Rocco let out a hard, little laugh, his eyes glazed with desire as he moved closer to me in order to get closer to her. “Fiery thing, aren’t you?”
“Touch me and you’ll find out just how much,” she purred, leaning into Frankie provocatively even as she kept her eyes pinned on him.
The entire charade was ridiculous. I wanted to pick the Don up by his fat neck and break him over my knee like a feeble stick. A man like him didn’t deserve to even look at Elena. The difference was almost blasphemous, a sinner looking on a saint.
I wanted him to die for wanting her and he hadn’t even tried to touch her yet.
He would.
I knew it as surely as I knew the sun would rise in the sky every morning. He was a man ruled by his impulses and his gut cried out to take Elena’s strength and overpower it with his own. He didn’t understand a woman like her. He wanted to break her to prove his machismo, not understanding that a true man stood beside a woman like that and was made more powerful by her own strength at his back.
“I worried for a moment,” he said slyly, shooting me a beady eyed look. “If you were married, you would be no use to me.”
“Oh?” I didn’t give him the benefit of genuine curiosity. Instead, the word fell like dead weight to the ground between us. I checked my cufflinks, adjusted the golden crest on my right sleeve that spoke of my first life in England.
He growled. “You wanna find a home in Napoli again, Salvatore, I got a home for you. But it’s in the bed of Mirabella Ianni. You remember her? The woman you were supposed to marry?”
I fought the crushing desire to shoot Rocco with the gun he’d dropped to his side. Of course, the figlio di puttana didn’t entirely trust that Elena was Frankie’s woman and not mine. Just in case, he’d thrown a grenade at us, hoping for maximum impact.
Elena didn’t say a thing and I didn’t dare look over my shoulder to see her reaction, but I trusted that her impeccable poker face was in place.
My own was not.
A muscle in my jaw spasmed as I ground my teeth.
“I’m not here to marry some country girl, Rocco.” He flinched at my disrespectful use of his first name, but I was beyond caring. He flinched again when I took a step down the stairs so I could loom over him. His gun raised between us, the butt pressed right to my heart, but I didn’t shy away from the gun. I was a man who only feared one thing, which I was learning was infinitely more dangerous than a man who feared nothing.
I would not lose Elena.
Not for anything.
Not for my bloody kingdom and stacks of crisp bills.
Not for my honor or my family, my Italian ideals.
She was it.
Mine.
Forever.
And if Rocco wanted to test that, I’d show him what happened to people who tried to come between our love and wedge us apart.
“I’m here to negotiate like men. I’m here to propose a change to the New York outfit that will mean millions more in cash lining the pockets of your Armani suits, capisci?”
He stared up at me, fury seething in the depths of those dark eyes. His breath was heavy between his lips because he was getting old and he’d always been unfit. Because he was scared of me. There was no denying my physical dominance over him and I knew he would do everything in his power to make me feel small so he could feel bigger and better than me.
I wasn’t intimidated by the prospect.
In thirty-five years of dangerous living, no one had gotten the better of me yet, and Rocco wasn’t clever enough to do what no one else had.
So I smiled down into his face, the expression slicing my face in two like the sharp edge of a blade.
“You wanna play, Rocco?” I whispered just for him. “Or you wanna make this as easy as possible for the both of us?”
Unsurprisingly, his eyes darted over my shoulder to peer at Elena briefly before reaffixing to mine. He canted his weak chin in the air and with one simple sentence, he declared war.
“Come and meet your future wife, Dante. She’s missed you. While you are getting reacquainted, I will entertain the lovely Elena.”
Rocco lived five minutes from Spaccanapoli, a main thoroughfare in Naples. The villa was flashy, sticking out like a sore thumb from the more modest pastel and sun-baked buildings on the rest of the street.
Stupid for a mafioso.
The kind of prideful senselessness that decimated numbers in both the New York and Italian Camorra in the last few decades.
Not to mention, it wasn’t particularly safe. Most high-ranking members of the outfit had well protected, isolated homes in the countryside where they could spot an intruder or the police from a mile away.
Obviously, Rocco thought it made him seem fearless to live his life amid the amasses. It made him feel even more untouchable.
No one was untouchable.
And I’d prove that to him before long.
He ushered us into a wood panelled dining room filled to capacity with a massive, ornately carved table that seated twenty. Every seat but two were filled with a variety of Made Men. His capos, all focused exclusively on me as I entered the room behind their capo dei capi. This wasn’t New York. Even though most of these men raked in serious cash with their schemes for the Camorra, many of them wore old sweaters, stained tees. The ones who tried to impress had gaudy gold jewellery nestled in their chest hair, on their furred knuckles and the hanging lobes of their ears. If you wore a multi-thousand dollar suit the way Rocco and I did in this city, you’d likely get mugged, even if you were a capo.
I recognized some of the men from Tore’s reign as king, but most were new faces, their expressions tight with bitterness.
Ah, so Rocco had replaced those loyal to the old king and told some stories about me in my absence to the new recruits.
This would be harder than I’d imagined.
To make matters worse, the door across from us swung open as I took the seat Rocco gestured for me to have and a familiar woman walked into the room.
Mirabella Ianni was a local beauty. Not the way Cosima had been, her name taking on a mythological cast because for some inexplicable reason Don Salvatore had forbidden anyone to touch her. But she was known from puberty as premium wife material. She was full figured, her lush chest swelling over the edge of her neckline, the flesh damp with sweat probably from laboring in the kitchen for these men. Her thick hair curled from the humidity around her heart-shaped face and those big brown eyes, thickly lashed, were limpid as they snagged mine across the room.
“Dante,” she breathed softly, an exhale more than a word.
Her fingers trembled as she lifted her fingers to clutch the small golden cross at hr throat. The men around us chuckled at her reaction, thinking she was a romantic girl overwhelmed by her reintroduction to a lost love.
I knew the truth.
She trembled because she feared me.
She always had.
After a brief hesitation, she moved around the table to serve espresso to each of the men from a tray on the sideboard. When ordered, she carefully balanced the tray on one hip to cut a spiral of rind from a lemon for the men to rub on the lip of their cups or offered the small bottle of Sambuca to add a splash of licorice liquor to the bitter contents. She handled her subservience deftly, with an ease that spoke of lifelong ritual. It was as beautiful as it was sad.
I’d spent too long in America where the women were fierce and entitled, always climbing, grabbing, scratching. I’d learned to find the beauty in their tenacity and verve and I’d forgotten the gentle loveliness of women who yearned for less.