Risking it All (Crossing the Line, #1)

Risking it All (Crossing the Line, #1)

Tessa Bailey




CHAPTER ONE


Here’s your meatloaf. Choke on it.

Seraphina Newsom crossed herself discreetly as she walked away from the customer’s table, muttering a quick Hail Mary for good measure. No sense in letting her immortal soul go to the devil because the man had treated her ass like it was on the specials menu. Still able to feel the sting of his pinching fingers, she vowed, then and there, to overtip her waitresses for the rest of her life. Thirty percent or bust.

Sera took a deep breath and pushed through the double doors leading to the kitchen of Dooly’s. Loud, tinny Greek music emanating from a portable radio greeted her, as did scraping silverware and dishes being submerged in hot, soapy water. Right on cue, the cook tossed two more plates of greasy meat loaf onto the dented metal shelf and ding ed the bell, even though she already stood there waiting. Squaring her shoulders, she reminded herself why a girl with a nursing degree and a budding career in law enforcement would be donning an apron in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

She was there to get up close and personal with her brother’s murderer.

“Why you never try my meat loaf, waitress?” the cook asked her in heavily accented English.

“Er…gluten allergy?”

“What is this gluten everyone talks about?”

She started to answer, but stopped.

“It’s probably just a myth. Like Santa Claus and comfortable thongs.” Satisfied with his frown and the fact that she’d avoided telling him his meat loaf resembled roadkill, Sera took both plates and backed through the doors.

Into the deathly silent dining room.

Discreetly as possible, she glanced toward the center of the silence. Two stools away sat Trevor Hogan. The man who’d gunned her brother down.

Hogan was a lifelong local who had started

small-time.

Stealing

cars,

robbing delis, brawling. His ambition had placed him in the right place at the right time, and with the help of a metal baseball bat, Hogan earned the trust of the boss and took over the protection racket. Loan-sharking, extorting local businesses, you name it—Hogan had both greedy hands in it.

Her brother, Colin, had been a rookie with the NYPD when Hogan began branching out, running an illegal gambling operation so large it had financed two successful nightclubs, ballooning his criminal influence even more. As inexperienced as Colin had been, he shouldn’t have been anywhere near Hogan’s case. He’d been too young, too cocky, wanting to land a major arrest his first year in the field.

But when your uncle was the police commissioner, exceptions were made, no matter how deadly.

She’d been working as an emergency room nurse at Massachusetts General in Boston when her brother died. Ironic, that. After taking a vow to save people’s lives, she’d been unable to save the life that mattered most.

Sera smoothed a thumb over the Saint Michael charm that hung around her neck. She wouldn’t go as far as to say the Newsoms were cursed, but…all right, they were pretty much cursed. The last three generations of Newsoms, including her father, had been killed in the line of duty. Her uncle was all that she had left, and he ran the city with an iron fist. As far as the people of this city were concerned, she didn’t exist. To the little family she had left, she didn’t exist, either. Seraphina Newsom was a ghost.

To her mind, that invisibility made her the perfect candidate to go undercover and find the key evidence to put away Hogan for life. Rumors of a ledger containing Hogan’s unsavory business dealings had long swirled through the precinct hallways. The rumors were fueled by the fierce opposition he’d shown when his financial records had been subpoenaed during the tossed-out murder trial. Added to the fact that Hogan was cocky as hell, and low-level informants had reported seeing the ledger, she knew it existed. His secrets were written on those pages.

Not secrets that would take him off the street. Not the conventional way, at least. Information was valuable in this neighborhood, and she could use the names in that ledger to implode his operation from the inside out, bringing Hogan’s operation down square on its head.

As soon as she’d felt confident enough that gaining possession of the ledger would be the key to outing Colin’s murderer, she’d taken a personal week off of work, citing the upcoming three-year anniversary of her brother’s death as the reason. And she’d gone undercover without a direct order from her uncle.

When this was over, she’d never again wear a badge. But she’d have bagged a murderer.

And then she would disappear.

Sera set down both plates of meat loaf in front of two burly male customers whose earlier loud conversation had devolved into subdued undertones with Hogan’s appearance, never letting Hogan out of her peripheral vision. Ever since he’d arrived, Dooly’s lively buzz had been switched off like a lightbulb, customers poking at their meals absently.

Apparently unconcerned about the pall he’d cast over the crowd, Hogan sat with one arm draped over his chair, focusing on the UFC match raging on the ancient television.

Hogan’s four-man crew stomped into the bar, making the sixth sense that ran in her family ping. Hogan leaned against the bar, gesturing animatedly as he spoke to the bartender. His friends laughed on cue and some of the customers began to relax. Hogan, his youthfulness beginning to fade along with his good looks, tossed back a shot of whiskey. He turned as he plunked the glass down on the bar, catching her eye across the dining room floor. Instead of cringing under his interest, Sera smiled back and sailed toward the kitchen, conscious of his hard gaze on her.