The Mafia Boss’s Innocent Prisoner Chapter 01
Bastian’s POV
“Cancel every meeting next Friday.”
Malcolm looks up from his tablet.
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
I slide the invitation across my desk.
Tamsin Reed’s nursing graduation.
Ten months ago, my men dragged her half naked from
one of my clubs.
I called her a rat.
I tied her to a chair and cut her face before checking
whether the evidence was real.
When I finally learned she was innocent, I kept her
prisoner because she had seen too much.
Then she trusted save me.
Again and again.
I put Tamsin back in chains and signed the transfer
order that almost delivered her to her killer.
Now the truth is finally public.
Then Tamsin left me.
I will go to her graduation without a gun.
I will clear her name in front of everyone.
If she wants my fortune, it is hers.
If she wants me on my knees, I will kneel.
And if she still tells me to leave, I will finally learn how
to obey her.
kidnapped Tamsin once.
This time, I have to make her choose me.
Tamsin’s POV
The first time Bastian Kane saw me, I was half naked
under a red light while thirty men shouted for me to
spread my legs.
I had silver heels on my feet and a thin black thong between my hips.
That was all.
Three months earlier, I had worn blue scrubs and
spent my nights studying for nursing exams.
I had been six weeks away from graduation.
Then Theo Kane called me a traitor.
His family donated half a hospital wing to my school,
One call from him erased my clinical placement.
Another closed every private clinic in New York to me.
By the end of the week, Velvet Saints was the only place willing to hire me.
Theo had come to watch my first shift.
He sat in the front row with my half sister, Vivienne Cross, on his lap.
“This is where women like you belong,” he had said.
I never forgot it.
That Friday night, I wrapped one hand around the brass pole and forced myself to smile.
Velvet Saints hid below an old hotel in Lower Manhattan. No sign hung above the steel door. Men
paid five thousand dollars a year just to enter.
They liked to believe that made them better than ordinary perverts.
It did not.
“Turn around, sweetheart!”
A folded hundred–dollar bill hit my thigh.
I kept moving.
One more hour, I told myself.
One more hour, and I could go home, shower until I stopped feeling their eyes on my skin, and pretend
some part of me still belonged to me.
The music stopped.
At first, the men complained.
Then the first gunshot tore through the room.
The bartender behind the private bar dropped with a hole in his forehead.
Women screamed. Men dove under tables.
Four armed men came through the side doors in dark
suits, moving like they had practiced the raid a hundred times.
The tallest one fired into the ceiling.
“Nobody moves. Nobody reaches for a phone.
The room went still.
I tried to get off the stage.
A hand closed around my ankle.
“Not you.
I kicked hard. My heel caught the man under his chin,
but another one grabbed me from behind.
I bit his hand.
“Fucking bitch.”
He twisted my arms behind my back and slammed me
against the stage. My cheek hit the polished wood.
Someone threw a coat over my body.
Not from kindness.
They did not want street cameras recording them as they dragged a naked woman into a black sedan.
I fought until a needle entered my neck.
The red lights blurred.
The last thing I saw was the dead bartender staring at me from across the room.
When I woke, my wrists were tied to a metal chair.
Cold air moved over my bare legs. The coat had slipped
open, but I could not reach it. A strip of black cloth covered my eyes.
My mouth tasted like blood.
Footsteps crossed the concrete floor.
Slow. Heavy. Certain.
“Tamsin Reed,” a man said.
His voice was deep and flat.
I knew that voice.
Every person in New York’s underworld knew it.
Bastian Kane.
The head of the Kane family.
Theo’s older brother.
“I don’t know what you think I did,” I said. “But you have the wrong person.
Paper struck my lap.
“Twenty thousand dollars from a Romano account.
Three meetings with their capo. Building plans for one of my warehouses.”
“What?”
“You sold my family to a rival crew.‘
“No.”
“You hid inside my territory and called yourself a stripper.
“I am a dancer.”
“You’re a rat.
I pulled against the rope. “I’ve never met anyone from the Romano family. I don’t have twenty thousand dollars.”
“Shit, I don’t even have two hundred dollars.”
He removed my blindfold.
Light stabbed my eyes.
Bastian stood in front of me.
He was bigger than Theo. Older too.
His black hair was pushed away from a hard face, and
his dark suit did not have a single wrinkle. A heavy gold ring sat on his right hand.
The Kane crest.
I had seen him twice before.
Both times, a whole room had gone quiet when he entered.
Now I understood why.
He held a knife in his other hand.
Malcolm Hale stood near the door. He was Bastian’s
right–hand man, though no one stupid enough to value
his life called him an assistant.
Bastian opened a file.
There were photos of me walking beside a man I had never seen. Bank records with my name. Messages about shipments I knew nothing about.
“Those aren’t real.”
“They came from a source inside the Romano crew.”
“Then your source lied.”
His eyes did not change.
“Who gave you the warehouse plans?”
“No one.”
“Who owns you?”
“No one.
The knife touched my cheek.
My body locked.
“Everyone belongs to someone in my city.‘
“I don’t.”
The blade moved.
Pain burned across the right side of my face.
I screamed.
Warm blood ran down my neck and onto my chest. Bastian watched it fall. His hand stayed steady.
“Give me a name.
“I can’t give you what I don’t have.”
He pressed the tip of the knife beneath my chin.
“Then tell me why a nursing student became a stripper in one of my clubs.”
My stomach clenched.
I looked into the face of the most feared man in New York.
“Because your sick brother put me there.”