Page 3 of Mafia Doctor

Like the wedding she was blowing off tonight. The one she’d been all but ordered to fly home to Chicago to attend.

“It’s him again,” Jackie muttered, picking up Aurora’s phone and shoving it at her.

Aurora groaned, “I’m not in the mood to deal with The Godfather, Part Seventeen right now.”

Missy paused the Love is Blind episode playing in the background and sat up, staring at Aurora, clearly annoyed, “Oh my god, just answer it! It keeps interrupting the show, and I’m dying to see these cheesy proposals!”

Aurora sighed dramatically, but grabbed the phone from her lap, knowing her friends were right. He would just keep calling if she didn’t pick up. Besides, she was starting to get a funny feeling that this might be more than just a scolding for skipping yet another event in the Chicago mob social scene.

Grudgingly, she picked up, and the moment she heard the voice on the other end of the line, she knew something was terribly wrong.

It was her uncle’s number, but she recognized the voice as that of Dante Donato, his unofficial consigliere.

“You need to get to Northwestern Memorial right now, Aurora. Your uncle’s been shot.”

CHAPTER 1

Two years later

As she sipped her coffee at the small streetside café, Aurora felt it again. That feeling she’d been having all morning.

Like she was being watched.

Just like the previous several times, she glanced around the tiny establishment, once again seeing nothing but the same cute elderly Italian couple and the same obviously honeymooning tourists that had been here as long as she had. Adjusting her gaze to take in the street outside the window proved no more fruitful.

What was she even expecting, she asked herself. Some Pink Panther looking guy in a trench coat?

It didn’t have to be a trench coat, she decided. But he would definitely have one of those 1930’s detective hats…

Not noticing anyone particularly suspicious, behatted or otherwise, Aurora finished the last sip of her cappuccino, grabbed her purse, and headed out the door. The walk back to her Airbnb just had to include several back alleys, of course—or at least what passed for back alleys in the hip part of Milan—but after some serious self-scolding she coaxed herself off the café-lined street.

What was she worried about anyway?

Probably the fact that you skipped out on the marriage your mob boss uncle arranged—the one you agreed to as his dying wish—in order to traipse around Europe for the last year?

But that had been two years ago, and she barely knew the guy she was supposed to marry. Granted, she’d been ignoring his calls, texts, and emails, but still…

Arranged marriages were bullshit anyway, even if she’d technically consented to this one.

“Dante Donato can go fuck himself!”

She hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but uttering it made her feel a little braver somehow.

It wasn’t like he was just going to kidnap her off the street, after all.

He had in fact kidnapped her off the street.

Or rather, someone had.

But she was pretty sure she knew who it was that had grabbed her, clamped a hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming, and dragged her into the back of a limo that pulled up at just the right time.

Within moments she was gagged and blindfolded, and she spent the twenty-minute drive to wherever she was taken with her hands cuffed in front of her. He’d put on her seatbelt, at least…

When the limo finally came to a stop, her captor had opened the door, pulled her gently but firmly from the vehicle, and then thrown her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carried her into a building of some kind, through a door or two and down a couple of hallways, and finally into what seemed from the way sound echoed from the walls to be a fairly small room.

Over the course of the next few minutes she’d been quickly and efficiently stripped to nothing but her T-shirt and panties—she wasn’t wearing a bra—then bound to what felt like a padded table of some kind. Only when she was helplessly restrained with her wrists above her head and her legs spread wide did her captor remove the cuffs and gag. The blindfold had stayed.

Then, ignoring her pleas and questions, shouts and threats, he’d left her there.

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