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Consequences be damned.

But I had a Cyrillic tattoo, a perpetual ache in my chest, and the ghost of a brother that reminded me all too often what those consequences might be if I ever truly lost my head.

“I’ve given Serena everything,” I explained, because I was feeling grateful even though I made it a point never to explain myself. “She was just a teenager in an abusive home when I found her and took her into the Family. There is no one else who could give her more than I have.”

“Not the Pakhan?” she asked.

I arched a brow. “The Pakhan would not move against me. I’ve told you this before.”

“Well, excuse me for not believing you when three of his thugs abducted me,” she snapped.

“Three?” I asked quietly, because never had there been mention of a third Russian involved in her kidnapping.

Daniil and Afansay were the only two in the building when I arrived, and there was no sign of anyone else. Fiammetta herself had only ever spoken of them both.

She waved her hand dismissively. “Two, three. Non importa. What does matter is that the Russians clearly want to fuck with you, and they have the next-strongest power base in the city.”

I chuckled, but there was something tightening in my belly that couldn’t write her off. “How do you know so much about power dynamics in the city, bambolina? Have the boys and girls who drape themselves all over you at parties told you some of what goes on in the shadows?”

She smiled, a closed-mouth curling that spoke of mysteries and smugness.

Sometimes, even when I was inside her, thrusting into that gorgeous body and silken heat, I had the unmistakable impression she was still a stranger to me. Eternally impossible to know.

Of course, I hadn’t let myself get too close, but Fiammetta was a simple woman.

She should have been one, at least, as she presented herself as such most of the time.

But I increasingly had the impression that she was more like an iceberg, that the 10 percent she presented to the world seemed wholly realized, but there was a monolith of secrets beneath those easy, pretty smiles that most people would never know.

I had always been intrigued by puzzles. A businessman and a criminal, it was in my nature to wonder and push boundaries. I wanted to push hers until they cracked and crumbled, until the raw Fiammetta Ferretti was beneath my hands and mouth and driving cock.

I wanted to earn the smiles she gave to her beloved friends, the gentle touches she bestowed on those bikers and MMA fighters.

But that was not the kind of man I was or life I led.

So, instead of indulging her and myself with my own curiosities, I said, “Enough, Fiammetta. I will handle this from here. Luigi and Stefan will take you home.”

“I spooked her today, Dario,” she insisted, standing so she could step closer to me, pressing herself along the line of my body so I could feel every inch of her soft curves against my hard edges. “She’s just lost her right-hand man, and her playground has been compromised. If she is working for someone else, she’ll reach out to them. If she’s really scared, she might even come for you.”

Something softened in my chest, a physical sensation that made me slightly breathless. I cleared my throat but allowed myself to slip a hand under Fiammetta’s heavy hair to cup her neck.

“Your concern for me is charming,” I told her, feeling her spine snap straight with indignation. “But I can take care of myself.”

“Just like you took care of me when the Russians took me?” she countered with mock sincerity.

She shook her head and stepped away from me without another word, turning on her heel for the door with Cerberus sliding into her side.

Before she closed the door behind her, she popped her head back into the room and added, “At least watch your back. I’d hate to have to marry some other mafioso if you died. He might be even more awful than you.”

I swallowed my snort of amusement until the door was shut and I saw through the cameras that she was safely ensconced in the elevator. My amusement quickly dissolved in the churning emotions souring my gut as I sat in my desk chair and pulled open my locked desk drawer.

Within it lay all the threats I’d received since Fiammetta went missing.

Pictures of my wife walking arm in arm with the magazine editor Lily Winchester down the Magnificent Mile, others of her meeting the Russian girl for coffee on the University of Chicago campus, and more still, her at the gun range, the dojo, sunning herself in our very backyard near the pool.

In each of them, her eyes were crossed out with scratch marks, her throat slit in a similar method.

I had received similar threats about a woman before, when I was just a young man, and that woman was long since dead.