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It immediately went to voice mail.
I turned back to look at my brother. “If my wife isn’t presented to me within an hour, Iwill burn this entire fucking city to the ground, Elio.”
Finally realizing how serious I was, he gestured at Silvio,then both men were gone before I could shoot them both.
“They’ll find her,” Aurelio said, trying his best to calm me.
“They’d fucking better.”
Chapter 12
Kasen~
While there were so many things wrong with moving in with Nero, the confidentiality of my job was my biggest concern at the moment. Even though I had a trust fund through my parents, my condo, my car, and all my other expenses were financed through my paycheck as a defense lawyer. All these years later, my trust fund was still untouched, something that I was really proud of.
At any rate, my jobhad afforded me a condo in a safe and upscale neighborhood, and though considered luxurious by most people’s standards, it really wasn’t. It had an open-floor plan, floor-to-ceiling windows, a small sitting balcony, a washroom, state-of-the-art kitchen, large sitting room, two and a half baths, and three bedrooms. Now, while most people would kill for the master-bedroom in my condo, it was the bedroom that I had converted to an office that was my pride and joy.
Working as many hours as I did, working from home had been a comfortable thing to be able to do. While most of my files were stored and locked safely away in my work office, my current cases traveled back and forth from work to home a lot. Living alone had afforded me the ability to keep everything confidential, but even then, I’d made it a habit to always lock up my home office whenever I wasn’t in it. So, while I often worked ten-to-twelve-hour days, some of those hours were spent at home, making it not as bad as it sounded.
However, now that I was expected to live with Nero, a home office was no longer going to be a luxury that I could afford. With no guarantee of privacy, there was no way that I was going to be able to take my work home with me, leaving me stuck at the office during all hours of the night. Granted, considering my desire to avoid Nero Sartori at all costs, that wasn’t a complaint. I was just going to have to invest in a more comfortable chair.
Setting up my shredder, I figured that I might as well rearrange my office to make room forall the paperwork and stuff that I was going to have to house here from now on. Luckily, I wasn’t a packrat, so this was more about getting better organized than anything else. I also had enough money to rearrange my office if I needed to. While we were allotted small expense accounts, new furniture was not on the list of approved purchases. The Milton Legal Group might be raking in the dough, but you had to be at the top of the ladder to spend the firm’s money as if it were your own.
Their spending budgetaside, The Milton Legal Group was a great firm to work for. The building was five stories high and classy, though nothing super fancy. The first floor housed the lobby, reception area, a set of restrooms, and a very small conference room that I still hadn’t ever seen anyone use. The second floor housed our paralegals, another set of restrooms, two mid-size conference rooms, and a small breakroom. The third floor housed the junior partners, one large conference room, a another set of restrooms, a storage room, and another small break room. The fourth floor housed a decent-sized legal library, four large conference rooms, and another set of restrooms. The fifth floor housed the three senior partners, their secretaries, Lilibeth and Dianna, a large conference room, another legal library, and a coffee bar that was way fancier than our little break room. As for restrooms, each office came with its own private lavatory, so there wasn’t a need for communal restrooms on the top floor. Even the secretaries had their own private restrooms, and how wasn’t that everything?
I also couldn’t complain about the size of my office. This building had been built and designed to ensure that clients felt confident handing over thousands of dollars to us for their defense, and image was everything when you were asking someone to trust you with their money and freedom. Though I wasn’t one of the fortunate ones that had a window in their office, there were worse things in the world.
Yeah, like marrying a Mafia Underboss who fucked other women on his wedding night.
Shaking my head, I knew that Nero’s careless disregard for me was something that I was going to have to get over. I mean, while it stung to be disrespected, this wasn’t exactly a love match, so it wasn’t like I was walking around here with a broken heart or anything ridiculous like that. I also couldn’t decide if he was wrong or not yet. Yeah, I didn’t deserve to be treated like shit, but should I have really expected anything more?
Now, while it’d be nice to have a husband that was faithful, my biggest concern was the safety of my health. I had no idea if Nero practiced safe sex or not, and I knew that I’d be expected to give him children at some point or another in our marriage, suggesting unprotected sex between the two of us. I’d never had sex without a condom before because my health wasn’t anything that I’d ever taken for granted, but not everyone felt the same way that I did. Lots of people rolled the dice, and I couldn’t see any of the girls at the club insisting on condoms if it earned them less money.
