Hidden: A Dark Mafia Romance (Forbidden Kiss Book 1) Read online

  Hidden

  A dark mafia romance

  By Lyanna Thomson

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Conclusion

  Introduction

  I want to thank you you for buying Hidden, a dark mafia romance.

  My name is Lyanna Thomson. Ever since I was a little girl I was always fascinated by storytelling and world building. I used to play in my garden, imagining stories and characters, brave knights and princesses, or the evil bad guy who turns out to be good in the end. Now that I am older I’ve decided to write compelling stories that readers can relate to and have fun reading. I wanted to bring passion and emotion into my stories. Characters that are as brave and mysterious as they are human and relatable. And I believe I did so with Hidden, as you are about to find out. I wish you a lot of fun reading this dark mafia tale!

   Copyright 2019 by Lyanna Thomson- All rights reserved.

  - From a Declaration of Principles which was accepted and approved equally by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  The trademarks that are used are without any consent, and the publication of the trademark is without permission or backing by the trademark owner. All trademarks and brands within this book are for clarifying purposes only and are the owned by the owners themselves, not affiliated with this document.

  _____

  The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

  -Oscar Wilde

  Chapter 1

  She trotted slowly. Gently. As if she was afraid that the floor would be hurt if she walked too fast. There were three pieces of luggage rolling behind her. They were piled on top of each other and were all of the same shade of a bright pink colour. As she walked, the biggest luggage which was the one that was below stumbled on a pebble or something of the sort and shook violently. For a minute, it seemed to her as if the luggage would fall over and their contents would spill all over the floor but soon, the luggage steadied and she frowned at them for the umpteenth time that day.

  “Pink! What sort of a girl drags matching pink luggage all over in a small British town?” she had asked her mother in exasperation when she had come home with the newly bought luggage. Her mother cracked a childish smile and looked at her with excited blue eyes.

  “Why baby... isn’t it the colour of every fashionable girl!?” She would be away from her family for over six months.

  “I’m not getting any younger, I think I should learn to look after myself!” she had said to her mother when she had initially tried to talk her out about moving out. Her mother had turned on her with flashing eyes.

  “Yes... you can assert your independence by leaving home. But halfway around the world is overdoing it. It is taking all of this way out of proportions and I don’t think you should do it.” Amie had listened and she had argued and she had even joined her mother when she burst into a torrent of tears. But her mind was made up. She was going to have that semester at Colerain and her mother would do herself a lot of good by getting used to the idea. She had packed her bags and had left for the airport on the appointed day, and nearly 72 hours later, here she was. In the streets of the town she had been dreaming for a while now, and on her way to the campus that would house and educate her for the next six to seven months.

  Her luggage stumbled again and this time it took a whole lot of fight to finally get it to be steady. She knew that the bags were overfed but she had had no choice. She had sat at the edge of her bed for hours trying to decide which one of her clothes would go and which ones wouldn’t. For a girl with humble origins, she definitely had a lot of clothes. It didn’t matter, of course, that most of the clothes were cheap or that she bought on sale or on a bargain. She had a lot of them and she loved each and every single one. Eventually, she had decided to just take as much as her bag would take and stop wherever the clothes stopped fitting in the luggage. She still found ways to cramp a whole lot of clothes and shoes in even after it was obvious that the bag could not take anymore. She knew it was silly, but she didn’t want to have to shop when she arrived at the new school. She knew she had to watch her spending, especially since she was not sure if there would be accommodation for her on the campus or if she would have to use her meagre savings to rent some shit hole somewhere in town.

  “Hey, watch where you're going lassie!” some hunched over man snapped at her as she almost bumped into him. She was lost in her thoughts and seriously finding it hard to keep her mind conscious of her environment.

  “Nice! I'm barely here and people are already yelling at me!” she said to herself with a cynical smile. Her phone started to ring and she knew that she could not even dare to fumble with her purse to fetch it. If she let go of the luggage, even for a minute: everything would most likely tumble to the floor and she would look like a total idiot. She paused in her walk anyways and wondered if it really made any sense to pull the luggage all the way to her destination and then back if things didn’t work out with the accommodation. She took a quick look around and decided that she knew what to do. Instead of even walking into the school gates that she could see up in front, she would just make a call and find out by phone. If anything, she could feign a sense of importance on the phone and the man… or woman… or fairy… or elf… or gnome might be feeling obliged to let her have a room. She wasn’t the sort to resort to this sort of mental blackmail but well... desperate time requires desperate measures.

