Page 69 of The Kingpin’s Bride

She stopped in front of the steel doors and stood there with her back to me. The soft white fabric of the top moved with every uneven breath. The ring lay on the marble behind me where she had thrown it.

I walked to her. She did not turn until I was close enough to touch. When she did, the full force of her grief hit me like a physical blow. Her face was wrecked. Tears ran freely. The thin cut above the collar had begun to dry into a narrow red line.

“Morena.”

She shook her head again, but the movement was weaker. I lifted both hands and framed her face. She did not pull away. For the first time since the night I bought her, I felt the full weight of how much I had lost without realizing it. The wife purchased for a seat at a table of men who would never understand what it cost to stand in this quiet hallway and watch the only person who had ever meant something prepare to walk out the door.

I kissed her.

It was not the hard claiming kiss from the stage. It was not the possessive press of mouth I had used when I filled her while the politician’s blood was drying in a side corridor. It was slower. Deeper. The kind of kiss that asked instead of took.

She kissed me back for three full heartbeats while fresh tears slipped between our faces. I tasted salt. I tasted the last of the fight leaving her body. I tasted the goodbye she had decided on.

“I will come back,” she whispered. “When you have her. Not before.”

I rested my forehead against hers for one more second and closed my eyes.

“I will find her,” I said. The words came out rough. “I will bring her home. And then I am coming for you.”

She nodded once. The movement was small and final. I unlocked the elevator from my phone with a single command and watched the doors open. She stepped inside. The white clothes I had dressed her in were soft against the body I had marked and claimed and filled… And owned.

I stood in the silent hallway and listened to the distant mechanical sound of the car descending. It felt like something that had been torn open completely and left raw to the air. In the apartment, I picked up the ring. My hands were shaking.

The heavy gold was warm from her hand. The pale diamond stone caught the light the same way it had the night I forced it onto her finger in front of the entire underworld. I closed my fist around it until the metal bit into my palm.

Then I took out my phone and made the first of the new calls.

“Double the price on Dario Rizzo,” I hissed. “I want him alive. I want Camilla unharmed. Expand the search to every private airstrip, every shipping container, every safe house within three hundred miles. Call Santino. Call Leo. Call in every favor the Ventura name holds. And if anyone in this organization has been feeding information to the people who moved them, I want their names on my desk before midnight.”

I ended the call and stood in the center of the room that smelled faintly of the cream I had worked into Rena’s skin.

She was gone.

I was alone again.

Chapter Nineteen

Morena

The elevator doors closed on the penthouse like they were sealing a tomb. When they opened again into the lobby, the night doorman looked up once and then found something fascinating on his phone. In buildings like this, barefoot women like me were someone else’s expensive problem.

I walked out into the cold with almost nothing.

A few folded bills I had taken from the drawer while he was on the phone. No real phone of my own. No keys. No plan except the one that had formed the second I heard him admit the trail on Camilla had gone cold. Dario had my sister.

I had put a knife to my own throat rather than stay inside those walls another night knowing I was pregnant.

The city felt sharper than I remembered. Wind cut through the thin fabric of the top he had dressed me in that morning. My bare feet burned against the sidewalk within the first block. Even after I threw his ring at his chest, some part of me belonged to him on paper and in the eyes of every man who mattered in this city.

I kept walking anyway.

Anger was the only clean thing I had left.

I didn’t cry. Tears had spent themselves on smaller losses. What settled over me instead was a cold clarity that made the residual ache between my legs and the throb in my nipples feel suddenly far away. I needed information. I needed a direction. I needed someone who might remember I existed as more than Matteo Ventura’s newest acquisition.

The only name that rose through the static belonged to a girl I had helped once in a different life. Bella Dolce..

I hadn’t known her name at first. The night she walked into After Dark she had been all diamonds and bad decisions, a rich girl playing at danger in a place that ate rich girls alive. She was much too young to be there, anyway.