Chapter 1 #3
Dominic silences me by crowding into my space, his massive thighs boxing mine in, his broad chest pressing me back against the wood of the doorframe, his weight crushing the air from my lungs. He looms over me, a wall of pure, terrifying masculinity.
"You aren't listening, Sienna," he rumbles, his voice dropping into a register that makes my tits ache.
"The life in which you worry about vans and weddings ended the second you broke that vase at my feet.
You aren't a florist anymore. You're a guest of the Costa family.
And I don't let my guests walk through alleys at midnight. "
"You can't do that," I gasp, turning my head to glare up at him, finding a scrap of anger beneath the paralyzing fear. "You can't just kidnap me because I walked into the wrong room!"
A dark, arrogant smirk plays at the corner of his lips. It transforms his harsh, aristocratic features into something devastatingly handsome, and dangerously obsessive.
"I am Dominic Costa," he murmurs, his breath warm against my lips. "I spent the last twenty years burning down empires to get exactly what I want. You walked into my room, Sienna. You belong to me now."
He doesn't give me time to process the sheer madness of his words.
He releases my waist, his hand lingering on the curve of my hip for a second too long, before he grabs his charcoal-grey suit jacket from the coat rack.
He doesn't shed the holster. He doesn't give up the weapon.
He simply layers the jacket over his broad shoulders, the tailored wool concealing the lethal steel beneath.
He turns to the coat rack by the door, grabs a meticulously tailored, charcoal-grey suit jacket, and wraps it around my shoulders.
The jacket is massive on me. It falls to my mid-thigh, swamping my frame, heavy with the scent of him and residual body heat. He pulls the lapels together across my chest, his knuckles grazing my collarbone. The touch is deliberate. A claiming mark.
"You're freezing," he notes, his brow furrowing deeply. He looks genuinely furious at the fact that my spine is locked rigid with terror, completely ignoring the fact that he is the reason why. "Your hands are like ice."
"I'm terrified," I snap, my voice thin but defiant. "You have people tied to chairs."
Dominic glances back at the plastic-covered floor, looking at the mutilated Bellanti soldiers as if they are nothing more than inconvenient stains on the rug.
The cold, sociopathic detachment in his eyes when he looks at them is terrifying, especially compared to the heavy, burning intensity he directs back at me a second later.
"They are monsters, Sienna. The men who murdered my family." He looks back at me, his gaze softening into something that looks dangerously like reverence. "I am a monster, too. But I will never be a monster to you. Do you understand me?"
I stare up at him, my throat working as I try to swallow the lump of panic.
He isn't asking for my understanding. He is laying down the absolute law of my new reality.
I am a captive, yes, but looking into his eyes, seeing the obsessive, unhinged devotion already sparking in the dark depths.
.. I realize with a sickening jolt that he isn't locking me away to silence me.
He is locking me away to keep me.
"Santi, the keys," Dominic orders, holding his hand out.
I numbly reach into the pocket of my sundress and pull out the worn lanyard holding my van keys. I drop them into Dominic's massive palm. He hands them off to Santi, then turns back to me.
He doesn't ask me to walk. He doesn't guide me by the elbow.
He steps into my space, his massive thighs boxing mine in from every direction, and hooks one heavy arm under my knees.
He hauls me up in a single, explosive surge, my body pressed hard against his side, held tight against the solid wall of his chest. I gasp, my arms automatically flying up to wrap around his thick, corded neck.
The muscles in his shoulders flex like steel cables beneath my grip.
I weigh absolutely nothing to him—a thing to be carried from the wreckage.
He tucks my head under the shelf of his jaw, and the scent of him—vetiver, expensive tobacco, and raw adrenaline—suffocates my common sense.
"What are you doing? Put me down! I can walk!" I hiss, my face flushing scarlet.
Dominic's grip tightens into an iron vice, completely immobilizing my struggles.
"The floor is covered in glass and blood, Sienna," he rumbles smoothly, his chest vibrating against my side. He strides out of the ruined private dining room, carrying me down the dark mahogany hallway. "And I prefer you exactly where you are."
He doesn't set me down when we reach the front of the restaurant.
He carries me through the kitchen, through the service corridor, and out into the night air, where the armored SUV is already idling at the curb, Fabio behind the wheel.
Dominic pulls open the rear door and slides in—with me still locked against him, my body settled across his lap, my back to the door.
His hand stays flattened against my hip.
He does not release me. He does not put me down on the seat and slide in beside me like a man dropping off cargo.
He pulls the armored door shut with his free hand, and I feel the heavy, pressurized click of it sealing us in.
His thigh is solid beneath me. His arm is a bar of iron across my waist. Outside, Chicago moves past the tinted glass in amber smears of light, indifferent and oblivious, while I sit in the dark lap of the most dangerous man I have ever touched and try to remember how to breathe.
As he carries me through the dark, the terrifying truth settles over me like a suffocating blanket.
I didn't just walk into a mafia hit.
I walked into a building that had been watched for weeks by the enemies of the man now holding me, and he has decided, in the space of ten minutes and one shattered vase, that the only answer to that problem is to put me somewhere no one else can reach me.
I walked into a trap set by a man who had spent his entire life learning how to hold onto things with a grip that breaks bones. And he has just decided to hold onto me.