STONE: Her Ruthless Enforcer: 50 Loving States, North Carolina Read online

  STONE: Her Ruthless Enforcer

  50 Loving States, North Carolina

  Theodora Taylor

  Copyright © 2019 by Theodora Taylor

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Book Editing: Author Designs

  Cover Design: Najla Qambar

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  KEANE PREVIEW

  Also by Theodora Taylor

  About the Author

  Prologue

  “Hey, Naima.”

  I freeze, inside the empty rectangle of my doorless kitchen, a spike of fear replacing my early morning yawn.

  There is a man sitting at my kitchen table. A total stranger I’ve never seen before. And, even scarier than that….

  A gun rested on the otherwise empty kitchen table in front of him. Lethal and almost as menacing as the stranger’s non-smiling mouth. How did he know my name?

  Fear pumps through my body. And to think just a few moments ago, I’d been wondering if even a large cup of coffee would be enough to get me alert and out the door this morning.

  I’m wide awake now, no coffee needed.

  “Sit down, Naima,” the stranger says. He has a thick Jersey accent, but his voice lacks any emotion whatsoever. There was no emotion in his cold black eyes either. The single kitchen light I always leave on reflected off his completely shaven head. But other than that, he’s all shadow.

  And though he hasn’t touched the gun on the table, it feels like he’s pointing it straight at me.

  I stand there, my body stuck in a rictus of previously unknown terror. What does he want? Why is he here?

  The midnight black suit he wears looks like it was specifically tailored to fit over his huge, hulking body. It probably cost more than the entire monthly rent on this townhouse, which I used to share with my blind parents before they moved to the Dominican Republic to retire way more cheaply than they would have been able to here in New York. He’s dressed for business, but I’m a social worker, living paycheck to paycheck. I can barely afford rent now that I’m handling it alone, much less a suit anywhere close to the quality of the one he’s wearing. If he came here to rob me, he’s incredibly stupid.

  But this stranger doesn’t strike me as stupid.

  “Sit down,” he says again. “We can do this the easy way or the dead way.”

  Both my body and mind scream in protest as I fight my primal flight instinct to obey his ruthless command. Like I said, this stranger doesn’t strike me as stupid, or flippant either. He said he’d kill me if I don’t sit down, and I believe him.

  Eyeing him warily, I take a seat in the chair furthest away from him at the table.

  The stranger is technically handsome with tanned skin I’m almost sure isn’t due to the summer sun but genetics. He has ebony eyes, and what I’m guessing would be black hair to match, if he hadn’t shaven his head bald. His coloring and Jersey accent put me in mind of my best friend Amber’s ex-husband, Luca.

  The ex-husband who now heads the Ferraro Crime Family.

  My heart ices over with a new layer of fear. Is this stranger related to my best friend’s crime boss ex-husband? He pronounced my name perfectly, which is unusual for a first meet.

  Usually people call me Nay-ma, Nay-ima, Nah-ima, Nancy—pretty much anything but the Nigh-eema, my parents intended when they named me after the social worker who helped them when they decided to start a family after losing their eyesight due to early onset macular degeneration.

  The fact that this guy knows how to say my name further convinces me that though Luca Ferraro isn’t currently in the room, he’s somehow behind this visit.

  “What do you want?” I was going for a demanding tone, but the words come out shaky. I’m not nearly as brave as Amber would have been if this happened to her. Unlike me, she doesn’t take ish from anybody—or use substitute words for shit. She even fought off a gun man last year when he tried to come after one of her clients.

  But I can barely talk to the scary dude on the other side of the table, and I’m not at all confident I won’t pee my pants if he actually picks up that gun. For the first time, I wish I had actually finished those self-defense classes Amber encouraged me to take. At least then, I wouldn’t feel so weak right now, so totally at this man’s mercy.

  “What do I want?” he repeats with a cold smile. “Just a little bit of conversation.”

  His words might have reassured me if his smile got anywhere near his eyes. Or if he didn’t raise one large, beefy hand and place it on the gun, before adding, “About your bestie, Amber.”

  “No. No, no way!” I answer immediately. She is my best friend and I will do whatever it takes to protect her. “You might as well kill me, because I’m not telling you anything!”

  “Alright then,” he answers, just as immediately. “Have it your way.”

  He raises the gun.

  “No, don’t…” I cry out, suddenly not feeling so brave.

  But he squeezes the trigger anyway and the gun goes off with a loud BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

  I lurch up in bed, breathing hard as the alarm clock blares on my nightstand. Oh God…oh God, I’m dead!

