Chapter 40
BEA
We kiss, and I melt in his arms.
“I love you, Bea Mendez.” He pulls back from my lips just long enough to sweep me off my feet.
“Raffaele!” I can’t help but giggle, even as the blood on him squeaks against my skin.
“Let’s get you cleaned up.”
He carries me across the bathroom.
It’s enormous—I didn’t take it in before, when the only thing in the room was him and what he was doing.
Now I see the size of it. And at the far end, away from the corner where it happened, the shower: a glass enclosure standing on its own in the middle of the floor, the size of a small bedroom, four walls of glass already fogged white from the inside.
Victor must have turned it on a while ago and never gotten in.
The water’s been running hot long enough that the whole room is dense with steam, the mirrors blind with it.
Raffaele doesn’t put me down to undress me. Instead, he kicks the glass door open with his foot and steps inside with me still in his arms, into the heat, into the water, and the spray hits both of us at once.
The blood on him becomes the blood on me, until the water sheets off his chest and his arms and runs pink down both of us.
He sets me down on my feet and starts ripping off my clothes. His hands are fast and rough and certain, and the steam is so thick now I can barely see the glass walls around us.
“Turn around.”
I do as I’m told.
He puts a hand flat between my shoulder blades and gently presses me forward until my palms are against the glass. The glass is hot and slick and fogged, and there’s nothing on the other side of it—no room, no light, just white steam and the pink the water makes of what’s running off us.
His mouth finds the back of my neck. His fingers wrap around my hips. He pushes into me from behind in one passionate stroke.
I whimper with pleasure, the pain melting away under heat and need.
“Mine,” he whispers against my ear. “You’re mine. Say it.”
“I’m yours—“
“Louder.”
“Yours.”
He groans into my neck, and his hand leaves my hip, sliding around and down between my legs. His fingers find me without slowing the rhythm of his hips, and I come apart almost immediately, embarrassingly fast, clenching around him hard enough that he curses and his rhythm finally breaks.
He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me upright against him, my back to his chest, his other hand sliding up to my throat.
His mouth is at my ear, saying filthy things I’ll never to repeat to anyone, low and wrecked and mine.
He’s close. I can feel it in the way his rhythm’s gone ragged, in the way his hand has tightened on my throat.
“I’m never letting you go again,” he groans.
He pushes up into me one more time and holds himself there, deep, and I feel him let go—feel the heat of it, feel him shake against my back with his face buried in my wet hair and his arm locked across my chest like he’s afraid I’ll dissolve if he loosens it.
I fall over the edge with him.
Neither of us moves for a while. The water runs clear off both of us now. Raffaele holds me up, his heart beating hard against my back.
It doesn’t matter that there’s a decapitated body lying in a pool of blood only a few feet away. Nothing exists but him. But us.
And it’s heaven.
We end up on the floor, the water finally turned off, both of us in towels, my back against the warm tile and his arm around me. My head’s on his chest. I can hear his heart settling.
“So… what happens now?” I ask.
“Now?” He strokes my wet hair back off my face. “Now we finish it.”
“Finish what?”
“All of it. Victor’s operation. His men, his money, his properties.” A pause. “It’s ours now.”
“Ours?”
“Everything I have is yours. Everything I take. Everything I build.” He tilts my chin up so I have to look at him. “You’re not part of my world anymore, Bea. You are my world.”
I don’t have a single word big enough for that.
So, I kiss him instead.
He’s the one who pulls back this time. He’s grinning.
“Actually.” He stands. “I’m going to claim it right now.”
He pulls a towel around his waist and crosses to the glass doors on the far wall. They open onto a terrace. He lets the fresh air roll in as he picks up Victor’s head and takes it outside.
I wrap a towel around myself and follow him.
The terrace looks out over the grounds. The area below is full of men.
Below us, in the gravel courtyard, Victor’s people are gathered in a loose, confused mass—milling around, talking to each other, none of them with any idea what’s been happening inside.
They don’t know Raffaele and Lorenzo came.
As far as they’re concerned, their boss went upstairs for a shower, and the house went quiet.
And now there are SUVs they don’t recognize hemming them in from every side, headlights on the crowd, guns up, and nobody in the middle of that courtyard is going anywhere.
They start looking up, one by one, when Raffaele steps to the railing.
In nothing but a towel, he holds up Victor’s head for everyone to see.
“Victor Moreno is dead!” he roars. “This house belongs to the Conti family now. My family.”
Silence.
“Those of you who turned on me tonight. Who took his money and sold me out.” He lifts the head an inch. “It’s going to be short for you. And it’s going to hurt.”
A few of the men shift, looking for exits that aren’t there.
“The rest of you. The ones who worked for him but never raised a hand at me. You get a chance.” His voice goes flat. “Starting now.”
He throws the head.
It arcs out over the railing and lands in the middle of the courtyard with a wet thump.
One of Lorenzo’s men shoves somebody forward—a traitor, on his knees in the gravel. Raffaele looks down at the nearest of Victor’s men. Young. Terrified. Not one of the ones who turned.
“You want a place with me?”
The kid nods like his life depends on it, which it does.
Raffaele nods at the man on his knees.
“Earn it.”
The kid looks at the traitor. At Raffaele. At the thing in the gravel. Then he draws, his hand shaking, and fires once, and the man on his knees goes down.
The kid looks up at the balcony. White. Shaking. Still standing.
Raffaele nods once.
“Welcome to the family.”
It happens again across the courtyard. And again. Victor’s men proving they’re Raffaele’s now, one execution at a time, the traitors paying for tonight in the same gravel where Victor’s head is already lying.
These men were starving for a real boss. Victor was never going to be that, and some part of every one of them knew it.
Now they’ve got one.
Raffaele turns away from the railing.
He looks at me.
I’m in the doorway in a towel with my hair dripping, and I’ve just watched the man I’m going to marry run a loyalty trial by execution from a balcony.
I should feel some way about that, but I’m so relieved he’s alive that there isn’t room for anything else.
I’ll deal with the rest later. Tonight there isn’t any rest. Tonight there’s just him and me. Us.
He walks toward me. Slowly, deliberately.
“Bea.”
“What?”
He stops in front of me. He takes my hand.
“I’ve spent my whole life running empires for other people.” A pause. “I never knew what it was for.”
“Raffaele—“
“I do now.”
My heart fills to capacity.
“Everything I’ve done. Everything I’m about to do. It’s for you. That’s the only reason.”
And then he drops to one knee.
On the terrace. In a towel.
“Marry me.”
I stare at him.
This man. This monster. This whatever he is now—king of two families as of about twenty minutes ago, kneeling on the cold stone in front of a woman in a borrowed towel.
“You don’t have a ring,” I say.
“I’ll buy you a hundred.”
“You’re covered in blood.”
“I’ll wash it off. Again.”
“You just threw a man’s head off a balcony.”
“I’ll throw a hundred more if you ask me to.”
I’m laughing. I’m also crying. Both at once. This is what this man does to me.
“That’s not romantic,” I tell him.
He’s grinning up at me. “Say yes anyway.”
“Yes.”
He’s up off the floor before the word’s all the way out. He pulls me into him and kisses me like the world is ending, and maybe it is—maybe the old one ended tonight and maybe what’s starting now is something new.
Below us, the courtyard is quieting. The trials are ending. The men who are going to live are getting to their feet.
Lorenzo is somewhere in the house. Probably found Victor’s liquor by now. I can almost hear him deciding which bottle he’s earned.
Victor’s head is on the gravel.
And I’m standing on a balcony in a stranger’s towel, freshly engaged to the most dangerous man in the city. And I couldn’t be happier.
What a fucking night.