He inclined his head. “I’ll get Carmita to pack your clothes for you.”
“No. I leave here with nothing more than what I came with.”
His throat tightened all over again. “Those clothes belong to you, Chicca.”
“My name is Francesca, and I’d rather wear rags than anything you’ve paid for. Return them to the store, give them to your next lover, give them to charity, put them in a bonfire, do whatever the hell you want with them. I don’t want them.”
Then, as if accentuating her point, she sat on her bed, pulled the book she’d had when he’d kidnapped her out of her large handbag, and began to read.
“It’s time to go.”
Francesca got up from her seat at the living room’s dining table and put her book in her bag. Strangely, the words she’d struggled to read when she’d read it that first night had been nice and clear to her eyes that morning, and she’d been able to immerse herself in it fully. She’d finished the epilogue only minutes ago, which felt very fitting for the circumstances.
Filled with calmness she didn’t even have to work at, she joined Gino in the elevator. She would have tuned him out as she’d done when reading, but when the door closed, he handed her phone to her with a quiet, “For you.”
She slipped it into her bag without a word or a glance at him.
“I’ve messaged my number to it. Save it. If you ever need money, call me.”
“Gino?”
“Yes, Chi…Francesca?”
She finally met his stare in the mirrored door they stood in front of. “Go fuck yourself.”
Francesca sat in the back of the same monstrous car she’d been abducted in, sandwiched between two of Gino’s men. He was sitting up front, the dividing screen lowered so the four men could converse. She ignored their conversation. She had no wish to annoy or make her final mark. All she wanted was to go home. She was even looking forward to seeing Artu.
They stopped an hour into the journey, at a restaurant in a small town she’d never heard of.
If any of the other diners were aware that the back table crammed with twenty men and two women was acting as the hub of a deal built on kidnap and blackmail, Francesca imagined they thought it best to pretend it wasn’t happening. She was the only member of the party not armed. Even Siena had a gun visible through her chic clothing.
Maybe it was her naivety, but she felt no fear, not even from the guns discreetly pressed into her sides by two of Gino’s men. Discreetly, but visible to her cousins.
She’d thought the contracts had already been signed, but it was an assumption she’d got wrong. One by one, her Esposito cousins signed the documents, and then Gino signed too. Once the signed contracts had been gathered by both side’s minions, looks were exchanged and phones were tapped at. Sharp nods were shared, and then before she knew it, the guns pressed against her skin vanished, and everyone was throwing money onto the table and rising from their chairs. Gino stretched his arm across the table to Mattia. Unsmiling, her cousin shook his enemy’s hand, and then Tommaso followed suit, as did Siena.
It was done.
Now penned in by her cousins, Francesca was led out of the restaurant. The car park was full, not just with cars but with men deployed by both sides to keep watch in case things took a wrong turn.
Led to a car as monstrous as the one she’d arrived in, a back door was opened. One of the identikit bruisers keeping watch swept an arm inviting her into it.
Only as she was about to bow her head to get in did she give in to the urge that had been steadily growing inside her, and turn her head.
Gino was on the other side of the car park. For the first time since they’d left his elevator, their eyes met.
There was a painful sensation in her chest, almost as if her heart was spasming.
His powerful shoulders rose.
Her spasming heart clenched.
He turned his face away, climbed into the back of a car, and vanished from her sight.
The debrief went on for what felt like forever. Francesca’s parents were allowed to embrace her tightly to welcome her home, and then it was down to business. Although she was spoken to with kid gloves, her cousins wanted to know everything that had gone on over the last week and pick out any information she might have gleaned in her time with their new business partner and sworn enemy.
She didn’t know why, but through it all, Francesca kept close to Artu. Possibly because he was the only member of her family she didn’t know for a fact had been conspiring behind her back to marry her off.
All the others had, she thought numbly as she met the eyes of her parents, her cousins and her aunt Valeria. All of them. Even beautiful Siena, who would herself be stuck in a marriage arranged by her now-dead father if the groom hadn’t got cold feet and jilted her at the altar.
