Taking Antonia (Vicious Kings Mafia #4)

Chapter 1

Chapter One: Antonia

My father summons me at dinner.

Not during dinner. He doesn't eat with me. Hasn't in years, not since I turned seventeen and told him his veal was overcooked and his mistress was ugly and both problems could be solved if he raised his standards. He threw a glass at the wall. I finished my pasta.

We haven't shared a table since.

The summons comes through Enzo, his head of security, who appears in my doorway while I'm sharpening Morte on the whetstone I keep on my nightstand. The sound of blade on stone is the only music I've ever liked. When the song is done, it’s sharper than it was before.

"Your father wants you in his office," Enzo says.

He doesn't look at the blade. Men in this house learned not to look at my blades years ago, after I put Vita through the hand of a soldier who grabbed my ass during a training session.

Marco didn't punish me. He punished the soldier for being stupid enough to touch his daughter.

Unfortunately, he didn't care that I'd been grabbed.

He cared that his property had been handled without permission.

"When?"

"Now."

"Tell him I'm busy."

"He said you'd say that. He also said to remind you that the last time you made him wait, he gave your friend a new assignment in Caracas, and you didn't see her for six months."

Giada. He's talking about Giada. The one card Marco Castillo has ever held over me that works, because everything else he's tried, the money, the threats, the guilt, the suffocating pressure of being the only heir to a family that treats its women like shit, all of it bounces off me.

I've been deflecting my father's control since I was old enough to understand that control was what he was doing.

But Giada... Giada is the only weakness I have and Marco found it when I was sixteen and has been pressing on it ever since.

I set Morte down on the nightstand beside Vita.

Both blades catch the lamplight. The handles are custom, black carbon fiber, curved to fit my grip.

The finger rings are sized to my index fingers, left and right, so the rotation is fluid when I spin them.

Most people who carry karambits carry one.

I carry two because one is for living and one is for dying, and I like having both options within reach at all times.

I follow Enzo down the corridor. The Castillo estate is old money dressed in new money's clothes.

Marble floors that belonged to my great-grandfather, covered in rugs that cost more than most people's houses.

Oil paintings of men who killed their way to the top and then commissioned portraits to celebrate the climb.

My grandfather is on the wall near the staircase.

My great-uncle beside him. Marco isn't on the wall yet because he is alive and in this family you don't get a portrait until you're dead.

Not even going to fucking lie, I've thought about accelerating the process.

Marco's office is on the second floor. Oak doors, brass handles, a desk the size of a small country.

He's behind it when I walk in, reading something on a tablet, his glasses low on his nose.

He's fifty-seven years old and aging the way powerful men age, slowly and with hidden resentment.

His hair is still dark, chemically maintained, and his suits still fit because he has them tailored every six months whether his body has changed or not.

The vanity of a man who believes appearance is the first weapon noticed in negotiations.

He doesn't look up when I enter. This is intentional.

Everything Marco does is to make everyone else feel small as fuck.

The timing of the summons, the mention of Giada through Enzo, the head-down posture when I walk in.

He's setting the terms of the conversation before the first word is spoken, and I'd respect it… if it weren't being used against me.

"Sit."

"I'll stand."

He looks up. Brown eyes, same as mine, except his have a flatness to them that I used to think was strength and now understand is absence.

My father is missing a piece that other people have, the piece that connects what they do to how they feel about doing it.

He runs the Castillo mafia the way a surgeon operates, with clean hands and detached precision, and the bodies he leaves behind are never personal.

They're merely scum that refused to bow.

He made me the same way.

The difference is I know I'm missing the piece. He doesn't.

"I have an arrangement to discuss with you," he says.

"Then discuss."

"You're getting married."

The words land in my chest and sit there, inert, because my brain refuses to process them as real.

Married. The word belongs in other women's lives, women who date and plan and pick out dresses and cry at proposals.

Not mine. Not the woman who carries two karambits and has killed six men on her father's orders and hasn't cried since she was fourteen years old, when she realized that crying was a performance Marco would use against her.

"No," I say.

"This isn't a request, Antonia."

"I don't care what it is. The answer is no."

Marco sets the tablet down and removes his glasses and folds them and places them on the desk with the care of a man handling a loaded weapon.

Everything is ceremony with him. Everything is pacing and control and the arrangement of objects and words designed to make the person across the desk feel managed.

"His name is Matteo Billone. He's thirty-one. Law degree, political connections, well-funded. He's also Aurelio Bonaccorso's son."

The last sentence changes the temperature.

Aurelio Bonaccorso, the Don who ran the family we've been fighting for two years.

The man who died last month in a compound full of soldiers who buried him with bullets and playing cards.

His son. An heir to the enemy bloodline, raised outside the family now wanting a way back in.

"You want me to marry a Bonaccorso."

"I want you to marry the man the Silent has designated as the bridge between both families.

The Replication Initiative requires stability.

The war between our organizations has served its purpose, and now the people above us need cooperation, not conflict.

The marriage binds the bloodlines. It gives the Silent a foothold in both families through a couple they can monitor and direct. "

"A foothold. Through me."

"Through both of you."

"And what do I get?"

"Continued protection under the Silent's umbrella.

Continued funding. Continued existence." He leans back.

"The alternative is withdrawal of support.

The Castillo family exposed to federal scrutiny, financial audits, the kind of attention that destroys organizations in months.

The Silent giveth and the Silent taketh away, Antonia. You know this."

"I know that you're selling your daughter to preserve your empire."

"I'm securing our future."

"YOUR future. Not mine. Mine apparently involves spreading my legs for a man I have no interest in, and a trust fund that was built on dead innocents.

" I'm standing with my feet apart and my arms at my sides and my fingers are twitching for Vita and Morte, but the blades are upstairs on the nightstand.

The emptiness infuriates me.

"The wedding is in two weeks. The Bonaccorso compound. Leone Costa will facilitate the arrangement. You will be transferred with a security detail of my choosing, and you will conduct yourself in a manner appropriate to the Castillo name."

"Transferred." I hate the word. It's the word you use for prisoners. For assets being moved between facilities. For inventory being relocated from one warehouse to another. "You're transferring me."

"Alright, fine. I'm positioning you. Is that better… daughter?"

"Same fucking thing, father."

Marco stands. He's taller than me by six inches, which he uses the way tall men always use their height against shorter women, as a reminder that the physical space between them is a hierarchy. I don't step back. I've never stepped back from my father and I never will.

"The marriage happens, Antonia. You can walk into it with your head up and your blades at your sides and whatever dignity you choose to bring.

Or you can fight it, and I'll make the arrangements without your cooperation, and the experience will be significantly less comfortable for everyone involved. "

"Is that a threat?"

"It's a description of options."

"Sounds like a threat."

"Then let me be specific." His voice drops and his eyes narrow as he stares at me.

Marco gets dangerous when he gets quiet, the same way a blade gets dangerous when you stop hearing the sharpening.

"You have one friend in this world, Antonia.

One person you care about more than your pride and your blades and your stubborn fucking refusal to accept reality.

If you decline this arrangement, Giada's position within this organization becomes... complicated."

The air leaves my lungs…. not because I'm surprised, but because I knew it was coming and the knowing doesn't protect you from the feeling of your father leveraging the only person you love to force you into a marriage you don't want with a man you haven't met in a world you were raised to destroy.

"You wouldn't."

"I wouldn't need to. A reassignment. Caracas again, maybe. Or Bogotá. Somewhere far from you, somewhere her particular skill set can be utilized, somewhere you can't reach her until the arrangement is finalized and your compliance is confirmed."

"She's not part of this."

"Everyone is part of this. That's what family means."