"You aren't a transaction," he says, the feral possessiveness returning, coating his words in steel. "You aren't collateral. You aren't a debt. You are the only quiet I have left in this world. And I will slaughter every single Bellanti breathing before I let them take that away from me."
The absolute certainty in his tone is terrifying. It is intoxicating.
My father sold me to save himself. He traded my life to pay a debt. He looked at me and saw a casino chip.
Matteo Costa looks at me and sees his salvation.
He looks at me and sees the one thing worth burning the entire city to the ground for.
He strips the ruined henley over his head, leaving his chest bare. I let go of the silver cross, leaving it pressed against his chest as I slide my hands up the slick, damp plains of his torso. The heavy slabs of muscle contract violently under my touch. I wrap my arms around his neck, pulling myself up onto my toes.
He catches me. His arms band around my waist, lifting me effortlessly off the floor until my face is level with his. He buries his face in the crook of my neck. He inhales deeply, dragging the scent of me into his lungs like oxygen.
"You're safe," he repeats into my skin, the vibration of his voice humming through my bones. "You're mine. And you're safe."
"I know," I whisper back, resting my cheek against his damp hair. I close my eyes. The war is still raging outside these walls. The Bellantis are still hunting. The blood on the pavement downstairs has not even washed away yet.
But here, in the center of the fortress, locked away from the violence and the rain, there is only quiet.
I tighten my grip on his shoulders. He carried the silence alone for twenty years.
He doesn't have to carry it alone anymore.
8
Matteo
Her small fingersdig into the bare skin of my shoulders. Her clean, comforting scent cuts straight through the fading heat of adrenaline clinging to my body.
The endless screaming in my skull is completely silent.
Twenty years of screaming, twenty years of freezing rain and flashing ambulance lights and cold morgue steel. Gone. Burned away by the soft, curvy woman trembling against my chest.
She holds me. She holds me.
My massive arms wrap around her back, shielding her against my chest. I bury my face in the crook of her neck. The contrast between us is brutal. I am heavy, coarse, covered in dark ink and the invisible weight of a slaughtered hit squad. She is soft. She is light. She absorbed the poison of that rainy alley just by standing here in my secure office, reading a frayed police file, and wrapping her arms around the monster who found the body.
Silence. Absolute, ringing silence in my brain.
I pull back just enough to look at her face. Her cheeks are tear-stained. Her wide eyes search mine, tracking the sharp silver at my temples, the rough line of my thick beard. She does not look at me with fear. She looks at me with understanding. The heavy gold chain around my neck presses into her collarbone, marking her skin with my metal.
I wipe a stray tear from her cheek with a rough thumb. My feral instincts claw at the inside of my ribs. Mine. She belongs to me. She is my peace. I will slaughter every breathing soul in this city before I let anyone take her out of this penthouse.
But the ledger in my safe mocks me.
She is here because her father, Arthur Reeves, sold her. He handed over a million-dollar gambling debt and a stack of stolen Bellanti shipping logs, trading his own flesh and blood to save his pathetic life. I claimed her as collateral. I bought the debt to keep her safe, to possess her, to force her into my world.
It is a dirty chain. It is a transaction.
Looking at her now, feeling the absolute devotion radiating from her soft body, the transaction makes me sick. I cannot keep her with paper. I refuse to let her look around this fortress and see a cage built by her father's sins. She needs to see a cage built by my absolute obsession. She needs to choose it.
I step back. The distance between us feels like a severed limb.
"Stay here," I command, my voice a low gravel rasp. "Lock the door behind me."
She blinks, confused by the sudden shift. "Matteo. Where are you going? The men downstairs?—"
"The men downstairs are bagged meat," I tell her bluntly. "The perimeter is secure. I have family business to handle. I need to see Dominic. Ten minutes. Do not leave this room."
