CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AINSLEY
“W ere you close with Glines?” Wells asks in a more cordial tone as he sifts through his Sour Skittles.
“Yes.” I warm my slightly steadier hands on the coffee cup with my answer. “Sort of. We became friendly. Not friends. I trusted him as much as you can trust a Fed. But he was committed to helping me because he knew some of the things I was enduring—”
“What kinds of things?” Gage growls.
“Not things I’m sharing now,” I grit out in return. “ Statazit .”
“Got that one. She told you to shut up,” Liam boasts, to which Gage grunts.
“Of course not,” Ty coos, addressing my objection and directing a warning glare at both Gage and Wells.
Something unspoken passes between the three of them. And that’s my clue that Gage informed them about what I’d confessed regarding my marriage. I figured as much. It’s evident that very little stays private among this crew. Maybe it was fuel for them to strike the Morelli and Vittori holdings. Regardless, I’m not that vexed at the thought. Ty had likely suspected anyway.
“Why was Glines helping?” Liam breaks in, and his skeptical leer is unmistakable. He doesn’t trust me. “You said you weren’t giving him anything.”
The subtle judgment pisses me off.
Everything I did to survive, to get away, to be smart, and I’m still on fucking trial. Irritation bubbles in my veins. “I wasn’t willing to get myself killed over piddly shit, so if he wanted smaller conquests—like what you all exposed, which would take down the foot soldiers, but never the administration—he needed to get my son for me. He respected that. We both agreed the most important crime for them to go down for was their human trafficking and prostitution ring. I would have given him that whether he found any leads for me or not, but I’d been snooping for a couple of years and could never get close enough to link them to that or the stolen-goods warehouse.”
“How did you manage it?” Ivy asks, in a delivery dripping with far more serenity than the interrogation the men are slinging at me. “Meeting with a federal officer, digging for information, getting away.”
I’m not sure what she’s searching for, but I drink my coffee and walk them through everything I did—the money I covertly siphoned from accounts when Nick had me organize functions, the martial arts and trap-shooting classes I took to get stronger, the car, storage facility, and weapons I snuck. Every calculated move to persevere in a world where I was completely on my own. Even the final steps I trudged to flee the murder scene, like sweet-talking Levi—the guard I’d been befriending for years because I needed a quasi-ally.
“Badass,” Celeste declares, and Rena echoes her compliment with, “You got that freaking right, girl.”
The support is ironic because I never liked women. I’m not sure why exactly. It was men who imprisoned me, abused me, manipulated me. Every man in my life, aside from George and Josh and the old guys at the senior recreation center. But it was women who abandoned me.
My mom, mother-in-law, cousins, sisters-in-law, and fellow Mafia wives—they all played a part. They were the ones who looked the other way when they saw the bruises. Who encouraged me to keep my head down and do as I was told. Who fussed over trivial gossip when it was clear to anyone with eyes that I’d been silenced due to life-and-death matters. Who flirted with my husband in front of me because they knew I meant nothing to him and that he’d buy them something pretty.
They knew more than that; they knew that between my father and his administration, my husband and his brothers, and the countless foot soldiers and guards, I was barely treated as a human. And yet they kept their blinders on, hoping for a piece of that imaginary pot of gold they believed was in my palm. Perhaps they were inmates, too, but still, I despised them.
My husband may have filled our home with the anise pizzelles—the scent I told him I hated, which he weaponized into a subtle reminder of his hold on me—but they were the ones who baked them.
Even when I was young, girls seemed catty to me. I didn’t connect with people my own age in general, but I far preferred males. They told it like it was, which was something.
So, these women standing up for me is a gift beyond compare. Even if this all goes to shit, that’s a treasure I’ll always cherish. And maybe their support will be enough to convince Gage to give me a chance.
Wells scans the three girls before parking on me. “We need to present you to our organization.”
An incredulous humph flies out of me. Slapped in the face just as I choose to embrace them.
Is he fucking kidding me with this?
I let my guard down and allowed myself to envision them as … mine. Foolishly hoping. And I knew how perilous that was. Shit.
“So, I’m not protected or family or being erased?” I snipe with all the indignation weighing on my bones. “You’re turning me in? So much for that fucking heart-to-heart last night, huh?”
Gage whips his head toward Wells, probably wondering what the heart-to-heart was about. Doesn’t fucking matter.
“Take a breath and listen,” Wells demands, holding my gaze until he sees that I am indeed granting him my full attention. “I told you we’d work through things, and we will. But this is a fucking mess. We know it’s the Morellis threatening us, possibly the Vittoris, too, since the families are so connected. They killed Glines. They’ve got Vargas in fucking hiding. Both are our contacts. And you are at the heart of everything.”
