“The Cartel’s greatest ally is Hernando Lacruz.”
I school my face into a neutral expression. “He is.”
“He’s fifty-eight.”
“He is.”
“Carmen.”
“I thought you didn’t want to know his name?”
There’s a shuffle next to me, and I almost regret pushing back so hard, because now Dante will leave, and I’ll have to ruminate on this conversation for the next twenty-four hours.
I don’t bother getting up. I just listen to the sound of his footsteps approaching the door, trying desperately not to fall too far into self-pity before he’s actually gone.
But he pauses, lingering on the threshold.
“For what it’s worth, you don’t deserve that.”
I laugh bitterly. “But I deserve to be your prisoner?”
The door closes behind him with an almighty thud.
7
DANTE
It should be a terrifying realization that I would rather be sitting on the floor of the dungeon hallway than at this “ball”. Except it feels like less of a realization and more of an inevitability.
Carmen “son of a bitch”Rubio.
Effortlessly witty, disarmingly smart, endlessly patient—though I do suspect the latter to be heavily influenced by her desire to escape as opposed to any fondness she might have for me.
And really, I should have known better than to share my woes with a literal captive audience. What else could she do but listen? What else could she do but take it? It was an exploitative, self-indulgent plan to maintain my sanity.
She wasn’t supposed to be…happy about it.
She wasn’t supposed to light up every time I walked into the hallway. She wasn’t supposed to insult me in charmingly accurate Italian. She wasn’t supposed to tell me she’d be forced to marry someone more than twice her age.
And I’m reading into it too much. And that’s very dangerous, because I’m looking for things I hope are there when they most likely are not.
It’s very dangerous for me, who would be crucified by Leon before I even landed in Brooklyn, but only if my mother didn’t get there first.
It’s very dangerous for Carmen, whose purity is apparently worth more than her actual feelings on the matter.
And dear God, have I been thinking about that, fantasizing about all the ways I could destroy a man like Hernando Lacruz. About all the ways I could tarnish his precious virgin and show Carmen her true worth.
I swallow down the champagne in my hand abruptly and turn to find something to distract me from the growing strain in my pants.
Luckily, my mother isn’t too far away.
“Dante,amore mio,”she beckons me over. “I would like you to meet someone.”
With a resigned sigh, I make my way across the veranda. The cool evening air plays with the long, dark hair of the woman she’s talking to. Waves of hair that fall almost to her waist make her backless dress feel tastefully less exposed.
As I’ve quickly learned, these “balls” tend to be an excuse for high society to spend an evening scantily clad on Emilia-Romagna’s most expensive rooftops.
As I approach, the woman turns to me, and something jolts in the back of my mind. It takes me a moment to differentiate the instant attraction from therecognition.