  She dragged herself into a tea shop and plopped herself into a seat close to the door as every person in the room turned to look at her. They were obviously puzzled and wondering what might be in her bag. The room was small and the tea lady seemed to have more teeth than anyone Amie had ever seen. She had on a crisply neat dress and a pretty yellow apron over it. She was in what seemed to be her middle ages and had a slight limp. But everyone seemed to be okay with her when she came to Amie’s table and asked with a smile that showed her plenty teeth,

  “What do you want to have?” Amie made a crisp order of biscuits and coffee. The woman had looked at her in a weird way and Amie had tried as much as she could not to instantly change her mind and order some tea instead. But she hated tea! She didn’t like it one bit and feeling like she was under pressure to drink it made her very uncomfortable. So she looked up at the still smiling woman and said:

  “It’s okay if you don’t have coffee. I'll just have a glass of water with my cookies.” And to her chagrin, everyone in the room burst into laughter. Had they all been waiting for her to make a mistake?

  “Hey Amanda... you should keep this one. She knows what she wants!” someone called from the crowd and people started laughing again and Amie became scared. What did he mean by she should keep her? Did Amanda eat all the rest who didn’t know what they want? Was she some sort of a human trafficker? Amie’s heart began to pound in her chest as Amanda bent just a little bit closer towards her and seemed to snif
f her. For a second. Then she turned around and yelled on top of her voice.

  “Cinnamon cookies and a cup of coffee coming up!” She walked away from Amie and disappeared behind the only other doors in the room apart from the one Amie had come in through.

  Amie sat still for a few minutes more before finally concluding that she could relax and wait for her order in peace. Everyone else seemed to have faced their business and she was once again alone. She picked up her purse and rummaged inside it till she found her cell phone. She dialled a number and waited for the recipient of her call to pick up. When a voice came on the other line, her heart skipped a beat.

  “Hello.... I am calling in respect of the exchange student’s accommodation once again, I just got into town and I was hoping to move in and start my program immediately.” She was saying into the phone. The person on the other end was silent till she finished and when she was done, he coughed lightly and proceeded to tell her that there was not long free accommodation for exchange students and that only students that were on scholarship got the accommodation. She would have to find herself a house. By the time he was done, her throat was dry and her hands were tingling. She had thought that she was mentally ready for whatever response she got from the agent, but now as she finally realized that she would have to actually spend her money on accommodation, she panicked inwards. She knew that rent was incredulously expensive in the university town and she would end up using up a huge chunk of her savings. Except she got a job pretty soon, she would be stranded; she closed her eyes in silent prayer and opened it in a flash when she suddenly heard the click of a coffee mug on the table and the clatter of the cookie bowl.

  She looked up into the pale brown eyes that stood above her and almost retreated. But for some reason, she stayed and stared back at it. After what seemed like a minute of staring into her eyes, the woman straightened herself and turned away from Amie.

  “She isn’t scared of me too!”

  She exclaimed and a bunch of people who had been watching the show signed their agreement. Amie sat there, wondering what in god’s name was wrong with the weird waitress. She had never been one to go looking for trouble, but she also didn’t back away from them when they get brought to her. The months and months of martial arts training did not leave her empty of ideas of how to protect herself against a bully. She knew she could bring down a man in a matter of minutes and so she usually wasn't afraid of confrontations either with men or women.

  She could vividly remember how her interest in martial arts had affected her relationships ever since high school. There was Fred, her first ever boyfriend who wore the green tinted glasses and had his hair in a never changing Mohawk. Now that she looked back at him, she wondered what it was that had attracted her to him in the first place. He had a pale skin. Skin so pale that she ought to have known right away that he was an albino. Then there were those gold irises that made her heart jolt in her chest all the time. She had mistaken that jolt in her chest for love or at least a mad crush. But now that she was older, wiser, she knew better. It was just her very own reaction to the strange look that always seemed to be in his eyes all the time. Besides any of that was the way he dressed! Sweet lord, she still beat herself up over the very thought that she had let him kiss her behind the boys bathroom. How did she manage to fall for a boy like that? She knew that she really ought not to ask that question because deep within her, she knew the answer to it. She had been eager to do what all the other girls were doing. There was Tanya... that black girl that had the longest hair in class. Only heaven knew how she ever managed to grow her hair that long. No matter what all the other girls did, they just never seemed to grow their hair that long. She was the centre of attention of all the boys. That Tanya; she loved them as much as they loved her and she thrived on the attention that they gave her. She walked around school with her extra-long neck and rumour had it that she was dating a college boy who liked to do everything to her in a thousand and one styles. Then there was Beatrice! The one and only Beatrice who walked with her round backside shooting out behind her, seeming to be a detachable part of her body. The gossip on her was that she had had sex so much that she had broken a hip. It was hilarious and a subject for jokes at the beginning but as time wore on, there came to be more jealousy than mockery amongst the girls who gossiped behind her back. All the other girls had been envious of these two reigning queens and wanted to be like them. Amie has never been a girl to be much into the high school spotlight. She got bullied now and then and frequently hated her life. But perhaps it was for the best as it allowed her to focus on her education more and thus excel in most of her subjects. On the downside of it all, she had a terrible social life and lived most of her time in high school as the quiet girl whom people picked on once in awhile.