I shrug, at a loss. “Well, turning me in to some organization so they can hand me over to the Morellis is a lot less messy for all of you.”
Eternally the goddamn lamb.
Family means sacrifice.
“That is the last thing they’ll do,” Ty insists, and coming from him, it soothes my nerves slightly. “I told you that you were safe with us. And with everything you did to break free, to help Glines—but only when it came to the trafficking—it’s apparent you’re cooperative and on the same side as the cabal and all they stand for.”
I’d like to believe that, but I know how these things work.
I stare into my near-empty coffee cup and release a staggered breath. “I’m on my own side. I always have been.” I lift my chin to Gage because he accused me of as much, but what else is there? “Not the Morellis or the Vittoris, obviously, since I killed their high members. And not an organization that I know nothing about. And by the accusatory glares I’ve been getting in this room, I’m not really even part of this. Don’t try to spin it to be more. Just own it. What do you want from me? If it’s information on the media conglomerate, I’m sorry to disappoint. I don’t know anything.”
That is breaking the cardinal rule in Mafia wars—or more like my cardinal rule in negotiating. You never tell your captors you don’t know something. It’s your one shot at staying alive. But I’m not sure I have much will in me if that’s the existence.
Wells drags a hand over his mouth. “You’ve been through enough, Ainsley. So, I respect that perspective. We—”
“Why can’t you just erase her and let her stay with us?” Rena breaks in, and the vulnerability in her voice tugs at my heart. She’s so young, far from what the ordinary world would consider innocent, but in mine, she’s as pure as snow.
“Because the Morellis and Vittoris already know someone has her,” Liam explains to her. “They don’t know where she is. We’ve already erased any leads, but she can’t live her entire life inside this house. And they won’t buy that she’s dead, so they’ll go after Gage.”
I huff, setting down my coffee cup and slicing my hand through the air. “Which is actually not a problem I created. Wrecking their primary holdings was a grand gesture.” Shifting my focus to Gage, I try to convey that his intent meant something, but that isn’t enough now. “I’m grateful for the sentiment behind it. But if you weren’t willing to do whatever it took to keep me safe, hidden, erased, then it was selfish, not helpful. They didn’t know for sure that I was alive and receiving aid until you responded.”
Guilt coasts across all their faces. Whether it be that they didn’t think about that angle or they’re simply regretful, I don’t know.
“There is nothing that says Gage Porter,” Celeste reasons. “They have a picture, but it’s not enough to prove anything.”
“It’s enough to bring our contract with the CIA into question,” Wells argues. “We’re lucky they only sent this to Vargas. If this gets blasted, the CIA will know his identity is compromised. That is a violation, especially if it’s brought to light that we harbored Ainsley Morelli—a contact from his past, which we are explicitly prohibited from having any association with.”
Gage finally breaks his silence, arms crossed over his bulging pecs. “So, we fucking go. All of us. Reborn.”
That catches right in my throat. He may not be looking at me, but I think he’s suggesting that they all get erased with me.
“I’m not opposed,” Ivy chimes in, petting Felicity’s full head of raven-black hair. “If that’s what we need to do to keep everyone safe and together. But some of us have people we’d be leaving behind, and … I don’t feel great about that.”
“I don’t like the timing either,” Wells sighs, and something about that has Gage’s brows furrowing while Wells elaborates. “Between everything that went down with the Balzanos and now the Morellis, KORT will see us defecting as a hostile threat. And erasing eight wanted adults isn’t a simple process. Not with the resources they all have.”
“Court?” I ask.
“Heard of them?” Wells volleys, and it occurs to me that he slipped that in there on purpose. He’s as smooth as my father was, but a better human being. Although that’s a dirt-level bar, I suppose. Still, Wells far surpasses it.
“In hushed corners,” I tell him. “I don’t know much, just that the families not associated aren’t very fond of you.”
“That’s not entirely accurate—”
“What month?” Gage cuts him off, his question rumbling through the room.
Since he’s leering at me, I try to gain some clarity. “What?”
“When was he born?” he roars.
Oh, I wondered when we’d get to this. “March.”
He works through the time frame, whirling the damn fidget ring on his index finger so hard that it’s a miracle it doesn’t spin right off. But then it stops. He stops. “When did you know? When did you know that you were pregnant with my baby?”
“I knew the day you told me about the Navy,” I confess.
“You knew before … Christ, I’m such an idiot.” He raises his fist to his mouth, patently grappling with the picture I was most afraid of him having. “I’m still trying to save you, and you … Were you in on it?”
