Page 30 of The Kingpin’s Bride

I stopped tracking the voices. They all sounded the same, hungry, entitled, imagining what they would do once they owned me. My shoulders curled inward on instinct. Another tear followed the first. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood and forced myself to stay still.

Then the room went quiet in a way that felt wrong. A single voice cut through the club like a blade. “Thirty-five million.”

My head snapped up before I could stop it. He was standing now, stepping forward into the red light from the shadowed place near the back column where I had felt him watching for weeks. Tall. Dark hair. Sleeves rolled over the tattoos that covered his forearms and the backs of his hands. The same cold, focused eyes that had looked at me over Dario’s shoulder while he held a knife to the other man’s stomach.

The stranger. The presence.

The auctioneer’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again.

“Sold,” he stammered. “To Matteo Ventura.”

The name hit me like a second set of chains.

Matteo Ventura.

I had felt him watching for weeks. I had watched him take Dario’s knife without raising his voice. Now the entire underworld knew the man who owned me.

My stomach dropped so hard I thought I might vomit on the stage.

Thirty-five million. The number didn’t feel real. Nothing about this felt real. He had bought me.

There was no delay.

A judge I had never seen before stepped onto the stage carrying a black folder. Two of Santino Moretti’s men closed in on either side of me. Their hands were impersonal and hard as they dragged me forward. I stumbled in the stilettos. The chains clinked. My bare skin brushed against expensive suits and I flinched so hard one of them tightened his grip.

They held me up to stand beside him.

Up close he was even more dangerous. The kind of handsome that felt like a threat. Sharp jaw, with a short beard. Mouth set in a line that gave nothing away. He didn’t look at my face. Not yet. He looked at the judge like this was just another contract.

The judge cleared his throat and began speaking in a flat, bored tone. “Matteo Ventura, do you take this woman as your wife, to bind your bloodline to the Five Families and secure your seat?”

“I do.”

Exactly as empty as the look in his eyes when he finally turned his head and glanced down at me.

The judge turned to me. “And you, Morena Caruso… do you take this man as your husband?”

Silence stretched. The entire club seemed to lean forward. My lips trembled. For one wild second I thought about screaming. About refusing. About begging someone, anyone, to stop this.

Then I saw Camilla’s face again behind my eyes. I whispered the only word that would keep her breathing. “…I do.”

It sounded like a death sentence in my own mouth. The judge nodded once. “By the power vested in me by the Five Families, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

Matteo took my left hand. His fingers were warm. My hands were closer to ice. He slid a heavy gold ring onto my finger, ancient, with a sharp diamond that looked almost translucent under the lights. It sat on my skin like a brand. A shackle. I stared down at it and felt something inside me crack cleanly in half.

Then he cupped my chin and forced my face up to his. His eyes were darker up close. Bottomless. I saw no kindness in them. Only possession and something sharper underneath that I didn’t have a name for yet.

He kissed me. Hard. Possessive.

His mouth claimed mine in front of the entire room, in front of every man who had just bid on my body, in front of Dario somewhere in the dark. I tasted my own fear. I stiffened.

A small, broken sound escaped my throat as he deepened the kiss, one hand gripping my chin while the other settled on my bare waist like it had every right to be there. The chains between my wrists pressed against his chest. My naked body was flush against his suit.

I could feel how hard he was through the fabric and the knowledge sent a fresh wave of terror and something uglier through me.

Mine.

I felt the word in the way he kissed me even though he never said it out loud.