He takes one look at what I hope is my murderous glare, holds his hands up in surrender, and backs away toward the door.
I take a step toward him, ready to throw him down the stairs, but he’s gone. He’ll inform Piero, and when Piero calls me tonight, I better have the answer he’s expecting.
Yes, your girl is safe. No, no one hurt her.
No, no one fucking will.
Though Mia’s been raised in the family and she’s no stranger to the way we operate and who we are, Piero’s sheltered her from more than bills and responsibility. She stares at me unblinking, still frozen in place, and she’s white as snow.
I approach her carefully, my hands palm up so she knows without me saying that I’m not going to hurt her. I wouldn’t, and if she were in her right mind, she’d know that, but she isn’t right now. Right now, she’s operating on instinct and survival, and time will tell how she reacts.
“Baby,” I say, in my softest voice. It’s taking all my self-control not to run to her, pick her up in my arms, and cart her away from here. Where she’s safe, away from any danger that could come her way. Goddamn it, when I get ahold of whoever’s behind this, they will pay for this. I didn’t want this for her. I don’t, still.
Her lower lip trembles when I get a little closer. “Come with me, baby. That’s a girl,” I say, reaching for her hand and taking it in mine. It’s cold and clammy, and when I touch her, a tremor ripples through her. She shivers.
“You’re safe, Mia.” I tell her this because she needs to know this but I do, too. “You’re safe. Come to me.”
So slowly it’s as if she’s waking from a dream, she takes a step toward me. I draw her closer, to my chest, where it’s warm and she can hear the steady beating of my heart. She’s shaking so hard it breaks me.
I should have shielded her from this.
I should’ve protected her better.
She never should’ve seen that.
And while I hold her, my mind is churning with where we go from here. Davo, the fucking brainless idiot, played with the big dogs and got bit.
I’ve been on the other side of this. I’ve been the executioner, the one sending a warning sign. The one dealing with and executing severed limbs, fingers, tongues. Piero once found one of our own with his woman; that was a beating and execution he ordered me to handle that’ll haunt me until the day I die. I can still hear the fucking loser’s screams in my nightmares.
It’s clear as fucking day: you screw with the family, you pay, and violence is our language.
But now that I’m on the other side of the coin, what we do next isn’t as clear.
I could take her to Logan Airport, catch the next flight to Italy, and do exactly what the fucking cartel wants me to do. Run, with my tail between my legs. But I don’t operate that way, and it wouldn’t solve the greater issue. We’ve got men in every corner of Boston, from the Charles River to the Ritz Carlton. We’ve got business transactions that are the lifeblood of the family, associates and business partners. Leaving now would be a sign of weakness.
You threaten me, you pick a fight. You threaten my girl, you sign your death sentence.
So now I’ve got to keep her safe while I find who the fuck did this and handle them.
I hold her to my chest to still the trembling.
“Is he alive?” she asks.
If he’s still alive, I’ll donate my nuts to fucking science, but she doesn’t need to hear that now.
“Could be. They could be bluffing.”
“That wasn’t bluffing,” she says, shaking harder. “What if they...what if they cut his hand off or something. Can a person survive losing a hand?”
“Does Peter Pan mean anything to you?”
“Jesus, Enzo, this isn’t a time to joke.”
But she’s wrong. Sometimes you deal with the bullshit life throws at you by making light of it. You light a smoke over a body and toss some dice for the shoes. It’s how we deal with the more gruesome aspects of what we do. And I have to keep her spirits up, help her deal with her trauma. They very well could sever a limb.
There’s no telling from a bunch of dimly lit pictures.
“Hook hand is kinda macabre, and makes wiping your ass pretty tricky, but Davo would figure shit out.”
“Ha,” she says humorlessly, She’s shaking in my arms, and at first I think she’s crying, but it isn’t until she looks up at me that I realize I hit my mark. She’s actually laughing.
“Can’t really spank the monkey with a hook either.”
I grimace. “Thanks for the visual, baby.”
Now she’s smiling though her eyes are still bright, like she’s going to cry or lose her mind and scream her head off, but at least she’s smiling.
I can’t help myself. I bend down and kiss those full, beautiful lips. She wraps her arms around my neck and breathes me in, as if this is exactly what she needed, what she wanted, a reminder that she’s more to me than a girl under my care. And she is more to me. She’s so much more.
I wrap my arms around her, my hands splayed on that sweet, tender spot of her lower back. She feels so small in my arms, so frail, and I want to tuck her up to my chest and hold her here forever.
I slide my tongue in her mouth, and she whimpers. I move my hand lower, down over the small of her back to the swell of her ass, and my cock stiffens. She grinds against me, building friction between us. We both want this. We both need this. I can’t take her back to Calabria, and I can’t lock her up, but I can claim her as mine. I have to. She needs this from me.
I lift her up and she swings her legs around my hips. She’s fucking meant to be here like this, her little body wrapped around mine. If I’ve got a soul, this girl’s found it, excavated it, dusted it fucking off.
I pull my mouth off hers enough to whisper in her ear. “You please me very much, Mia.”
She groans in response, rocking her hips. My cock strains for release against my jeans as we walk toward my bedroom.
I wasn’t going to do this. I was damn near bound and determined not to. But hell, right now, there’s no better choice than to make her feel as safe as fuck.
I kick open the door to my bedroom, and walk with her toward the bed. Her hands are at my waist, reaching for my t-shirt, but I capture her wrists and still her movements.
She’ll get what she wants tonight, what we both want, but I’m the one who leads the steps in this dance.
I lay her down on the pillows, her hair cascading around her like sun-kissed honey. I kiss her temple, her nose, her forehead, her dainty little chin, and she giggles and smiles so prettily, my heart squeezes. I’m not a sentimental guy, but Mia brings out the softest parts of me.
My hands span her waist, then I’m lifting her top. She watches me with wide-eyed wonder as I ease it up and over her head gently. As if testing me, she reaches her hands to her waist and grabs the button of her jeans.
I shake my head once.
No.
That’s my job. She smiles at me, a little bit of the sassy Mia returning, coy and tempting, and she reaches for her belly again.
I make a tsking sound, and take her wrists in my hand. “I undress you.” I place her hands above her head. “Keep them there, beautiful. You’ve already earned a spanking. Do you want a spanking that doesn’t end in orgasm?”