  It takes several seconds before the truth sinks in…that I’ve just woken up from a dream…a traumatic memory, of something that had happened nearly a year ago. A nightmare…albeit with revisions.

  I hadn’t been brave that day. With a gun in the room, I’d done exactly as Stone said. Answered all of his questions, and even called Amber, so that she could walk straight into Luca Ferrarro’s perfectly laid trap.

  I’d been so naïve back then. Kept thinking that the more I co-operated the more chance Amber and I would have of getting out of the situation alive. But a year later, shame washes over me, remembering how easily I’d rolled over for the granite-face stranger, who turned out to be Stone Ferraro, Luca’s cousin and the Ferraro family’s most ruthless enforcer.

  I’m always encouraging self-compassion to my vision-impaired clients. Be gentle with yourself, I tell them. Don’t get too hung up on all your mistakes. Learn from them and let them—blah, blah, blah. As I climb out of bed this morning even more tired than when I went to sleep, I’ve got to admit, it’s
hard as heck to practice what I preach.

  Climbing into the shower and scrubbing my skin especially hard with Dove Extra Moisturizing body wash isn’t nearly enough to make me feel clean, though. I’m even more frustrated with myself by the time I climb out.

  When will I stop having that nightmare? I wonder, as I push aside all my usual business casual to get to a black dress at the far end of the rack. When will I get over what’s happened since waking up to find Stone at my kitchen table a year ago?

  I blame it on the day as I pull on the black dress I bought when my parents’ original landlord died. That had been just three months before I inadvertently pushed my best friend straight into the arms of a Luca Ferraro, the future don of the Ferraro family. At the time, I’d thought her fellow law student was simply rich, generous, and outrageously handsome to boot.

  “You’re so lucky,” I remember telling Amber, and I’d secretly wished I was beautiful like her. Beautiful enough to land a guy like that. I was a few years older than her. And I’d thought I was the wise one in our friendship back then.

  Ha. Stupid—that was all I’d been before Stone showed up at my kitchen table. Stupid and naïve.

  Amber and I had made plans before that moment. She was pregnant—I’d thought by some anonymous sperm donor. We’d decided to raise her baby together, create a new family in the townhouse I could barely afford on my own. It was the perfect solution for my own boring and stale life…a dream come true.

  Until Stone showed up and it all fell apart.

  Memories of Amber and Luca’s rekindled romance mix with ones from my unexpected love story with Stone’s identical twin, Rock. He was supposed to make up for losing Amber and the baby to the ex-husband who turned out to be its real father. He almost did.

  Until that, too, fell apart.

  Stone had hated me, and I guess, what they say about twins is true. Eventually Rock decided to dump me on his brother’s advice. Then he died the very next day, without telling anyone that we were no longer a thing.

  I zip up the dress I haven’t worn in several years and look at myself in the mirror on the back of my door. I was born in this house, a house without any full-length mirrors, and I can still remember how guilty I’d felt when I’d gone down to Target when I was fifteen to buy this one with my birthday money. Like it was a betrayal of my parents to add something only a sighted person would need to our domicile. Even now, with both my parents and the prospect of living with Amber long gone, it remains the only item specifically made for sighted people in the house.

  However, I don’t love what I see in my secretly bought mirror. Thanks to the thirty pounds I’ve put on, the dress is now too tight, verging on lewd. I’ll have to grab a cardigan to button over it, so that people don’t think I’m trying to flash them at my dead ex-boyfriend’s funeral. My dark curls also aren’t playing along with my somber look. I was supposed to get a long-needed trim last week after my annual physical.

  But the doctor’s news at that appointment had so stunned me that I never made it in. Now, here I am with flyaway curls and a split-ends problem that makes me wish my Haitian mother and Dominican father had never met in that Macular Degeneration support group. My curls are the kind of frizzy, dry mess that would take at least an hour with a flat iron to fix.

  But Rock’s funeral is in less than that. Sighing, I return to the town house’s single bathroom to consult with the patron saint of bad hair days. St. Scünchi No Slip Grip headband goes over my hair, pulling the huge mess into a puff. I rub in a cheap CC cream that evens out my smoky brown complexion, brush on some mascara, grab the cardigan and try again with the mirror.

  A little better, I decide, but not putting in much effort feels strange, considering I used to spend hours getting ready for my daily mandated dates with Rock. He was my first and maybe last chance at real romance, and I wouldn’t have even dreamed of opening the door to him in anything less than full hair and make-up…all the way up until he dumped me.

  But Rock’s dead now. My okayest will have to do.

  My phone’s ding interrupts the second outfit check.

