Chapter 5 - The Trap is SetI stared at the paper on the desk, my hands shaking. Every logical instinct in my brain screamed at me to run. Accepting favors from a mafia boss was signing a pact with the devil. Everyone knew that in the underworld, nothing was ever free; debts to men like Antonio Russo were paid in blood, loyalty, or secrets.
And yet, looking at that paper, I saw my entire future—the degree I thought I’d lost forever, the freedom from crushing debt, the chance to finally breathe without a suffocating weight on my chest.
“And if I say no?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
Antonio walked back to the window, gazing out over the courtyard. “Then I will still pay off your hospital debt anonymously, because my mother would be sad if her favorite waitress suffered. But you will leave this room, return to your seventy-hour workweeks, and remain entirely unprotected in a city where dangerous people are already starting to ask who the mysterious girl at Bellarosa was.”
My head snapped up. “What do you mean, dangerous people?”
Antonio turned back around, his face a mask of absolute granite.
“Word travels fast in Brooklyn, Sophie. Rivals who want to use my mother to destroy me have already noticed that you spent twenty minutes talking to her in a corner booth. To them, you aren't just a waitress anymore. You are a target.”
The blood drained completely from my face. Outside, unseen by us, the distant wail of police sirens began to echo through the crisp Brooklyn air, drawing closer by the second, as if punctuating his warning with grim reality.
The trap had already closed around me.
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I looked down at the pen resting beside the contract, then up at the most dangerous man in New York.
I took a slow, deep breath, reached for the pen, and signed my name.
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