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There was a hot, itchy pain at the side of my head that was easy to ignore as I stood languidly, buttoning my suit jacket before strolling around the wood to peer down at my fallen adversary. My fingers pinched her chin and wrenched it high so that her watering eyes met mine.

“Who are you working for?” I demanded.

She flashed her teeth at me and coughed wetly in answer.

I dug the fingers of my free hand into the bullet wound in her chest, twisting deeper so hot blood bubbled out over my palm and dripped down my wrist to the floor.

“I said,” I repeated coldly, bending closer. “Who the fuck are you working for?”

“Ghosts,” she whispered as blood gushed between her teeth and gurgled at the back of her throat. “They’ve haunted long enough, and now they’re out for your blood.”

I hauled her to her feet, but her eyes were already rolling back, breath rattling thinly through her chest on a few last ineffective inhales.

It seemed my wife was too excellent a shot; her bullet collapsed one lung and my own the other. If only one of us had fired, Serena could have lived, but the damage was too extensive, and a moment later, she choked on the blood drowning her throat and went limp in my arms.

I peered at Fiammetta over Serena’s shoulder, gauging her reaction to this violence. To the very real possibility that she had just murdered someone.

Those catlike eyes, large and faintly tipped, were empty of anything but a cool triumph.

“I told you,” she said simply, flicking the safety on her gun before tucking it back into an unobtrusive holster on her outer thigh.

My cock twitched at the sight of her, even as a scowl stole over my face.

She was a far cry from the classy mob wife in a designer dress and fur coat who accompanied me earlier that night, but something about this version of her, stripped down to the studs and sharply honed, appealed to me.

“What the fuck were you thinking storming in here with a gun?” I demanded, the words frostbitten.

She had the audacity to roll her eyes at me. “I think you mean ‘Thank you, Fia, for uncovering a conspiracy in my casino and saving my life.’”

“Does it look like I needed saving?” I asked, shaking the dead woman in my arms before tossing her flippantly to the floor at my side so I could stalk toward my wife. “I am capo dei capi of the Chicago Outfit, Fiammetta, I do not need my young wife to protect me.”

“I don’t care what you need,” she retorted, her lovely face twisting with fury. “What you have is a wife who will protect you just as you always claim to do for me. We might not have a conventional marriage, Dario. I might not even like you very much, but I’ll be damned if I let some puttana steal from you and take your life.”

It seemed my little doll had transformed herself into quite the G.I. Jane while I was preoccupied trying to ignore her. Unbidden, something like warm humor bloomed in my gut. Suddenly, I wanted to kiss her, to taste the passion on her mouth and test the strength of that dojo-honed taut and curved body.

“You are the only one allowed to hate me, is that it?” I loomed over her now, my voice huskier than it should have been.

Normally, I was so good. It was my other self who capitulated to Fiammetta’s charms too many times to count.

But how was I supposed to resist a wife who would kill for me when all I had ever done was cause her sorrow?

She glared up at me, gold-green eyes glittering fierce as a lioness’s. “Yes, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly right.” One hand reached up to lightly touch my ear, and I realized that was where the burning sensation originated. Serena must have clipped the upper shell with her wayward shot. It was only a mild buzz of pain, the flood of blood down the side of my neck itchy and more irritating than the actual sting of the missing flesh. But Fiammetta seemed moved by the wound, tracing her fingertips gently over the broken skin as her eyes darkened indecipherably.

“Tell me you hate me, then,” I taunted her, already curving the same hand that had just fired my gun under the heavy fall of her ponytail at the back of her neck. “Lies always sound so pretty from your sweet mouth.”

“It’s not a lie,” she insisted, but her eyes flashed with desire, and her pulse pounded visibly under the thin skin of her neck. My naughty wife had just killed a traitor, and far from being traumatized by it, she was aroused.

Dio mio, Satan had delivered her to turn my carefully ordered life upside down before sending it straight to hell.

“No?” I hissed, pressing my other hand to the flat of her ribs above her breasts to feel the thrum of her mad heartbeat. “A wife who hates her husband lets him be killed.”

“Perhaps I would hate you less if you showed me a little gratitude?” she suggested, pivoting neatly away from the real question.

I let myself be distracted because I liked her proposal better.

And a part of me, the only part that had ever really known fear, was too chickenshit to believe her feelings could be anything other than glacial toward me.

I couldn’t afford to feel anything more.