Haley
Leo Morelli is a thousand times more intimidating in person than the men he just chased away.
My dad was right. He is focused. He’s unbearably focused. His eyes linger on my face, then slip lower. He returns his gaze to mine with a sneer.
It’s outrageously unfair that he’s so beautiful with that expression on his face.
“Look at you, with your pale blonde hair and porcelain skin and that willowy body.” My peacoat might as well be nothing under his knowing dark eyes. “I’d pick you out of a lineup in a second. A Constantine. I’m right, aren’t I?”
He steps closer. I press my back harder against the bricks, bracing for him to touch me. To kill me, even. That’s what Morellis do. They hurt people. They kill people. Cash was right. I never should have come here on my own. Leo blocks out the rest of the street. His face could be the last thing I see before I die.
No. I’m not going to die. I came here for a reason.
He cocks his head to the side, the movement graceful. Almost elegant. “What’s a pretty Constantine like you doing in a neighborhood like this? You’re not Elaine, so you didn’t come here for a hit. No, you must be here for something else. Someone else.” Another slow smile.
“I came here to save my father.” I stand up straight. Peel my hands off the wall. “Save him from you.”
A laugh so dark it matches his eyes. “Daddy can’t take care of himself? I should have known. The Constantine men need their daughters to protect them. You must be the one he talked about tonight. Haley.”
My body is one huge heartbeat, my thoughts and bones and skin reduced to the drum of the pulse in my ears. “Where is he? What have you done with him?”
“Don’t worry, darling.” Darling sends an electric cold tiptoeing down my spine and it’s all I can do not to shiver. The sound of that word in his mouth... “He’s getting everything he ever wanted.”
“Don’t play with him.”
“Play with him?” Leo smiles at me, mocking. “I would never. He’ll have his invention made. It will change the world. And the Morellis will get richer. I wonder what Caroline Constantine will think about that.”
Caroline can never find out what my dad has done, because she’ll go ballistic in the Constantine sense, which is more dignified than when the Morellis target someone—but just as deadly. Leo has already been toying with the Constantines. With Winston, especially, and that means he knows all about Caroline, too. He wouldn’t hesitate to reveal this to her. He would do it in the most mortifying way possible. That would be the end for us.
Caroline and all the rest of the Constantines have always rejected my dad’s ideas, but he can’t become a traitor to the family. They would expel him. Blacklist us. They might do worse. Appearances are everything in the Constantine family. Caroline would do anything to protect the image.
Anything would come in the form of a tragic accident or an undiscovered allergy or sad twist of fate that no one could have predicted. Caroline will keep her hands clean. No one would ever know, except me and Cash.
I’ve backed up into the wall again, but I find my voice. “No. Please. Caroline doesn’t need to be involved. Just release him from the agreement."
An amused laugh. "Why would I do that when I stand to make a fortune?"
The laugh doesn’t warm his features. Faint sparks play in the dark center of his eyes—shards of moonlight, caught in a black sky. That moonlight is never going to get free again. This is how the conversation ends. This is how it all ends, unless I do something right now.
I don’t have anything to offer. No trust fund. No limitless credit card. We’re the only Constantines who have no hope of matching the Morellis dollar for dollar. All I have in my coat pocket is my phone and a pass for the campus bus route.
I’m the only thing I’ve got.
“You like to make deals.” Everybody knows that about Leo and his brother. They’re heavily into real estate, both in the city and in Bishop’s Landing. They like to buy and sell buildings as a cover for all the real antagonism they do. The real evil, like tricking my father into a business deal, knowing that he’s not like the other Constantines. “Trades. What would you take in trade?”
His eyes move down over my face. To the collar of my coat. His slow perusal burns through the cold and my coat and even the clothes underneath. I hold my breath, like he’ll look away if I’m a statue.
Leo does not look away. He trails his gaze back up the front of me, over the button that holds the coat closed over my breasts, and his eyes land at the exposed hollow of my throat. I should have worn a scarf. I should have brought Cash. I should have brought all the Constantine firepower and hired security and I didn’t. It’s too late. It’s way too late.
My face heats. He can tell. I’m sure of it. He can tell that if he stripped away the coat and the clothes, he would find an innocent virgin underneath.
He knows because it’s true. Men like Leo Morelli always know. He would take that innocence and do things to me that I haven’t dared to dream about, that I’ve held my mind away from because thinking about those things is an endless descent into a dark night. There’s no coming back. There’s no staying the same, when you think about hands like his and a mouth like his and eyes like his—
Eyes that catch mine. He’s done with his assessment and I remember, suddenly, painfully, that I asked him to trade with me. The next move is his.
“I might be willing to make a trade.”
My knees give out, and I’m glad for the wall. I hook a hand around the nearest brick and keep myself standing. “You’ll let him go?”
“I’ll consider it.”
He takes a step toward me and stops, bending to pick something up off the sidewalk.
It’s my mitten.
Leo holds it out to me with a sarcastic flourish, the wrist hole pulled open by his fingers. It feels like a trap, sticking my hand into my own mitten.
I can’t do it.
He makes an impatient noise and pushes it over my hand himself. “Helpless, pathetic Constantines,” he says. “Like father, like daughter. Come with me.”
All the breath goes out of me. I summon enough oxygen to speak—barely. “Right now?”
The look Leo gives me is so cutting I want to cover my face with my hands. “You could stay here. Keep showing your tits to every fuckface who walks by.”
I jerk away from the wall like it’s the brick that stung me and not his words. Crossing my arms over my chest is a pointless move, but I do it anyway, face hot and red. I’m wearing a winter coat. I wasn’t showing anyone my tits. The fact that I was arched back against a wall in front of Leo Morelli should be incidental.
A gust of wind knifes under my collar. “Where are you taking me?”
“Do you see your gullible father here?” He brims with irritation and I have the ridiculous thought that it’s my fault we’re out here. It’s not. It’s this monster’s fault and no one else’s. “You want to see him, you’ll be a good girl and come with me.”
I could die. I could die, but instead I take the first step and follow him back down the block. He turns at an alley, an empty twin of the one with the barrel and the fire and those men. And there, in the alley, is my dad’s car. He’s not in it.