Chapter 10
MATTEO
Add insult to injury, why don’t you?
That’s what I wanted to tell the Capo when I was informed I’d be joining his daughters’ security team.
I have no doubt it’s a prestigious job, seeing as his daughters are his only heirs and therefore his little treasures, but still, there’s no way to advance from there, no way to fast track climbing through the ranks, which would be my only hope of making this detour from my plans worth my while.
I figured that the best I could hope for is a year or two of proving myself to the boss and then maybe he’d let me strike out on my own, return to the West coast and get back what my family lost. That’s the peace I made with it all on my way over here this morning.
But no. He saddled me with the one job that has no upside, no promotion track, and is a lifetime sort of gig.
The head of my security unit is Rafaelle.
He’s the same one who dragged me upstairs last night and kept looking at me like he wanted to kill me the whole time.
He looks no happier today. And he’s still looking at me like he wants to murder me.
Especially after he was told to personally make sure I know all the ropes.
He’s about my age and comes across as someone used to giving orders, not someone looking after a bunch of women, most of them barely out of their teens at that. He must’ve fucked up bad to get this post, but I don’t even want to know. I don’t want to know anything about this family.
I especially don’t want to know anything else about Goldie.
But as it is, I now know what she looks like right after she wakes up in the morning—her long, thick, golden hair a mess and smudged mascara outlining her big honey-colored eyes like she’s the queen of the Nile.
I also know the exact shade of the smooth skin on her long legs—coffee with lots of cream.
Bottom line, she’s as gorgeous on the morning after as she was last night, dancing in her gold dress and preventing me from leaving that club. If I had, if she hadn’t looked so damn mesmerizing, I’d have been out of there in time to prevent landing myself in this new form of slavery.
She might be dead right now though. And that’d be a shame, but I wouldn’t know anything about it.
As it is I’m now a slave to her father and my dick, which very clearly doesn’t want to hate her as much as my brain does.
Add to that the way she’s looking at me… like she’d put up no sort of a fight, if I decided to snatch her away and lock her up somewhere to play with as much as I wanted.
And my dick wants to do exactly that. Right now. No waiting, fuck orders and hierarchies and even death threats. Fuck my own damn plans.
But of all the ways I could get myself killed, claiming her would be the fastest. It would probably get me tortured first and then killed.
She’s sitting on the white leather sofa like it’s a throne, the early morning sunlight streaming through the huge windows making a halo of sparkling softness around her, and yeah, my dick’s already decided she’s mine. Even though my brain knows full well she’ll never be.
She’s the beautiful vessel ruin has chosen to come for me in this time.
The ruin that follows my family around doesn’t usually come in such pretty packages, at least not for me, but I still recognize it for what it is.
What she is. Downfall and destruction and the end of dreams. Across the room is as close as I’ll ever stand to her.
Rafaelle snaps at me that we’re leaving, making me realize I didn’t hear a damn thing any of them said after Goldie breathed, “You’re alive,” in my direction.
That was another thing that got my dick twitching, because she seemed to genuinely care that I was still alive. Seemed genuinely happy that her father hadn’t murdered me for saving her from the Russian thugs and driving her home. Which means she believed he would do that.
Beautiful, treacherous and caring vessel of ruin. The worst kind.
“You never look at any of them that way,” Rafaelle hisses at me once the heavy door to the apartment is closed behind us and we’re alone in the sunless, marble-and-carpet-lined hallway, which will be my place of work for the next who knows how long.
There isn’t even a window to look through in this hallway.
“In what way?” I ask, opting for that instead of going with, “Why don’t you make me?” which I’d prefer.
The second might’ve cut my servitude here very short—everything in Rafaelle’s rage contorted dark face tells me so.
And then the beautiful golden rose on the other side of the door behind my back would have successfully completed her mission of ruin only a few short hours after she started it.
Because I am a hundred percent sure Raf here still wants to kill me and is just waiting for an excuse.
Red hot rage is practically bubbling out of him like he’s a barely contained volcano.
We’re staring at each other, the tension between us thickening to the hardness of steel. Lots of men have wanted to kill me for many reasons. But this guy that I’ve barely met, for some reason, wants to kill me worse than any of them.
“Are you in love with her or something?” I ask and I’m pretty sure he’s gonna pull his knife on me and poke a bunch of holes in my chest with it,
“No,” he says in such a strained voice it must hurt him to use it. “They deserve respect, and you will give it to them. Stand guard here now. None of them leaves the apartment.”
Then he stalks off, hands balled into such hard fists both his arms are shaking.
“For how long?” I call after him.
“Until I tell you to stop.”
And that right there is everything that’s wrong with my situation boiled down into one sentence.
Until they tell me to stop… that’s how long I’ll be stuck in this dark, cold hallway, my dick throbbing for a woman who will never be mine, my dreams of vengeance turning to dust.
So, in a lot of ways, I’d rather be dead.