  Then she found martial arts and everything had changed. She started to frequent the kung Fu dojo and soon became pretty known. She lost focus briefly when Tyrell, her albino Mohawk wearing boyfriend came into her life. Then came the one and only party she ever got to attend where he had tried to get all the way. She had stiffly resisted him in spite of the fact that she craved to have the experience so as to be able to talk about something when all the other girls talked about it. On one hand she wanted to be experienced and wanted to enjoy the pleasures that she had gotten hints of when he leaned in to kiss her and when he fumbled around her bra. But that night was different, it was not going to be just a little kissing and fumbling around. It was going to be a journey all the way and somehow, on the other hand, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to have that first experience with this Mohawk guy who smelled funny. Forget his golden irises that gave her the jolts, there was nothing much that kept her with him beyond the fact that she wanted to have a boyfriend like all the other girls.

  So that night at the party, she had resisted him over and over again and then somehow, he seemed to take the on and off resistance and the seeming uncertainty as his cue that she wanted it and only wanted him to work for it. So he persisted and tried harder. What he didn’t know was that he was starting to seem violent and she was starting to be reverted into her self-preserving mode. When she felt that he was starting to be too pushy for her liking, she pushed him away from her a little violently and he came back with just as much force she got really angry and threw a long kick at him which caught him at the jaw just as he started to come back towards her the second time. His lower jaw had slammed against his upper jaw and he had bitten himself through the force of the blow. Before she knew what was happening, she had been covered in his blood and then, perhaps because he had been so scared of the amount of blood, he had fallen down and fainted. She had screamed on top of her voice and ran out of the bathroom cubicle where all of this was happening and into the hallway where there were at least a dozen couples who stood against the doors and walls and seemed to be getting the better of each other. She stumbled her way out of the house where the party was being held and hailed a taxi. It would be a long time before she would even consider the idea of sex all anymore and by that time, she had become old enough to not see the big deal in it anymore and just decided to focus all her attention on all of things that she would rather be doing.

  Someone dropped something. She whirled around and saw the mortified face of the defaulter look at the shattered teacup and then at the waitress woman who had now turned around and was glaring at him now. He seemed dazed and lost and she felt a sudden urge to say something nice to him but she turned to her cookies instead and silently dreaded the taste of the coffee. Some part of her somehow assumed that the waitress would have attempted to punish her in some way for choosing coffee over tea. She turned away from the sight of the man with the shattered teacup and concentrated instead on her cookies. She was not going to be drawn into whatever dramatic even that would most likely be about to happen. She had accommodation arrangements to worry about.

  “Are you going to drink the coffee or what? You had me go through all the trouble of getting you coffee and now you loo
k at it as though I poisoned it! “Amie looked up and the woman's eyes were staring down at her again. Something about the woman's eyes reminded her of her albino boyfriend. Maybe something about any pair of eyes that was that close to her face would remind her of the guy. She smiled sheepishly and nodded.

  “Certainly! I will drink it...” she said with some hesitation in her voice. The woman looked at her with them eyes again and sighed.

  ” You have a place to put the luggage?” she talked too fast and Amie didn’t hear her right at first.

  “What?”

  “I said you got accommodation yet?” Amie’s eyes widened as she realized that the woman was indirectly offering her accommodation.

  “No... No... I’m actually worried and don’t know where to start searching for one.” she looked like she was in deep thought for what seemed like an hour but was really about sixty seconds.

  “Well... it so happens that I have a crib that I want to rent out. If you promise to be a good tenant and pay your rent on time in addition of treating the house well, I just might let you stay there for a token.” Amie blinked twice. She couldn’t believe her luck and if only five minutes before, someone had told her that she would be able to get accommodation there and then and from the waitress lady, she would have laughed it off as a joke.

  “Wow! That will be really nice. And of course will pay my rent on time. In fact, I’ll pay you for this month up front once I see the place.” The waitress exhaled as if she had been holding the breath for a few months and leered over Amie in that intimidating maternal way again.

  “Well... finish up with them cookies and drink the coffee. I have an apartment to show you.”

  Amie nodded obediently and focused on wolfing down the rest of her cookies and calculating in her head how much the fat big breasted waitress would demand for her house.