“Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.”
—Maya Angelou
HEARTBEATS ARE FICKLE THINGS. BEATING one moment and then stopping the next. Raging a storm and then lying as still as a tranquil sea. But what I didn’t know is that they change. They glow and warm and expand in a chest. They ache and yearn for a reason to beep.
My heartbeats had a fondness for the romantic.
They began to skip, to multiply, to fill with a contentment as thick as honey and as warm as the sun. They did it all as my skin grew cold and while I stared at the ceiling and tried to ignore them.
I couldn’t fall in love with this man.
I would rather never fall in love at all than to experience it unrequited. I’d seen it enough times to despise the possibility.
I couldn’t love a man who treated me like a commodity, or even worse—a pretty bird in a cage, and not like a wife. If there was anything I knew with a certainty about Made Men, it was that they couldn’t grasp the concept of fidelity. Those heartbeats tied into a knot, a strangling, uncomfortable ball in the back of my throat.
I smelled like him. He was all over me, and I’d asked him nicely for it. Someone needed to save me from myself before I got on my knees and professed my inevitable love to him. Might as well make it right after he finished screwing another.
Bitterness cut through my chest, and I moved to get up and leave but an iron grip wrapped around my wrist.
Slowly, I glanced at the man who lay like a freshly fucked king next to me. I bet his heartbeats were satisfied that he’d finally laid his easy fiancée. But as soon as I looked at him, the resentment faded into a different kind of ache. When had he become so handsome it hurt? I fought not to rub at the pang in my chest.
He didn’t say a word, just watched me with a lazy stare while inhaling rough breaths. It’d been only moments since we’d had sex again. But in my head, it’d felt like an eternity as the seconds mocked me with the inevitable that he would soon hold another like he had me.
I was ruining a moment I’d wanted badly enough it felt like a need. But now I couldn’t stop myself from analyzing everything—the possibilities and outcomes—and it didn’t look to be in my favor.
When the eye contact began to burn, I tried to pull my wrist away, but he wouldn’t let me go. His expression didn’t show a hint of emotion, as though he could hold me here effortlessly. As though he might hold me here forever.
A moment later, his grip slid from my wrist, releasing me. Something dipped in my chest, though I pushed it away before I could analyze it. I got off the bed and, as I took a step toward the door, something dug into the bottom of my foot. I halted and glanced down. The ring sat there, forgotten, like the sweet boy who’d given it to me. My stomach twisted.
Without a thought, I picked it up. A wave of tension brushed my back, evoking a prickling sensation that ran down my spine. The silence was an antagonistic one, the kind that doesn’t contain words but says everything.
Nico hated this ring, and I could only ascertain he knew it was connected to a man—or believed it was. Nobody knew about the ring but Adriana, and even then, the only thing I’d told her about the incident was that he’d given it to me.
My promise remained with or without the fifty-cent piece of jewelry, but . . . I hesitated.
I would never be with another man but the one in this room. We both knew it, and that removed any type of advantage I would’ve had in the Outside world. If a man knew you’d give it up to him and no one else and that you couldn’t even leave him, what would ever encourage him to be faithful?
He had the upper hand in every aspect of this relationship. Maybe the only thing that would save face was that Nico didn’t know the man who’d given this ring to me hadn’t meant anything. I imagined believing one’s fiancée was in love with another man would cut any boss’s ego in half, especially Nico’s giant one.
I could tell him everything. Bare my soul and be honest. Be an open person and hope that good would win.
But maybe I’d always been as manipulative as him.
Maybe this was the only way I’d survive him.
I slid the ring onto my finger and walked out of the room.
Nico
I’d never hated a thing in my life.
I resented the Zanettis, who killed my father and uncle in that shooting five years ago, and while I might have shot them in the goddamn heads like they’d deserved, I hadn’t hated them.
Like regret, there wasn’t room for hate.
Hate changed someone’s make-up. It made them reckless. Hate killed its host.
I never let myself hate because I loved to live.
But right now, I could say I hated something. Two things. That goddamn ring and the man who gave it to her.
Hatred fucking burned, like inhaling mace, getting punched in the throat, and being stabbed simultaneously. That was my comparison gathered from trial and error as a Made Man. Add in a dose of poison that eats you from the inside out, and that’s hatred.
Fuck.
My chest tightened, each breath a burn in my lungs.
I stood, and before I even knew it was in my hand, I chucked a lamp at the wall. The porcelain shattered with a crash that would wake the entire fucking neighborhood. I took a deep breath and shook my head. She definitely heard that. She always did say I was a psychopath—might as well show her one.
My gaze paused on her clothes still lying on the floor. They sat there, hers, probably smelling like her and shit. I picked them up and dropped them in my top dresser drawer right next to her white bikini top. If she wanted them back she could fucking ask me nicely.
