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The story was not a happy one, and it started so long ago. Her mother had been religious. After Miguel had sold her out to Rocco Moretti for a night when she was just fifteen years old, he suggested she visit the same church—and she did. That priest, Father Charlie, saved her life that night, and they formed a close bond after that.
And then, not too long ago, right before she and Miguel had moved here to try to get on the Black Hand, Father Charlie was murdered by some Greenback Serpents. Giselle had killed them in retaliation. She’d found them mid-deed and enacted her own bloody vengeance.
Giselle then thought that was that… until they came here and she began to suspect her father wanted her dead. That possibility was further cemented after she was nearly killed and quickly married off to Luca Moretti because Miguel had a secret pregnant fiancé.
The person who tried to kill her before was one of her father’s men. Damian had been the one to save her that night; he’d been following her, knowing she was the one who’d killed some of his crew. He was, from what it sounded like, the Serpents’ leader, even though he’d never call himself that.
She thought Miguel was the one who put out the contract with the Guild. Miguel obviously wanted to paint someone as the murderer; the Guild worked secretly, so the truth would never come out. Miguel could paint whatever story he wanted, and Giselle would be too dead to correct him.
It’s why she was here now. Miguel had handed her over to the Serpents after having one of his men kidnap her from the Moretti suite. He had assumed the Serpents would torture her and then kill her for what she did in that church, but he assumed wrong. Damian had found out Miguel had bought some of the Serpents, and he wanted revenge on the asshole.
Revenge on Miguel was something I understood all too well.
“I don’t understand why your father would hire those Serpents to kill Father Charlie,” I said, bringing up something that bothered me. I’d heard bits and pieces of the story before, but now that it was all together, it still felt like something was missing. An important piece of the puzzle.
“My mother… I don’t think she really loved Miguel.”
It struck me then how, this whole time, she kept tripping up when she said Miguel’s name, and it hit me: she didn’t call him her father. Any time she started to, out of habit, she stopped and corrected herself by using his first name.
Ah. Okay. I think I understood now.
“She had an affair. Miguel had her killed when he found out she was unfaithful, and he spent years looking for the man she’d been with. His ego couldn’t let it go,” Giselle whispered. “That man… was Father Charlie.”
“Fuck,” I whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
“Miguel told me all of this when he had me in that warehouse. He assumed the Serpents would kill me, so it wouldn’t hurt to tell me the truth, finally, after all these years.” Giselle’s hands curled into fists. “All my life, he never loved me. Everything was a lie.”
Miguel. What a fucking asshole. I wanted to take my hands to his neck and squeeze until his lips turned blue and his eyes bulged. He deserved to go out in a gasping, helpless mess. A bullet to the head would be too fast, too painless. No, that asshole should die in absolute misery for the pain he’d caused Giselle.
“I assume Damian knows all of this?” I asked. “And that you two are coming up with some kind of plan to take him down?”
She nodded once. “He wants the same thing I do: to see Miguel crash and burn. I don’t care who gets on the Hand, but it sure as hell can’t be my… it can’t be Miguel. Anyone but him. Everyone but him.”
I let out a loud breath. “What’s the plan, then?”
“We haven’t gotten that far yet. We didn’t have too much time to talk before you came to save the day.” Giselle’s hands relaxed, and she lifted her head off the couch, turning those amber eyes to me. “Thank you, by the way. I… I didn’t know you cared enough about me to do this.”
Something in my chest swelled. My heart? Of course my fucking heart. This girl had wormed herself inside me, refused to leave, and now I was basically a slave to her. Helpless and desperate in the way I wanted her, not to mention in the way I’d do anything to keep her safe. The world had hurt her far too much as it was already.
I wanted to reach for her hand, but I stopped myself, and I settled for leaning a little closer to her and whispering, “Of course I care for you. You don’t have to thank me for any of this. I…” What was I trying to say? “You got in my head that first night and never left it, princess.”
Her lips were slow to quirk into a smile. “Even though I’m too young for you, dragon man?” Dragon man was what she supposedly called me before discovering my true identity. Course, if she’d known anything about the Cunningham family, she could’ve put it together herself. Each member of my family had tattoos similar to mine.
The sigh that came from me right then was full of frustration—not at her, but at this whole situation. At current events. At, yes, her damned age. She was fourteen years my junior, young enough that I shouldn’t look at her twice. I didn’t get off on that fresh-faced baby-eyed look most other eighteen-year-olds seemed to have.
But Giselle… fuck, Giselle was different. She’d seen so much, been through so much. She wasn’t a normal eighteen-year-old. That’s the only way I could justify my feelings for her in my head. The world—Miguel, mostly—had forced her to become an old, injured soul.
“You are,” I agreed, though I knew she’d only said that because it was something I’d told her at the Playground. “You are too young for me.”
“Plus, I’m a married woman now,” she said, and unless I was mistaken, a mischievous glint glimmered in those eyes as she studied me, once again throwing my own words back in my face.
I nodded once. “You are a married woman, yes.”
“So many reasons why you shouldn’t be here right now. I’m not your responsibility in any way,” she spoke, her voice dropping to a bare whisper. “But you are here. You did come for me.” That smile of hers grew when she asked, “If there were twenty people in this house, would you have killed them all for me?”
“If it meant saving you, I’d kill countless.”
To any other girl, to any woman who hadn’t grown up surrounded by self-made mafia kings and mob lords, something like that would scare her off. But to Giselle, to someone who wasn’t afraid of getting her own hands bloody, that declaration was a sweet nothing whispered into her ear.
