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“Like I told you yesterday. I’m not going to eat until you agree to release me from this marriage,” I quip.
I hear an audible groan on the other side of the door. I assume he’s given up, but a few minutes later, Christian knocks again. “I brought you some caponata. It was my mother’s recipe. There’s also some tea. If you won’t come out, then at least eat in your room.” I refuse to answer. He lets out another agitated sigh as he sets a tray down outside of my door. My stubborn heart melts just a little when he shares that he brought me his mother’s caponata. Growing up, Loreto and I spent hours in the kitchen with our mother learning traditional Scillian recipes. Any time she knew that our father had yelled at us or hurt us by shelling out his rendition of discipline, she would always make us caponata and bring it to our hiding place that only the three of us knew about.
Despite the growling in my belly, I refuse to open my door to accept the gift of food and tea that Christian left. I find myself curious that this toughcapois bringing me a tray of caponata and tea rather than sending one of his kitchen staff. I know I’d been ungrateful for his attempt to rescue me from my father, but despite this unusually kind act, I just can’t bring myself to give in. I have to keep fighting for myself to be free of the unfair fate I’ve inherited just because I’m a woman who can be used as a bartering piece within the war of mafia men. I spend the rest of the day in tears without eating or leaving the room once.
By the time night rolls around, I’m starving and tired of crying. I stand with my ear pressed against the door, listening for sounds of activity out in the hall. After a long while with everything being quiet enough to hear a pin drop, I slowly unlock and open the door, where I see the tray of now cold caponata and tea still sitting there. The apartment seems to be all asleep. There’s no noise or activity, and although I’m sure Christian has a staff, there isn’t a sign of anyone moving about. So, I sneak out of my room and find my way to the kitchen.
The place is a maze of hallways and rooms, lit by dim overhanging lights that cast a cool glow. It’s uncharacteristically large for a place in Hell’s Kitchen, where most everything is tiny and artistically crammed into a small square footage. Christian must have purchased the entire top floor of this building and turned it into one very big place for himself and his staff.
“You look like a little mouse sneaking about,” a voice says from the kitchen almost as soon as I step inside. An old woman startles me as she turns to look at me. She has a tea kettle in her right hand and is holding the string of a teabag with the other. It’s nearly two o’clock in the morning, and I definitely didn’t expect to see anyone in the kitchen making a pot of tea.
“Don’t fret your pretty little head.” She smiles kindly at me. “I’m not going to rat you out. I’m Ester, the head housekeeper here, and I’ve been working for Christian long enough to know that he isn’t about to come out of his room until dawn. Your secret is safe with me.” She looks like a kindly old woman, and her eyes are filled with pity as she stares at me. “It’s hard being uprooted, dear, isn’t it? And sometimes it’s even harder not to want to run away from your fate.”
“Is that some sort of tea-leaf-reading prophecy?” I ask, glancing down at the teabag dangling in the air as it hangs from her fingers.
“No, not at all,” Ester laughs. “Just the musings of an old woman who’s seen a lot in my time. Christian told me a little about you and what you’ve been through. And I told him that he has his work cut out for him.” I huff and sit down at the kitchen table as she pulls down another teacup. “I know you don’t think much of him yet, but he’s not all that bad.” She sets the kettle onto the stove and plops teabags into two cups. “He’s just trying to protect you.”
“By locking me up and starving me out?” I ask.
She raises an eyebrow. “Technically, aren’t you doing that to yourself?”
I don’t really have a rebuttal for that since she’s partially right. I watch her in silence as she goes about warming up some of the caponata that I had refused earlier in the day, and setting both it and a cup of blackberry tea down on the table in front of me. I’m so hungry and ravenously thirsty, and I burn my tongue trying to gulp it down. Funny,she doesn’tbring the other teacup to the table as she sits down across from me. Instead, she lets it steep on the counter while she talks and watches me devour my food.
“Christian made that caponata himself. He isn’t a terrible man,” she says. “I know there are rumors about him and honestly, most of them are true. But he has a good heart inside that chest of his. And he isn’t bad to look at either.”
