I don’t make many mistakes.
They’re an anomaly if they happen and so rare that in a scientific analysis of my game play, they’d be considered statistically insignificant.
But it takes me less than five seconds to realize I made a mistake bringing Tess here.
“Who’s the girl?” Leone rasps interestedly.
They’re the first words he’s spoken in days and they’re about to be his last. It takes burying my hands in my trouser pockets to hide just how tightly my fists clench in response to his suicidal question.
“You can speak,” I say, ignoring him as I fight to regain control over my focus. “And here I thought Marco might have cut out your tongue and forgotten to tell me about it.”
Bringing Tess here after I just fucked her for the first time was a bad idea. I’m beyond compromised. I’m edgy, shaky, and uneasy, like a lifetime smoker who’s on hour forty-eight of nicotine withdrawal and about to lose it. Protectiveness contorts my insides. I can’t let the fucker see it. All I can think about is the fact that she’s within ten feet of a man who wouldn’t hesitate to cut her to pieces if he thought it would hurt me in any way. I should have set up a camera and remote feed and shown her that way.
I don’t let myself look at her or acknowledge her in any way. His eyes flicker interestedly when I move to stand between them.
Fuck.
“Tell me why the Famiglia went after Adriana,” I demand. “What did you gain from having her killed?”
Leone should understand better than anyone my need for revenge. His son, Rocco, was found murdered in an alley a month ago, his killers still in the wind. We should be united by a common goal, but it’s too late for that now.
He ignores me, his gaze meeting mine when he repeats his question, intelligent eyes watching to pick my reaction apart.
“Who’s the girl?”
The muscle in my jaw ticks dangerously in response.
“Why did you involve Dadurian?” I continue as if my temper isn’t ticking like a time bomb. “If you wanted to keep your hands clean, you did a piss poor job of it. That fucker led us right back to your family with barely any effort.”
“She’s a tasty little number, Diablo. I didn’t peg you as someone who’d have a thing for blondes.” He licks his lips. “Looking at her though, I can’t say I don’t get it.”
My eyelid twitches.
My jaw ticks dangerously.
He’s baiting me and I won’t rise to it. I’m chanting it to myself over and over again, hoping if I say it enough times, I’ll actually fucking listen.
“Tell me where the fuck Adriana’s body is.”
Blood leaks from his mouth, seeping from between his teeth and from the cuts on his face, and continuing gruesomely down his chin. Speaking is excruciating for him, the effort of moving his lips draining him almost completely.
With a ghastly-sounding inhale, he throws his head back and opens his mouth once more.
And based on the expression on his face, I know that I’m not going to like whatever it is he’s about to say.
“When I have Blondie here taken from you, I’ll make sure they give you her body back this time,” he rasps, voice barely lifting above a whisper. “She’ll be well used, her holes nice and stretched out for you from her time spent with the Famiglia, but at least you’ll know what happened to this one.”
Pressure explodes bright and white behind my eye and I black out.
When I come to mere seconds later, I’m standing over Leone with his hair clenched in one fist and my knife clutched in the other, stabbing him repeatedly in the throat with frantic, jerking slashes of my wrist. The blade jams in again and again, all the way to the hilt with each vicious stroke as I hack away at him barbarically. There’s a frenetic mindlessness to my actions as I roar my fury dementedly in his face. Blood gushes in increasingly lame spurts from his wounds and covers me.
When the adrenaline recedes, I realize that he’s long dead even as I continue to butcher his body. His lips are twisted and frozen in a final, gleeful smile like he got what he wanted. He wanted me to kill him, to end his misery.
“Fuck!” I boom deafeningly, kicking the chair until he falls back and shouting my wrath open-throated at the ceiling. “Fuck! Maldita sea.”
“Jefe–” Arturo starts.
I cut him off with a hand. “Don’t say a fucking word.”
I can hardly see. The anger is still throttling me and dangerously dotting my vision. I need a second to breathe before it takes him out next. There’s nothing he can say that I’m not already screaming at myself. I just completely fucked our only lead. Leone never spoke, he never gave us anything to go on from here, and I killed him. He was trying to get me to do exactly that and I lost my shit and fell for it in less than ten minutes.
But the vision of Tess that my imagination was kind enough to conjure and burn into the back of my eyelids at his words, the one of her broken, mangled body returned to me, is still so fresh and vivid in my mind that I’m about to continue desecrating his corpse just for the fun of it. My blood rings in my ears and thrashes in my veins and I’m glad the hijueputa is dead because there’s no universe in which she lives where I would have allowed him to keep breathing too. I would never have slept again knowing she could be in danger.
When I turn around, I find her standing by the door, hair wildly down around her shoulders, her blue dress criminal in the way it’s hugging her curves and her heels held in her hand. There’s something about seeing her barefoot, holding her shoes, that undoes me completely. She looks so young. Fragile, even though I know she isn’t. Completely at odds with the situation. The thought that this is what Leone saw when he looked at her makes me even more furious.
She’s shaking violently, a shocked expression on her face, and she’s white as a sheet. I can’t tell if it’s horror at what she just witnessed, terror at her seeing with her own eyes exactly what kind of monster I am, or pure, unadulterated disgust at the blood dripping off my clothes and hand. I stride towards her, needing to touch her, to take her away from the darkness where she doesn’t belong. Relief loosens the muscles of my stomach when she takes a stumbling step towards me instead of shrinking away. It immediately leadens when a haze passes over her eyes.
