8. Cami
— · —
Cami
The shitshow with Dominic should have shaken me more than it did.
A man had cornered me in a hallway. Called me a slut. Threatened to taste the goods like I was a piece of meat waiting to be consumed. Twenty-four hours ago, something like that would have sent me spiraling into panic and tears and the desperate need to make myself invisible.
But that was before.
Before the wedding. Before the altar. Before I watched my entire life collapse and realized that the only person who was ever going to protect me was myself.
And, apparently, Salvatore.
The image kept replaying in my head. Sal rounding the corner, a force of nature in a tailored suit. His hand closing around Dominic’s wrist. The way he’d sent the man flying into the wall with a casual violence that should have terrified me but somehow didn’t.
The way he’d turned to me afterward, his voice rough and wrecked, asking if I was all right like my answer was the only thing in the world that mattered.
The tea.
God, the tea.
A mafia boss had made me chamomile tea in his kitchen because one of his men had been mean to me. That shouldn’t have been comforting. That shouldn’t have made me feel safe and warm and oddly protected.
But it did.
Wow. Who would have thought. The most cared for I’d felt in months, maybe years, came from a man I’d known less than a week. A man who ran a criminal empire and broke bones in soundproofed basements and looked at me like I was something worth protecting.
I was still processing all of that when Pedro appeared in the library doorway.
“Boss wants you in the war room.” He grinned at me, that easy smile I was starting to associate with him. My new friend, if you could call a mafia soldier a friend. “Time to do some damage.”
The war room.
The name alone sent a shiver down my spine. Part anticipation. Part nerves. Part want, which I was trying very hard not to examine too closely.
Pedro led me through the compound, past rooms I hadn’t seen yet, down a hallway I hadn’t explored. We stopped in front of a heavy wooden door, the kind that looked like it could withstand a battering ram.
“After you.” Pedro pushed it open and gestured me inside.
The room was smaller than I expected. A long table dominated the center, surrounded by chairs. Screens covered one wall, all of them currently dark. The lighting was dim, atmospheric. A setting where plans got made and lives got ruined.
Sal was already there, standing at the head of the table, his hands braced on its surface. He looked up when I entered, those gray eyes tracking my movement across the room.
He wasn’t alone.
A woman sat at the table, her fingers flying across a laptop keyboard. Dark hair pulled back in a severe bun. Sharp features. Eyes that assessed me in a single glance and seemed to file away everything they saw.
“Camellia.” Sal straightened, nodding toward the woman. “This is Vera. She handles our technical operations.”
Vera looked up from her laptop and offered a thin smile. “Ah, yes. The Caldwell wedding’s bride. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“All good things, I hope.”
“Mostly interesting things.” Her smile sharpened. “I hear you have information that could bury your ex-fiancé. I’m intrigued.”
The way she said it turned it into a challenge. She didn’t quite believe I had anything useful to offer, and she was waiting to be proven wrong.
Good.
I liked proving people wrong.
“I need a laptop.” I looked at Sal. “Something with internet access.”
He nodded to Vera, who produced a sleek silver laptop from somewhere and slid it across the table toward me.
I sat down. Opened the laptop. Let my fingers hover over the keyboard for a moment.
This was it. The moment I’d been building toward since the warehouse. The moment I stopped being a victim and started being a weapon.
My drive was cloud based, backed up automatically every week.
A habit I’d developed years ago after a hard drive crash nearly cost me a semester’s worth of work.
I’d applied the same paranoid carefulness to everything I did at his company, making copies of every document, every file, every number that crossed my desk.
Logan had never known. He’d never asked. He’d been too busy fucking my sister to notice that his fiancée was building a digital paper trail that could destroy him.
It paid off finally.
I logged in. Navigated to the folder I needed. Watched as years of files loaded onto the screen.
“What am I looking at?” Vera had moved to stand behind me, her eyes scanning the documents.
“Everything.” I scrolled through the folders, each one labeled by year and quarter. “Financial records. Internal memos. Expense reports. Contracts. Every piece of paper that moved through Logan’s company for the past four years.”
“You kept copies of all of this?”
