Mafia King’s Forbidden Enemy (The Crimson Empire #16)

1. Mirella

ONE

Mirella

" D on't move."

The words were supposed to be a bluff. I kept my hand on the doorframe, breath pulled tight, pulse steady—trained muscle. The man inside didn't freeze. He folded a shirt.

I shouldn't have come in. I knew that the apartment might be empty, might be safe, might be exactly what it pretended to be. I also knew curiosity was a luxury I couldn't afford. Mirella Esposito—contract killer—doesn't let curiosity cost her a living. I move fast. I leave no prints.

He looked up when the floor shifted under my weight.

Dante Costa, tall with thick dark hair and a single silver streak at his temple, bare-chested and folding a shirt, made the light catch his shoulder bones and the faint crescent scar along his jaw, and the slow, almost private heat in his almost-black eyes cut through me.

"You're supposed to knock," I said, voice even.

He smirked, the movement small like a fault line. "You were supposed to stay away."

I stepped inside because my feet had already decided.

The apartment smelled like leather and citrus—his cologne—thin and dangerous in the way a snake smiles.

He placed the shirt down carefully, like it mattered where the fold met the seam.

I cataloged him without meaning to: broad shoulders, long efficient limbs, the silver streak that made him look older than he was.

My mouth went dry the way it did before a fight.

"You're trespassing," I added, because rules are useful.

"Depends on how up-to-date your contacts are," he said. "This used to be mine."

"Used to be a lot of things," I shot back. "Move and I shoot a hole in the wall as a courtesy."

That got a laugh. He didn't raise his hands. He walked to the counter and poured two shots of something that smelled like burned sugar. The movement was economical. Every small action was a question. He set one glass in front of me.

I didn't accept drinks from men I didn't know. I accepted them from men who offered solace.

"I don't drink with strangers," I said.

He leaned close enough that the heat from his chest grazed my face. "Not a stranger."

I didn't tell him his breath hitched when I moved. I didn't tell him my fingers twitched toward the gun at my thigh. I said, "Names."

"Not a bad first demand." He sat on the edge of the island and looked at me like he'd been waiting for me to make one. "Dante Costa. If you're compiling dossiers, note the scar and the way my left sleeve is cut at the cuff."

He was teasing. I let the order of my life file the amusement away. "I'm not compiling your dossier," I said. "I'm compiling an exit strategy."

"From me?" He smiled slow. "That's a shame. I'm terrible company."

His voice was low, rough-kept like gravel in a well. It settled in my chest. I hated the way it did that.

I said nothing when my hand brushed the edge of the countertop, felt the sting where the blade had nicked my palm earlier. I hadn't noticed the blood until it slicked my fingers. Dante's head turned the way a hound catches scent.

"Hold out your hand," he said.

I did. It was a reflex. He moved with the same precise patience I used to slide a blade between ribs. His thumb hovered, close—so close that I could count the tiny notch along his knuckle. He let his thumb brush the fresh cut.

Electric. Like the first time I let someone get too near a gun and the recoil surprised me.

Heat climbed my spine and pooled low in my stomach.

Air left me in a single, surprised inhalation.

He watched me watch him, his thumb damp with my blood, not fazed.

The contact lasted a second longer than it needed to.

"You're bleeding," he said. Not a question.

"Not anymore," I lied.

He didn't laugh. He wrapped a handkerchief around my palm with the kind of attention people saved for family or sin.

His fingers pressed against the tender spot and I felt a private, ridiculous lull in the city around us.

For a heartbeat I thought of staying. I thought of letting him be the one who tied my messy edges together.

No. I stopped the thought the way I'd stop a bleeding vein—fast and ruthless.

Trusting someone is a transaction I can't afford.

If I let someone in, they'll be taken. That's what life taught me.

One handler left me on a roof; someone else took everything.

I don't hand people my ribs and expect them to keep me.

"Why are you here," Dante asked. His eyes flicked to the knife at my hip and then back to my face. "You look like trouble got a map and marked you with an X."

"Flattery will get you a clean cut," I said. I wanted to sound dry, detached. I wanted him to believe I kept the parts of me that ached locked away.

He shrugged and rose, draping the shirt over his shoulder.

The sight of his skin, the taut planes of his chest, made my heartbeat stutter.