I feel my cheeks flush instantly. “If the rumors are true,” I say, “he’s a vicious killer.”
“Everyone in the mafia can be a vicious killer if the situation warrants it,” she says. Once again, she’s not wrong. “It all depends on what you’re killingfor. If you’re fighting to protect someone you love or to right an injustice, does that really make you a vicious killer? Or does it make you a brutal hero?”
“You think Christian is a hero?”
“I think he’s a good man.” Ester’s smile is filled with the kind of wisdom only earned through hard-lived decades of time. The way she speaks about Christian does make him seem less intimidating, though. Especially imagining him standing over the stove making his mother’s recipe. “Here,” she says as she stands up and walks over to the teacup on the counter. She takes out the teabag, puts the teacup on a saucer, and brings it over to stand beside me as she holds it carefully in her wrinkled hands. “Christian always has a 3 a.m. tea. It’s when he ‘thinks his deepest,’ or so he says.”
I stare at the cup and the still-steaming liquid inside, faintly tinted a deep purple. “You want me to deliver tea to him?” I ask in surprise.
“Why not? He won’t bite, I promise.”
At first, I’m reluctant to take the tea from her and to bring anything at all to the man I owe my new captivity to. But the things she’s said have made me curious about him, and less apprehensive and angry than I was earlier in the day. Besides, she was so kind to me tonight that I feel bad refusing her request, especially since Ester is now my only friend in this place. “Okay,” I nod as I stand up and take the teacup and saucer from her.
There are stairs inside this condo, which means that I was wrong in my first assessment—Christian must have purchased the toptwofloors of the building to make this into his own private penthouse of sorts. Since Ester seems to live here too, I’m guessing that some of the doors in this place lead to staff bedrooms. I wonder how many people actually reside in this place. When I find his bedroom, the door is closed. I only recognize it as his because Ester told me that there’s a lion’s head doorknocker on the outside of it. My eyes flutter into a small eyeroll when I think about how arrogant he must be to need an ornate doorknocker to designate himself as the “leader of the pack.”
For a minute, I stand there waiting, second-guessing my willingness to deliver tea to him. I’ve only ever seen Christian hanging out with my brother when we were growing up. I knew him only as Loreto’s best friend until we all grew into adulthood, and I then knew him as an unusually youngcapoto be feared and respected. But in both cases, I’ve never reallyknownhim. All I have to base my opinions off of are the stories surrounding Christian and a few patchworked memories of watching him play in the streets with my brother.
But I’m here and the tea is getting cold, so I might as well knock on the door. I refuse to use the doorknocker, though, opting to lightly rap my knuckles against the door instead. The door doesn’t immediately open, but when it does, I can’t help but to suck in a quick breath. Christian stands there in the open doorway in front of me completely shirtless, with his pants hanging low enough on his hips that I can’t ignore the “treasure trail” leading down his rock-hard abs beyond where my eyes can see. Ester wasn’t correct in her assessment of him being “not bad to look at.” He’s stunninglyhot. I find myself stumbling over my words as I try and deliver the tea to him. He looks surprised to see me, but not upset about it.
“Your housekeeper told me to bring you this. She said it was for thinking or something, and I…well, since I’m here already, I thought I’d apologize too. I’m sorry I was so rude when you were only trying to—”
I don’t manage to get any further words out of my mouth before the doorway starts to look like it’s spinning around me, and I feel my grip on the teacup and saucer loosen. Before I know what’s happening, I drop and spill the tea, and everything starts to go black. My legs buckle beneath me, and I feel Christian reach out to grab me, wrapping his strong arms around my waist just as I’m about to hit the ground.
“Honestly, Ester, sedative in her tea?” I hear him say with a sigh just before I pass out in his arms.
4
CHRISTIAN
I look over Lara’s shoulder as I catch her mid-fall and see Ester standing there with a rag and broom at the ready. “You couldn’t have found a less messy way to calm her down?” I ask.
“Actually, she wasn’t as tightly strung as I had expected, based on what you had told me. She listened to me, ate some food, and was pretty receptive to delivering your tea to you at my request.”