And then she faints, crumbling to the ground like a broken doll.
I catch her inches from the floor, scooping her into my arms and holding her tightly against my chest. She’s so pale the veins under her eyes appear beneath her skin.
“Is she alright?” Arturo questions, coming to my side.
“Just shock, I think. I’m taking her home. Clean this up,” I ask. “Dump his body on the front steps of Firenze.”
“If we do that, it’ll be like leaving a calling card saying that it was us.”
Fresh anger fires through my veins when I look down at an unconscious Tess and hear Leone’s threats against her echo in my head. “I want them to know it was me. Let them know no one is safe until Adriana’s killer is dead at my feet.”
He nods, looking back at Leone thoughtfully before facing me. “Guess this leaves the door wide open for Matteo Leone to become the new capo.”
Matteo Leone is a mystery. Very little is known about the only living son of Augusto Leone and the apparent heir to the Italian mafia. If he’s a sadistic, violent, piece of shit, he hasn’t been a show off with his tendencies, unlike his late father and brother. But the Italian mafia is like a hydra – you cut off one head, they grow back and multiply. I have no doubt he’ll do anything to avenge his father.
Well, like I said.
Let them come.
✽✽✽
Tess doesn’t open her eyes again until we’re back home. I brush Diana away when she runs up to me, face worried, and take my wife up to the master bathroom instead.
“What happened?” Tess asks, coming to.
I’m relieved to see most of the color is back in her cheeks. She rubs at her eyes as I set her on the counter next to the large marble sink. She looks around with an intrigued look on her face.
“Is this your bathroom?”
“Our bathroom,” I correct, holding her by the hip to make sure she doesn’t topple over. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine, I–” A confused look furrows her brow, her eyes scanning side to side as if searching her memory. “I can’t remember what happened, did I faint?”
I grab her ankles and turn her so she faces the sink, her shoulder resting against the bathroom mirror. “You did.”
“Wh–”
With a guarded look, I watch as realization crosses her features. She replays the moments leading up to her fainting spell, her eyes widening. I expect her expression to turn to one of fear or disgust, for her to pull away again, but instead it’s dismay that appears next.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, looking down.
My back tenses. “What for?”
I hate the way she won’t meet my eye.
“I thought I could handle it, but I couldn’t.”
Her tone cleaves at my chest. I cup her face and force her to look at me. She tilts her cheek into my touch, looking up at me with soft eyes. Eyes that hold the depths of the entire ocean in them, ones whose gaze slithers beneath my skin and burrows deep into my bones.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I answer quietly. “Was it the blood? Or because I killed him?”
Turning the sink on, I test the temperature of the water with my finger until it’s warm, waiting for her reply.
“No, not that. He…” she trails off when I take her ankles and place her feet in the sink, under the hot jet of water. “He scared me,” she admits, her tone embarrassed. “The things he said he’d do to me.”
My eyes close, my hands tightening stiffly on her. In a heartbeat, I’m back there, standing in front of Leone, all the blood in my body freezing in place as he threatens Tess. Hearing that he scared her so much she fainted makes me want to discover the cure for bringing a man back to life just so I can kill him again. Slower this time.
Breathing out a steadying exhale through my nose, I reach for the soap and pump some into my hand.
“I’ll never let anything happen to you. I promise.”
She wraps a hand around my elbow, pulling my attention to her. “And you keep your promises.”
My eyes flick up to hers before I smirk and answer. “Always.”
Her gaze turns thoughtful, her fingers digging into my flesh. “I’m sorry you had to kill him.”
“I’m not,” I reply through gnashed teeth.
She shakes her head. “I’m not sorry he’s dead. I’m sorry that he won’t be able to tell you where Adriana’s body is. I never meant for that to happen.”
Grabbing the top of her foot, I lather it with soap until thick suds fall off her skin. I do so for long seconds, getting lost in the motions of washing her.
Eventually, I say. “I’ll find another way.”
My hands move to her other foot, repeating the same process I did with the first.
“What are you doing?”
My hand slips around to the bottom of her foot, passing over it repeatedly until it’s clean. She giggles softly, instantly hardening my dick in the process.
“Washing your feet,” I answer. “Why did you take your shoes off?”
Her tone is bemused when she replies, as if she can’t quite believe what I’m doing. Understandable, I’ve never washed anyone else’s feet before.
“I wanted to be more comfortable.”
“One of my men could have gotten you a chair. Ask next time so you don’t have to dirty these pretty little feet,” I growl, looking at her and pressing a kiss against the top of her now clean foot.
She laughs. “Do you have a foot fetish or something?”
I shake my head slowly, the ghost of a smile tugging at my lips. “No, I have a you fetish.”
Lust blooms like plumes of smoke in her eyes and she reaches for me. Her arms twine around the back of my neck and her lips come down on mine, wiping away the last lingering thoughts of violence with a sweet kiss.
My hands go to her waist, pulling her off the sink and wrapping her legs around me. With her clinging to me, I march us into the bedroom where I take my wife for the first time in our marital bed.