“In on what?” I gasp, baffled by that detour.
He rises, his booming timbre and formidable stature causing my veins to shiver. “Did your father offer you a position if you sent me away to trap Wells, the Cabrini heir? Is that why you didn’t tell me you were pregnant?”
“No,” I scoff, thoroughly pissed. “It wasn’t like that. I pleaded for him not to send you. Begged.” I grip my hair in frustration, defending myself and owning my failures at once. “He did say that we would both have an administration position if we carried everything out, and I … I wanted to be someone he’d be proud of. Someone you’d be—”
“I was already fucking proud.” The hurt that accompanies his statement is nearly more than I can bear.
“I know you were.” I nod, emotion dripping furiously, my bleary gaze unable to even take him in. “I just … the thought of us both … I messed up. I know how bad I fucked up.”
Dabbing my eyes with a tissue that Celeste hands me, I collect myself and try to explain. “I’ve had over a decade to hate myself for that choice, and I could not be sorrier or wish more for a do-over. But that also gave me time to try to forgive myself. I was nineteen, pregnant, and scared. Running didn’t seem like a realistic option. And I knew if I told you about the baby, you’d refuse to go, and my father would kill you. It was wrong. You deserved to know. You deserved to make your own choice. But I thought he’d soften once the baby came. Maybe let me move in with you on base. And then we’d work for him when you were done. Delusional? Yes, but I wanted to believe in family—that I was a part of what he’d always preached.”
He stares at me for a minute that stretches out like an eternity, and again, I can’t read his expression. But then he tromps past me and out the door. That message is loud and clear.
As is the more deafening one when the front door slams, rattling the windows. Without him, the air is instantly thick and humid and stifling.
Closing the fucking floodgates is next to impossible now, so I speak through the mortifying sobs as Ivy scooches her chair closer and wraps an arm around me. “I’m sorry for all of this and appreciate the time I’ve had here. I certainly don’t expect you all to erase yourselves on my account, but the consideration alone meant the world to me.”
I squeeze Ivy’s hand because it’s clear she’s upset, but I need to get the hell out of this hot box.
Standing, I wipe my cheeks and do a brief perusal of the souls who started to look like my rays of orange in a gray world. There are various shades of empathy on their faces, but those colors aren’t mine, so I address Wells. “I did not intend to come in here and upend the life he built for himself. I’ll take my chances with KORT.”
He holds his hand up to me to stay, gets out of his chair, rounds his desk, and places something in my palm. It’s his depleted Skittles bag. I’m not sure what to make of it, but Rena’s smile behind him suggests that she thinks it means something.
“The orange,” he says, and it weakens my knees.
They might not know what that color conveys to me and certainly not what my thought about them was seconds ago, but it’s a symbol of importance or belonging to this family, so I accept it, sliding the folded bag into my shorts pocket with a grateful dip of my chin.
This hurts too much.
“Upending a life isn’t always a bad thing,” Wells goes on, and his emeralds shift toward his wife and daughter. “Sometimes, the best things take us by storm.” When he looks back at me, there’s a glimmer of repentance in his eyes. “We will have to deal with KORT, but you aren’t alone.”
Comparatively, no. I’m not as isolated as I used to be. And yet I feel so much lonelier than I ever have. Because I was a whisper away from having it all. Or a snowball’s chance in Hell from begging for it, like Gage claimed I would last night.
And he walked away.
Losing everything when you’ve been in the depths of Hades is tolerable. But this is obliterating. A range of emotions surges through me, the whole gamut from shame to anger to leftover longing.
I’m utterly exhausted by a life I’m not sure is worth fighting for anymore. That was bound to happen. I’ve been running and braving and persisting for so long—silently, in the shadows, in solitude, but pushing through nevertheless. A respite was bound to cause me to collapse.
I proffer the best placating grin I have before I head out of the office, so they don’t detect the wrath boiling beneath my skin or sense the self-deprecation brewing. I’ll get through this.
When I’m nearly at the staircase in the foyer, the front door swings open, and Gage barrels inside, beelining right for me. His jawline is stone, ambers glinting like steel. And I wonder if we’re going to have another sparring session, like the day in the shelter, when he threw me up against the wall. I’ve got nothing to defend myself this time. I even left my empty coffee cup in the office.
He hoists me up without explanation, so fast that he knocks the wind out of me, my lungs deflating into my spine.
“What the hell are you doing?” I wheeze, ready to brawl if I have to and hating that there was no backbone to my words. That, after everything, him leaving is the straw I’m too weak to carry.
