Charlotte rose slowly, her hand cool in mine. It was so slender I could have crushed it with a wrong move, yet she made no attempt to pull away. Much like a misguided little lamb, thinking the wolf might save it from the farmer, she looked at me as though my mercy might just save her from the unfortunate derailment of her life.
Tonight, she had joined an exclusive list of people who had looked to me for mercy, ones who’d put their fate in my hands and trusted me to save them. In fact, she didn’t just make the list. She was the list. She was distracting to look at. Petite with an hourglass shape, smooth velvet skin and doe-like eyes. Her thick eyebrows and pretty bow lips were straight from an 18th century painting. She wasn’t trying to look beautiful, but nonetheless, she did. I suspected it was impossible for her not to.
No one in her position had ever gotten down on their knees and offered to make me their god. Especially since she’d just seen me kill two men in cold blood. She was an intriguing mix of contradictions. Good and pure, and mercenary as hell. It seemed there was nothing she wouldn’t do to keep her and her sister safe, and that was interesting. Life had been stale lately, uneventful. Charlotte Burke was a burst of color against a black-and-white background. She was too tantalizing a prospect to pass on.
For now.
Elio’s phone rang as I forced myself to drop Charlotte’s hand. He listened to the caller, nodding, and then hung up.
“Incident in the kitchen. Angelo was burned on the stove,” Elio said.
The code was pretty obvious if you were a De Sanctis man, but Charlotte was just confused. We often spoke in code, even in the halls of Casa Nera. There were spies everywhere these days, just waiting for a good soundbite they could sell to the highest bidder.
I looked at Charlotte. Charlie. “You’re studying nursing?” She jumped, her leftover adrenaline making her edgy. She nodded.
“Then come with me. You can start our bargain right now.” Without waiting for an answer, I turned and walked out of the study. I knew Charlotte would follow, or Elio would make her.
“W-wait. My sister,” Charlotte stuttered.
Lucy lay soundly unconscious between two dead men. “Don’t worry. They can’t touch her now.”
I headed down to the basement level of the property. It housed cells and a makeshift medical room at one end. Many a man had been held down here to be tortured or killed. A few made it back to ground level, but not many. It had seen more use under my father, but I still found it useful at times.
The air grew stale as we descended the cold stone staircase leading to the basement, one of the features of the original house.
Grunts of pain and snippets of conversation could be heard as soon as we reached the lowest level. Charlotte peered curiously in the direction of slurred Italian, peppered liberally with curses.
“This way. I want to see what you can do, bambina,” I murmured to her, putting my hand on the small of her back when she failed to move.
She leapt forward, escaping my touch, and I allowed her. Now wasn’t the time to demonstrate what it meant to be mine. Soon, she’d understand that her fate was mine to decide, she was my property, and I’d touch my things whenever I damn well pleased.
But since I’d decided not to kill her just yet, and to give her a week or so to see if she could live up to her promises, there wasn’t any point in scaring her now. That could come later. It always did. No matter how driven a woman was to get close to me, or how far they thought they’d climb socially by being with me, there was always a moment when their mask would slip, and I’d see their fear.
I didn’t have time to play those games with Charlotte Burke right now, and besides, her courage upstairs had been such a fucking turn-on. I didn’t want to ruin it already.
We reached the cell at the end, which we’d set up with a hospital bed and a cabinet of supplies. A man sat in the middle of the bed. His name was Angelo, and he was one of the longest serving made men in the family. He groaned as he held his face in one hand, a bottle of liquor in the other. The smell of metal and booze was thick in the air.
“Renato! They just came out of nowhere. Castillos, right there at the diner. They jumped me, but I got a few good hits in,” the older man panted.
I liked Angelo, as much as I liked anyone who wasn’t blood. He was a good man and a loyal soldier.
I clamped a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Bravo. You protected our name well. Let the nurse see your face. We don’t want to let it become uglier, for your wife’s sake.”
He chuckled at my teasing and relaxed a little, looking at Charlotte. She stood rooted to the spot, staring at him.
“Come on, Miss Burke, this is your chance to shine. Show me what you’ve got.”
“I’m just a student. I’ve never done anything like this without supervision,” she hedged.
“I’ll supervise you, how’s that?” I offered.
She shot me an annoyed glance, a flash of her true feelings.
“I might mess it up,” she said flatly.
“While I’m sure your confidence is really setting the patient at ease, don’t worry about it. There’ll be no complaints here to the hospital board. If you weren’t here, we’d duct tape it closed until our family doc comes out tomorrow. You can’t do worse than that,” I pointed out. “Stop the bleeding and get a move on.”
I settled against a nearby wall and watched her. Her hands curled into little fists and then released. I wondered if it pissed her off to be ordered around. It would be more fun if it did. Maybe that way, I’d get to see more of those fiery sparks she’d shot at me earlier; little glimpses of her true self.
Instead of arguing, she took off her leather jacket. The emblem of La Leonora, my favorite of my casinos, winked at me as she rolled up her sleeves and doused her hands with sanitizer. This woman had been right under my nose, and I’d never seen her before. I’d remember her. I was sure of that.
“Good girl,” I murmured.
She scowled at me, and the look was an aphrodisiac. This woman was more than fiery, she was the entire bonfire. And I liked it, I realized dimly as I watched her prepare her workspace. She was the most interesting person I’d met in a very long time. I settled back to enjoy observing her.
