Kindle Edition
Amazon
RockHill Publishing
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: RockHill Publishing LLC
ISBN-10: 1945286742
Type: Fiction
Pages: 284
Copyright: September 5, 2022
ISBN-13: 97819458286742
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Maria, raised in the Mafia and educated by the gangs of New York, is hunting the man who killed her Akalina, and she will kill anyone who gets in her way.
1997 – Maria is twenty-two years old. She is leading the Bright Skies Agency, an anti-terrorist/mercenary group, which combats human trafficking around the world. Barry Thomas, a government intelligence agent, working with Maria and her father MoJo objects to her tactics of letting herself be captured, then using the GPS within her to direct the BSA mercenaries to their target.
Maria is driven to finding Sgt. Warren whom neither her nor MoJo is convince died in the rocket attack on D.C. MoJo tells her and Barry the only way to be certain of death is to look a man in the eye and shoot him in the head.
Nicky tells Maria he is stepping down as the Godfather and she is going to head both organizations. She has plans to rebuild the mob as a legitimate business after the Commission Trials had decimated the five families. At her request, Nicky puts out a contract hit on her as if she is performing a hostile takeover. She thinks it will bring Sgt. Warren out of hiding. It brings out more than they bargain for.
Excerpt
Chapter 2 – Shadows of the Past
Barry sits with MoJo in his lounge in South Palms Estate on his private Mediterranean Island. He downs a scotch and quickly pours another. Then he drinks that one straight down, only a slight grimace betraying the burning sensation in his throat.
“Something on your mind?” Morris asks as he sips his scotch. He holds his glass up in the sunlight coming through the twenty feet tall bay window. He peers through the golden liquid at Barry and says in a fortuneteller’s voice, “I see troubled waters in your future. You are perhaps unhappy with your assignment. You wish the government assigned you to another task.”
“No. Not at all,” Barry shifts to avoid direct eye contact with Morris. His muscular chest fills out the black T-shirt, the clean shave and close-cropped black hair giving him the look of a young man just out of bootcamp. But the three lines across his forehead and the beginning of luggage beneath his eyes carries the signs of a man approaching forty. “You are helping the USA in areas where it’s best we stay out of. I’m okay with that. It’s not like we haven’t worked with mercenaries before.”
Morris strokes his beard, tugging on the grayish streak in the middle. He gets up and walks to the bar, retrieves the decanter of twenty-year-old scotch and refills Barry’s glass. “Well, then what is it? Because you are drinking my best liquor like water. When you drink for pleasure, you can never drink too much. But when you are trying to drown your sorrows, there is never enough in the bottle. There is only pleasure and sorrow when it comes to drinking. So, which is it?”
“It’s Maria,” Barry says definitively.
“You really haven’t answered the question.”
Barry takes a shorter sip and waits for Morris to sit back down. “Why did you let her go on the mission? You had to know there was a better than good chance she was going to be taken. She could have been killed.”
“Ah, so it is pleasure that drives you to drink.” Morris’ face twists into a sadistic smile. He enjoys toying with the CIA agent. Watching his stone-cold face hold back his true emotions.
“What?”
“You find pleasure in my daughter, but feel sorrow she can be hurt,” Morris puts a fatherly tone to the statement. “Totally understandable. But not to worry, I raised her to be tougher than most. She can handle herself in a rough situation. Besides, this plan was mostly her idea, and you did agree to go along with it. So, what changed?”
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