I grab her wrist and gently drag her to her feet. “Let me.” I palm her waist, pulling her close.
She holds the shirt up as I grip the drawstrings, the scent of my soap on her skin sinking into my lungs.
My blood doesn’t just heat. It ignites. The primal impulse to take this further is a savage counterpoint to how wounded and broken she is.
She’s become an obsession. A compulsion.
I tighten the drawstring with more aggression than intended, jostling her roughly. I should let her go. But I can’t. My fists are white-knuckled around the cord.
“Raffael?” Her voice is a whisper. A questioning plea.
“Give me a second.” The war inside me digs deeper. The desire to keep her, the torment of knowing I can’t, the sickening certainty of the man I’d have to become if I succumbed.
One day my lineage will become public knowledge and the vultures from my father’s world will circle, looking for a piece of his sons.
We’ll be targeted. Attacked.
I’ve made contingencies for when that day comes. I’ve spent a fortune on private intelligence and have mercenaries on retainer. There are safe houses scattered across Europe and South America, properties buried under shell corporations with no paper trail leading back to us. I even have falsified passports stored in vaults under assumed identities. I’ve planned for every threat except the one standing in front of me.
There’s no thinking straight around her, which means I can’t protect my siblings if I have to protect her, too.
I stare at my fists, willing my hands to release her. “Walk away, Isla.”
Her breath catches, but she doesn’t move.
She remains in front of me, her fingers finding my chest as she denies my command. “I don’t want to walk away.”
“Even after those men hunted us down?”
She stands taller, her lips parting. She knows we dodged a bullet with Bishop and Langston. “Did they work for your father?”
“Yes.” My hands move of their own accord, sliding to her hips, skimming upward under her shirt to the softness of her bare waist.
“Do I want to know what they’re capable of?”
I raise my gaze to hers, unable to voice the atrocities I’ve tracked for years. I’ve kept tabs on my father’s organization since I was nineteen through a network of private investigators smart enough to understand that what they witnessed wasn’t something to take to the cops.
Sometimes I wonder if my father knew. He had to. Maybe he wanted me to gain insight into who he was—or maybe it was a way of keeping me tethered, his version of fatherly affection, letting me hold space in his world.
Her grip tightens on my shirt. “What happens if they find out the truth?”
“You didn’t cut ties.”
Her expression turns somber. “Raffael?—”
“Youdidn’t cut ties,” I grate, then soothe the bite of my tone with a skim of my thumbs over her ribs. “You’re going to go home. Take a few days to regroup. And while you’re away from the office I want you to contact a few of your closest staff members. Tell them, privately and personally, that your actions were a power play. That you threatened to cut ties with the Cavallo group for a reas?—”
“But—”
“Just listen. Tell them that it was a bluff due to a decline in the professionalism you’d seen from us over the years. Anorchestrated move that worked like a charm because it pulled us into line and brokered a new mentoring program.”
“But won’t that admit?—”
“My father’s men can’t punish you for a bluff.” I frame her face in my hands. “And they can’t prove it wasn’t. But it will show your staff that this was a highly thought-out plan, while distracted by your father’s failing health, that you also took the fall for despite achieving success. You’ll be admired for it.”
“What if those men?—”
“A bluff is the best way to explain your way out of this. It’ll be enough.”I’ll make sure of it.