I noticed, with an unhelpful amount of clarity, the way a muscle bunched when he reached.

My mouth was suddenly full of the idea of him—close, honest, not a mask of appointment.

"You always come prepared," he said. "Or you just enjoy making enemies?"

"Both," I answered.

He was closer now. Closer enough that I could smell the citrus on him clean and a faint trace of smoke. Proximity is a weapon. I knew how to wield it. His presence pinned me in its gravity, a quiet pull I could have stepped away from but didn't.

A noise outside—a siren swallowing the harbor—had nothing on the sound of his inhale. He looked at me in a way that recorded and didn't judge. I read it as hunger, and something tender. The hunger had teeth; the tenderness had weight.

"You shouldn't be in this part of the city tonight," he said. "Not without someone watching your back."

"I don't need a babysitter," I said.

"No one said you did. But stupid is still stupid."

His hand found my shoulder. It wasn't a command.

It was the kind of contact that organizes a crowd around a fight—subtle, protective.

I tightened my grip on the gun now for manners, not fear.

He let his fingers rest along the small of my back in a way that made my breath catch. Protective. Territorial. Forbidden.

The apartment held a thin hush, the kind that forms between strangers who are assessing whether to leave blood on the carpet. Dante watched my face like he could read the ledger of my life in the stiffness of my jaw. I kept my face neutral.

"I could leave," I said. "I can leave and forget you exist."

He didn't answer immediately. Instead he took off the shirt he had been folding and threw it over the back of a chair. The silver streak flashed under the light, then was gone. He moved with a slow economy that irritated me.

"People don't usually storm into other people's safehouses for a chat," he said finally. "They usually come for business. Contracts."

My pulse did a careful thing—tightened and then flattened under control. Contracts circulate like rumor in this city. Names change hands faster than coins. I had no intention of telling him whose name I was looking for.

"You looking for work?" I asked.

"Could be," he said. "Could be I was folding a shirt and someone louder than me opened the door. Or maybe I was waiting for you."

Waiting for me. That line bent the room. I kept my face cold because humor was a leash I didn't want him to hold.

"If you were waiting for me, why didn't you—" I started.

"Because you scare easily," he said. He reached up then, fingers trailing along my jaw with a curiosity that felt like trespass and mercy.

His touch was deliberate and slow, thumb resting at the corner of my mouth.

The scar there—tiny, almost ornamental—pulled my chest tight.

I hated that he noticed details. I hated that I liked being noticed.

"You're full of assumptions," I said, but my voice had thinned.

"You have the look of someone who enjoys not being known," he murmured. His face neared mine. The gap between us was a slat of air. "And the way you hold your knife says you learned to cut people out before they hurt you."

"You don't get to diagnose me," I said.

"No, but I can observe." He tipped his head, close enough that I could feel his breath ghost across my lips. "Tell me your name."

He said it like it was a dare. Like he thought I might fold under the pressure of sharing one single thing. I remembered the handler who said my name like it meant paper and then left me pinned and bleeding. The memory was a hot stone in my chest that I couldn't spit out.

I kept my mouth shut.

"Tell me," he repeated. His voice had that low thread of insistence men used when they were used to getting what they wanted. There was ownership in it that bothered me—and warmed something internal I swore was dead.

He edged closer, so our breath braided. I could feel the calluses along his thumb, the faint scar on his jaw against my cheek if I leaned. He smelled like citrus and leather and a promise I didn't trust.

I could have stepped back and been fine. I could have pulled the gun and walked. Instead, for the first time in a long time, I wanted him to know me.

Not to love me. Not to save me. Just to know.

The knock on the door cut him off. Sharp wood against wood, three times in a rhythm that made both of us jerk.

Dante's hand stayed at my jaw. He didn't look away. He leaned so close that his breath clouded my lips and murmured, "Tell me your name," as if between us it mattered more than the world outside.

The knock came again. This time there was a voice too: "Dante? You in there?"

He didn't answer. His fingers tightened at my pulse in a way that was more promise than warning. My heart hammered against the place his palm cradled. I could choose to step back, to disappear into the night I knew how to live in.

But the way he watched me—so intent, so hungry—made me consider a different kind of danger.

The door clicked like someone opening an impossible trap.