POSSESSED: MISS CIA AND THE MAFIA DON

CHAPTER FOUR:

Always, always bring a gun to a knife fight

CAMERON

He barely even looks at me when he leaves the room which is just as well because I don’t think I could stand to look at him either.

My hands in my laps are still shaking.

His wife.

I just agreed to be the wife of the future leader of one of the most successful criminal enterprises in the country.

Oh God.

One of the bodyguards steps towards me.

“Your car is ready ma’am.”

But I barely hear him.

Not until Rose touches my arm. “Cam?”

I jerk alert before rising shakily to my feet, refusing Rose’s arm of support.

Earl had given me leave to go to my apartment and get a few things and as the shiny black car drives down the street of my drab apartment block, I can’t help the tears that spring to my eyes.

The car stops in front of my apartment and the driver, a young man in a glossy brown shirt and gold chain, speaks without turning.

“The Boss says you have ten minutes.”

I almost spit on the floor.

“You can tell the boss to go screw himself. I’ll be down when I’m down.”

Rose tries to come after me but I stop her with one look.

“Not yet Rose. I’ll forgive you but not yet.” My voice cracks. “Please.”

Rose looks away. Her jet black hair falling to cover her face.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t really have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice Rose.”

To her credit, she nods and I step out of the car.

“Cam…” she calls before I can shut the door.

I glance over my shoulder at her. She leans halfway out the door, tears in her dark eyes.

“Please don’t hate me”

I don’t answer. I just walk away.

I don’t hate her.

But I can’t look at her just yet.

The look of hurt and guilt on her face is eating me up inside.

Especially not since I’m the one who has betrayed her.

I knew exactly who Rose Salvatore was from the minute I set foot in that café.

In fact, I had chosen it exactly because of that.

By the time I arrived in New York, The cafe had two regulars, The old pigeon woman, and Rose Salvatore, daughter of the most powerful Mafia family in the country.

Which is how I suspect the cafe still stays open despite its horrid tasting food.

And also the fact that I’m very sure it’s a front for money laundering.

The truth is, I had been looking for her.

And the encrypted file tucked away in my laptop had told me the cafe was exactly where I would find her.

But years of training had also taught me that I could not just waltz in there and shake hands with her.

Given what I would have to do later I knew I had to find another way or it would be obvious that I had tracked her.

I needed it to feel like she had found me and not the other way around.

So I had waited till I got the intel that she was out of New York on vacation

And then I had swooped in, made myself a regular at the coffee shop she liked to frequent and by the time she returned, I had a semi-permanent seat and a favorite mug.

After that, all I had to do was play the quiet, slightly gullible but uninterested recluse.

Rosalind could never resist a project.

I step into my apartment and bolt the door firmly behind me.

My heart is beating rapidly in my chest.

I cross the room and draw the curtains close. I do the same in the kitchen and in the bedroom.

Back in my room, I open the bottom drawer of my bedside table.

It’s filled to bursting with needles and pens and sweet wrappers. Shoving everything aside, I pull out the false bottom and seated inside is a small black electronic device.

A bug detector.

I am pretty sure it has some other fancy technical name but bug detector works just fine for me.

I sweep it across the room, under my bed, near my lamps and inside my closet.

The device remains silent. The room is clean.

Then and only then do I pop open my laptop.

A few keys and a single beep later and a beautiful, but lined face framed by dark ringlets and bright red lipstick frowns hard at me.

“About time.”

I smile back in response. “Hi Ted.”

“I’ve told you not to call me that.” The woman on the screen grunts harshly, squinting despite the glasses perched on her nose.

I laugh softly.

Ted is my handler and she is almost thirty years my senior.

Yet in my mind’s eyes, she will always look the same way she did the day she walked into my cell room, sixteen years ago.

I do not remember much about the night my birth parents died.

All I remember is the blood. Bright red and sticky

It was everywhere.

On the floor, on the walls, in mother’s shoes.

They found me stuffed in a suitcase.

Apparently my mother had hidden me there moments before a knife had sliced her neck open.

I don’t remember crying.

I was too small to understand that I needed to cry, needed to grieve or else the trauma would fester inside of me like a cancer until it exploded and destroyed everything.

By the time I did, it was too late.

I was sixteen and while trying to run away from my abusive first foster father I pushed him too hard and he hit his head against a counter and never opened his eyes again.