Plus, I also wasn’t naïve enough to believe that all those women were willing. Members of the Mafia weren’t cut from a moral fabric, so I knew thatsexual assault in those ‘business meetings’ was probably more common than I wanted to think about.
So, yeah, if Nero was keeping himself occupied with the women that worked for him, then I should probably consider that a blessing in disguise.Though sad and pathetic, I was going to be just another vapid Mafia wife, and I wasn’t even sure if I was upset over it right now. Granted, the image of Nero and that blonde was still fresh in my mind, so that could be some of it, but still.
There was also the depressing notion of realizing that consensual, satisfying, passionate sex might not be in my future any longer. While I wasn’t out having sex every other weekend because of the demands of my job, that didn’t mean that I didn’t have a few memorable flings under my belt over these past few years. I was a healthy woman with healthy sexual appetites, and I enjoyed sex just like everyone else. Having lost my virginity in college, it hadn’t taken long to realize what all the fuss had been about. With a partner that knew what he was doing, nothing felt better than sex.
Glancing at my watch, I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had a lot of work ahead of me, and only one night to get the work done. I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that I’d be able to get away with something like this a second time, and if Nero didn’t inject a tracking chip on me after this, I’d be surprised. Even if he held no affection for me, I was still the Sartori Underboss’ wife, and he’d take it personally if his enemies ever got ahold of me. Sure, he and his family could disrespect me all day, his enemies not so much.
Not knowing if Nero had anyone on his payroll that could track phones, I was leery about turning my phone back on, but I knew that I was going to check it, if even for only a minute or two. I was a defense attorney, and I had clients that needed to get in touch with me whenever they needed to. I’d lost count of how many times I’d gotten a call in the middle of the night because of an arrest. Even though it was late, I still needed to check my messages, and I needed to respond if any were important.
Letting out a steady breath, I turned on my phone, and those little icons lit up like Christmas. Most of them were from an Unknown number, but I didn’t need a degree in rocket science to guess who those were from. Ignoring those, I went through my phone quickly, and when I saw nothing arrest related, I quickly turned my phone back off.
I had to smirk when I realized how lucky I wasnot to have a window in my office now. If Nero or his guys were looking for me, the light from my office would’ve been visible enough to tip them off that I was here. While the building had a top-notch security system because of the confidential nature of our jobs, there was no nighttime guard to keep an eye out on things. Hell, there wasn’t even a daytime guard to make sure that no one came in here and shot up the place. So, while the front doors were securely locked at night, the back entrance was accessible to all employees through our keycards. The senior partners didn’t care about us working after-hours, and between the cameras and digital keycard logs, if anyone was here doing shady shit late at night, it wouldn’t be long before they got caught.
Five hours later, I neverthought that I’d be so grateful for an industrial paper shredder. While I had believed myself not to be a packrat, it was obvious that I needed to spring clean my office more than once every three years.
Luckily for me, everyone here was good aboutkeeping their records organized, so when I’d gone to store some of my older case files in the storage room, there was plenty of space in my section of the room. For organizational purposes, we were all assigned our own section of the storage closets, racks assigned to each junior partner. We stored our paper records for ten years, though our electronic records were stored indefinitely. Once a year, we all pulled our expired boxes and got them ready for a shredding company to come out and take care of them.
Glancing at my watch again, it was already past midnight, and while I normally didn’t eat this late at night, Istill had a couple of hours to go before I was done in my office, enough room made for the client records that I had at home. So, hitting the breakroom, I grabbed another water, but also a couple of protein bars. While I was hungry, my stomach would hate me if I stuffed myself with junk this late at night.
Once I got back to my office, I was tempted to turn my phone back on. Unless Nero told my parents that I was missing, there was no need to believe that they were worried about me. Even before marrying Nero Sartori, I worked so many hours that my parents were used to not hearing from me for a few days. Any calls from my clients were my only concern, and I didn’t like the idea of not being available if any one of them needed me.
However, I also didn’t knowhow long before Nero would get tired of looking for me.
Chapter 13
