10. Tamayo
TAMAYO
M y knee throbs, a bone-deep ache pulsing up to my hip and lower back. I yank on my compression brace, knowing it won’t be enough—it never is—but it’s better than nothing. The house is quiet and still so early in the morning, as if no one exists in the world but me. I breathe in through my nose and wish I had a cup of steaming coffee and no obligations for the day.
Unfortunately, those days are few and far between in this life.
I pull on my clothes, gritting my teeth when I have to balance on my left leg. Each twinge cues up another memory previously buried in a shallow grave. I’ve spent years visiting their headstones, paying respect to the revenge they demand, but never digging under the surface.
I stomp on their undead talons raking through my mind. There’s no use in excavating them. Not today, not ever.
Footsteps patter down the hall. I frown, checking the clock on my nightstand as I tame my hair. Darius will already be in the gym. No one else lives here. The guards are relegated to the perimeter, and the capos to the inner houses .
Except we have guests now.
The memory of the silk of Zarina’s skin under my fingertips, her hand on my chest, her hair against my cheek, tingles through me. I snatch up my Rolex and my suit jacket and slip into the hall. The pain in my knee fades to background noise as I stride across the wood floors of the hallway and down the stairs. I force my feet to slow as I pass the dining room, the den, and then round the corner into the kitchen.
Darius stands at the counter, pouring coffee from the carafe into two mugs. He glances over his shoulder at my entrance, but I’m checking the breakfast nook, the hallway, the deck. No one else is here. When I turn back, Darius is sliding a mug of coffee across the black, leathered granite island to me and shaking his head.
“Eager this morning,” he teases.
“Can’t I look forward to seeing you?” I toss my jacket over a bar stool and slip on my watch, clicking the clasp shut.
He levels A Look at me over the rim of his mug. “You can.”
I lift my own to my lips—“But you don’t,” he says—and almost inhale my coffee with a snort.
“Would be nice if you did.” He replaces the oat milk in the fridge with an exaggerated sigh. “I deserve more than grunts in the morning.”
“I don’t grunt.” I successfully drink my coffee without drowning myself this time.
“You grunt,” he insists.
“I do not,” I snap. “I don’t even speak.”
“How is that better?” he asks.
I wrinkle my nose. “It’s not fucking grunting like a caveman?—”
“I need coffee before all this noise.”
I snap my mouth shut.
Zarina’s morning voice is gruff and a little croaky from lack of use, her hair a cloud around her face. She’s wearing a huge black shirt that falls to her mid-thigh and nothing else. And while it’s technically covering more skin than her dress did last night, my body does not understand the logic of my brain. I stare at the hem, at her bare feet padding over the matte-black tile, at her sleep-swollen face she rubs as if trying to encourage it awake, and grip my mug like it’s the only thing holding me upright.
Darius opens the cabinet with the dishes and steps back, watching me watch Zarina. She doesn’t mutter a word of thanks to him before she rises on her tiptoes to reach over her head for a mug. And the moment she does, the shirt rides up just enough to show the crest of her ass where it meets her thigh. That’s the moment my brain loses all function for a full ten seconds.
Zarina settles back on her heels and pours her coffee while I squeeze my eyes shut and attempt to imprint that image in my head for all eternity. My imagination replaces Darius’s shirt with mine, and I almost stagger at the thought.
Something flicks my temple—Darius. He leans close and whispers, “Simp.”
“Shut up,” I grumble, rubbing my temple.
Darius huffs a laugh and carries his coffee out to the deck without another word. I glare at the back of his head as he surveys the inner courtyard of our compound, which is really the combined backyards of the Sallay block where we bought every single house and renovated them into an estate worthy of a Cardinal Family. Darius has aspirations to convert the courtyard into a training ground, but I refuse to let our home become militarized like that. Home should be refuge, not warfare.
The fridge door snaps closed, and Zarina picks up her coffee.
“Good morning.” I raise my mug.
She squints at me and does not return the greeting, taking a sip instead.
“Sleep all right?” I ask .
She licks her lips like she’s chasing the caffeine. “Fine.”
“Not a morning person, then,” I say.
“Not until coffee.” She leans a hip against the counter, her shirt blending into the black-on-black theme of the kitchen, and holds her mug with two hands.
“Drink up, then.” I keep my gaze on her face, my hands relaxed. “We have business to discuss.”
