The warm candlelight flickered on the face of every man watching Katie too closely as we walked back in. I wanted to leash her and drag her from the gala. Yet no wild animal like her was meant to be tamed. I only got that privilege when I was making her moan my name.
She glanced at my watch. “It’s probably time for you and me to go our separate ways.”
“As long as they intersect at some point later on,” I mumbled as I nodded and started to back away from her.
Her dark cat-eye makeup had smudged around her misty gray eyes, and her hair wasn’t bone straight anymore. The wave that broke through her ponytail was a sign of the heat that had passed between us before. That look of dishevelment only worked in her favor. As the music swayed the guests, her presence mesmerized them. For the next hour, I watched her bounce around while hungry eyes tracked her movements.
I should have been satisfied. We’d settled on the fact that her place wasn’t with Bastian. He’d agreed to let her go, agreed that I owned some part of her that he never would.
Still, my body vibrated with anxiety.
Something was off.
The lighting flickered too much, and one violinist always seemed to play just a tad off from the other musicians. Even my drink tasted a degree too strong.
I twisted the watch on my wrist as someone carried on idle conversation with me. I didn’t miss things. It was my job to feel the irregularities and shifts in the night in order to protect.
I filed through each moment of the evening and went back to the men glaring at Katie as she walked by. It had started with them. Their stares jumped from her back to each other like a plan had already been set in motion, like they were baiting us when we thought we were baiting them.
I straightened my suit jacket and nodded to the man talking to me. He waved me off, aware that I wasn’t listening to a damn thing he said anyway.
My constant awareness of the surroundings and people allowed me to track down the culprits easily. I rounded a corner where only staff for the event were supposed to be. Yet two men stood there, whispering angrily.
One grabbed the other by the collar and threw him up against the wall. “If we’re going to do this, it’s going to be my way.”
“If we bring her in, she’s taking his place. It’s the only reason he’s seeking her out now.”
“Or he’s bringing her in to do that himself. I’m not stepping on his toes, you dumbass.”
“We just say she did it herself. One bullet to the head is a reasonable story.”
“That’s his granddaughter. I’m not fucking with his granddaughter,” the other one spat.
I stumbled back. His words echoed in my head as I tried to regain my footing.
They were wrong.
Katie was the daughter of a black man . . .
But we’d never looked into her mother.
I strode back to the gala, back to where I could make sense of things, and scanned the crowd for Katalina.
How could we not have known?
Mario held his gut as he laughed at something Katie was saying. His eyes sparkled, and his smile stretched wider than it ever did with me or his boys.
Mario Armanelli was hiding something, and I was going to figure out exactly what it was.
