run. She had done it before, but never in this much of a hurry. That was because she’d done something stupid. She crossed the wrong people and it was only a matter of time before they found out and came after her. She suspected sooner rather than later.
And she was right. Seconds after that thought entered her head, as she was reaching for her purse, preparing to leave her tiny apartment for good, the door crashed open. The only thing that saved her from being shot in the heart as she stood gaping at the man who kicked the door in was the fact that he kicked it so hard it rebounded off the wall and slammed shut again. The bullet meant for her thudded into the heavy wooden door.