“First of all, no drinking. It makes the bleeding worse,” she said firmly, prying the bottle of hooch away from Angelo. She ignored his protests and started to clean the long slash on his face.
He hissed when the cotton ball touched the cut.
“This might sting,” she said after a long pause.
“Bit late for the warning, Doc,” Angelo grumbled.
“Yeah, well, ask for forgiveness, not permission,” she muttered, her eyes lifting and catching mine for a moment before shooting away.
I wondered if she was half as affected by my presence as I was by hers. No, I doubted it. I was the one living in monochrome, not her. The one whose world had become unbearably dull.
After one last dab with the cotton ball, she straightened and looked at Angelo. “I have to stitch your cut now. It’s going to hurt, and I’m sorry,” she said evenly.
Angelo sighed, resigned, but obligingly held still. After a moment, he spoke. “You’re right, it’s worse to be warned, but I can take it.”
I shifted, wishing they would finish up and I could have Charlotte’s undivided attention again. “Of course, you can,” I said. “You have no choice,” I added, more for her sake than Angelo’s.
Her mouth formed a firm line, and she focused on her task. Painful moments ticked by, and then, suddenly she was done. I moved closer to take stock of her handiwork. It was lovely. Just as neat and tidy as if it had been done by a surgeon.
“Leave us,” I tossed to Angelo, who thanked Charlotte profusely and made for the door, swiping the bottle on his way past.
“So, what else do I need to do to prove to you that I’ll keep my word? You really didn’t have to bring me to this kind of place to make your point.” She had her arms folded, like that fragile barrier of bone and flesh could keep me from her.
“This kind of place? This is my home,” I added.
She turned critical eyes around the basement cell. “Well, it looks like it was ripped straight out of a Medieval Torture Chambers Monthly, special edition.”
That outrageous, unexpected statement nearly pulled a laugh from me.
“Since the décor isn’t to your liking, I’d recommend doing everything you can not to end up as a guest here. That means keeping your smart little mouth shut, and your sister’s, too.”
She swallowed hard, and my eyes tracked the movement. “I know. I get it. Don’t worry. I know what I agreed to.”
No, bambina, you’re wrong. You have no idea.
“You offered to make me your god, Charlotte. A man like me doesn’t forget a promise like that.”
“A man like you? What kind of man is that?” she asked, her soft voice failing to hide the undercurrent of challenge in her tone.
“A man who gets whatever he wants,” I clarified.
“You mean takes it, right?” she added.
The sass on this woman would be the death of her.
I shrugged. “Either way, it ends up mine.” I reached up and rubbed a dirty smudge from one of her plump apple cheeks. “You’ve started out as mine. Don’t forget that.”
She stared at me for a long moment, her gaze reminding me of the long look we’d shared upstairs. The one that had shown into her soul, and I’d been able to see how it glowed.
“You can go, for now. But remember, Miss Burke, I’ll be watching. I’ll always be watching, so behave accordingly, and be a good fucking girl, or we’ll be right back to where we started.”
The bodies had been taken care of, and my study was once again undisturbed. But the stink of death remained, and my handwoven Persian rug was gone.
“What do you want on them?” Elio asked as soon as our guests left, driven home by the two men who I’d be using to tail them from this point forward.
We ran several different levels of surveillance on our targets. Most often, our targets were politicians or important public figures. We used the information we gathered to curate a nice leverage folder (blackmail was such a dirty word). This was the first time I’d be using my invisible eyes for a pet project. We never watched potential problems or witnesses. They ended up fertilizing the Black Baccara roses that grew in abundance on the Casa Nera grounds. The burgundy velvet roses were splendid this year; they’d been fed so well.
“Eyes on them round the clock.” I sat back in my chair. This was the highest level of invisible eyes. I wanted to see what Charlotte was going to do with her hard-won chance to impress me. Men my age often took up new hobbies. I already read voraciously and played chess. That left golf, and I’d beat too many people to death with golf clubs to take the sport seriously. Maybe stalking the little nurse could be my new hobby, at least until I grew bored of it. As I inevitably would.
Elio nodded and left. My sottocapo didn’t question my reasoning, even though leaving the sisters alive would require a lot of effort on our part. This was uncharacteristic of me. I wasn’t a man known for mercy.
And yet, when that beautiful, brave young woman had sunk to her knees in front of me, she had blown something inside me wide open. When she had prayed to me…the darkness lurking in my soul had become hungry for more. Sure, I was no saint, but people used to worship demons, too.
For all the religious education I’d had as a child, beaten into me by uncaring, or downright evil-intentioned men, there was a twisted kind of curiosity in me toward this girl. Besides, my mother had always worn a St. Anthony’s pendant. My mother, who had never deserved her terrible life. A woman who had prayed for my father’s soul every single day, until she’d died too young. A light stolen from the world.
Charlotte shared her goodness; I could feel it radiating off her. Innocence and compassion. Things I had little experience with but felt curious about. I was a man who could buy anything he wanted, do anything he dreamed of, and had long since realized how tedious that kind of life became.
Charlotte pressing her forehead into a loaded gun and asking to die in place of her sister was a fucking turn-on. It was brave in a way I’d never seen. As pale and innocent as a Caravaggio angel, a nurse who would step in front of a gun to save her sister, she shone with goodness. While I’d long ago accepted what I was, I was intrigued by how much darkness and temptation it would take to sully her angelic aura.
How much sin could turn a heavenly creature to the dark?
I looked forward to finding out.
