Page 8

"Who was on the phone, Iris?"

Romeo's voice is soft and deadly, and he is standing less than three feet behind me.

THREE

ROMEO

The dining room is quiet enough to choke on.

I stand in the arched stone doorway, watching my wife with the cold focus I use before putting a bullet between someone's eyebrows. The morning sunlight pours through the twenty-foot windows, bathing the white marble floor in gold, but all of my attention is fixed on the small, trembling silhouette standing at the head of the mahogany table where I usually sit.

Iris clutches the cheap black plastic burner phone against her ear like a lifeline. Her knuckles are stark white against the casing. Her chest rises and falls in sharp, rapid gasps that strain the thin cotton of her sundress.

Even with the scarlet silk ribbon tied across her eyes, hiding the cloudy green irises that haunt my every waking thought, I can see the raw terror vibrating off her skin. She is frozen, strung tight as a wire.

My nostrils flare, drawing in the scent of the room. The sweet aroma of poached eggs and warm blood orange juice is completely overshadowed by the metallic tang of her fear, and beneath that, the lingering musk of her from last night.

She just spoke to someone. Someone from the life she thinks she left behind.

I take two slow, measured steps across the marble floor. My Italian leather loafers make no sound at all.

For three years I listened to her sleep through a wall and told myself patience was a kind of love. This morning, patience is a luxury I do not have. Someone reached into my house, into my dining room, into the only woman I have ever wanted to keep breathing, and they used a cheap plastic phone to do it.

I catalog the room the way I catalog a hit. Two exits. Enzo in the hall. Sofia under the table. The knife block on the sideboard. The window that faces the cliff. If the call was a locator ping, they already have a tower lock on this coast. If it was a warning, someone wants her scared enough to run. Either way, the man who just spoke to my wife is already dead. He just does not know which day.

I watch her throat work. I watch the ribbon tremble. I watch the little liar try to hide a war in her fist.

Sofia, lying beneath the far corner of the table, lifts her head, her dark eyes tracking me with disciplined silence. She knows better than to bark when I am in business mode. She gives a faint, respectful thump of her tail against the stone and stays down.

Iris hears the slight rustle of my linen trousers, or perhaps she simply senses the sudden drop in temperature that always accompanies my presence. Her shoulders lock rigid. Her throat bobs as she tries to swallow down the scream building in her chest.

"I asked you a question, Kitten," I repeat, my voice dropping into that calm purr that makes grown men break out in sweat. "Who was on that phone?"

She jerks backward on pure instinct, her hip slamming hard against the corner of the table with a dull thud. A sharp hiss of pain escapes her lips, but she doesn't drop the phone. Instead, she shoves her arm behind her back, trying to conceal the device as if I hadn't spent the last thirty seconds watching her talk into it.

"No one," she lies, her voice cracking over each word coming out of her lying mouth. "It was... it was a wrong number. A telemarketer." She says.

A dark chuckle rumbles deep in my chest. The sound is low, gravelly, and vibrating with amusement.

I close the remaining distance between us with three long strides, stopping until my chest is hovering an inch from her nose. My shadow falls over her like a shroud, blotting out the Sicilian sun.

"A telemarketer calling an encrypted burner phone registered to a blind relay in the North Sea?" I ask, tilting my head as I gaze down at her pale, upturned face. "You're a brilliant artist, Kitten, but you're a fucking terrible liar."

"Give me some space, Romeo," she snaps, her Irish temper flaring through her panic like a match dropped in kerosene. She plants her free hand against my sternum, pushing with all her might, but my body is solid muscle and bone. I don't budge a millimeter. "Back the hell up."

"I don't think so, Pet."

My hand shoots out, my fingers wrapping around her slender wrist like an iron vise. She gasps, her breath hot against the bare skin of my throat as I peel her stiff fingers off the plastic casing, one by one. The plastic is slick with her cold sweat.

The moment the phone drops into my palm, her other hand swings around in a wild, vicious arc, her fingers curled into a fist aimed squarely at my temple.

She has excellent form. Danny clearly taught her how to throw a punch before he drowned himself in Irish whiskey.

I catch her fist inches from my ear, twisting her arm behind her back with an effortless, fluid twist. Before she can kick my shins, I hook my arm around her waist and drag her hips flush against the front of my trousers, lifting her onto her tiptoes until she is completely trapped against me.

She lets out a furious shriek, thrashing in my grip, but every movement only presses her soft, rounded ass deeper into the rock-hard ridge of my cock.

"You son of a bitch!" she screams, throwing her head back, her red curls whipping across my cheeks. "Let me go! Put me down!"