"Boss," Dante Vitiello’s voice crackles through the speaker, tight and completely devoid of his usual arrogance. "We have a massive fucking problem."
"It better be life or death to wake me up, Dante," I warn, my eyes narrowing in the dark.
"It is," Dante replies grimly. "Someone just firebombed the west side warehouse. And Boss... Arthur Vance is gone. His men vanished from his estate three hours ago. The four million was a distraction."
My blood runs entirely cold. I look down at the sleeping girl in my arms. The daughter left behind to pay the debt while the rat scurried into the sewers.
Suddenly, the heavy double doors of the master bedroom swing open without a knock.
Matteo, one of my newest and youngest capos, bursts into the room, holding a encrypted tablet. "Don Thorne, we traced the—"
Matteo stops dead in his tracks.
The dim morning light spilling from the hallway illuminates the bed. It illuminates me, shirtless and covered in ink, sitting up. But more importantly, it illuminates Sybil. The duvet has slippeddown, exposing her pale, bare shoulder and the curve of her thigh tangled in the dark sheets, pressed intimately against my side.
Matteo’s eyes widen. He makes the fatal, unforgivable mistake of letting his gaze drop to her exposed skin, his mouth parting in sheer shock at the sight of the untouchable boss in bed with his new prize.
The violent, possessive rage that detonates in my brain is absolute and catastrophic.
I release Sybil, throwing the heavy duvet entirely over her body to shield her from his eyes. I am off the bed and crossing the room before Matteo can even draw his next breath.
My hand shoots out, my fingers wrapping around Matteo’s throat with bone-crushing force. I lift him off the ground, slamming his back against the mahogany doorframe so hard the wood splinters. The tablet clatters to the floor.
"Look at her again," I whisper, my voice a demonic, soulless hiss that makes the young capo’s eyes bulge with absolute terror as my grip cuts off his oxygen. "Look at my wife again, and I will gauge your fucking eyes out with my thumbs."
CHAPTER 5 THE SACRIFICIAL LAMB POV: SYBIL
The sound of splintering wood is completely deafening in the quiet shadows of the master bedroom.
It echoes like a gunshot, tearing through the fragile, disorienting haze of my sleep. I am completely submerged in the heavy, dark gray duvet, the expensive down material suddenly feeling less like a shield and more like a suffocating shroud. My heart executes a violent, erratic leap against my ribs, thrashing so hard it sends a wave of nausea rolling up the back of my throat.
I clutch the edge of the blanket with trembling, white-knuckled fingers and slowly, terrified of what I might see, pull it down just enough to expose my eyes to the dim morning light spilling from the hallway.
The air in my lungs vanishes entirely.
Thayer has a man pinned halfway up the wall.
It is the young soldier who burst into the room—Matteo, my panicked brain supplies, remembering the name Thayer growled. But Matteo is no longer speaking. He can’t. Thayer’s massive right hand is clamped around the young man’s throat,his fingers digging into the flesh with a sickening, bone-crushing pressure. Matteo’s feet are completely off the plush carpet, kicking frantically, his expensive leather shoes scraping against the mahogany doorframe as he desperately claws at the immovable iron grip cutting off his oxygen.
"Look at my wife again," Thayer hisses.
His voice does not sound human. It is a demonic, soulless vibration that seems to drop the temperature in the room below freezing. It lacks the explosive, chaotic volume of my father’s drunken rages. It is infinitely worse. It is the quiet, methodical promise of absolute carnage.
"And I will gauge your fucking eyes out with my thumbs."
Matteo’s face is turning a deep, terrifying shade of bruised purple. His eyes are bulging, locked onto Thayer’s face in pure, unadulterated terror. He manages a choked, wet gurgle, his hands weakening, sliding down Thayer’s heavily tattooed forearm.
I am completely paralyzed.
My brain short-circuits, completely unable to process the sheer, brutal capacity for violence unfolding ten feet away from the bed. I grew up adjacent to the criminal underworld. I knew my father dealt with dangerous men. But I had never seen the violence firsthand. I had never seen the monster let off the leash.
The muscles in Thayer’s broad, bare back are bunched and rigid, his skin pulled taut over heavy bone and muscle, completely mapping the lethal power required to hold a grown man suspended in the air with one hand. The dark ink of the Syndicate tattoos snaking down his ribs and arms seems to pulse with the violent surge of his blood.
He is going to kill him. Right here. Right in front of me.
And he is going to do it simply because the man looked at my bare shoulder.
A profound, deeply twisted shudder rips down my spine. It is terror, absolute and pure, but beneath it—buried so deep I am immediately sickened by my own biology—is a dark, foreign spark of something else. Something entirely unhinged.
