Page 27 of Rent a Mob Boss

Every person I care about lives inside a perimeter a rival family has started measuring. Quinn goes home every night to an apartment with a lock a child could pick, in a building with no security, on a street where any car could park for any length of time without anyone noticing.

The problem is that she doesn’t know what I am. Every hour I spend not telling her is another hour the lie gets heavier. She thinks I’m in finance. She thinks the wall, the cameras and the guards, and the rest of it exist because rich men get stalked by disgruntled investors. I’ve overheard her mention it to Ms. Beaumont, who didn’t bother to offer a correction. She’s built a version of me that makes sense to her, and I’ve let her build it, because the truth would send her running.

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to. The safest place for her—the most secure, the most protected, the most monitored square footage in a fifty-mile radius—is this house. My house. Behind my wall, inside my perimeter. Watched by my people.

If she’s here, I can keep her safe. I can’t do that if she goes home to her apartment. It’s that simple and that selfish, and I’m not pretending those things aren’t tangled together. They are. I don’t care.

“All done!” Lillie announces, stepping back to admire her work. She holds up a plastic hand mirror, and my reflection stares back at me with glittery pink eyelids, an uneven stripe of rouge across each cheek, and a small purple bow clipped above my left ear. I look like a man who has surrendered completely, which is accurate.

“Beautiful,” I tell her.

“Now you have to wear it all day.”

“We’ve discussed this. I’m not wearing it to⁠—”

She folds her arms. “All. Day.”

“Maybe for the next hour?”

Quinn leans over. “You should do what the artist says,” she whispers loudly. Her eyes are bright, and her ridiculous blue and green eyeshadow catches the light, and I’m so far gone on this girl that the word gone doesn’t begin to cover it.

“Quinn.” I say it before I’ve planned what comes after it, because the thought that’s been building all afternoon has reached the point where keeping it inside would take more effort than letting it out. “Move in.”

The playroom goes quiet. Even Lillie stops arranging her impressive makeup collection.

Quinn blinks. “What?”

“Move in. Here. With us.” I say it flat, the way I say things I’ve already decided, because that’s usually how you make things real. You speak them into existence.

Underneath the flat delivery, my chest is tight in a way it hasn’t been since I asked her to the party. “You’re here every day as it is. You drive twenty-five minutes each way. You leave at night and come back in the morning. Half your week is spent in transit between here and an apartment you barely see. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It—” She’s staring at me with her mouth slightly open. Her gaze darts to Lillie before returning to me. “Dorian, we… you know… just last night. Isn’t this a little⁠—”

“It’s practical.” And it is. It’s also the only way I can sleep, knowing she’s behind the wall, but she doesn’t need to hear that part. “Lillie is here. Your work is here. You’d have your own space—the guest suite is yours, or any other room you want. You wouldn’t have to worry about rent.”

“My lease⁠—”

“Can be dealt with.”

“My stuff⁠—”

“Can be moved.”

She laughs. It’s the startled, overwhelmed kind. The kind that happens when you’re trying to process something too big to seem real. She looks at Lillie, who has stopped pretending not to listen and is now vibrating on the spot with her hands clasped under her chin.

“Do you want Quinn to live here with us?” Lillie whispers, as though speaking at full volume might undo something.

“I do,” I tell her.

Lillie turns to Quinn. Her whole body is a question. Please?

Quinn drags both hands down her face, smearing the lipstick further, streaking eyeshadow to her temples. She looks at me through her fingers. “You’re serious?”

“I’m always serious.”

“That’s actually true,” she admits, and now her mouth is doing a twitchy thing. “Except right now. Now you just look pretty.”

“Is that a yes?”