  It’s a text message from Aunt Mari, with a suggestion for a two-bedroom apartment in Charlotte, along with another admonishment about how, “You know you could just stay with Yara and her three kids. She could really use the help, since her husband’s been deployed again and all that oldest daughter of hers knows how to do is play on her phone.”

  Her admonishment tugs at my heart. It must be so hard for Aunt Mari’s daughter, Yara. Aunt Mari and her can’t live together because they have one of those oil and water mother-daughter relationships. And raising three kids with a husband away has to be so—

  I cut myself off right there. That’s Too Nice Naima talking. Always giving too much of herself to others, only to be left behind when the people I build up move on.

  Refusing to case work my cousin, I tap on the apartment link—holy macaroni, is that really the price of a one-bedroom? I’m paying twice that for our place in Jackson Heights…

  No, not our place. My place, I remind myself. Just my place now.

  I’ve got to start remembering that. I type a quick note of thanks to Aunt Mari and hit send.

  Then it’s time to go.

  A wave of grief crashes over me. Rock hadn’t been the tough twin. He’d hated to fight and couldn’t bring himself to kill.

  “I know how it looks on the outside, but I swear I was born into the wrong family. I’ve been suspecting that from the time I was a kid. Stone took to all the backroom deals and gun stuff real natural, just like our dad, but I taught myself computers because I knew that would never be me. Anyway, that’s all I want. To marry a normal woman, so we can settle down and have a normal life. You keep asking why a guy like me would be interested in a girl like you. But you’re a sweet social worker. You wouldn’t have nothing to do with my family if you weren’t trying to help your friend. Believe me, you’re exactly what I want. Because on the inside you’re just like me.”

  He told me that as we walked home from yet another amazing dinner date. And that ended up being the night we finally made love.

  And now he was dead. Guilt, regret, and resentment swirl around my chest in a confusing grief.

  God, I don’t want to go to this funeral. But I order a Lyft anyway and even pay the extra so that I don’t have to share it.

  The funeral is just as I’d expected it to be. Long and super Catholic. As the priest drones on about tragedy and lives cut short, I remember Rock’s and my first date. He’d told me stories about all the stuff he used to do to keep from falling asleep during Mass. Shouting Amen after every hymn, writing computer code by hand on the back of the offering card, and even shoplifting some smelling salts from the local Walgreens.

  I laughed until tears were coming out of my eyes, and thought, so this is what a spectacular first date feels like.

  But at Rock’s funeral, my eyes remain bone dry. I don’t shed a single tear. There are too many other things to think about, too many worries fretting up my mind.

  “You should have sat up front with us,” Amber says, later when we’re all gathered around the gravesite at a famous Queens’ cemetery, known as the final resting place for many of the organized crime world’s biggest household names. And now Rock.

  Despite being blind and having her four-month-old baby on her hip, Amber managed to find me in the large crowd of her husband’s and Rock’s Italian family members. I can’t say I’m surprised. Amber’s always been amazing that way, and as I turn to face her and the baby she named Luca Jr, my chest pangs with what might have been if Stone hadn’t shown up at my kitchen table.

  “Hi, Amber,” I say, glad not for the first time, that she can’t see me.

  “Why didn’t you find me as soon as you got here?” she answers, staying on point like she often does. She’s a natural born lawyer. I thought that the first time we met to set up her freshman year dorm room at Hunter’s College. And I continue to think it now as we sta
nd beside Rock’s grave.

  I glance around and end up feeling even more self-conscious. Amber is easily the most beautiful person I know in real life, and the gorgeous blue-eyed baby boy sleeping contentedly on her shoulder hasn’t taken away from that sheen. As always, a lot of people are staring at her, which means they’re staring at us.

  She doesn’t know that this happens everywhere she goes. Has been happening ever since I met her. I used to shove the self-conscious feelings down. Used to tell myself it didn’t matter. And then act like I really believed that.

  Today is different, though. Today I mumble, “I’m not part of the family,” and drop my eyes to my feet, so that I don’t have to look at her or anyone else.

  “You’re part of my family,” Amber says. “That’s true no matter what.”

  No matter what. I wish that were true. I wish things were really as simple as she decided they were after she accepted Luca’s second marriage proposal.

  “Nai…” she says with a sigh when I don’t answer. “I know how sensitive you are, that you’re hurting. I am, too. I mean, I was…”

  A sad shadow falls over Amber’s face, reminding me that she has traumatic memories of her own. Ones that are way worse than mine. I feel all sorts of petty for not wanting to come here this morning. Not just because Rock’s funeral would be sad, but also because I didn’t want the pain of seeing Amber with her perfect family and the baby we were supposed to raise together.