Lost and Found in New York Read online

  Lost and Found in New York

  Tanja Neise

  Translated by Katharine Oden

  “Lost and Found in New York”

  Written By Tanja Neise

  Copyright © 2019 Tanja Neise

  All rights reserved

  Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

  www.babelcube.com

  Translated by Katharine Oden

  Cover Design © 2019 Die Bücherfee

  “Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Lost and Found in New York | Tanja Neise | Translated by Katharine Oden

  Your Review and Word-of-Mouth Recommendations Will Make a Difference

  Are You Looking For Other Great Reads?

  Your Review and Word-of-Mouth Recommendations Will Make a Difference

  Are You Looking For Other Great Reads?

  Lost and Found in New York

  Tanja Neise

  Translated by Katharine Oden

  “Lost and Found in New York”

  Written By Tanja Neise

  Copyright © 2019 Tanja Neise

  All rights reserved

  Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

  www.babelcube.com

  Translated by Katharine Oden

  Cover Design © 2019 Die Bücherfee

  “Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

  A feud between two New York Mafia families, a fiery couple surrounded by lies and intrigue.

  For years after the death of her family, Ally went into hiding. She left everything behind and thought she’d never see her true love again.

  When John, a renowned rock guitarist, finds her after years of searching and refuses to let her get away again, Ally discovers she still has feelings for him, although she fights them desperately.

  But John isn’t the only one who’s been looking for her – suddenly, the past confronts them both...

  “A hard shell and an even harder interior. How had he been dumb enough to believe that his life could ever have a happy ending?”

  A book for anyone who believes that true love conquers all.

  Tanja Neise lives in a small town very near Berlin, Germany.

  She attributes her start writing novels to the influence of her husband, who was convinced of her potential before she’d ever even written one word.

  Since then, she’s had several books published and is regularly found on bestseller lists.

  For my little sister, Bianca.

  You’re still singing and dancing in my heart.

  I will never forget you.

  You’ll find recipes for the dishes mentioned throughout the book in the appendix.

  Have fun cooking!

  Prologue

  Four Years Ago

  “Since there are no other living relatives, or at least none who can be located, you, Mr. John Dempsey, will inherit the sum total of Mr. Galletti’s worldly fortune,” the notary explained to everyone in the room from his position behind the enormous mahogany desk. He looked over his glasses at the young man. “Do you accept the inheritance?”

  .John sat there, completely perplexed, not really knowing what to make of the reading of the last will and testament. His former boss, his wife, and his eldest daughter had been murdered just a few weeks before. After the horrific event, the younger daughter had disappeared. Ally. His Ally – the woman John had once wanted to marry. Sometimes it seemed to him as though it had already been an eternity since those days. So much had happened since then. His career with his bandmates had catapulted him out of the realm of normal life, smack dab into full-on showbiz. He had been one of America’s most eligible bachelors. All of a sudden, the world was his oyster – at least that’s how it had seemed. But he’d never forgotten Ally.

  Secretly, John hoped she was still alive and that no one had hurt her. Her father’s murderer was surely in organized crime and wouldn’t rest until all members of the immediate Galletti clan were dead. At that moment, he swore to himself he’d search high and low for her until he found her – or at least what was left of her.

  Three weeks ago, immediately after he’d returned to the States, he’d put numerous private detectives on the trail of Allison Galletti, but no one had yet been able to give him the slightest hint as to her whereabouts. It was as though she had disappeared from the face of the Earth.

  Chapter 1

  Ally

  She was so done with life. The room – if you could call this pigsty that – was a nightmare! Dirty walls stained with water damage. Wallpaper peeling off, a totally threadbare carpet, hardly recognizable as such. How had she wound up in this dump? How had her ideal world been destroyed so thoroughly?

  She knew the answer to this question well enough, but her frustration ran so deep, it threatened to break her. Ally was often so overwhelmed with emotion, she could hardly contain herself. But she couldn’t allow these feelings to take control or she would no longer be able to defend herself.

  Today was one of those days, but she couldn’t afford the luxury of forgetting, or else she’d be discovered – and that’s something she never wanted to live through. She owed it to her dead family to survive.

  As the memories flashed through her brain like some techno bass line, she closed her eyes and returned to the past:

  Four years ago, on a rainy November night, she disappeared. Ally knew then that it was her only chance to survive. And she seized upon it.

  As soon as she returned home from a friend’s house – she had snuck out of her room for a few hours – she noticed that something was amiss. The bodyguards weren’t at their usual posts. That had never happened before. The strangeness of this scenario put her in high alarm. Shortly thereafter, she found her father, lying in a pool of blood in the living room. The beige carpet was red with his blood, his dead eyes stared blankly up at the ceiling, and the room was gripped by a ghostly silence. Tears running down her cheeks, she lay down next to him and put her hand to his cheek – it was cool to the touch. Her whole life, he’d been there for her, solid as a rock. And now here he lay, like a felled tree.

