Chapter One #3
“Send Cobra confirmation on Olivia,” I tell Alessandro. “No details. Just time and place. I don’t want the bikers anywhere near the main extraction.”
He nods. “And Nina?”
My entire body reacts to her name.
Ridiculous. Dangerous. Unacceptable.
I keep my voice even. “Confirm delivery to the estate tomorrow evening. Increase perimeter security. Only Nico, you, and Tammy know she’s coming.”
Nico’s brows pull together. “Tammy?”
“She’ll need a woman.”
“She’ll need freedom.”
The words strike clean.
I look at him.
Nico looks back.
For several seconds, neither of us speaks.
Then I say the only thing I can. “She’ll have it.”
“Will she?”
Anger flickers hot beneath my ribs, but it is not because he is wrong. It is because I do not yet know how to make him right.
“She will have free range of the house and grounds,” I say. “No locked doors except exterior security until I know she won’t run straight into traffic or back toward the men who sold her. Clothes. Food. Medical care. Money if she asks for it.”
“And if she asks to leave?”
The office seems to tighten around the question.
I think of Nina’s eyes. Her chin. The spit on that bastard’s face. I think of her looking at me with hatred. I think of opening my hand and letting her walk out of my life before I have even stood in the same room with her.
My answer comes slowly. “Then I will make sure she has somewhere safe to go.”
Nico watches me too closely. “That wasn’t a clean answer.”
“It’s the only one I have tonight.”
He accepts that because he has no choice. Or maybe because he knows me well enough to hear the war already starting inside my head.
I leave the office before dawn.
The halls of the estate are silent around me, marble floors reflecting low amber light from the sconces.
My house is too large. Too empty. It was designed to intimidate, not comfort.
My father liked wide rooms, high ceilings, black iron, imported stone, and art no one was allowed to touch.
He liked people to feel small when they entered.
I have changed pieces of it over the last year.
Not enough.
Tomorrow Nina will walk into this house and see money, power, locked gates, armed men, and me.
She will not see safety. Not at first. Maybe not ever.
I pause at the base of the stairs and look toward the east wing, where guest rooms sit untouched behind polished doors.
By tomorrow night, one of them will be hers.
Not a cell. Not a cage. A room with windows, clean sheets, and a lock she controls from the inside if I have to rip out every old system myself.
Still not enough.
Nothing will be enough to erase how she comes to me.
Bought. Delivered. Furious.
Mine.
The word returns without permission, and this time I don’t push it away quickly enough.
“Dio aiutami.”
I climb the stairs slowly, but I don’t go to bed. Sleep would be useless. I enter my private suite, strip off my jacket, and stand beneath the hot spray of the shower until steam fills the room and the scent of smoke and electronics fades from my skin.
It doesn’t wash away the memory of her.
Nina.
I see her every time I close my eyes. Not crying. Not begging. Spitting in the face of a man who had the power to hurt her.
There are women who survive by folding inward. There are women who survive by making themselves invisible. There are women who survive by learning to please the monsters until they can slip away from them.
Nina survives by baring her teeth.
Piccola vipera.
The thought comes before I can stop it.
Little viper.
It should not fit so well.
By the time the sun begins to lighten the edge of the city, I am dressed again, standing in front of the window with coffee going cold in my hand.
The world below wakes slowly, unaware of the blood being moved beneath it.
Cars fill the streets. People open shops.
Men kiss their wives goodbye and take their children to school while other men arrange deliveries of stolen women through encrypted channels.
Both worlds exist at once.
I live in the seam between them.
My phone buzzes with a message from Alessandro.
Delivery confirmed. Tomorrow, 10:00 p.m.
Beneath it is a still image pulled from the auction feed.
Nina facing the camera. Lip cut. Eyes furious. Chin lifted.
I stare at it longer than I should.
Then I delete it.
Not because I don’t want it. Because wanting it is exactly the problem.
She is not an image. Not a prize. Not a possession no matter what the paperwork from tonight claims. She is a woman who was stolen, sold, and now will be brought to the home of a man whose family name probably sounds no safer than the men she escaped.
I can give her clothes. Food. Security. A full wardrobe, if she wants one. A room. A staff. Tammy’s steady hands. Space to rage at me until her throat hurts.
But I cannot undo the first truth between us.
I bought her.
And God forgive me, part of me cannot wait to see her in person.
Not through a screen. Not filtered by cameras and code.
In front of me.
Close enough to hear her voice when she tells me she hates me. Close enough to learn whether her eyes are brown or black or some dangerous shade between. Close enough to find out if she bites as hard as she looks like she does.
My fingers tighten around the phone until the glass creaks.
I set it down before it breaks.
There is still work to do. Men to kill. Routes to sever. Women to move to safety. Cobra’s extraction to monitor. Olivia Martin to deliver into hands that may be violent but will not sell her.
I turn from the window and walk back toward my office, already becoming what the day requires.
Boss. Judge. Executioner.
Not my father.
Never my father.
But somewhere beneath all of that, beneath the control and the rules and the blood-soaked discipline I have used to carve myself into something different than the bastard who raised me, there is a new hunger moving through my veins.
It has dark hair. Furious eyes. A cut near its mouth.
And a name.
Nina.
For the first time in my life, I understand obsession.