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“I don’t have to. I know the men at the club. I hear the whispers. I know my father. I know my mother. I know it wasn’t a fluke that Johnny went after my sister.”
“I know you’re caught up in it, Lilah, but—"
“If I prove it. If I prove your father is poison, will I change your mind?” I ask, panic rising.
For a moment, I convinced myself that we could work together toward the same cause. That he saw the world—this world—the way I did. That when the chips fell, when the war was over, we’d rule together. The Russos and the Carluccios bound together to bring back the golden age of what these families could have been. Should have been.
But maybe I was wrong. When I see the warring in his eyes, him trying to decide if he should agree or fight it, I think I must have been wrong.
But then it shifts.
And clear as day, I see it without him even speaking it aloud.
For some reason, I win. For some reason, in his internal scales of trying to balance his family, his duty, his morality, and his goals, I come out on top.
“I don’t think you will, but if you do, yes. I’ll help you take him down, too,” he says, and his words are solemn. Sad, even.
I know the feeling. It comes right before you accept that the people you idolized were nothing but a facade.
I want to take that look away, change it. So I step closer, putting my hands on his chest.
“So, where’s your room?” I ask, smiling as I play with the lapel of his suit jacket. “I don’t quite remember the way. The last time I was here, I was kind of distracted.”
He gives me a wide smile in return, and goddammit.
It’s moments like this I wish more than anything that this is our normal.
That I’m just a girl falling for a man. That I’m not caught in some tangled web that I didn’t choose to be born into, that I don’t need proof or revenge.
And it's when I wish that Dante is just Dante. A normal man, not some potential future heir. That we aren’t working to fix a mess other people made; that we aren’t risking everything every step of the way.
“If I tell you, you’ll cause trouble,“ he says, smiling and kissing my nose.
“Me? Trouble?” I’m nearly intoxicated by this, by us.
By the ease of us.
Everything is burning down to embers, the chaos winning, the uncertainty taking over, but something about being in his home, there being so much less hiding between us? It’s giving me hope.
Hope that this could maybe work at the end of everything.
That we could work.
That somehow, I’ll get everything I want: the title, the revenge, and the man.
Famous last words, I suppose.
Thirty-Four
-Lilah-
Weeks pass.
I work in the back of Jerzy Girls, filing papers and making calls, processing paychecks, getting new girls on the books. It’s strange to think that this place actually has some kind of system to keep it in business.
And each night, I find myself tangled up with Dante in my bed. Each night, I drive to the giant mansion alone and crawl into the giant bed in the room I’ve been given. And each night, I’m awakened by soft kisses—up my thighs, across my belly, right on my pussy.
Every night, he whispers I’m perfect, beautiful, worthy. He tells me he’s obsessed with me, that I’m an illness infecting his every thought. That I’m his and his alone forever and always.