  Panic gripped her then. Where were her mother and her sister? Blind with terror, Ally ran up the stairs – something she would regret doing to this very day. The sight of those violated bodies, throats slit at the end of their ordeal, had buried itself deep in her subconscious. She would never be able to forget it. The images pursued her every night and even in the daylight, she was helpless in the face of sudden flashbacks.

  Shaken by the emotions that gripped her anew every time she recalled that night, Ally opened her eyes again. Back in the here and now, she straightened up weakly and drove the images from her mind. She couldn’t get distracted – there was no room for sentimentality. She was no longer that sheltered girl, Allison Galletti. Now she called herself Ally Gale. Up until recently, she was Mary Collins. She’d already forgotten the other names; there had been too many, too many false identities that she’d taken on over the course of the past four years. Her new name was the first one that hearkened back to her old self. Up to now, she’d strictly avoided that. Also, she was back in New York. This was also a first since that horrific day. She was once more in her home city, which was another reason the memories were taking a hold of her so strongly, pulling her into a maelstrom of emotions that threatened to drown her. It was almost as bad as in the first few weeks after she’d gone underground.

  Glancing at her watch, Ally was overcome with urgency, which ripped her, gratefully, from the dark hole of reminiscing. Today was the day she had to do the night shift. One of her colleagues was sick, otherwise Ally wa
s always on the early shift. The hole-in-the-wall she worked in at the moment was a shady dive during the daytime, but at night it was sheer hell. Rough characters loitering, drunk, at the tables, now and then swerving into the path of one of the female bodies to grope them. Bodies, not women, for the waitresses here were not regarded as people, but rather as fixtures that belonged to the drinks that the men here consumed by the liter. The girls who served here were prey for them.

  Her choice of name gave her an uneasy feeling on a daily basis, so she’d come to regret it. Ally Gale – Allison Galletti. It was too similar. What if it lead her family’s murderers to her trail? One thing was certain: she had to disappear again soon and change her identity again, for she would not find any peace with this one. Maybe she should be a ‘Monica Lewis’ for a change and go back to the West Coast – she liked the weather there better, anyway.

  Ally had wanted to turn down the night shift, but her boss had totally flipped out and threatened to fire her. It was the end of the month and Ally was afraid she wouldn’t get her pay for the last four weeks if she didn’t go in tonight. She needed the money. Badly. She’d hardly eaten anything for two days. Before she’d gotten this job, she’d been unemployed for three weeks and burned through all her savings. She hated being so dependent on the whims of others. There was nothing for it but to bite the bullet. It would only be a few more days before she disappeared again, anyway. There was no chance of one of her father’s enemies washing up in this hole. Nevertheless, she went into work today with a queasy feeling. Years of running had made her mistrustful of every little change. Although her entire life was in a constant state of flux and she should actually be used to working odd hours, it was particularly difficult for her to go into work on this night. Every few weeks she pulled up stakes, moved to another city, started using a new name, and got a job in some place where no one asked for her ID. Like in this one where she worked now. In her experience, these were always questionable operations in which she was employed as a waitress, although sometimes she cleaned. After a while, some of the men would want more and get pushy, and that’s when she disappeared again.

  ***

  The cigarette haze burned her eyes and made her throat feel sore. She had been right – this dive was the gates of hell tonight. The men here were altogether the scum of the earth. They were constantly groping Ally and trying to convince her, with a dirty vocabulary, to meet them after her shift. Their chances were nil, but Ally dared not say that to any of them directly, or her boss would throw her out on the spot and her wages from almost four weeks would be gone. She didn’t want to go hungry anymore and was also worried about being thrown out of her apartment. She couldn’t withstand that. Frugality, spartan meals, and a run-down room, that she could bear, but no more hunger.

  That very moment another somebody pawed her behind. With nothing more than an irritated sigh, she turned to the groper with a sweet smile. “Can I get you anything else?”

  The look in the man’s eyes was unmistakable. “No no, honey. You don’t need to bring me anything else. I already have everything I want right here in my hand.” He waggled his eyebrows smugly and his buddies laughed. Drops of beer glistened in his dark beard and a broken tooth blemished his smile. He was no beauty and his bad behavior this night made him seem even uglier.

  Ally bent over to him and whispered in his ear: “Better lay off me, big guy. My boss has a couple nice surprises under the bar for guys who don’t respect his property.” Lying was one of her defenses against these types and she’d learned to use it well. The other was Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art that she could do in her sleep, but only used in cases of absolute emergency.

  As though he’d burned himself on her much too short jeans, the patron withdrew his hand. Ally said out loud: “Your friend has magic hands.” A round of guffaws went up and she left him not too unhappy. She’d rebuffed him without embarrassing him. It was one thing she’d learned over the course of time.

  The evening progressed with several similar scenarios, but she wasn’t surprised. Early shift was easier. Sullen men who just wanted coffee and who let loose with a rude joke once in a while. That said, her tips were looking good tonight. She was easily tripling her hourly rate. That ensured that she’d have dinner tonight and enough left over for food for tomorrow and the day after. She heaved a sigh of relief. Hunger was awful; she didn’t want to live that way anymore. Every lapdog needed its gravy.

