Chapter 12
CALLUM
The air still smells like her.
Sweet, dangerous, floral, fruity.
A fading memory, a shot of strong desire.
A fading sunset, swelled up by a storm.
As she walks away, I can finally rake my eyes over her body.
She’s changed.
Her hair is more rebellious, her legs seem longer, and her curves are more pronounced just in the right places.
My gaze falls to her backside, and the beast inside me stretches a slow smirk as I feel a heap of heat between my legs.
The Gallos should know better than to let her dress like that.
She was unmanageable in New York, and spending time in Sicily has helped her morph into a nightmare.
I can’t stand that she slid her arm through Paxton’s, and he so easily allowed himself to be fooled by her tricks.
They may be intended for me, but he certainly benefits from them, which makes me lock my jaw now.
I knew she’d be trouble since I walked into the Gallos’ home, ready to strike a deal with Bianca’s father.
I knew what I was getting myself into, and honestly, I didn’t have a choice.
One twisted event made me indebted to him, putting me on a collision path with their world.
Giorgio Gallo had always played dirty.
My late father had warned me about him. He told me everything about this family. Their most disgusting deals, their penchant for useless deaths, not to mention their unhinged women.
His last words as he was bleeding to death were about the Gallos. ‘Save yourself and pay our debt. Find out who did this to you and make them pay with their lives. Don’t spare anyone. They haven’t spared us.’
He died a few moments later.
He was convinced the Gallos were behind everything that led to our empire crumbling.
Within the span of a week, I got ambushed, lost half of our most loyal men, including my father, had shipments confiscated by the authorities, and was suddenly knee-deep in debt, with my back against the wall.
The money that hadn’t come through wasn’t mine to begin with. It belonged to one of our worst enemies.
Stefano Varela.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and feelings have no place in this business.
Money is money, and sometimes, the circumstances dictate how we go about making it. There is no code of honor, although I wish there were.
The lines of a territory are not neatly drawn on a map.
You gotta do what you gotta do.
The whole story had the fingerprints of betrayal all over it.
It’s just that the events unfolded so quickly, and there were so many moving pieces and so many layers to that story that it was hard to figure out who the players were.
My father was convinced that Gallo wasn’t innocent.
He went so far as to suspect that Stefano Varela, a mobster with strong connections to the Chicago mafia, might’ve orchestrated the whole thing in collaboration with the Gallos.
It sounded crazy, but I trusted my gut and my old man. I had the same feeling.
Framing an enemy and making them take the fall for a loss they weren’t responsible for had been done before.
What did Stefano gain? It’s hard to tell.
He got the money that I owed him from Giorgio Gallo. I paid Giorgio back and married his daughter.
You’d think I was lucky I didn’t lose my life over that.
Initially, I thought that too. But then I realized that something was amiss.
Giorgio Gallo contacted me in a flash and threw me a lifeline out of nowhere. And I was supposed to believe that someone had spared my life out of the goodness of their hearts?
Color me suspicious.
I knew even back then that something wasn’t right, but I had promised my old man that I’d find out who did it and possibly join the circus before plotting my revenge.
The aftermath was dark and somber as our power dimmed.
I said yes to Giorgio’s proposal and married his younger daughter. I became his partner, and he quickly let me know he was looking for a man to take over his empire.
No one in his family was qualified for that role––he said that––and I knew that, too.
I was aware of Bianca’s wicked ways, her insatiable appetite for men, her attraction to the wrong men, and Giorgio’s need to put his affairs in order.
I knew enough not to believe everything he’d said to me, but I pretended that I had.
It cost me nothing.
My plan had been made before I tossed the first fist of dirt onto my father’s coffin.
I needed to have patience, and my time would come.
The more time I spent in the Gallo family, the more I learned about Giorgio.
Everything that people said about him proved to be correct. He was a wise man and managed to control his empire through practical alliances, and I was only one of them.
It had little relevance to me. Knowing that someone had set me up was all that mattered.
And here I am, but possibly not for long.
Things have settled down.
I’m part of the family now. Bianca’s gone, and my obligations have boiled down to staying in the family and being loyal to them.
Honestly, our deal was up when Bianca passed.
And no, I had nothing to do with her death, although her death untied me from her family.
Giorgio must’ve never taken into account that his daughter might pass prematurely, despite her being addicted to living dangerously.
He also couldn’t foresee that Bianca’s daughter would turn into a wild card, become a headache, and also a big pain in my ass.
I couldn’t foresee that either, although something told me I might be in for a big surprise.
And there she is.
The girl from New York is now a wild woman with bronzed skin, lips softer than the juicy peaches of the south, eyes burning like luminaries, and a way to draw a man’s gaze that should be outlawed.
It’s impossible not to notice Paxton’s arm sliding around her waist, his hand inching closer to the top of her rear.
