A dark, dangerous smirk spreads slowly across his face. The heavy gold medallion resting against his chest gleams in the low ambient light.
"I hope you do, Clara. I really fucking hope you do."
2
Matteo
Metal clangsagainst the imported Italian tile. The ash wood bat rolls away from her boots, spinning to a stop against the baseboards. I drop my hand. Muscle fibers twitch in my forearm. The sheer force it took to stop myself from snapping the bat in half vibrates straight up into my heavy shoulder.
She stands there. Defiant. Furious. Beautiful.
Her curves are pressed flush against the black marble island of the Il Corvo penthouse kitchen. Softness colliding with cold stone. My mind spirals. The war room in my head violently shifts focus. Twenty years of calculated mafia strategy evaporates in a single second.
Mine.
She belongs to me.
The scent hits me. Chalkboard dust and fresh linen. It cuts through the sterile, expensive air of the penthouse. It smells like a normal life. It smells like third-grade classrooms and Sunday mornings. It has absolutely no business being inside a fortified mob safe house in the West Loop of Chicago.
"You think you can just buy a person?" Her voice shakes. She tries to hide the tremor with rage. She fails. Sassy. Sharp. Terrified.
"I can do whatever I want." My voice comes out rough. Coarse. It scratches my throat on the way out. "And I want you exactly where you are."
I take a single step back. I need space before I do something stupid. Before I put my hands on her waist and drag her against my chest. The size difference between us is almost comical. I am a brutally heavy man. Built for violence. Built for taking hits and giving them back ten times harder. She is soft. Round in all the right places. The kind of woman a man ruins himself for.
I turn away from the island. The heavy gold chain around my neck swings, clinking softly against my collarbone. I walk toward the wet bar on the far side of the massive living area.
"Do not turn your back on me!" Clara snaps.
"You don't have the bat anymore." I pick up the heavy glass tumbler I poured earlier, the amber liquid swirling against the crystal. "You're not a threat to me, Clara. You never were."
"I will find a knife." Her boots slap against the hardwood. She is following me. Good. Let her follow. "I will find a knife and I will use it while you sleep."
"I don't sleep." I lift the glass. The scotch burns a clean trail down my throat. "And there are no knives in this penthouse. I had my men clear the kitchen before you arrived. You'll find spoons. Whisks. Flour. Sugar. No blades."
She stops dead in the middle of the Persian rug. Her chest heaves under her fitted sweater. She crosses her arms, pushingup curves that make my jaw lock. Heat crawls up my neck. I take another drink just to cool the feral possessiveness burning in my veins.
"You're insane." She shakes her head. Wild curls bounce around her shoulders. "My father wouldn't do this. He wouldn't hand me over to a mob boss."
"I'm the underboss." I correct her. Blunt. Exact. "My cousin Dominic runs the family. But your father didn't deal with Dominic. He came to me."
"Arthur Reeves is just a gambler." She spits the words like venom. She wants to believe it. She needs to believe the man who raised her is only guilty of bad bets, not a man who trades stolen goods with the mafia.
"Arthur Reeves is a degenerate gambler who got in bed with the Bellanti family." I set the glass down. The crystal clinks sharply against the granite counter. "He owed them a million dollars. He couldn't pay. So he stole their shipping logs. Detailed routes of every illegal cargo shipment coming into the South Side of Chicago. He thought he could leverage that information to blackmail us into clearing his debt."
Her face goes pale. The defiance cracks for a fraction of a second. She knows her father. She knows the late nights, the moves, the hushed phone calls. She never knew the names of the monsters he was talking to.
"The Bellantis found out." I walk slowly back toward the center of the room. The floor-to-ceiling windows behind her display the sprawling, rain-slicked Chicago skyline. "They put a death mark on him. And they put one on you."
Rain batters the reinforced glass. The sound is a violent drumbeat.
My chest tightens. The rain always brings it back.
Twenty years ago. I was twenty-four.
The phone call came in the dead of night. Turi's voice on the other end, frantic and broken.
The tires of my car hydroplaning on the slick Chicago pavement. Running down a dark alley six blocks from a warehouse. The smell of garbage and copper.
