Rake: A Dark Boston Irish Mafia Romance (The Carneys Book 1) - Sophie Austin Page 0,6

me with effusive greetings.

The weak winter light barely penetrates through the gap between the floor I’ve parked on and the level above. The overhead lights won’t come on for hours. If I were anyone else, perhaps a smaller person or a woman, the shadowy corners of the garage would make me nervous.

For one terrible second I wonder how Sasha felt, tied up to that fence, fearful of what was going to happen next, but I can’t be distracted by that, not now.

And I start formulating a plan. I generally try to seek out a weakness and exploit it to get what I want. Unfortunately, Sasha’s weakness right now is probably her fear. That’s my opening: to be the antidote to her fear and make her see that I can keep her safe.

It’s messy, and I don’t love it. Yet if someone forcibly gets Sasha Saunders to my apartment, I’ll keep her there long enough to either seduce her or convince her to work with me.

P.J. Hennelly immediately comes to mind. He’s an absolute sociopath, and one of my father’s fixers. I wouldn’t use Hamish again—it seems a step too far to use the man who put her through such hell again—but he wouldn’t do this even if I asked him.

Hamish is an oddly ethical man.

It’s a weird thing to say about a man who takes out the enemies of the rich and powerful for a living, but each profession has its own code of conduct, I suppose, and Hamish follows it to the letter. Beating a woman half to death is one thing. Helping me trick her into thinking she and I are somehow on the same team is quite another.

So P.J. it is. He could get Sasha to my apartment easily, and make it seem like I had nothing to do with it.

If I had any bit of a soul left, it’d be fleeing my body now. Luckily for me, I’d learned long ago that souls are easier to sell than maintain.

I hope for her sake that Sasha can learn the same.

3

Sasha

God, it’s cold.

I hated the cold before I had broken bones, but now the ache in my healed tibia lets me know it’s going to snow. Overcast skies seem to close in as I stare out the window at the parking lot next to my office building. The asphalt is streaked with salt. Giant piles of snow shoved up by the plow are left to melt and refreeze into disgusting icebergs, blackened by the exhaust of the non-stop traffic.

Not exactly the New England winter wonderland they project in movies.

My shin is right, though, and small flakes start drifting down from the milky sky, floating aimlessly until they find something to stick to. They’ll coat the filthy icebergs with a pretty frosting, but it won’t last.

The bleakness of it makes it hard to believe spring will ever come.

I never used to be bothered by the weather, but I lost most of the summer and fall to recovery. Day after day of gray, sunless days leaves me struggling with what feels like a constantly encroaching depression.

“Sasha?”

I jump at my boss’s voice. I startle much easier now, ever since the incident.

“Sorry,” Gary says, smiling gently. “You okay?”

I was zoning out. Ironically, the man who put me in the hospital for nearly a month was correct in one way: being a young woman in labor organizing isn’t easy. Respect is hard to come by. But after what happened to me, I have it in spades now.

I expected pity when I returned to work. Instead, my colleagues treat me with a deference I find unsettling. No one wanted to continue my work on the Trinity Casino case, unsurprisingly, but I made a promise to help those workers.

When I finally got released from the hospital and recovered enough to go back to work, I picked up where I left off. I always keep my promises. And I promised myself I’d make James Carney pay.

Otherwise, all that pain would’ve been for nothing.

“I’m fine,” I reply. “Just a little cold.”

“Better fix those working conditions,” he says, nodding. His dark hair flops into his eyes and he gives me what he thinks is a roguish smile. “Don’t want an uprising.”

He brings over a space heater and plugs it into an outlet near my feet. The warm air eases the ache in my shin.

“Thanks.”

He pats me on the shoulder and sees the stack of petition cards on my desk.

“Are those…?”

“We reached majority today. I was afraid folks would