She grimaces. “At seven thirty-four in the morning?”
“Do you have any clothes?” I ask. And it’s half an excuse to give in to the overwhelming urge to drop my gaze to the hem of her shirt again, to her thighs the color of honey. I linger there, imagining there are actual smears of sweet, sticky honey on her skin and?—
“Whiplash, Jesus,” she mutters.
I drag my eyes up again, slow enough to know it’s less heated and more calculating by the time I meet her glare. “I’m trying to decide if our business should wait until you have clothes.”
She arches a brow. “Is it my clothes or lack thereof that bothers you?”
I want to say that it’s my inability to string two non-sexual thoughts together with her in that goddamn shirt that bothers me. But I don’t. Instead, I rest my chin on my hand with a lazy grin. Her glare darkens, red flushing her neck, and I file that away for later.
“Would you prefer to be in Darius’s shirt while we discuss next moves or in a tailored outfit?” I ask.
She drops a hand to the top of her thigh and bunches up the hem of the shirt in her fist. The crease of her hip lies in the shadow just beneath the heel of her palm. I can’t stop my eyes from flicking down, tracing the line of her body, trying to see what might lie beneath the black cotton.
“Which would more easily bring you to your knees?” Zarina’s voice is as husky as when she entered the kitchen.
Darius’s shirt, hands down .
But I don’t say that. This is a game, a negotiation of terms that will determine how we dance with each other in this house, in this city, in this deal. Zarina is a princess who has had the majority of her desires fulfilled at the snap of her pretty, manicured fingers. But me, I’ve fought and bled for what I want. If Zarina Gallo wants me on my knees, she must learn, like everyone else, that I don’t bend first.
I disconnect my brain from the lust heating my skin and arrange my face into an expression of disappointment. Like Zarina Gallo is behaving badly rather than making my body pulse with the beat of my heart. I sip my coffee and watch the red at her neck travel up to her cheeks as she reads the shift in my body language. Her brown eyes are shot through with gold that hardens the longer she stands in silent defiance.
I set my mug back on the counter and raise one, sardonic brow. “Your choice, princess.”
She drops the shirt and sighs. “You talk, I drink.”
I nod and pull my phone out of my pocket as if I have something more important to focus my attention on than Zarina. “A pair of black SUVs have been circling since early this morning. They have Gallo plates.” I slide the phone across the counter, video footage of the cars pulled up and playing.
Zarina leans over to watch, and I silently thank any powers that be that I can no longer see where the shirt ends and her thighs begin.
She hums and nods, resting her elbows on the counter.
My brain attempts to conjure up an image of her ass at this very moment, and I shut that down as swiftly as possible. “We need to nip this in the bud before they cross a line.”
Zarina picks up my phone, tapping on it.
I let her. “What are you doing?”
“Nipping it in the bud.” She raises the phone to her ear.
I drop my shoulders and shake my head. “Princess, that’s not what I meant and you know?— ”
“Ssh”—she holds her finger to her smirking lips—“it’s ringing.”
“Zarina.” I rap my knuckles on the countertop with gritted teeth. “Hang up.”
“Mother.” She brings the phone down to tap the screen and suddenly a very stern voice floods out of the speaker.
“—na Giovanna Gallo. Where the fuck are you?” Alessandra Gallo’s voice is frigid in the otherwise warm kitchen, and the way it strikes through me feels like lightning. It’s been years since I heard it, but the sound loosens the soil covering the shallow grave of my memories. I stomp on their clawing hands until they fall back, leaving scratches down my mind. Now is not the time.
Zarina pulls in a deep breath, gold-streaked eyes finding mine and holding. “It seems you already know where I am.”
“What does that mean?” Alessandra snaps.
“Why are my cousins, Paul and Donny, driving around Sallay like tourists?” she asks. “There’s nothing to see on this side of town.”
“Apparently, there is.”
“Call them off.” Zarina’s gaze trips over the mole on my left cheekbone, my triple pierced ear, back to my eyes.
“Not until you’re safe.”
She snorts. “So that’s the angle.”
“It’s not an angle.” Her mother sniffs like the suggestion is preposterous.
“Call them off, Mother,” Zarina sighs, tired. I wonder if she ever calls her Mom, Mama, anything with more familiarity than the formal Mother. She stares at the coffee in her mug. “I’m more safe here than at home.”