  “Hey baby,” called her boss, who was pulling beer from behind the bar at the moment. Ally approached him reluctantly. “You’re really on it tonight. These guys are drinking more tonight that ever. I’m thinking I’ll keep you on the night shift.

  She had been afraid of just this sort of thing happening. “Uh, that’s nice of you, but I usually have to watch my kid in the evenings.”

  “Then you’ll have to get a babysitter.” He kept skulking around, waiting for her next excuse. Her internal alarm went off. He had something up his sleeve and she had to be careful.

  “I can’t work here forever, anyway. I’m pregnant again.” Why had she said that? She didn’t even know – it certainly didn’t help her case.

  Alexej neared here and took her chin roughly in his hand. “Either you take over the night shift or you’ve worked here long enough. Got it?” His cold eyes gleamed threateningly. Evidently, no one had ever refused him before and there was no way she was going to be the first.

  “Yeah, I got it.” Boiling with anger on the inside, she didn’t say what was actually on her mind, making a secret pledge to pack up and leave as soon as possible. As soon as she had this past month’s wages in her pocket, she was gone.

  When he realized how submissive she was acting, Alexej’s eyes lit up and he looked her up and down. He was basically a good looking guy, but his character was straight out of a nightmare. She felt a shiver of fear run up her spine. “Good girl. You’ve earned a reward. I’ll see you in my office after your shift.”

  Ally gulped and moved away from his hand. Without even looking at him again, she turned away. Don’t run, she kept telling herself, while she found her feet steering her to a table full of empty glasses. By no means did she want to show the fear that she felt in this moment. Her flight reflexes were kicking in and she rapidly ran through her options. There weren’t a lot to choose from.

  One thing was certain: She would never again enter Alexej’s office, not tonight or any other night.

  Chapter 2

  John

  In the past four years, he’d searched high and low for her. He had even contracted people to find her, but it was as though Ally had disappeared from the face of the Earth. Thinking about what might have happened to her drove him absolutely crazy. He’d never found closure. He still had music, but it hadn’t been long before even that had failed to distract him. When the band had broken up and they had all disappeared from the public eye, the need to find Ally had turned into a kind of obsession that he could hardly control.

  He thought back to the young woman that she had been – no one was more beautiful to him than Allison Galletti. An angel. At first, he’d just seen her as a kid, but with time that had changed. John had fallen head over heels for her, and she for him. There was hardly a moment he wasn’t thinking about her. But Ally’s father was against their relationship and forbid them to see each other. With heavy hearts, they respected his wish, so feared was Calogero Galletti – full-blooded Sicilian and a man capable of anything. He was the only person whom John had ever feared and, at the same time, Galletti was something of a hero figure for him.

  Ally’s father had taken him under his wing when he was a young hoodlum, fighting for survival. At the time, he had been sixteen years old and felt honored to become a member of the notorious Galletti Clan. He idolized the boss and, over time, had done everything for him without question, even when that meant denying himself his true love – or taking somebody’s life. Galletti House was his first real home. He didn’t know who his real father was. His mother
died of an overdose of some tainted drug when he was fifteen. She had been a junkie as far back as he could remember and had never really been a real mother for him. As a child he had felt only disdain for her and now, as an adult, he couldn’t comprehend how a mother could treat her child that way.

  So John listened to Calogero, tried to stay away from Ally, but his heart was always with her. At some point, there was a moment that changed everything. He could no longer stand the situation – seeing her without being able to touch her was sheer hell for him. The decision to leave the Gallettis was not an easy one, but he wanted to prove himself to Calogero and return someday to ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage again. The Boss wouldn’t be able to refuse him, with his pockets full of honest money. But John missed the right moment.

  After he had gotten to know his bandmates and they’d began climbing the charts, the way back was difficult. Up to that point, he’d just played guitar to make up for some of his screwed-up life. He’d found his first instrument next to a dumpster and lovingly restored it. He still had the piece, but in the meantime he’d started playing much better guitars. Music had saved him – without it, he would’ve been totally down and out, destroyed by the type of shit that had been the story of his life up until that point. In the years before he wound up with the Gallettis, he’s spent all his time playing guitar. He’d practiced every free moment, learning songs from the radio and, later, composing his own versions of top hits. Before he was discovered, he knew he could play well, but obviously other people thought he was the stuff of legend.

  From that point on, his life went into fast-forward.

  And now, seven years after he’d left the Gallettis, he had seen Allison again for the first time. He would have recognized her anywhere. And what he saw was hard to take. His stomach had cramped terribly, when he rediscovered her, his Ally, all grown up and more beautiful than ever. Curly, chestnut-brown hair falling over her naked shoulders, wearing hotpants that revealed far too much of her gorgeous legs. There was little left to the imagination. But her eyes didn’t have the same light; instead she seemed tired, exhaustion written over her whole body.