It’s hard to ignore the tension in his touch, his fingers burning with fire––he’s that eager to feel her skin beneath his touch.
I like Paxton Maclean.
I consider him my friend––one of the few––but he needs to stay away from her unless he wants to lose his life over nothing.
She’s not nothing.
She’s Giorgio’s granddaughter.
And Giorgio isn’t trustworthy.
She needs to stay away from Paxton. From me. From anyone who has good judgment.
Her mother was half as powerful as she is and got men killed left and right. She eventually got caught in a bad story of her own and lost her life.
I know her grievances.
She made no secret of what had pushed her into that man’s arms. I was her man on paper. She couldn’t have more than that.
There were many things that Giorgio could do, but making me consummate my marriage wasn’t one of them.
I got a pretty good deal.
She got a good deal, too, but she also wanted other men and wasn’t willing to change her ways.
I think we all got what we wanted.
What I didn’t want was to have her daughter on my tail just because she was bored and had nothing better to do.
Women like her are bad news. They’re bad for business and a man’s peace of mind.
They come draped in the stench of death and ruin everything they touch.
She can’t be ruining my plans.
I need to deal with her family if I find them to be in the wrong. And I also need to avenge the death of my father, and be gone.
At the top of the stairs, she laughs at the fool’s joke and tilts her head back before she tosses a glance over her shoulder and catches me observing her.
She catches Vittoria’s eye as well, and her smile dims a little.
One last time, she looks at me, and I fix my stare on her, warning her to mind her business.
As the group of people sweeps her away from me, I go back to exploring every inch of her skin as she reveals it for public consumption, along with the little tools women like her employ sometimes to make hot-blooded men like me lose their heads.
Heels that make her legs even more irresistible, underwear that under no circumstances should be visible through layers of whimsical fabric meant to make you stare more than to cover her body.
Dresses that won’t pass the test of sartorial sanity.
But beyond all that, who can escape those eyes?
Desperation is hardly my drug of choice.
I like power through and through.
I’m addicted to strength. I live it, breathe it. The women even know that. They’re tough as nails. They need to be, or they wouldn’t have my time.
I can’t deal with weakness.
But this woman’s desperation isn’t purely that.
It’s a toxic mix of full abandon and the promise of a one-in-a-lifetime experience.
What man can resist that?
A young woman’s hunger for flesh, crazed out of her mind, willing to play hard and win if only for the fun of it. She’s the last thing I need right now.
She was wild even back then, when I walked into the Gallos’s headquarters to make a deal with her grandfather.
I didn’t have eyes for her or anyone else.
I was there to discuss business.
For the next year or so, I held my end of the deal, played the role of a husband, stayed out of trouble, and, more importantly, kept away from the Gallo women.
Something was not right in that family. I could smell it and feel it in every nook and cranny of that house.
Dark clouds hovered over that space, dripping with horrible stories, which wasn’t my business.
I was a man with a plan, and I stuck with it.
She wasn’t much better at her mother's funeral.
During the time I spent in their house, she evolved into a ravenous, curious woman who, for the first time, got her claws out.
Her family was faster than her and planned her immediate departure.
The shock on her face, the hatred in her stare, and the trembling of her lips solidified my belief that it was the right thing to do.
She needed to spend some time away from everyone in that house, myself included.
I’m not so sure about that now, though.
She’s more dangerous, more desirable.
More potent.
More determined to pursue whatever she’s set to pursue, and she’s even more stubborn.
She’s also the enemy, the wild card who can throw a wrench in my plans, the linchpin of a complete disaster.
She’s a pain I can’t indulge in right now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t look at her.
She’s long gone, swallowed up by the groups of people who, if I heard that right, are here for her.
Word is that Giorgio is about to trade her off for some new territory he’d like to control, more money, or simply to show his granddaughter who is in charge, or get in the good graces of some mob lord looking for a wife.
I’m not into sadistic endeavors, so I can’t say I’d willingly participate in the slaughtering of this little lamb, but something deep inside me makes me change my plans for the evening.
“What about we call it a night?” I say with a semi-cold smile as I turn to Vittoria. “My driver will take you home,” I say in response to the woman’s flash of surprise.
Tenderly, I brush my fingers over her forearm.
“I don’t want to keep out here while I attend some family business inside. It might take a while,” I add in the same monotonous voice.
“All right?” I add, peeling off my touch.
She quickly gets the hint.
A seasoned woman, Vittoria tilts her head and gives me a smile while I signal to one of my men to walk her off the property.
Once she’s out of my sight, I pick up a drink from a server’s tray, take a sip, run a hand over my tie, and head inside.
It somehow dawns on me that I haven’t checked Vittoria’s dress once, yet I can describe in detail how every bit of fabric has hugged Leilani Gallo’s curves.