I catch my frown before it twitches across my lips.
Alessandra Gallo is quiet for the length of one breath. “Is she there?”
“I’m here,” I say .
Zarina scowls. It only makes me grin.
“Return my daughter before I’m forced to wipe your little gang off the map,” she demands. If I wasn’t Andrea Tamayo, assured in myself and my people, I might be scared. But I’m not. Especially of a Gallo.
“Really, Mother, you’re so dramatic,” Zarina grumbles.
“Marcus is distraught, Zarina.” Her mother tries a new tactic, and it immediately makes my hackles rise. “He fears for your life.”
Zarina mock gags. “Sure, if my life is his perceived possession of my vagina.”
Any mention of Marcus Accardi and this sham of a marriage is too ludicrous to entertain. I snatch the phone out of Zarina’s grip. She grunts, affronted, and throws up her hands as if to say, fine, you deal with her.
Gladly.
I turn up the charm, hoping we don’t have to resort to threats and manipulation too quickly. “I’m sorry for worrying you, Mrs. Gallo. Zarina is safe, and she’s here by choice. I think you know your daughter can’t be easily forced.”
“Don’t speak to me as if I’m your equal,” she growls. “You exist by my grace. You make money, because I allow you to. You own property built on land I own. We are not equals, Andrea Tamayo.”
A muscle in my eye twitches with the force of the clench of my jaw. “Even so. Zarina is here by her own choice and will remain here as long as she pleases.”
“Then we declare belligerence.” She says it as if speaking to a throne room full of courtiers rather than a “lowly gangster” over the phone. “The Council will call upon you to answer for your misconduct.”
I chuckle. “I look forward to it.”
“You’re an idiot,” she snaps.
Zarina steals phone back before I can so much as breathe a reply. “Hope you have the day you deserve, Mother!” She smashes the end call button and drops it on the counter.
I stare as Zarina sips her coffee again, one hand tucking her hair behind her ear, and lean my elbows on the counter. “Your mother seems really nice.”
Zarina guffaws, loud and amused, before she covers her mouth again. A grin bursts across my face.
She shakes her head. “I hate that I love her.”
I get that, the push and pull of wishing a parent could be as perfect as you imagined them to be when you were younger, when they weren’t fully fleshed-out adults with faults and ulterior motives. Of wishing they could love without conditions, like they said they would.
My hand stretches across the counter before I can stop it. I force it to grab my phone rather than Zarina’s hand. “We don’t choose our parents.”
“Yeah.” She straightens, thumbnail catching an imperfection on her mug.
I pull my phone over, tucking it in my pocket and clearing my throat. “Clothes, then. Give Darius your sizes, and we’ll have some pieces delivered for you.”
“The Council will convene soon.” She ignores me and sets her coffee on the counter, back straight and chin set. “My parents and the Accardis won’t let them wait very long.”
This is Business Zarina. In an overlarge tee and no pants. Maybe no underwear. I pluck up my own mug and take a drink lest I drool in front of her. “What story do you want to tell?”
“The lesbian tale as old as time.” She waggles her brows.
“And they were very good friends?”
She chuckles. “The other one—secrecy and shadows and pseudonyms.”
I hum affirmation. “A classic.”
“I need a couple things other than clothes for the meeting. ”
“Like?” I have to forcefully suck in my lips before I make an entire list of inappropriate suggestions.
“Hair, makeup, jewelry, shoes, purses.” She rinses her mug in the sink and places it in the dishwasher, bending just enough to tease me into damn near cardiac arrest. I grip my own mug tighter, the ceramic creaking under my fingers. She continues on, as if she hasn’t already listed a casual six-figure wardrobe. “And if we don’t die at the Council meeting, a phone, laptop, car?—”
“I didn’t know having a fiancée would be so expensive,” I grumble.
Zarina digs a fingernail into the skin under my collar, just beside my jugular, and scratches across my neck. “It can cost more than money, if you like,” she purrs.
I take her wrist in my hand, sweeping my thumb along her pulse point in a harsh contrast to her threatening claws. I lean over, lips beside her cheek. “Really, someone ought to bend you over their knee, princess.”
“Maybe later, hm?” She pats my shoulder with her free hand as I let the other slip from my grip and watch her back out of the kitchen, expression smug. “Right now, we have business to prepare for.”