Marie’s grin turned mischievous. “Nothing your… companion shouldn’t already know. I’ll be back to take your orders in a bit.”
When she hurried off again, Killian picked up his signature drink and sipped, a soft hum of pleasure escaping as he did so. “Liam outdid himself, as usual.”
She wasn’t quite ready to dive into his reasons for helping a struggling business with seemingly no real return on his investment, so she focused on the other elephant in the room. “Who was on the phone?”
Triumph flickered across his face. “My personal hacker. The DeLucas have made a very generous donation to a local women’s shelter.”
“How generous, exactly?”
“Pretty much every penny of their liquid assets. Sophia’s college fund is intact, and full control of said fund has been shifted to her name. Other than that, the DeLucas are, as they say, broke as a joke until they’re able to liquify some of their other holdings. And when they do, I’ll be right there to buy everything up through my wealth management company, Stone Investments.”
Vicious. And a much deeper, cleaner cut than Lochlan’s plan to kidnap them all and dump their bodies in the middle of Charleston as a warning. “So when will Lorenzo know it’s you who dismantled his entire empire overnight?”
His smile turned razor sharp. “When the final tower falls and he’s left standing in the rubble.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Aria
The encounter from the restaurant stayed with her all through dinner, and the ride home. It was difficult, reconciling the man with the mobster. The man who would invest a not-insignificant amount of money into a flailing business—taking only a fraction of the profits for himself as repayment—versus the man who had so coldly walked her through the plan to utterly annihilate his enemy without getting a drop of blood on his hands. Two wildly different sides of the same dangerous coin.
She was drawn from her contemplation by the slowing of the car, but when she looked out the window, it wasn’t his home looming in front of them.
It was her father’s club.
Panic and excitement twisted around her, squeezing the air from her lungs. “What are we doing here?”
“Tonight is about being seen. Letting people know we won’t be forced into hiding.” Linking his fingers with hers, he met her eyes in the dark. “This seemed like the perfect place for such a statement.”
“We’re supposed to be letting the DeLucas know we aren’t scared of them. Not my father.”
“Two birds, one stone.”
When she didn’t answer immediately, he squeezed her hand. “If you’d rather go home, we can. I apologize if I overstepped.”
“No. No, you didn’t overstep.” Now that they were here, she could see the logic of it. And she really, really wanted to make that fucking statement. “We can go up.”
“Then let’s go.”
He climbed out of the car before turning to help her out. And if her heart picked up its pace when he settled her hand in the crook of his arm instead of releasing her, it was just because she was about to see her father again for the first time since the man standing beside her had threatened to have him killed.
Maybe this was a mistake.
But she didn’t argue as he led her toward the front door, where he paused to look down at her, his expression somehow both serious and playful. “Before we go in, we need to discuss your rules.”
“My rules?”
“Yes, princess, your rules. The most important of which is that you listen to Daddy at all times. If I tell you to kneel, you kneel. If I tell you not to speak, you keep your mouth closed. You will obey or you will be punished, and if you disobey publicly, you will be punished in the same manner.”
An image of her, bent over his knee while he spanked her ass red in front of a faceless crowd flashed into her mind, and she had to fight the urge to whimper at the molten-hot need coursing through her veins. “I suppose that’s fair enough.”
“Good girl,” he purred. “You will address me as ‘Sir’ or ‘Daddy’, especially when you are responding to a question or a command. So if I tell you to kneel at my feet, what should you do?”
“Flip you the bird and call myself an Uber?”
“Aria…”
A single word, and yet it dripped with warning. “I’m just teasing.” Mostly. Probably. “I should say ‘Yes, Daddy’ and drop to my knees like the good little doormat I am.”
