We sat in silence as he studied me closer and I him. Tattoos splayed across his knuckles. Definitely prison ink. And a faint scar on his upper lip. Something felt strangely familiar about that scar, and him.
He spread his hands across my desk in ownership then flashed his eyes to mine. “Come here,Passerotto.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m trying to decide whether to kill you or keep you. So give me a reason to keep you.”
I considered if I could avoid this. Stay on this side of the desk, even if the safety over here was precarious at best. In an arm’s length, he could snap my neck with one hand.
“My patience is not infinite,” he said, his voice a deep rumble.
I stood, smoothed my skirt and walked around to stand beside him. At my height, and his, he didn’t need to tilt his neck to meet my eyes. Heat and a spicy cologne wafted from his skin. I didn’t want to think he smelled good, but damn, he did, like a long distant memory.
He reached out and pulled me closer by the hips. Then lifted me as if I weighed nothing and deposited me on the desk. My feet hung down on either side of his knees. I wanted to snap my thighs closed, but I also didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking he rattled me.
“Word on the street,” he said, dragging one calloused hand up my calf to the sensitive hollow behind my right knee, ‘is you’ll do anything for a price.”
He continued moving his hands up both legs now until he stopped at my thigh holster outside the wool of my skirt.
“What’s this?” Something like amusement played in his gaze now.
He dove his hands under my skirt, unlaced the weapon and drew it off in one swoop. When he caught sight of the gun he chuckled.
“Next time, grab a bat or a hammer. It might be better protection than this tiny thing.”
He placed his hands back on my thighs inside the fabric this time, the gun forgotten, by him at least, next to him on the chair. “Now where were we, oh right, a price.” His hands inches higher. “Name it.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just kill me?’
“I can’t kill you until I know all your secrets and dismantle you body and soul from the inside out,” he said like reciting a grocery list. ”This is my only offer. Name your price.”
Frustration, nerves, the sensation of his big hands framing the soft squishy parts of my legs, I didn’t know, but my calm fractured.
“For what? What are you buying for fucks sake?” I said, not quite a yell, but definitely not a whisper.
Another almost smile. “You’re smarter than some of your contemporaries. I'm buying you. Every secret, every memory, every inch of your delicious body will belong to me, and me alone. Now name your price before I decide to just take it all, since there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
He destroyed my street crews, dismantled my territory, and now he wanted to lay claim to my body as well? “Aren’t there twenty year olds out there who would line up to see to your needs? Don’t you want something with a little less miles on it?”
“I prefer my women with some experience.”
“And I prefer my men a little less sociopathic.”
He stood, towering over me to lean in and meet my eyes better. “Stop playing with me and name your price.”
I sucked in a long breath and pushed it out slowly. “My men, and my safety. No one dies. Use them, put them to work, if they want to work for you, but no one dies in this invasion.”
He took the seat again and gave me a real smile this time. It looked debasing. “If they don’t attack me or mine, I’ll let them live.”
“Does that rule apply to me as well?” I asked. The ice pick on the bar at the corner of my eye begged for a home in his neck.
He licked his lips and cupped my ankle gently. “No,Passerotto. I like a woman who puts up a bit of a fight.”
Two
Eddy
Ishould have killed her. Walked into her office and been done with it. This damn woman was going to be more trouble than she was worth. But after all these years, the betrayal, and her causing endless suffering I wasn’t going to simply walk away from my revenge.
