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“I have to go.” I turned and reached for the handle of the door, expecting it to be locked. It shocked me when it flung open. The behemoth of a man stood guard on the other side. He narrowed his eyes on me, but when he glanced over my head, presumably atMatteo, he took a step aside and cast his gaze down to the floor.
“Remember what I said, Liliana.”
My heart raced, and I was frozen in place, still refusing to look back at him.
“Sometimes, you have to take matters into your own hands.”
His words hung in the air ominously because I knew they meant something much deeper. I just didn’t know what.
I didn’t look behind me, didn't want to risk Matteo telling me I couldn't leave. I all but ran out of that warehouse and into the night, sweat beading my brow because deep in my bones I knew this wasn’t over.
I knew Matteo wasn’t done with me.
Chapter2
Matteo
Iwatched her leave… run away from me like a scared rabbit being chased by a fox.
Although I’d known Liliana Johnson had been seeking me out, had known from the very first time she uttered my name, I’d waited and watched to see how things would play out.
Bringing her toButcher and Sons, an abandoned slaughterhouse that was now only used for illicit affairs and unsavory ventures, had done what I’d intended it to—scare the hell out of her.
But despite her being surrounded by this death, she had been so fucking pretty.
She was gorgeous, a shining light next to all the dust and gore, decay, and age of this fucking warehouse.
It was a death hole. A cemetery.
It was my butcher block.
“Luca,” I barked out, and the man who worked for me opened the door a second later.
Luca, the big fucker that he was, had to turn to the side to enter the doorway. He was a behemoth of a bastard, topping in at seven feet tall and weighing over three-hundred pounds of pure muscle.
I’d found him on the streets of Rome two decades ago, both of us homeless orphans who’d been committing petty crimes just to survive.
Back then, he’d been tall and lanky… starving and beat up because he constantly got into fights.
We’d both realized how alike we were, that the world had created us into these deviants and monsters who would do anything and everything to stay above water.
And as we grew older and I built my empire, Luca had been the logical choice to be my second-in-command.
Irritation consumed every cell in my body at the fact Liliana came to me, wanting to sell her pussy to help those pieces of shit men she called family.
I was even more upset over the fact they had hurt her, that she had a mark on that pretty, porcelain skin. I felt murderous.
“I want you to find and bring in Derek and Logan Johnson,” I said to Luca, my voice low, deadly, as I thought about all the ways I’d kill them. Nice and slow. Painfully. Because I knew for a fucking fact that bruise on her eye weren’t the only time one of those bastards had hurt her.
Luca gave a deep grunt in acknowledgment. Although he knew English fluently, he rarely spoke it, and when he did, it was as derogatory terms and swearwords.
He didn’t wait for me to say anything else, just turned and left to follow my orders.
It was time to put this shit to rest, to clear those motherfuckers’ slates where I was concerned. I curled my hands tightly into fists, hearing my knuckles crack, feeling my skin stretch over the new scabs that had formed over them from beating the shit out of a guy two days ago.
One of those fuckers had hit her, left a bruise on her. She tried to hide it and had done a decent job of it, too. But I knew when someone was trying to mask abuse and violence. I lived with it before I killed my father for doing the same to me.
And knowing that someone had laid their hands on her stoked a fire inside of me I’d never experienced before. I didn’t know if I liked feeling this way over a woman. She was becoming a weakness, and I didn’t fucking allow myself to have any of those.
