LOGINShare
Chapter 14: The Legal Pad
publish date:
2026-08-21 12:00:00
Latest chapter
ROUGH TRADE Chapter 15: Vanished
They drove through the night, Cruz's hand on her thigh, her hand over his, the city falling away behind them. He had a car waiting in a garage downtown, no plates, cash paid, untraceable, a go-bag already in the trunk. He'd planned for this, she realized. He'd planned for the moment he might have to disappear, because men like him always did, because the world they lived in left no room for the unprepared."How long have you known about me?" she asked, the dark road unspooling ahead of them."Since the party. Since you looked at me across the room and didn't look away." He glanced at her, and she saw the ghost of a smile. "I went to find out who the beautiful woman was who didn't flinch from the shadows. Imagine my surprise when I found out she was a cop.""And you stayed anyway."His jaw tightened. "I stayed because of you. Not the job. You. From the moment you looked at me, I was gone. I didn't care what you were. I only cared that you stay
ROUGH TRADE Chapter 14: The Legal Pad
They sat in Nina's apartment with the takeout going cold on the counter and the truth hanging between them like smoke. Marsh told Cruz who Nina was. Cruz told Nina who he was. Nobody raised their voice. That was almost worse. "You're a cop," Cruz said. He said it flat, the way a man says a thing he's already figured out but needs to hear spoken aloud to believe it. He looked at Nina, and she watched him put it together, every moment, every night, every time she'd asked a question, every time she'd let him inside her. "The whole time." "The whole time," she said, because there was no point lying now, because the lie was dead and the truth was all that was left. He laughed, soft and broken, and pressed his palms to his eyes, and Nina felt the sound of it like a blade between her ribs. "And the baby?" "Yours. Ours." Marsh cleared his throat, uncomfortable, a man caught between duty and the woman he'd
ROUGH TRADE Chapter 13: Sombras
The precinct was empty at three in the morning, the fluorescent lights buzzing, the coffee in her hand cold. Marsh ran the name in the system while Nina stood beside his desk, and she watched the results come back, and she felt the world tilt beneath her.Cruz Navarro. No priors. No arrests. No photos. No registered address. A ghost in the system the same way he was a ghost in the city. Clean. Impossibly clean.Marsh's fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling threads the way he'd been trained. DMV. No license under Navarro. Voter registration. Nothing. Property records. The penthouse was leased through a trust, no named beneficiary, the same pattern as the hills estate, the same pattern as Sombras's known shells. Tax filings. None. A man with a penthouse downtown and no tax return on record."He doesn't exist," Marsh said, his voice flat. "On paper, Cruz Navarro doesn't exist. No birthday, no Social Security number that belongs to a real person, no
ROUGH TRADE Chapter 11: The Brother
The warehouse sat between them in the days that followed, a thing neither of them named. Cruz started reaching for her hand in the car, thumb tracing her knuckles, a gesture he'd never made before. He cooked for her three nights running, elaborate meals that kept him at the stove and off the phone. When he caught her watching him across the kitchen he'd go still, then smile, but the smile never quite reached his eyes. Nina found herself touching him more, a hand on his back when she passed, her head on his chest in the dark, holding on a little longer than she used to, as if she could press the truth out of him through her skin if she just held tight enough.It was in that mood that he brought up his family.Cruz took her to meet his family on a Sunday, the kind of ordinary thing that made her stomach churn with guilt because she wasn't ordinary and neither was he, and these people would never know what sat at their table.His mother Pilar lived in a
ROUGH TRADE Chapter 12: Two Lines
The weeks that followed the family dinner were the happiest and the guiltiest of Nina's life. She moved through Cruz's world like a woman in a dream, sleeping in his bed, eating at his table, wearing his shirts in the morning while she made coffee. She stopped checking in with Marsh on the rotation. She let the burner phone go dead in her purse for a week at a time. When a client request came through from Greer, she read it and forgot to reply, and the next day she forgot again, and Cruz would come up behind her at the window and slide his arms around her waist and the request would stop mattering. The detective was still in there somewhere, but her voice had gone thin as a whisper, and Nina had stopped listening for it.She thought about Valeria. About the dinner invitation she'd never answered. About the texts her sister sent every few days, funny, concerned, increasingly worried, that she answered with short replies that grew shorter. She thought about her sister st
ROUGH TRADE Chapter 10: Concrete
She should have left it alone. She didn't.It started with a phone call Cruz took in the other room, his voice low and hard in a way she'd never heard, Spanish flowing fast and sharp, words she caught pieces of, numbers, names, a tone that gave orders and expected them obeyed. When he came back his face was smooth again, but she'd seen the other man underneath, the one who moved in shadows, and she couldn't unsee it."Work call?" she asked, casual, pouring herself more coffee like she hadn't noticed the change in him."Something like that." He looked at her, and she saw him deciding what to say. "Nina. There are parts of my life I haven't told you about. Parts that aren't pretty.""I think I figured that out," she said. "I'm not asking you to tell me everything, Cruz. Just tell me you're not going to get me hurt."He looked at her a long time, and she watched something move behind his eyes, something hard and heavy. "I would never le
You may also like
Half a Lifetime Later—My Mafia Princess is Finally Mine
Janedoewritings172.4K viewsMafia Men V - Marco's Vengeance
Janedoewritings135.0K viewsFlames and Roses
Babyofsun105.7K viewsMafia Men II: Lorenzo's Gilded Cage
Janedoewritings216.2K viewsA Submissive For The Beastly Mafia
Commy vic59.9K viewsBound To The Mafia King: The Salvatore Vow
driftingsoul29 viewsFilthy Letters To The Stranger
T.M Tales104 viewsMarried to Mafia
mr_dutta101 views
