I followed his stare to the woman in question, who was talking to another in the middle of the room. She wore a classy white cocktail dress and a tight chignon. Her posture was perfect and her current smile was tight. I bet she’d never let her hair down.
“She looks . . . fun.”
When I caught the corner of his disarming smile, something hot and hesitant flickered to life in my stomach. The feeling immediately brought a bad taste to my mouth.
I pushed off the table. “Okay, well, you have a decent night. I would say great, but I’m doing this new thing and trying not to say what I don’t mean.”
“Sure you don’t want to donate the shoes off your feet before you go?”
Glancing at my thigh-high boots, I clicked my heels together like Dorothy. Unfortunately, it didn’t take me home. “I would, but I think your girlfriend’s mamma would throw them away.”
I looked up to see his gaze trail from my boots to the few inches of naked thigh. It was clinical, assessing, and hardly lascivious. Still, the touch of his stare burned, like an ice cube melting on bare skin beneath a summer sun.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” he said, taking a large drink of what I was now sure was water.
“I would say poor girl, but . . .” My eyes sparkled with that new thing I’m trying as I began to walk past him.
His next words, dripping with something bitter and sweet, stopped me in my tracks.
“Trouble in paradise?”
My grip tightened around the pen I still held.
I swallowed and rubbed my bare ring finger with my thumb.
My marriage was a mockery, and I could never escape it—divorce didn’t exist in the Cosa Nostra—but I wouldn’t be chained by a diamond on my finger, by a symbol of love, when there was none. At least, none returned.
I turned to him, expecting to see triumph, but as I met his gaze, my heart stilled before tugging in an unnatural way.
There was something dark and genuine behind his eyes, and I didn’t realize until later that he was letting me see it. The steady drip, drip, drip of blood. The clanks of metal and fire that forged him.
He was up to his neck in blood.
I wondered if, even then, beneath his fake gentleman persona, his black suit and white shirt, he was covered in it.
“What have you sacrificed to stand here today?” The thought escaped me, pushed from my lips by an invisible force. “Your soul?” I stepped closer, inches away, until his presence brushed my bare skin. Running the tip of the pen across his palm by his side, I whispered, “Just how much blood is on these hands?”
He ran his tongue across his teeth, flicking his gaze to the side before bringing it back to me.
Bottomless. Blue. My heart beat heavy, because I knew if I stared too long I’d be trapped beneath ice.
“Someday,” I breathed, tilting my head, “it’s going to catch up with you.”
His gaze narrowed in distaste as it fell to the pen I’d bitten between my teeth. It took only a second to connect the dots. Germs, most likely.
I licked the end of the pen like a lollipop, tucked it into his front jacket pocket, and gave his chest a pat.
“Have a lousy night, Allister.”
Taking a step to leave, I realized how parched his stare had made me. I stepped backward, grabbed the glass from his hand, and downed the contents.
I choked.
Vodka.
The burn in my throat drifted to my chest as I headed toward the exit. Just as I pushed the door open and cool October air enveloped me, I came face-to-face with a familiar set of eyes.
“Going somewhere?”
I tensed and tried to step around him, but my husband’s hand found my own and stopped me.
“Let me go,” I gritted.
Antonio pulled me closer, wrapping an arm around my waist like we were the most normal couple in the world. As if there wasn’t a twenty-five-year age gap between us, as if he’d wooed me instead of having signed a contract for me, and, most importantly, as if he hadn’t cheated on me and then tried to apologize with a box of fucking chocolates.
I struggled, but his hold only grew tighter.
“Make a scene, Gianna . . .” he warned.
Antonio was like his son, only wrapped in pain and delivered with a side of righteousness, even as the cross around his neck singed a hole through his skin. After two years of marriage, I didn’t believe he could even feel sympathy, and I knew it was how he’d climbed the ladder to be one of the most feared men in the United States.
As for why he was revered—well, when Antonio was warm, he was like the sun. Everyone wanted his attention because, when he gave it, it was absolute, as though you were the only one who had ever mattered. Regardless of the heartache he’d caused me, the walls I’d put up and some I still maintained, I wasn’t a match.
Now, I had to figure out how to give up the sun.
“I really don’t like waiting around for you.”
“I really don’t like you fucking my friends.”
“Watch your mouth,” he chastised, walking us back into the hotel.
Sometimes, it felt like a scream was trapped in my throat, one that had been struggling to get free for the past twenty-two years. It had a voice, a body, fiery red hair, and a heart of steel. I was terrified she would escape, that her echo would burn this world to the ground and leave me standing alone, in smoke and ash. I pushed the feeling down, down, until a light sheen of sweat cooled my skin.
We passed the ballroom doors and, as I glanced inside, my gaze collided with Allister’s.
The exchange was a blur of heat, the burn of liquor, a flicker of pitch-black as his eyes dropped to Antonio’s grip on my arm. And then it was gone, replaced with gold wallpaper as we walked down a hall toward the terrace.
We stepped outside, and I sucked in a breath. The night was cold and dark, but instead of rubbing my arms for warmth, I let the icy breeze bite into my skin. Maybe I was a masochist, or maybe pain was one of the only things that made me feel alive.
The terrace was empty, save for two guests from the benefit smoking a cigarette.
“Give us a moment, yeah?”
It wasn’t a question, no matter how my husband had voiced it.
The men shared a hesitant look but didn’t take more than a couple of seconds to drop their cigarettes and head back through the double doors that led into the ballroom. Light fanned across the terrace floor before the doors closed and darkness consumed us once again.
A distant memory swept into the present.
“How could you love such a terrifying man?” my ex-best-friend Sydney had asked me as we sat on my husband’s office couch together and he talked on the phone.
I’d only had to think about the question for a moment.
“He listens to me.”
I guessed he listened to her, too.
“Care to explain what this is?”
I turned to Antonio to see he held a small, round compact in his hand. My heart beat in the base of my throat. Here was one of those walls about to come tumbling down.
“What is it, Gianna?” he bit out.
“Birth control pills.”
“Why do you have them?”
“Birth control.”
Antonio’s eyes blazed with anger, like two flames in the dark. We were devotedly Catholic, and birth control was frowned upon by the Church. But I knew what bothered him even more was that he wanted another child. Another son to rule his empire.