I Handed My Job Application To The Deadliest Mob Boss In The City—Now His Entire Crew Works Under Me

Freddy didn’t argue. He jerked the wheel hard to the right, sending the heavy German sedan careening across three lanes of empty highway tarmac. Georgie slammed against the leather doorframe, clutching her navy folder to her chest like a lifeline as the tires screeched a vicious protest against the damp concrete.

Behind them, the black Suburban took the bait, swinging aggressively into the exit lane with its high beams blindingly bright in the sedan’s rear glass.

“Wilkens Avenue is coming up!” Freddy yelled, his knuckles chalk-white on the steering wheel. “Where’s this brewery cut, girl?”

“Past the rusted grain silo, take the service entrance between the two brick warehouses!” Georgie shouted back, adrenaline overriding the terror that had paralyzed her knees. “It looks like a dead end, but my dad used to park his cab there during Orioles games! The chain-link gate was torn down by a runaway delivery truck three years ago and the city never put it back!”

Freddy stomped the accelerator. The luxury sedan surged forward with a deep, mechanical roar, cutting between two crumbling brick walls that swallowed them into pitch darkness. The heavy chassis scraped a pile of loose gravel, showering sparks into the wheel wells.

A low, vibrating rumble began to shudder through the floorboards.

“Train!” Tonio barked, pointing out the windshield.

A hundred yards ahead, the red warning lights of a rail crossing began to flash against the night fog, accompanied by the piercing, rhythmic clang of the bells. The striped crossing arms were slowly creeping down, and the blinding headlight of a CSX locomotive was already illuminating the damp tracks.

“We’re not gonna make it!” Freddy panicked, his foot hovering over the brake.

“Don’t you dare brake!” Georgie yelled, lunging forward between the front bucket seats, her finger stabbing toward the windshield. “That train moves at twenty miles an hour through the railyard switch! Hit the gas, veer left onto the wooden crossing timbers, and glide across! If you stop, they will pin us against the rails!”

Elio didn’t yell. He merely reached out, pressed his palm firmly against Freddy’s shoulder, and delivered two quiet, merciless words: “Floor it.”

Freddy jammed the pedal straight to the floorboard.

The sedan leaped across the tracks with a bone-jarring bounce just as the front cowcatcher of the locomotive roared past, its horn blaring a deafening blast that rattled every tooth in Georgie’s jaw. The clearance was so tight she felt the wind shear from the passing boxcars rock the vehicle sideways.

Behind them, the Suburban screeched to a halt, blocked entirely by an endless, unyielding wall of rolling steel freight cars.

Freddy pulled out onto Monroe Street, slowing the car to a smooth, legal speed. The silence inside the cabin was suddenly absolute, broken only by the hum of the engine and Georgie’s ragged breathing.

Tonio slowly turned around in the passenger seat, his mouth hanging slightly open. He looked at Georgie, then looked down at the crumpled résumé sitting between his combat boots.

“I’ll be damned,” Tonio muttered. “She actually knows the train schedules.”

Elio Fontana sat back, his dark overcoat sliding smoothly over his tailored shoulders. The tension that had tightened his jaw was completely gone, replaced by a quiet, calculating curiosity that was somehow far more terrifying. He reached down, picked up Georgie’s navy folder, straightened the slightly wrinkled paper, and began reading her qualifications under the dim dome light.

“Allegheny Valley Transport,” Elio read out loud, his baritone voice smooth and terrifyingly calm. “Reduced shipping delay margins by thirty-four percent across three Midwestern corridors. Managed twenty-four active fleet lines without a single lost container in four years.”

“I’m very organized,” Georgie whispered, her voice trembling as the post-adrenaline crash hit her muscles like lead.

Elio looked up, fixing her with those unreadable, predatory dark eyes. “And you were going to give this talent to Northline Freight for seventy thousand a year?”

“Eighty-two thousand,” Georgie corrected defensively, swallowing hard. “Plus full dental.”

Elio let out a short, quiet breath that sounded dangerously like a laugh. “Northline Freight is a shell company, Miss Marino. Half their fleet is owned by the Marcone syndicate. They run hijacked electronic shipments through the Maryland harbor.”

Georgie froze. “What?”

“The job you flew across two states to interview for,” Elio said, closing her folder with an elegant snap of his wrists, “was an open seat in a money-laundering clearinghouse. And Daniel Adair doesn’t hire senior route planners. He hires people he can frame when federal auditors start asking questions.”

Georgie’s world tilted on its axis. The prestigious corporate homecoming she had spent three years working toward, the salary that was supposed to save her father’s crumbling rowhouse, the pride of returning to Baltimore as an executive—all of it was an illusion.