22. VIN
VIN
Waking up feels like coming back from the dead. One minute there’s nothing, and the next, the ceiling materializes above me shadowed by the grey light coming through the curtains.
I lie there for a long time and do nothing but breathe.
The sheets smell like her. I close my eyes and drag the pillow toward me, press my face into it. No, not the sheets. I smell like her. Groaning, I throw the pillow across the room and stretch, sore.
One of my housemaids, Marta, appears in the doorway like she was waiting for me to wake up, carrying a pressed suit on a hanger.
“Miss Sophia said to have this pressed and ready for you for the funeral.”
I sit up slowly. My head feels like a fucking construction site. “She did?”
“Yes.” Marta lays the suit across the chair by the window, smoothing the jacket. “She also left food for you in the kitchen.”
My chest hurts. I press my fist against my sternum and wait for it to pass. It doesn’t. “What do you mean she ‘left it?’”
The way Marta says it, it sounds like Sophie is gone but I gave explicit instructions to my guards to make sure she stayed here.
“She left enough for several days, all portioned out and labeled.” She almost smiles. “Lucia must like her. She didn’t throw any of it out.”
I’m already standing. “She better not throw out anything Sophie makes.”
The kitchen smells like dark roasted coffee and baking bread. I come through the door scanning the room for her, almost hoping that she’s breaking the rules again and wearing clothes in the kitchen.
But Sophie isn’t here. Lucia stands at the sink, her back to me.
“Where is she.”
Lucia runs the tap then sets a dish in the dry rack.
“Lucia.”
She clatters pots and pans in the sink.
“Lucia.”
She turns and looks at me with a flat expression, wiping her hands on a towel she tucks into her waistband. She says nothing.
I roll my eyes, clench my fists. Women. I pull out my phone and text my security team:
Where the fuck is Sophie?
The bubbles appear as someone starts to respond, then disappear, reappear and disappear again.
FUCK.
Shoving my phone in my pocket, I storm toward the kitchen doorway ready to strangle the first person I see, but Darius and Jett, the two guards I left at the kitchen with Sophie, run in and almost run me over.
They both look startled and I split a glare between them. “Where. Is. She.”
“We fell ill, boss.” Jett says stiffly. “Both of us. We were incapacitated for—”
“How.”
“We’re not sure—” Darius stops. His eyes go to Lucia’s back for one half second, but it’s long enough for me to know exactly what happened.
“Were you eating when it happened?”
My eyes are on Lucia as I say the words. She scrubs the same pot she has been scrubbing since I walked in as if she hears nothing.
Darius clears his throat. “Uh, yes, boss.”
“You look like shit. Get back to your posts.”
Darius and Jett practically vaporize before I finish the sentence. Smart, if useless. I turn on Lucia.
“Is this you? Or did you help her do it?” I move to the counter, lean against it, cross my arms. “Because Sophie has never hurt anyone in her life, and I know what you’re capable of. I grew up in this kitchen.”
Lucia sets the pot in the rack then picks up a glass and holds it to the light to check for spots.
I wait. I have learned over the course of my 36 years that waiting is the only thing that works on Lucia.
She sets the glass in the rack.
“I like her,” Lucia says simply and continues washing dishes.
Lucia, the woman who made every woman I ever fucked use the service entrance. The woman who refused to acknowledge, much less speak to them when they spoke to her. But she likes Sophie? I feel like I just got the blessing of God.
“So why’d you help her leave when you knew I wanted her to stay?”
“You cannot force a woman to do your bidding, Vincenzo. That is not a love you want.”
Those words don’t even fucking making sense to me.
I push off the counter and go back to my bedroom, standing in front of the pressed suit that Marta hung up for me.
Sophie arranged a suit for a funeral she’s not going to attend. She got past my guards, got out of my house, went back to her restaurant, and somewhere in the middle of all of that she made sure I’d be fed for a week.
Lucia likes her. Yeah. Well. Me too.
I pick up my phone and call Matti and Tommy. Tommy picks up right away, and I add Matti to the call.
“I’m pushing the funeral.” This isn’t up for discussion. If Sophie isn’t with me, I’m not doing this shit. Period.
“FUCK.” Matti pulls the phone away when he yells, but it still almost blows out my ear drum.
“Why are you postponing?” Tommy’s trying to stay calm, but I can hear the irritation in his voice.
Fuck him. It’s not his call.
“I have shit to do first. When I’m done, we’ll do it immediately.”
“Vin, how long is this going to take?” Matti sounds like he’s reached the end of his rope.
“It takes as long as it takes.” However fucking long it takes to convince a woman that she’s fucking mine. And another woman that she’s not.
I hang up before they can ask any more questions.
**
I track down Ashlyn at a townhouse on the Upper East Side. It wasn’t hard. I’ve had a man trailing her since the whole fucked up engagement agreement we made, and she spends every second she can here playing house with her man.
