Read Online Listed: Volume VI by Noelle Adams - Free Book Online

gone to New England for college, Paul hadn’t looked or sounded like
he was from South Philly—yet another reason he was set apart from the rest of
them.
    “Hello
to you too.” Emily accepted the bills he’d handed her and dropped the change
into the tip jar. She’d been working at Joe’s part-time for almost two years,
so she knew the routine for all the regulars., Since she’d graduated from high
school a few weeks ago, she’d started working full-time, trying to save up
enough money for living expenses at college in the fall.
    He
ignored her sarcasm, still frowning out at the street. “You’re a witness in a
federal trial and that’s all the protection they give you? Anyone could just
walk in here and—”
    “Cut
my throat as I make coffee? Garrote me in front of the doughnut-eating public?”
    Paul
had tensed when he turned back to her, holding her eyes in that hypnotizing way
he had. “How can you not take it seriously?”
     “Your
dad isn’t going to kill me.”
    “How
the hell do you know what he’ll do? He’s dangerous.”
    She
shrugged, trying to hide the way her stomach churned with the low-grade anxiety
she’d suffered for the last five months.
    Her
father had worked for decades as a security guard in a research facility owned
by Vincent Marino. Emily used to stop by to visit and bring him snacks when he
worked the nightshift. One night, she’d gotten nosy and had overheard a
conversation she shouldn’t have heard, making herself a target of Marino.
    Not
a good position to be in.
    Marino
was born into a long-standing organized crime family, but he’d used his
ambition and business acumen to catapult his family’s crime business to the
international level, setting up well-hidden trafficking networks in drugs,
arms, women—anything that could be sold for a high profit margin. He posed
himself as a corporate mogul now, but everyone in the neighborhood knew he was
a criminal. The feds knew it too, which was why they’d jumped on the testimony
Emily offered them.
    Paul
was Vincent Marino’s only child.
    “What
about Witness Protection?” Paul asked. He had dark hair—now ruffled from the
wind outside—with classic, well-chiseled features and a lean, athletic body.
    She’d
had the biggest crush on him when she was thirteen years old and he’d been back
from college for the summer to visit his mother. All the girls in the
neighborhood had been crazy about Paul with his slick cars, sexy
rebelliousness, and obsession with extreme sports.
    Emily
wasn’t feeling particularly charmed at the moment. She frowned back at him.
“What about it?”
    “Why
aren’t you and your father in it?”
    The
authorities genuinely believed that, despite his mob roots, Marino wasn’t
violent, having been taken in by the white-collar persona he’d adopted over the
last two decades. The neighborhood knew better. Marino was just a thug in a five-thousand-dollar
suit.
    “Because
we weren’t offered it, and we wouldn’t take it even if we were. We’re not in
any danger, and everyone knows it. We wouldn’t have to be followed around by
that cop if you hadn’t raised such a fuss with the local precinct.”
    “I
know him better than you do.”
    “He
can be violent, sure, but he’s old-school. He isn’t going to kill a
seventeen-year-old girl from the neighborhood.”
    “I’m
not convinced of that.”
    She
was silent, wondering if Paul, with his privileged life and innate entitlement
to anything he desired, really believed his own father was so completely
ruthless.
    “He
burned down your house,” he added.
    “When
no one was in it.” She made the comment offhand, but she didn’t feel that way.
She’d loved the old row house where she and her father had lived all her life.
There wasn’t anything left to salvage after Marino’s men had burned it down as
a warning to keep what she knew about him to herself.
    The
irony was, if he hadn’t burned down their house, she never would have decided