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I stared at myself in the mirror as I ripped all of the pins out of my hair, tossing them into a pile on the counter. I couldn’t believe I had done this. I was so … I was trapped. There was no way out of this for me now; my husband was sitting on the other side of the door, and I couldn’t keep myself from him forever …
A man like that, involved with such darkness, would never have let me slip through his fingers. He was mafia, ran his own powerful business that stretched to the corners of this city, and everyone knew it. There wasn’t a chance in hell he would let someone like me escape. Too many people working for him, willing to cover for him, willing to do whatever it took to force his unwilling bride back to his bed.
I scrubbed my face and perched on the edge of the tub as I waited to hear his snores from next door. I pulled off the dress, and the delicate wedding-night lingerie beneath it and grabbed a heavy hotel robe to wrap myself in. I would have to sleep next to him tonight, but at least I wouldn‘t have to do anything with him …
I opened the door as quietly as I could, not wanting to wake him, and forced myself to look at the man sprawled across the bed in front of me. The man I had just taken as my husband. Nearly sixty, with gray, thinning hair, and an expensive suit that didn’t do anything to hide the paunch in his belly. I would have to get used to his presence soon enough—get used to even more than just looking at him, actually, no matter how sick it made me.
There was a small couch next to the window; it wouldn’t be a comfortable night, and I would have to slip back into the bed before he woke up, but I could manage it. Anything to put some distance between myself and this man, at least a little longer.
I curled up on the couch, tucking my knees up against my chest and squeezing them tight. I doubted I was going to be able to get much sleep tonight, but I could try.
Even if I would have to wake up the next morning, still trapped in this nightmare I wished with all my heart I could escape.
Chapter Two – Alex
"She’s married?"
The words hung in the air between us as I stared at Paulo. He shrugged and nodded.
"Seems like it," he replied. I shook my head, trying to wrap my brain around what he had just said to be.
"But … to Gregor?" I clarified, lifting my hand to stop him in his tracks. "That can’t be right. He’s nearly sixty. What is she now, twenty?"
"Twenty-one," he corrected me. Paulo, my father’s advisor, had been a solid source of information the whole time I’d known him, especially since my father had passed and I’d been left to take over the family business. But I couldn’t believe what he was telling me right now. It couldn’t be true.
Could it?
He pulled out a newspaper from the briefcase he always carried with him and pushed it across the polished wooden desk in the center of my office towards me. He tapped pointedly on a picture on the page it was opened to, and I squinted down at it.
And, sure enough, there it was—the wedding announcement, a picture of Morgan standing next to Gregor. His arm around her, a beaming grin on his face, like the cat who’d gotten the cream. A far less clear one on hers, as though she was trying to hold something back.
Or maybe I was just projecting, seeing what I wanted to see, because I couldn’t imagine what she would have seen in a man like him.
"When did this happen?" I asked. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but something about this picture sparked doubt at the back of my mind, sparked a question I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to.
"Last week," he replied, pulling the newspaper back and tucking it into his bag.
"That’s a lot of change for such a short period of time," I remarked. "Didn’t Ian die just a few months ago?"
"Just after the start of the year," he agreed.
"You think that might have something to do with this?" I pressed. I could have just been reading too much into it, but there was a part of me that was sure there was more to this than there seemed on the surface. No way, in a million years, would a woman like her have married a man like Gregor if she’d had a choice …
"I don’t know," Paulo replied with a shrug. "Just thought you’d want to know. You used to be friendly with that family, didn’t you?"
"Used to be," I muttered, shaking my head. It had been a long time since I’d been in touch with Leo, let alone Morgan—years, close to seven now. My father had insisted I put some space between us when Ian had started causing real problems with his gambling addiction, incurring debts he couldn’t pay back. It was a bad look for me to be spending so much time with a family who had developed such a clear target on their backs, and I didn’t want to cause any more trouble than they were already handling. I stopped replying to Leo’s texts, and I had figured he’d just moved on, headed to college, done all the normal things a boy his age would have done.
Sure, I had missed my friend, but I knew he wouldn’t have wanted me getting involved in everything that was going on with his family. He was proud like that, always had been, insistent that he didn’t need a single bit of my help, and I wasn’t going to go pushing him to give me more. I wouldn’t have given him much thought, wouldn’t have given any of them much thought, had it not been for this.
I’d been far too busy trying to take hold of the Caroni family business since my father had passed a few years before. There was so much to get a handle on, I sometimes found my head too messy to fit anything else inside of it. Much as I wished I could just take control of myself, there was too much going on, too much demanding my attention. Territory disputes to hash out, drug running routes to clear, petty enforcer squabbles that needed to be dealt with—if it hadn’t been for Paulo steering everything in the right direction, I wasn’t sure how I would have made it through without losing my mind entirely. He’d worked with my father for years prior to his death, and he was patient and solid, guiding me to the right decisions and then letting me think I had been the one to come up with them in the first place.
But this? This stopped me dead in my tracks. The look on her face, on Morgan’s face, had sent a shiver down my spine. She was so young, barely twenty-one; she couldn’t really want to marry someone like Gregor, could she? I seemed to remember him lurking around that family even when I knew them, so he must have known her for a long time. Had this always been his plan? Make a move on her, marry her, force her to be his wife?
Surely not. Gregor was rich, powerful, commanded a lot of respect in this city. He could have had pretty much any woman he wanted.
So, what if he wanted her? What if he wanted a woman that much younger than him, a woman who was beautiful and delicate and pretty much perfect? He must have had something heavy on them, for her to be willing to go along with that …
Or maybe I was being cynical. I had seen the dark side of this business, and I knew just how far people would go to get what they wanted, whether that was a new corner of territory in Bianco, or a woman to call their own. And that had influenced the lens through which I viewed the rest of the world. Yeah, maybe they had just fallen in love, decided they wanted to try things out together.