I sent Luca a text and got dressed. A suit as black as my mood. I had to get out of this goddamned house before I did something stupid, like demand she forget every man she’d ever met but me.
Instead of taking one cigarette from my nightstand, I grabbed the whole pack. I was going to smoke every last one of them.
Her door was shut and the light was off as I passed her room. Annoyance flared in me that she hadn’t even come out to see the damage. The last time I’d thrown something at the wall was when I was young enough to be kicked in the ribs for it. Maybe she should take responsibility for how crazy she made me.
I opened the garage door and leaned against the worktable, taking a deep drag on a cigarette. I could still smell her on my hands, and every time I brought the smoke to my mouth a memory of fucking her rushed in.
Fuck, she was the best lay I’d ever had. A chill ran down my back from the thought of it. I gritted my teeth and tried to shake the strange feeling off. Nonetheless, my body was alive like she was still touching me—her pink little fingernails digging into my biceps, her hand wrapped around my cock, her smell all over me. So damn sweet. I braced my hands on the table and hung my head.
I should have taken Salvatore’s other offer when we’d found out Adriana was pregnant—a corner of his territory that would’ve filled my pockets, and one I’d wanted for a while—because Elena fucked with my head, made me destroy the furniture and smoke more than I should. And I had a bad, bad feeling that if this girl used the word please, I would give her anything she wanted.
I’d fucked her raw, so fucking raw.
I was twenty-nine and had never been stupid enough to fuck without a condom until today. Now I was ruined—with my little fiancée, anyway. I didn’t think I’d ever slept with a woman who I hadn’t found out my cousins were fucking as well, or even better—Tony. No chance I was trusting the lot of them to be clean, so I’d always wrapped it up. My jaw tightened as I wondered about Elena’s sexual history. I wanted to know how many men there’d been, their names, and everything they did to her, so I could do it twice as hard and make her forget they existed.
I wondered if she was on the pill, and in a disturbing way kind of hoped she wasn’t. I wanted an irrevocable tie to this woman. I wanted to write my name on her skin, to do all kinds of fucked-up shit so she knew she was mine. Like lock her in my room and hand-feed her. With indifference, I finished my cigarette and contemplated the logistics of that.
Luca’s headlights pulled into the drive. He tucked his shirt in and fixed his cuffs as he got out of his car. “I’m gonna take a wild guess. It was the little pink princess that pissed you off and ruined my night.”
I shook my head at his stupid nickname for her and lit another cigarette. “Surprising you could even find someone to fuck that ugly face of yours.”
A smile pulled on his lips, and he rubbed a hand across his mouth like there might still be something on it.
“Did you have to pay her?” I asked, listening to the city in the background. Sirens, tire noise, the neighbor John’s TV playing endless ballgame highlights through an open window. He was an enforcer of mine, and I considered giving him a raise to fix his goddamn air-conditioner. If I wanted to listen to MLB all day I would’ve turned it on.
Luca walked to the fridge and grabbed a beer. “Might’ve been better if I had.” He cracked the can and took a seat in a lawn chair. “She fucking talked about you the whole time.”
“Interesting.” Inhaling deeply to get Elena’s scent out of my nose, it smelled like the end of summer. Like fresh-cut grass, motor oil, dying heat, and the urban sometimes bitter smell of the city.
A corner of his lips lifted. “Isabel.”
“Ah. If you think I know how to shut her up, you’re out of luck.”
He laughed.
I actually knew of a few ways, but I didn’t want to talk about Isabel. Agitation still rolled under my skin, and I stepped out of the garage and leaned against my Mustang in the drive.
The brief thought of Isabel reminded me that she would be here in the morning. She was just my cook and, to be honest, a shitty maid, though she used to be a regular fuck. Well, Mondays and Thursdays when she was here, anyway. She’d been a convenience, but then she fucked Tony and came with unwanted drama. I hadn’t touched her in a year and had only run into her a few times.
I considered what I should do about her. Not even a man in the Cosa Nostra would parade a mistress or ex-lover in front of his fiancée. And knowing Isabel, she would go out of her way to try and make Elena uncomfortable about our brief past. Would Elena even care? A burn radiated throughout my chest at the thought that she wouldn’t.
“Your pink princess is going to meet her tomorrow,” Luca said, though it was more a question about how he should handle it.
A movement in the window upstairs caught my attention.
I took a deep drag and met Elena’s gaze behind the glass. Soft lamp light lit her reflection. Messy black hair and soft eyes. My heart rate picked up an awkward rhythm.
I’d gotten what I wanted, what I thought I needed to end this obsession with Elena so I could stop fixating on her and get back to my life. But as I looked at her now, a throb ached in my chest, right behind the breastbone. Like her gaze had bruised me with a mere look.
My eyes narrowed on her as I blew out a breath of smoke.
“Let her.”