I open the door without knocking and find her man balls deep inside her on the dining room table. He’s pulls his gun almost as fast as I draw mine. I know him from the MacCuinn Clan gatherings I’ve attended, but I don’t think we’ve ever spoken.
Ashlyn’s eyes go wide for one second before she places her hand on her man’s gun.
“You’re not doing a very good job of hiding this,” I say it to Ashlyn, but it’s her man who responds.
“I don’t need to hide shit.” His gun doesn’t move. “She’s fucking mine.”
“I don’t disagree with that, but your woman and I have an agreement. And she’s breaking it.” I raise an eyebrow at Ashlyn. “You haven’t filled your man in on the details of our arrangement? I find that disappointing.”
I reach into my jacket for my cigarettes, find the pack, and remember the look on Sophie’s face when I lit one inside her apartment that first night at her house. I toss the pack onto the side table instead.
Quitting again. Apparently.
“Just because you two pretended to fuck for her brothers sake doesn’t mean she’s yours.
” His jaw tightens as Ashlyn maneuvers out from underneath him and walks slowly across the room to grab a blanket on the couch, wearing only heels.
“And from what I understand, you broke your end of this when you disappeared for weeks with no word, which frees her from any commitment to you.”
He’s not wrong about any of that.
Ashlyn steps in front of him, blanket around her and arms crossed. “I heard you were in hiding,” she says. “That you don’t even want to be boss of the Demonio family.”
“The Demonio Brotherhood. And I am the boss.” I let that sit for a second. “There’s no question of that. The only question was which woman would stand beside me.” I hold her gaze. “And it’s not going to be you. We’re done with this charade.”
I turn for the door.
“Wha—Vin!” She runs around me to block my way, her blanket slipping around her shoulders. “Wait—”
I stop.
“If you do this, they’ll kill me.” Panic threads through her voice. “Bringing this alliance together has been my one task. If you don’t marry me now, they’ll think I failed. And if they think you took my virginity and still walked away, they’ll kill you too.”
I believe her. I know her Ronan and her cousins.
“They wouldn’t be the first to want me dead.” I shrug. “I’m still here.”
Her man makes a move from across the room and she puts her hand up without turning around. He goes still. Interesting.
Less interesting is what she does next.
She steps in close to me, her expression softening. She makes a soft mewling noise in her throat as she trails her fingertips over my chest and down my arms. Gripping my wrist, she moves my hands to her hips and sways gently, brushing against my cock.
My cock that is not remotely interested in her games.
“You could have me for real. You two could take me together. Maybe this could even become a regular thing when we’re married. What do you think, babe?”
Her man grunts from behind her, his gaze burrowing into my skull. He doesn’t look like he’s on board until he shifts his sights to her ass.
Her ass which is nothing compared to Sophie’s. I almost smirk at the thought. No woman even comes close to Sophie.
When Ashlyn reaches for my belt, I catch her hand.
She closes her fingers around mine, but when she looks at my face, she must read everything I’m thinking because she steps back.
“Ashlyn.” I keep my voice level. “You know I’m not going to do this.”
Big round tears well up in her green eyes, hovering on the edge of her lashes before splashing down her cheeks.
I don’t think she’s faking, but I also don’t care.
She wipes drips of mascara off her face with the back of her hand.
When she sees it’s not working, she sniffles and cocks her hip. I guess she was faking.
“I heard your girlfriend’s restaurant got bombed,” she says, her sassy spark back.
I stiffen. “Are you threatening me, Ashlyn?”
“No, but my brother will. I heard he was the one that did it when they thought you might break the contract for her. What do you think they’ll do when they know you did?”
I go very still. She has an agenda, and I got burned before with rumors and misinformation. I almost killed Sophie’s father. I’m not letting her set me up to kill her brother, one of my good friends, to free her from her family responsibility.
She shakes her head. “They’re not exactly rational men.”
But the memory of the Arsenal’s old location burning, of the shock on Sophie’s face…. Is it possible that the Irish were behind it? Ronan and his people? Ashlyn’s people?
My hand is around Ashlyn’s throat before I’ve decided to move, not squeezing just letting her feel the weight of my hand. Her boyfriend racks the slide on his gun.
“If that’s true, maybe I make an example out of you,” I say. “Send you back to them with your heart cut out. Make it clear that I’m done with them trying to run my life.”
She doesn’t flinch. I’ll give her that.
“You could do that,” she says, carefully, around my grip. “But they wouldn’t care. They’d come for you anyway, and they’d have an even better reason. I’m the only one who would suffer.”
I let her go and head to the door.
“What am I supposed to do?” Her voice is shaky.
I don’t turn around. She’s not my responsibility. Only one woman is.