His wife, who knew the whole time that he was hitting me, pressed charges anyway.

I couldn’t be placed back into the system. I was too dangerous, they said.

So instead they sent me to juive.

Left me to rot.

Until Ted found me.

She had walked into my cell dressed in the cleanest white suit and sharpest red heels I had ever seen.

The CIA was starting an agents program, and they wanted new recruits, young people that they could train, mold into the perfect weapons.

People who had nothing to lose.

Ted, her real name, I still didn’t know all this years later, had said only one thing to me.

“You can either stay here, rotting away until you turn eighteen and end up on some street selling drugs. Or you could come with me and maybe someday get revenge on the people who took your parents from you.”

It had been all I needed to hear.

The past sixteen years of my life, training until I fell ill, moving from city to city, from case to case, has all been for this.

I was assigned to New York one year ago with a single dossier in hand.

There were Five powerful Mafia families in the country.

And the most successful of them all was the Salvatore family of New York, Manhattan.

My instructions had been simple.

Infiltrate. Gather intel. Bring them down.

Ted folds her fingers into an upside down v under her chin and stares at me.

“What do you have for me kid?”

Doesn’t matter that I am almost thirty. To Ted, I will always be the “kid”

I stare back at the screen. “I found a blind spot.”

Ted doesn’t smile but her eye twitches which in handler language is the same thing.

“The daughter finally cracked eh. Is she your way in?”

I bite my lip and I nod.

Another lie to add to the thousands that make up my life.

I shouldn’t lie to my handler.

It was the first rule drummed into my head at the agency.

As a CIA agent I would have to live a life full of false statements and untruths.

But never, ever should I be caught lying to my handler.

I have since broken that rule a million times.

What is one more?

It is true that Rose Salvatore was supposed to be my way into the Mafia world.

But not only is she completely uninterested in her family’s business besides spending their money, Rose dislikes her family.

She barely stays around them enough to give me any sort of useful information I could use to my advantage.

Ideally, I should have dumped her as my target months ago.

But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I told myself and Ted that it was because she could still be useful.

That maybe one day she would invite me to a family dinner, or a wedding, anything that could bring me within recording distance of the most powerful Mafia family and their secrets.

But the truth is, I couldn’t let Rose go because she has become the closest thing I have ever had to a friend in a long long time.

Even if every time I saw her, I was lying to her face.

Our friendship has been sort of real.

At least until I went and f****d her brother.

I swallow hard.

What am I supposed to do now, tell the CIA that I slept with one of the targets and ended up signing a contract and NDA to be his wife?

They would pull me off the job faster than I can say Jet.

Grace and Herb, the adoptive parents the CIA has assigned to be while I trained, weren’t in any real danger.

One word and Earl would never find them.

But if I am taken off the case, then I would lose my chance to bring down a rot in society that had ultimately led to the death of my parents.

This was the opportunity for revenge that I was promised years ago.

So what if it meant lying to my handler and to Rose?

So what if it came with a false marriage to a man who made me want to stick a pencil in his eye?

I could do this.

I would do this.

Or I would die trying.

Ted frowns at me like she can read my thoughts. But she doesn’t say anything. Instead she asks “What’s the plan?”

This was the tricky part.

“I’m going to live with them.”

Ted doesn’t even bother to shake her head. “Absolutely out of the question.”

“I have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice, Kid.”

I sigh and glance around at the door to my room.

I’m pretty sure the ten minutes the driver gave me is almost over.

“Look. I can do this Ted. I’ve been doing this my whole life. All these months of work, it’s all been leading up to this. I can do this.”

Ted watches me quietly.

Time for another lie.

I press my lips together. “I think Rose is starting to get suspicious. If I turn this offer down, I might raise alarm bells.”

“All the more reason to cut her loose now.”

I grab both sides of the laptop and lean it.

“Please Ted. Just trust me on this. We have them.”

Ted is silent for a long time. Too long.

Then suddenly she nods.

“Thank you.” I blurt out before I can stop myself.

Ted snorts derisively. Don’t thank me. Just be careful.”

I nod back, smiling despite myself. “I always am.”

“And Kid?” She calls out before I can disconnect the call.

I stop to look at her. “Yeah?”

She frowns at me through the screen. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

I think about Earl.

About the way he had kissed me.

About the contract I just signed.

Too late for that.

I nod anyway.

“I won’t.