Dante hummed. “Then make damn sure she’s protected, because whoever this is will see immediately that you’ve gaineda new vulnerability. Especially if they are someone close to your inner circle.”
Santino released an aggravated exhale. “I’ve got guards on her.” But he knew that only meant so much.
Dante didn’t push. “Stay alive until we get in touch again.” He disconnected without waiting for a response.
Santino tossed his phone to the seat beside him and let his gaze slide back out the window. He enjoyed stepping into the boxing ring and exchanging punches with whoever was willing to stand across from him. It was great stress relief, as well as a good work-out. But it was also predictable, and exposed.
Fighting Shape was a semi-legit athletics gym with a focus on boxing, kickboxing, and mixed martial arts. There were open spaces and defined rules for members who chose to drop in, as well as classes with coaches and personal trainers for those willing to pay higher fees or with more complicated lives. They were neither the most popular such gym in St. Louis nor among the worst, and Santino was fine with that. The ambiguity of swimming in the middle made it easier to run money through the business.
Most of their members were family or people family had dragged along and convinced to sign up. That was great, except for this moment, when Santino was forced to accept that he didn’t know who in the family he could trust.
Stepping into a ring with whoever was around and giving them permission to swing at him was potentially suicide. And he wasn’t looking for that.
Santino grunted, irritated, and snapped, “Never mind. Take me home.” The punching bag in his basement would have to suffice.
Reiko sat motionless on her exercise bike, sweat already dampening her hairline despite the morning hour. It wasn’t a nightmare that had woken her with the sun that morning, and she ought to have been grateful for that. But, somehow, it was embarrassing to have had a sex dream about a man she knew.
A man who’d touched her in ways no other had.
Her fingers dropped, again, to the scar barely covered by her lightweight top. Never in a million years would she have imagined anyone might react so …intimately, so intensely, to her scar. It had been as if the sight of her wound had wounded him in turn. She didn’t know if she would ever recover from the power of that reaction.
Her lips scrunched up into a frown and she lifted her shirt enough to reveal her belly to her gaze. He’d seen that, too, of course. Touched it, kissed it. But he hadn’t also seen the flab on her thighs. He hadn’t gotten the full effect.
Whereas she had seen enough to be certain. Santino Guerra was masculine perfection. It was hard to comprehend how he could be remotely interested in her.
She’d had hours to reflect on their long, strange, day together. And she had drawn a couple of conclusions.
First, she obviously should not have abandoned religion, because it was clear her soul needed saving. She saw no otherexplanation for why she was neither running screaming to the nearest airport or at least attempting to contact the FBI. The man had bluntly confessed to being a criminal, to not giving a damn that his security guy had dropped a body in public that happened to be the body of a guy who supposedly worked for him, and her emotional priority was his response to the story behind her scar.
She tried telling herself that was because literally the entire rest of the world, or at least every representative of it who’d had opportunity, had rejected and outright abused her. There might even have been some truth in that. But it didn’t matter, really. Santino was, by his own admission, not a good man.
Except when she thought about it that way, she immediately compared him to her father. And if either of those two males were an example of ‘not a good man’, it was her father.
So, if she had already reached a point where she struggled to give a damn about a world that consistently pushed her down and stomped again for good measure, then maybe not being put off by the idea of her self-declared fiancé being a societally defined criminal wasn’t so wild.
The second conclusion she eventually came to was that if Santino had meant every crazy thing he’d said the previous day, then she was going to re-think her job hunt. She didn’t want to be a kept woman whose job was to maintain the home, but her current goal of throwing her application everywhere and seeing what stuck was also unappealing. So, when the hour was a bit more decent, she figured she would reach out and ask him when they could talk again. She had enough savings to skate by for a short while on her own, but she preferred having a plan and expectations. A conversation was best if it was an option. Then she would pull down her applications and allow herself to really think about the kind of career she wanted.
And before all of that, she needed to wash up.
Reiko gave herself a shake, powered down the bike she needed to remember to ask about keeping when Santino moved her into his mansion—another brain-melting concept—and made her way for the shower. Her phone buzzed with a new text as she stepped into the bathroom and for a delirious moment, she expected to look down and see Santino’s name attached to the message.
Instead, in a concerning twist of déjà vu, she saw an unknown number looking back at her. Still, curiosity nagged, so while the water warmed, she pulled the text open to see who it might be. Maybe it was a response to an application.
This is your father. Make yourself presentable. Now that you’ve lost that ridiculous job, it’s time we talked about your future. My car will be there to pick you up in two hours.
Chapter ten
Panic
The phone clattered tothe floor and Reiko stumbled back until she hit the wall. Her heart catapulted into an Olympic-worthy sprint and she couldn’t breathe. Steam wafted into the room from the shower stall, only making the air thicker.
Oto-san?
It wasn’t possible.
Rather, it was so astoundingly unlikely that it may as well have been impossible.
He didn’t speak to her. He hadn’t communicated a single message to her, by choice, since he’d thrown her out of the house when she was eighteen. He’d been full of words that day, the day he’d met her at the door of what she’d thought was her home, demanded her cell phone and keys, and indicated the trash bag that rested against the wall. The bag was all she was to take with her aside from the cash in her cheap purse and the clothes on her back. He’d even demanded she remove the bits of jewelry she was wearing, jewelry her part-time job hadn’t paid for. Later, she had learned the bag contained clothing, an old lunch box stuffed with her necessary papers, and an empty jewelry box she’d once written her name on with a colored gel-pen. The box hadn’t been empty when she’d left the house that day, of course.
