Page 12 of The Kingpin’s Bride

No future.

They were vulnerable in the exact way that mattered most in our world.

Legacy.

I thought of the girl from the club again. The tremor in her hands. The way she had looked at me like she understood pain. Young. Fertile. Already broken in by life. No powerful family to interfere. No one who would fight for her once I took her.

A wife the Vernizzi men could never produce.

Heirs they could never claim.

I smiled in the dark penthouse, slow and cold.

If the syndicate would not give me a seat, I would take the one that was dying.

I left the Vernizzi files where they were and crossed to the long table under the windows.

A new section started that night.

I pulled up the security feeds from After Dark first. Santino’s system was good, but I had been given quiet access months ago for “emergency” reasons. Frame by frame I watched her. The way she moved on stage. The small flinch when men got too close. I screenshotted stills and printed them.

Then the real work began.

I worked alone. I always did. No soldiers. No shared intel. No one to question how deep I went. By dawn I had her full name. Morena Caruso. Twenty-one in three years. Daughter of Salvatore Caruso, the traitor Leo had poisoned in a restaurant eight years earlier. Mother dead of an overdose. One younger half-sister, Camilla, currently living with a man named Dario Rizzo who had a long list of assaults and two sealed juvenile records.

I found the apartment she had grown up in. The scholarship she had earned and been forced to decline. The medical records from the night her mother died. Bank activity that showed every dollar she made at the club went straight to Dario. Photographs of her leaving After Dark at four in the morning with her head down and her arms wrapped around herself.

I learned the shape of her life until it felt like I had lived the worst parts of it with her.

She was perfect.

No powerful relatives left. No one who would come looking if she disappeared into a marriage she did not choose. Young enough. Broken enough. Beautiful in the exact way that made men stupid and possessive. The pain I had seen on stage was not an act. It was carved into her.

I sat back in the chair as the sky started to lighten over the city. Printed pages and photographs covered the table. Her face looked up at me from a dozen angles. On stage. Leaving the club. One grainy shot from years earlier, a school photo where she had a little softness left in her eyes.

My cock had been hard for hours.

I unzipped and took myself in hand, eyes locked on the clearest of her mid-dance, lips parted, that trapped look in her eyes. I stroked slow at first, then harder, imagining what it would feel like to be the one who put that expression on her face. To take every piece of remaining fight out of her and replace it with need. To fill her until there was no question who she belonged to.

I came with her name in my mouth and the private knowledge that she had no idea I owned her future.

When it was over I cleaned up, lit a cigarette, and stared at the web of her life I had built in one night.

The Vernizzi seat was the goal.

Morena Caruso was going to be the way I took it.

One week later the walls of the penthouse had changed.

Morena’s face was everywhere.

I had stopped pretending the Vernizzi files were the priority. Every night I sat in the dark and watched the After Dark security feeds from the beginning of her shift until the second she left. I knew the exact minute she stepped on stage. I knew which songs made her shoulders tighten. I knew the precise moment her eyes went empty, the moment she disappeared inside herself so the men watching could not touch what was left.

Some nights I only meant to check the feed for a few minutes. Those nights turned into hours. My hand would end up around my cock while she danced, slow and reluctant, and I would come to the image of the faint bruises Dario left on her when he thought no one was looking. Afterward I would sit there breathing hard and force my mind back to the plan.

The plan was simple in the way the most violent things usually are.

I needed the Vernizzi seat empty.