Page 28 of The Kingpin’s Bride

When she finally left through the staff door I followed at a distance that kept me invisible.

Six blocks. The same route she always took when she refused the bus.

Head down. Keys between her fingers, metal glinting once under a streetlight. Shoulders curled inward against a cold that had nothing to do with the weather.

She never once looked over her shoulder. Never once checked the shadows. Either she had stopped caring if someone was behind her, or she had decided that looking would not change whatever was coming.

I let her reach the building. Let her climb the stairs. Let the light in her single window flick on and then, after a long time, flick off again.

The room went dark. The street stayed quiet. Only then did I drive home.

At home, I didn’t turn on the overhead lights. I walked straight to the wall under the windows and stood in front of the largest printed photo of her face. That trapped, hollow look she wore when she thought no one who mattered was watching. The photograph had been three weeks ago. I knew then. I had decided.

I pressed my palm flat against the photograph.

I would buy her in front of every man who had ever stared at her body like it was theirs. I would put my mother’s ring on her finger. I would take what the Families demanded, publicly, thoroughly, without mercy, and I would do it with the entire underworld watching.

The seat would be secured. The bloodline would begin. The plan would hold. And somewhere underneath the strategy and the bloodline and the seat I was carving out of Vernizzi bones, a quieter, darker truth had settled.

I was no longer doing it only for the power.

I was doing it because the thought of any other man touching what I had claimed made something violent and permanent open inside my chest.

Because the idea of Morena Caruso looking at anyone else the way she had looked at me in that private room, fear and something else, something that was not quite surrender, was unacceptable.

I left my hand against the photograph until the paper warmed under my skin. Then I turned away, poured the whiskey I had ignored at the club, and began the real work of the next twenty-one days.

Dario would stay in line. I would make certain of it. A quiet word to the right people. A reminder of what the cut on his stomach had cost him, and what the next one would cost. The other bidders would understand the new order of things. A few carefully placed conversations. A few men who needed to remember that some prizes were spoken for. And when Morena Caruso walked onto that stage in three weeks, she would belong to me in every way that counted.

The rest would simply be the performance the Families required.

I sat in the dark with her face staring back at me from a dozen angles and let the final pieces of the plan lock into place. The photographs watched me the way she never had. Her eyes that did not know they were claimed.

Chapter Seven

Morena

Three weeks later

Ispent the last hours of daylight sitting on the edge of the mattress with the collar around my throat.

Dario had dropped it off that morning along with the rest of what he called “the merchandise package.”

A thin black box. Inside: the same collar I wore every night, only this one had a small silver ring at the front for a leash. A pair of black stilettos with heels high enough to make walking feel like a controlled fall. And nothing else.

No lace. No scraps of fabric. Just the collar, the shoes, and a folded note in his handwriting that said Be ready by eight. They want you sparkling clean, shaved and gorgeous.

I had showered twice already. Scrubbed until my skin felt raw and my nipples ached from the cold water. The apartment smelled faintly of the cheap soap I used and the fear I couldn’t wash off. Every time I looked at the empty box on the floor I remembered the things Dario had listed in the car three weeks ago, the cutting, the branding, the cages, the men who bought girls like me and never gave them back.

Camilla’s latest photo sat face-down on the kitchen counter. My stepfather had let me keep that one. I hadn’t been able to look at it since he left. He smiled while he watched my face change.

“Last one until after,” he had said. “Be a good little hole tonight and maybe you’ll get another. Run, and she disappears for real.”

I believed him.

The sky outside the window turned the color of old bruises. I stood on legs that felt disconnected and walked to the bathroom mirror. The girl looking back at me was gone behind the eyes. Dark hair hanging damp past her shoulders. Collar dark against her throat. Naked except for the shoes I hadn’t put on yet. I looked like something that had been prepared for slaughter and was only waiting for the knife.

I forced myself to dry my hair. Forced myself to leave it loose the way they preferred. Forced myself not to think about the man with the tattoos who had walked into that private room and taken Dario’s knife like it belonged to him. The man who had looked at me over Dario’s shoulder and told me to leave in a voice that lived under my skin.