“I kept copies of everything.” I clicked on a specific folder, one I’d created six months ago when the numbers started not adding up. “But this is what you really want to see.”
The file opened. Numbers. Bank statements. Money slipping out to places it was never meant to go. A trail that told a story Logan had never wanted anyone to read.
“There.” I pointed to a line item, highlighted in yellow.
The satisfaction was already building in my chest, spreading across my face.
I kept my explanation plain, no lecture, no unnecessary detail.
The evidence spoke for itself. “That account. It’s listed as a vendor payment, but the vendor doesn’t exist. I checked.
The company was dissolved three years before Logan supposedly started paying them. ”
Vera leaned closer. “Where’s the money actually going?”
“Here.” I clicked to another document. A bank statement from a foreign bank, the kind that helped rich people hide money where no one could find it. “It’s a hidden account. Money goes in from his company, gets bounced around a couple more secret accounts, and ends up... here.”
The final destination was another account. This one with a name attached.
Logan Alexander Caldwell.
“He’s been stealing from his own company.” Vera’s voice was flat, but I caught the gleam of appreciation in her eyes. “For how long?”
“At least two years. Maybe longer.” I scrolled through more documents, more highlighted numbers, more proof of the man I’d almost married quietly robbing the business I’d helped him build.
“The amounts are small enough that no one ever thought to look twice. A few thousand here, a few thousand there. But it adds up.”
“So what do we do with this?” Sal’s voice came from across the room. He hadn’t moved from his position at the head of the table, but his eyes were fixed on the screen, taking in every detail.
“We hand it to the people who put men like him in prison.” The words came out certain. Decisive. “Anonymously. No way to trace it back to any of us. They’ll tear his life apart and find everything he’s hidden, all the things I never even got to see.”
Vera nodded slowly. “I can send it so it can never come back to us. Bounce it around until no one can find where it started.”
“How long?”
“Give me a day. Maybe two.” She was already typing, her fingers flying across her keyboard. “I’ll need copies of everything you have. The more documentation, the more seriously they’ll take it.”
“You can have all of it.” I gestured at the screen. “Every file. Every number. Every receipt. Four years of his lies, wrapped up with a bow.”
“That’s impressive.” Vera looked up at me, and the skepticism from earlier was gone. In its place was something that looked almost like respect. “You really did do his books.”
I smiled. A small, sharp thing that felt foreign on my face. “I did his books. He never thought I was paying attention.”
The laugh that escaped me was bright and bitter and victorious all at once. The sound bounced off the walls of the war room, filling the space with something that felt like power.
Greta had handed me over to be erased. Had dumped me on a warehouse floor like garbage, expecting me to disappear. To be dealt with. To become another problem that got solved in a soundproofed basement somewhere.
Instead, I was going to be the one who erased them.
Both of them. Logan and his mother. The man who’d betrayed me and the woman who’d tried to have me killed.
I was going to take everything they had and watch them burn.
“No.”
Sal’s voice cut across the room. Flat. Final.
I turned. “No what?”
“No prison.” He pushed off the wall and came toward the table, unhurried, and there was something in his face that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
Something patient and cold. “Prison is slow. Prison is lawyers and appeals and a man like Logan weeping to a jury about his addiction until they hand him five years somewhere with tennis courts. You want him erased?” He stopped at the head of the table.
“Give me a weekend. Him and his mother both. No bodies, no questions, no warehouse floor for them either. Just gone.”
I laughed.
I couldn’t help it. It bubbled up out of the dark place his words had opened, bright and disbelieving. “Okay. Sure. We’ll just murder them. Very funny.”
He didn’t laugh.
He didn’t even smile.
He just looked at me, steady and unblinking, and the laugh died in my throat as I understood, slowly and horribly, that he had not been making a joke.
That this man had said make them gone the way another man might offer to pick up dinner.
That somewhere in this beautiful house were people who did exactly that, and he could have it done by Sunday if I said one word.
The room went very quiet. Even Vera had stopped typing.
“You’re serious,” I said.
“I’m always serious about you.”
