10. Dante #2
Mirella's eyes harden. She gets to her feet with an animal grace. My hand slides into my holster before the thought finishes its arc.
Lucia is at the door, expression closed. Behind her, the city looks calm and stupid and unaware.
"We have company," I say. My voice is flat and steady because I learned to be a wall.
Mirella moves toward the stairwell. I step in front of her like a reflex.
"Don't," she says. "Stay with me."
"I said I'm staying," I answer, but the line between staying and standing in someone's way is thin.
The sound of boots on metal stairs is close enough to hear the treads mark time. The comm scratches again, a name this time—familiar, ugly.
"Marco," someone mutters through the speaker, and the blood in my veins drops to ice.
I slip my fingers into Mirella's hair, pull her close, and whisper, "Whatever comes, we're together."
She looks up at me, jaw set, eyes burning. "Together," she says.
The stair door slams open. Two silhouettes cut the light.
I let go of her hair and draw my gun. My hand is steady. My heart is not.
"Marco," the taller of the two calls, voice flat. "We have a message for Costa."
I don't wait for messages. I step forward, the decision made in the space between one breath and the next. I have chosen her.
"Tell him I'm listening," I say, and then the world narrows to metal, breath, and the man at the top of the stairs smiling like he knows what he wants.
Mirella's laugh is low and furious. "Then let's see what he offers," she says.
The first shot cracks.
END
If Paolo Moretti already has your heart trembling, wait until the mafia king decides Rosa is the one thing he refuses to lose.
A guarded florist and a dangerous man with secrets collide in a romance filled with obsession, tenderness, and the kind of love that blooms in the shadows.
Keep reading now for an exclusive preview of Mafia King’s Lost Rose .
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Rosa
A crate tipped in the alley and the world narrowed to the sound of ceramic hitting cobbles. I dropped the ribbon spool, caught for a moment on the lip of the crate, and then felt a solid arm cradle me under the ribs before my knees remembered how to work.
Rosa Ferraro, florist—my left hand still smelled of loam and citrus—so I swore and tried to steady the pots without making a scene.
Business as usual: keep the shop calm, greet the regulars, fix what breaks.
I'd rebuilt this small, sunlit life on careful routines after being burned once; trusting a stranger felt like handing someone the match.
"Are you all right?" His voice was low, careful. He held me at the hollow of my back and for a ridiculous second I forgot to say yes.
He was tall—Paolo Moretti, the kind of man whose coat swallowed him and whose shoulders made the coat look small.
He smelled of salt and cedar and something faint and sharp that set my teeth on edge: money, maybe, or old houses by the sea.
I noticed the slope of his shoulders first, then the way the sleeve sat against strong forearms. My pulse picked up and I told myself to breathe.
"Sorry," I said, because that was what you said when a crate tipped and a handsome stranger caught you. I tried to take a step away and his hand slid, not brusque but protective, to the small of my back and held me in the curve of him. Heat pooled behind my ribs.
"Don't move," he said softly. His fingers were warm through my sweater. "You might bruise the stems."
Lucia popped her head out of the doorway. Lucia Bianchi, my best friend, folded her arms and grinned like someone watching a private joke. "Rosa, you okay? Or do you need dramatic music and a stretcher?" she called.
"I'll live," I managed, because the last thing I needed was Lucia's running commentary. Inside, sunlight spilled over the counter and the shop hummed with quiet life—the scent of wet earth and cut grass, the radio low, a stack of invoices waiting for me. Keep the shop calm. Keep the shop calm.
Paolo shifted and I smelled sea again, cleaner now, mixed with cedar and something faintly sweet—rosemary. He reached for a fallen terracotta pot with the same careful touch I use on a fragile novae. His fingers were long, callused at the pads, the pale scar along one knuckle catching the light.
"Thanks," I said, because it was the correct small, civilized word, and because something in the way he watched my hands made me aware of every one of my own. "You couldn't have just walked past?"
He gave a small, almost-smiling tilt of his head. "I don't walk past people who look like they're about to be buried alive by peonies." His voice warmed on the last word. "May I—" He tucked a sprig of rosemary from a knocked-over pot and held it out to me. "For the trouble?"
The sprig lay cool between his fingers. He pressed it into my palm and watched, watching me inhale like it was small benediction. My throat thinned. Lucia made a noise that was half laugh, half disgusted aunt.
"You give me rosemary," I said, breathing it in, the citrusy pine filling my head. "You must be a very odd thief."
"Call it a civic duty," he replied, and his eyes—hazel, deep enough to feel like a room with the shades half-drawn—hooked on my face. The look held a familiarity that felt dangerous, like a line partially erased and then traced again.
There was a passerby in a dark jacket across the street who paused, took one long look, and muttered a name. "Moretti," he said, low, as if the word could bruise.
My jaw tightened. The name hung between us like a shadow. I felt my careful constructs, the small fences I'd built around the shop and around myself, pull taut.
"Is that a problem?" I asked, trying to keep the shopkeeper's neutral smile in place.
Inside, I felt the old fear—of opening, of someone stepping into the life I'd defended alone.
I had buried a man once and learned how to live by tending living things; love had been a liability then.
I could not, would not, go back to being fragile.
He shrugged, an even, measured motion. "Not unless you want it to be." He didn't look like someone who enjoyed being noticed. He looked like someone used to being measured.
"Well then," I said, and let a snark slip in because otherwise I might hand him my heart and not even know I'd done it. "If you're done with the charity gardening, the pots are on the second shelf."
He moved with a smooth, deliberate economy, placing two cracked pots as if they were delicate promises. His fingers brushed mine when he handed one over. The brush was accidental, his apology unnecessary—my skin registered it like a small electric current.
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