“Let me tell you what’s going to happen. I’m going to leave you here to think about things. Your woman is out there somewhere, unprotected, while you’re tied to this chair. I have your phone, and my men are already looking for her. Maybe she knows what Vincenzo Vici wants from Don Agnello.”
I swallow hard, remembering the photograph my father sent me of Adora Montoni. Will Dashamir realize that the sleek and perfect mafia princess and the provocative, smoky-eyed young woman I brought to the fight are one and the same?
“I’m going to come back, and we’re going to continue our conversation. And you’re going to tell me everything I want to know. Because if you don’t?” His pale eyes are like winter. “I’ll bring her here. And I’ll make you watch while I ask her the same questions.”
Every instinct screams at me to lunge, to fight, to tear him apart with my bleeding hands, but I’m bound so tight I can’t move.
“She has nothing to do with this,” I say again. “This is between you and me.”
“No.” Dashamir stands. “This is between you and what I want, and I will win. I always win.”
He walks toward the door.
I should stay quiet. Should conserve energy and not provoke him.
But I’ve never been good at keeping my mouth shut.
“Hey, Dashamir.”
He pauses, hand on the doorknob. He looks back.
I grin through the blood. “You talk a lot of shit for someone who hasn’t gotten a single answer out of me.”
For a heartbeat, his mask slips, and I see white-hot rage flicker across his face.
Then it’s gone, replaced by that terrible stillness.
“We’ll see what you have to say while you’re watching your woman scream for mercy,” he says quietly.
The door closes behind him, and the lock turns.
I’m alone in the dark, bleeding and bound, knowing I’ve painted a target on Adora’s back.
11
Adora
Ibarely make it inside before I’m running for the bathroom.
The toilet bowl swims in my vision as I collapse in front of it, retching. Sofia’s pasta comes up, the beautiful meal she made with such care, and the waste of it makes me feel even worse. My body convulses, trying to purge the horror of what I nearly did to Vincenzo.
The poison.
For hours tonight I was just Adora. Not Agnello’s daughter. Not a pawn or a prisoner or a girl with bottled murder in her nightstand. Just a woman in a smoky-eyed disguise, stealing phones, cheering at fights, and coming apart in the arms of a man who made me feel alive.
And then he said it.
My life is in your hands.
He was looking at me with such raw honesty it made me ache. All I could think was,There’s a bottle of cyanide in my nightstand meant for this man, and he thinks he can trust me.
I retch again, harder this time. More of Sofia’s meal. My hands shake as I grip the porcelain.
Vincenzo isn’t the enemy. He’s not the arranged marriage I feared. He’s the man I’m falling in love with, and the man I want a future with.
If I’d gone through with it, if I’d actually done what my father ordered, I would have killed my own happiness. I almost destroyed him with my own hands.
I’m falling for you, doe.
