Page 9

"Careful with that pretty mouth, Kitten," I growl, leaning down until my teeth lightly graze the delicate slope of her throat, right over her racing jugular. I feel the violent tremor that wracks her spine, the sudden, involuntary hitch in her breathing that tells me her body is already betraying her fury. "You know how much I love that filthy tongue of yours, but I will turn your backside black and blue right here on this dining table if you don't start talking."

"I'm not afraid of you!" she growls, literally growls.

"You should be," I whisper against her ear. The charm is gone. What is left is the voice I use when a man has already chosen the grave and does not know it yet.

The dining room goes quieter than a chapel before a funeral. Even Sofia stops thumping her tail.

I do not raise my voice. I never have to. The Don is not about volume. The Don is the moment when the air decides it belongs to me.

"You are standing in a house that has buried priests, politicians, and better liars than you," I tell her, mouth still at her ear. "You are wearing my ring. You are eating my food. You are shaking in my arms and still trying to protect a name that left you on an altar. Give me the truth, Iris, or I will take the phone apart and then I will take the man on the other end apart, and you will hear both."

She goes still. Not surrender. Calculation. My brilliant, furious girl is measuring whether I am bluffing.

I am not bluffing.

"I can smell how afraid you are," I go on, softer, worse. "I can also smell last night on your skin and the lie still sitting on your tongue. Fear and want are not the same thing. Do not confuse them when you answer me. Who. Was. On. The. Phone."

My thumb strokes her hip, almost gently, while the rest of me is a locked door. I pull her tighter until she feels how hard I am against the small of her back. Want and threat live in the same body. She should learn the difference before she tests me in front of my men.

"You're in my house, Iris. Wearing my family ring. Bound to me by law and blood. That phone is not a toy. It is a hole in my walls. Tell me who gave you this number before I lose my temper and lock you in our bedroom until you forget the sound of your own voice. I will do it. I will take every window, every phone, every pretty walk on the cliff, and I will leave you with me and the dark until you remember who keeps you breathing."

She shudders. Not only rage. Something smarter. Something that knows I am not bluffing.

"It was Jamie!" she screams, her voice cracking, dissolving into raw, frantic desperation. "It was my brother! Are you happy now, you paranoid bastard?"

I go completely still.

The dark heat in my veins instantly recedes, replaced by the freezing clarity of a Don on the brink of war.

Jamie.

I release her wrists, stepping back just far enough to examine the burner phone in my left hand. Iris stumbles against the dining room table, rubbing her bruised wrists, her chest heaving as she glares blindly in my direction through the scarlet ribbon.

I flip the phone open. My thumb taps the call log. A single incoming transmission, routed through an encrypted satellite channel bouncing off towers in the Scottish Highlands. The timestamp reads two minutes ago. The connection was terminated from the source.

"What did he say, Iris?"

My tone is flat now. No purring. No games. Pure mafia authority.

Iris straightens her spine, but her fingers tremble where they grip the edge of the wood. The color has drained completely from her cheeks, leaving her skin as pale as limestone.

"He said the church knows," she whispers, the words trembling with a horror that cuts deeper than any physical blow. "He said the Scottish diocese mobilized the minute you put a bullet through the bishop's head. They know Danny signed me over to the Messinas. They know I'm here, Romeo. In Sicily."

She takes a shaky step forward, her hands reaching out blindly until her palms find the lapels of my linen shirt, bunching the fabric in her fists.

"They want retaliation," she rasps, her voice breaking on a sob. "Jamie said they view me as an unholy offering that was stolen from their altar. They allied with Victor and the Russian Bratva. They're tracking your shipping lanes and your assets across Europe right now. They want to finish what they started in that cathedral."

A vicious, feral smile spreads slowly across my face.

Victor and the Scots.

The arrogant bastards actually think they can orchestrate a cross-continental coup against the Messina family. They think that because my father is dead and I've been sequestered in Sicily, playing domestic house with my bride, my gun is rusting and put away.

They have no fucking idea what is waiting for them.

While she shakes against my shirt, I do the math.

Victor wants the New York docks and a pretty Irish hostage to make the old families nervous. The Scots want a sermon and a corpse they can call holy. The church wants the girl they already tried to cage. None of them want a war with a Messina who has slept, eaten, and bled for one woman for three years and just found out the world still thinks it can take her.