My pulse was loud in my ears. And here was the thing that scared me, the thing I’d carry out of that room and turn over for nights afterward: a small, ugly part of me wanted to say yes.
I shoved it down.
“No.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.
“I don’t want them dead. Dead is easy. Dead is over, and they don’t get to be over.
” I looked back at the screen, at four years of Logan’s lies glowing in the dark.
“I want them alive. I want them to lose every single thing they love, slowly, in front of everyone, and I want them awake for every second of it.”
For a moment he only studied me. Then his face changed. Approval. Maybe more than that.
“Crueler than I expected,” he said softly. “I can work with crueler.”
“Good.”
“But understand me, Camellia.” He braced his hands on the table and leaned in, and the cold came back into his eyes, aimed past me now, at two people who weren’t in the room.
“The day either of them puts a hand on you, we stop doing it your way. That isn’t a threat.
It’s the only promise I’ll ever make you. ”
I should have been frightened.
I wasn’t.
He came around the table. Stood behind my chair, close enough that I caught his cologne. Cedar and sandalwood and something darker underneath. Close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his body.
“You’re enjoying this.”
His voice was low. Intimate. Close enough that I felt his breath stir the hair at the back of my neck.
I turned to face him. Those gray eyes were fixed on me with an intensity that made my stomach flip.
“Is that a problem?”
“No.” His voice dropped even lower. A rumble that I felt more than heard. “It’s attractive.”
Heat flooded my cheeks. My throat. My entire body, suddenly too warm in this dim room with its heavy door and its screens full of evidence.
“I like a woman who knows what she wants.” He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t stepped back. Was still standing right there, inches away, close enough to touch. “A woman who takes what she’s owed instead of waiting for someone to give it to her.”
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Could only stare at him while my heart hammered against my ribs and my skin burned everywhere his gaze touched.
This was insane. He was a criminal. A mafia boss. A man who had probably done terrible things to terrible people and would do terrible things again.
He was not a catch. He was not boyfriend material. He was not someone I should be feeling anything about except maybe gratitude for not killing me when his enemy’s mother dumped me on his floor.
But God, the way he was looking at me.
Like I was precious and dangerous and his to devour.
A throat cleared loudly.
Vera.
“I’m going to be somewhere else now.” She was already gathering her laptop, her movements brisk and purposeful. “Somewhere that isn’t here. You two clearly have things to... discuss.”
She was gone before I could protest, the heavy door clicking shut behind her, leaving me alone with Sal in the dim war room surrounded by evidence of my ex-fiancé’s crimes.
Reality crashed back in.
What was I doing? What was I thinking? This man was dangerous. This situation was dangerous. The way my body was reacting to his proximity was the most dangerous thing of all.
Yes, the mafia boss was hot. Devastatingly, unfairly, impossibly hot. With his gray eyes and his sharp jaw and his hands that could break bones and make tea with equal ease.
Now get it together.
He’s not a catch. He’s a criminal.
I cleared my throat. Stepped back. Put distance between us that felt like miles and inches at the same time.
“Is that it, then?” I kept my voice flat. “Can I leave?”
Sal was still staring at me. Those gray eyes hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked, hadn’t released me from whatever hold they seemed to have.
Then he nodded. Slow. Almost reluctant.
“For now.”
“Good. Great. I’ll just...” I gestured vaguely toward the door. “Go.”
I didn’t wait for a response. Just turned and walked toward the door, my legs carrying me as fast as they could without actually running.
My hand was on the handle when his voice stopped me.
“Camellia.”
I turned. He was still standing where I’d left him, watching me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Sleep well.”
I fled.
The hallway was cool after the war room. I pressed my back against the wall and let myself breathe, my pulse slamming at the base of my throat.
What the hell was that?
What the hell was I doing?
This wasn’t a romance novel. This was real life, and in real life, you didn’t fall for the man who was helping you destroy your ex-fiancé just because he had nice eyes and made you tea and looked at you like you were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.
He’s a criminal, I reminded myself. A dangerous man. A man who breaks arms in basements and runs a criminal empire and does God knows what else.
My heart, still pounding against my ribs, beating a mile a minute, disagreed.