He curls my body around his—solid and imposing and all-consuming—cradling my head and flattening me to the banister with a resounding thump. The curved railing jangles, and an umbrella stand tumbles, clanking against a wooden entry bench on its way to the floor. To the others, it probably appears like he’s trying to slice me in half. There are murmurs from them in the background, but neither of us acknowledges them.
Nothing about this union is gentle. But there’s something genuine and tender and invigorating in his unhinged side. So, I soak it in, silently begging for more.
He cups my cheeks, those amber eyes that have always held my whole world—the ones I wondered if our son had, the ones I prayed I would get to glimpse again, the ones that saw me in ways no one else ever could—they waltz over my face, tracking my tear streaks.
And a typhoon of resolution blasts through them.
He bites my lip, his teeth sinking into it until the metallic taste of copper seeps into my mouth.
Not a kiss. Not a soothing caress. Not a playful lick or lust-driven grope.
A stinging burn into the pillowy flesh, which is so fitting after everything we’ve both been through. It sparks something deep inside me, something that was dead and buried and rotting from the soil of abuse and abandonment. Something that is suddenly ignited to live.
So, I bite back, mesmerized by the crimson droplets that likely mirror mine.
And those ambers crinkle in response, announcing the hint of a smile to bloom. “This time, we fucking hold on to each other.”
My heart swells to a catastrophic size, but he doesn’t afford me a second to respond. His lips crash into mine in a violent tethering of tongue and teeth and nips and swallows. He fists my hair, wrenching my head in every position he dictates, my scalp tingling from the pain, which blends with my throbbing lip. I dig my nails into the flesh at the nape of his neck, and his chest rumbles, a coaxing for me to brand him more.
“Fuck,” he hisses through a choppy breath as he jerks my head to the side and devours the column of my throat, his teeth doing their own branding on the sensitive skin over my battering pulse.
“You walked away,” I pant.
I’m not sure what I’m saying or asking. Maybe it’s simply my own assurance that I won’t latch on to the promising words he just offered. I’m terrified to because I’ve never wanted anything more. And wanting, hoping, always lead to my downfall.
“I needed to breathe,” he growls, the explanation arriving more like a reprimand with his gruff tenor as he melds every rigid inch of his body to mine. “One minute to process and grieve and fucking rage. Alone.”
That last word slashes into my fears, even as his rock-hard cock twitches against my sopping core.
“And now?” I ask, his mouth coasting along my jaw and ear, neck and collarbone. Wet and wild and ravenous.
“Now we do all those fucking things together.” His words are simple, as though that’s not a life-altering notion.
And when his lips collide with mine again, that sentiment is a blazing inferno.
In the midst of this tethering, we might both be processing and grieving.
But we are most definitely raging.
This kiss, after more than a decade, morphs into a battle of wills. Both of us grappling for the upper hand in a reprisal that surely resembles an animalistic locking of horns. He clutches me tighter, commanding my every position, gluing our hips together, squeezing my ass, and enveloping the whole of me inside his Herculean frame and bulging muscles. I grip his shirt, balling it up as I claw at his taut flesh for purchase, my hands frantic to consume every part of him.
My back takes the brunt of his force, the railing digging into my skin and spine with its own searing imprint. But I don’t care. I spur him on, bucking my hips for greater friction so he presses harder. The melody of our moans becoming our war cry.
Winning for me isn’t all about dominating. Ally or adversary, I’m grateful to simply be alive in this combat. Maybe he is too.
So, we kiss and tussle, scratch and sting.
Mark and brand and bleed for one another.
Nothing about it is pretty. And yet it’s heartbreakingly beautiful.
He tastes like victory and battle scars.
An exhilarating punishment.
The kind served when you’ve conquered a mountain no one sanctioned you to climb, but it’s yours all the same.
Every bruise and muscle cramp and dehydrated step. The bone-deep weariness and chafed skin. Worthwhile sacrifices.
And Gage? He’s the war waged to get there and the breath taken at the top. The moment when the lens on life is widened to an inconceivable scope and it’s suddenly apparent that home isn’t a place or a house or a country.
It’s the realm you create with another soul. And mine has always belonged to him.
So, I permit myself the freedom to be feral and fierce, to let go and breathe him in—that coffee-and-caramel scent that is my bittersweet symphony.
In his embrace, I am both the hunter and the hunted.
Which transforms this man I’ve loved and lost and despised into my haven.
Because while I’m technically still his prisoner, I’m finally unchained.
He whips me away from the railing, racing up the stairs with my writhing body slung around him while he chuckles and pecks my temple. “I should have known holding on to each other would mean you spearing me with your damn talons. Let’s do this, Wicked.”
And our beautiful battle begins.