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1
CALLIE
A crush is like a disease.
A cancer. A malignant growth that twists through and poisons your very blood until there’s not a breath you take or a thought you have that doesn’t revolve around it.
Books, movies, pop songs… They lied to me my entire life. Because a crush isn’t cute butterflies and blushing smiles. It’s torture. It’s pain. It’s the sensation of a knife twisting violently in your heart every time they—the object of your obsessive affection—walks into the room. Or speaks. Or, worst of all, looks in your direction.
A crush drains the life out of you. It sucks the oxygen from your lungs and leaves you gasping for air they took with them. A crush lets the unspoken words dangle on your desperate lips, forever unsaid and turning to ash in your mouth.
A crush doesn’t lift you up or give you wings.
A crushcrushesyou.
To dust.
Until there’s nothing left.
Mine is a man who has been many different things. To his boss, he’s a soldier who became second-in-command of the Kildare Irish mafia family. To my two best friends, Neve and Eilish Kildare, he started as a bodyguard and became a figure who is effectively their older brother. To my family, he was once the enemy, and then became a friend.
But to me, Castle James started as a stranger and became myeverything.
He’s the reason I changed my outfit five times before dinner tonight. His is the face I think of when my favorite dumb, sappy love songs come on the radio. The hands I imagine in every dark, whimpering, shuddering fantasy.
Tonight, I was going to tell himallof that.
I have no ideahow, of course. The amount of liquid courage it would have taken might have legit killed me, so maybe it’s best that he was caught up with work and couldn’t make it. But still, his absence…
Stings.
I frown into the glass in my hand, swirling the wine in the bottom of it and watching the lights of New York twinkle across the rim. I’m at the far end of the grounds of our family home—an English manor that sits sprawled atop a forty-story building overlooking Central Park South. Now, hours after dinner has finished, I’m perched on the edge of the roof. My bare feet kick at the lawn under them, and the early fall air pebbles my skin beneath the robe I’m wearing as I twist to gaze out at the city.
This is the other problem with crushes: they hurt when they’re near you. But they hurt worse when they’renot.
It’s Sunday, and as she does every other week, my grandmother Dimitra hosted a family dinner tonight. Since my oldest brother Ares—who runs our family empire—married Neve Kildare and joined our family to theirs, the Kildares have been included in the invitation as well. It’s not like everyone from both familiesalwayscomes toeverydinner. I mean, life happens. And slowly but surely, my friends and my family have become enmeshed in their own storylines and as a result can’t always make it.
Ares found his one and only in Neve. Neve’s and her sister Eilish’s uncle, Cillian Kildare, who currently runs the entire Kildare family, found Una. She and Cillian actually weren’t here tonight either, as they’re on a belated extended honeymoon in Ireland. Even my wild-man, agent-of-chaos brother, Hades, found love, with Elsa.
And now, we’re down another one, now that Eilish—my best friend in the world—seems to be starting her own story with Gavan Tsarenko, the head of the powerful Reznikov Bratva. She also wasn’t here for family dinner tonight.
But while I would have liked Eilish, Cillian, and Una to be here, they aren’t the ones I truly missed. They’re not the ones I pined for. They aren’t the ones I hadplansfor tonight.
No, that honor goes to one man.
Castle.
Who didn’t come tonight.
Fuck.
There are a million other reasons that I feel like the world is grinding me under its heel right now. In the last year, my family has almost gone to war twice—once with the Irish mafia, and more recently, with the Russian Bratva. These shakeups have almost taken two of my brothers and three of my best friends from me. In fact, the only reason we’renotat war with the Russians right now is that my very best friend in the world seems to bedatingthe head of the Reznikov Bratva.
But above all, the dread that I should be drowning in is the fact that in a few short weeks, when I turn twenty-one, I’ll be forced to marry a disgusting pig of a man almost three times my age.
Such is the lot of mafia princesses.
In my case, I was promised to Luca Carveli when I was fourteen. My late father, Aeneas Drakos, sealed that fate for me when he and Luca signed a blood-marker—a mafia contract inked in literal blood that is as iron-clad as it gets. Dear old dad got control of a lucrative drug smuggling pipeline.
