Chapter 2 #2
Vicious claws tear down my insides as I try to suppress thoughts I’ve had more times than I want to acknowledge these last eighteen months. “You know exactly what I mean. You think I didn’t see how women threw themselves at you? You expect me to think you’ve remained celibate all this time?”
“Si. Absolutely I do,” he returns in a voice filled with the ice surrounding me. “And the fucking same better have been the case for you, dragunnida.”
Little dragon. His nickname for me straight after I burst into tears, screaming yes, yes, yes, when he asked me to marry him. What a stupid, blind fool I was.
“Or what, Giovanni? You’ll divorce me? I mean, you said this island suits me, right? For all you know, I’ve allowed it to suit me so much, I’ve been slutting it up since I left you.”
There’s a pause.
Then a smile in his voice. Real. Almost amused. “For three seconds, that was very funny.”
Silence. I squeeze my eyes shut as I exhale.
Then: “I know you haven’t cheated on me, dear wife.”
“Because you know better?” I demand.
“Yes.”
“And how exactly do you know better?” My laugh is brittle. “Let me guess. Because I know you’d kill me if I cheated on you?”
“No.” His voice is velvet over steel. “Because you know I would find those unfortunate fools. Line them up. One by one. And let you watch as I sliced off whichever body part took my fancy. Then I would slit their throats to put them out of their misery.”
A shudder racks me. “I never knew you at all,” I whisper.
“Ah, sweetheart. Did you even want to?” he asks quietly. “Or did you allow yourself to be dazzled by the gloss without wondering what made it shine?”
My throat closes as past fears and fury congeal in a sickly lump. As every horrific reason why I fled my barely one-day-old marriage comes flowing back.
My discovery that Giovanni Dragoni was far from the upstanding man he’d sold himself to me, that he was the very epitome of the thing I hated, shoves nausea up my gut.
“So you’re admitting it, finally? You’re the mob.” Not just the mob. The head that propels the parts. The Don. Cosa Nostra. Anointed from birth to be kingpin of Sicily and the entire East Coast of America.
I can almost see his head tilt in that half-pitying, half-disappointed way. That same way he addressed me when I screeched my outrage on our wedding night, when I found out what Giovanni actually did for a living. “Admission suggests prior evasion or subterfuge.”
“Don’t dodge the questions and don’t play word games with me.”
“I’m not conducting this conversation through a freezer door, Lucia. Come out. Come home. And all will be revealed.”
I snort. “Said the big bad wolf to Little Red Riding Hood.”
I hear the squeak of fingers over a hard surface. A moment later, a small rectangle of glass I didn’t even notice clears next to the freezer door and his hot-as-Hades face appears, teeth bare in a wolfish grin. “I quite fancy eating my wife. It’s been too long.”
Heat pummels me despite myself. Despite the cold I now feel seeping up the soles of my still bare feet.
“Nope. I have a job to get to,” I say stiffly. “And a boss I answer to.”
There’s a pause. “As of one hour ago,” Giovanni says mildly, “you are no longer Marcel’s employee.”
“What?”
“Your little bar is now mine. So is that freezer you’re hiding in. And don’t think I won’t punish you for what you’re doing to yourself. Especially those pretty feet you’ve mangled.”
A ridiculous bark of laughter escapes me. And I wonder if frostbite-induced delirium is setting in. “Why?” I’m not even sure what exactly I’m asking. And I’m not surprised when he chooses which question he wants to answer.
“Because he spent eighteen months staring at my wife’s arse,” Giovanni replies smoothly and with blade’s precision. “His only saving grace is that he didn’t touch. So I gave him two choices. Accept my ridiculously generous offer… or let his imagination work.”
My stomach tightens as I shake my head. “Marcel loves this bar.”
“Oh, I guarantee he loves my million dollars even more.”
“And if I don’t come back with you?” I demand.
His arms spread slowly. “Then you have yourself a bar with a single customer. Who drinks all your cocktails while ogling your arse night after night after night.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“When it comes to my wife,” he replies quietly, “nothing is more important.”
“That’s clearly not true,” I fire back. “Or we wouldn’t be here.”
“And where exactly are we?” he asks softly and his voice is filled with deadly venom. “Because as I recall, my beautiful wife of one whole day fled my bed in the middle of the night with zero warning and not even a fuck-you note.”
Silence crashes down. The freezer hums around me. And within the hum, I finally hear it.
The seething rage fuelling Giovanni’s purpose.
He didn’t just hunt down his wife. He means to make me pay for deserting our marriage.
And I suspect he means to make me pay in the kind of submission, wrapped so tightly in domination, that I’ll beg for mercy.
Mercy he will not give.