Chapter Three
Win-Win
Rafe
W aiting has never been my forte, but watching—as I am not allowed into the room where she currently holds court—is just as fraying. The women cluster around each other, occasionally chattering, often silent as another tells her stories.
Willow holds her own, unzipping her dress and displaying the scars her uncle left where she no longer hides them. Not that she ever did, once she understood they weren’t a deal breaker for me. On the contrary, the scars that cross her perfect, slender back bring a swell of pride to my chest.
No one is stronger, fiercer, than the woman I am blessed to call my wife.
I swivel sideways, a half-smile on my open lips ready to impart some pathetic husbandry wisdom to Dom, but the spot beside me is empty. I rub at the unexpected pang of pain in my chest.
Luca resides in the kitchen, poring over centuries of books while the chef clucks about and tries to remove him from her empire. The only shadow who watches me as I watch my wife is the nephew who currently possesses the other segment of my attention.
I roll my shoulders, keeping my back to my wife’s impromptu salon, and beckon my shadow. “You might as well come out. Hiding in this place only earns you enemies.”
“Am I one of those already?” Eduardo Kinzali steps from his shadowy place where he has watched me while I pretended not to notice.
His face is still and impassive and resembles a man I vaguely recall as his pateras, a thorn in my father’s side for some years. One of the reasons Armand Gallo rarely left Cyprus and the sole competition for the love of a spoiled brat of a son who had the world and craved his father’s approval.
I finally got that, and now I have his empire, too. What I wouldn’t give in order to have one more day to fight with the old man the way we did for too many years.
Years I never appreciated, until now.
“Not yet,” I murmur. “Hiding is a surefire way to earn my distrust.”
He scoffs. “So Americano, my Don.” Eduardo bows slightly at the waist.
A little too slightly for my liking, but the boy’s arrogance reminds me of a certain someone—and for once I’m not referring to myself.
“It is a curse of this game.” I shake my head sadly. “Where the money flows, the sins of our lives will follow.”
Eduardo frowns. “You consider yourself a sin—a stain on your father’s name?”
Once, the insult would have roused a murderous rage inside me but now I have Willow, the slight is small and ineffective.
“Or a darkness, spreading,” I say quietly in return. “Can I trust you, Kinzali?”
He blinks. “So A—” he catches himself. “You are direct. Should I expect a bullet as fast?”
“Only as long as my patience for my unanswered question holds.”
“Ah.” He smiles thinly. “Fast thinking, fast talking ... you have absorbed their culture and forgotten your own.”
“Time’s up.” I draw my weapon and don’t glance anywhere but his face. “Try not to get blood on my wife or her friends.”
When I expect him to blanch, the boy—man, mid-twenties, maybe—smiles. Really smiles. “I promise I will not shame my mother by soiling my pants before I hit the marble floor.”
And the fucker stands still.
I cough back a laugh, masking my amusement poorly. I can imagine Dom’s eyeroll and banish my best man’s shade along with his expressions. “Consider the test passed. This, however, is not. I need an answer, son.”
“At best I would be aged as your little brother,” he protests, the smile still creasing his face. “I have affairs to sort in order to be able to answer your question without being able to answer the next.”
Breath flows from me as I uncock the pistol. Eduardo hasn’t touched his, the same matte black pair slung at his lower back I noted before.
“Why is that?”
“Because if I tell you the truth right now, I will indeed disgrace myself on your marble floor.”
It’s my turn to grin. I like the kid, even if he’s got the makings of a prime asshole. At least with him around I won’t be bored. And something tells me I’ll find out the real answer to my question in the next day or so.
Behind me, Willow’s meeting breaks up.
“You have twenty-four hours.”
Eduardo’s smile fades as he holds my gaze for an unflinching moment. When he turns on his heel, his blank mask is restored, and my phone rests in my hand.
He might be entertaining, but a man like that needs two things—a woman in his bed to keep him from straying from my family, and a tail.
A good thing is I know someone who can cover both bases at once.
****
W illow runs her hand along the brothel’s luridly blue and gold painted banister and lets out a sigh. “We need something like this in that upstairs area, the one with Armand Gallo all over it.”
I snort, taking in the equally lurid velvet sofas and recliners of what used to be an opium den and hasn’t come up much in the world since the previous century.
“It was his house, my dear. It’s likely to hold his flair.” My mind flits back to the room I used to share her with Dom months ago. His room. It didn’t suit me then and even less now.
“Now it’s yours. And mine,” she adds as an afterthought.
I wind an arm around her shoulders and draw her in for a long kiss she returns. “Paint it whatever color you want,” I say softly, brushing my mouth over hers, and frown. “It’s been too long since I had you alone.”
“Two days.”
“Two days too long.”
She laughs, all raven black hair fanning out as she swirls away from me. I let her go, holding the heavily made-up eyes of the woman dressed in a red teddy with strategic cut outs and nothing else who appears in a doorway just beyond the stairs.
“I don’t do couples.” She eyes me as Willow’s laughter dies. “But her I’ll do for free.”
The pretty noise my wife makes leaves us both smiling. “Let’s discuss that last later,” I murmur. “First, I want to talk to you about a man, and a job. It’s good to see you again, Bonita.”
Her brow dips as Willow casts a quizzical glance my way. I hadn’t decided how to explain my connections in Cyprus and figure a little show and tell is in order.
“Are you an old flame?” The faintest edge of insecurity wobbles my wife’s voice.
I hold out my arm and she slides into my side, nestling possessively there.
“I fucking love you like this. Right now, I need to make a deal. I want you out of that dress. Sit on the sofa and work yourself into a frenzy for me.” I catch the tip of her chin with my fingers.
“Can you do that and not come? I want you soaking.”
Her gaze glides to the whore in the doorway and back to me. A sinful smile curls her lips. “I can do that.”
“Good girl.” I kiss her temple and slide my hand over her breasts, squeezing lightly and tease her nipples. “Let me work. Then you can tell me how I fucked up while my head is between your legs as penance.”
Her eyes glow as she backs up, slipping the dress from her shoulders and standing naked before us. Her perfect rump settles on the sofa that matches the banister— why the fuck is everything blue? —and spreads her thighs.
My cock hardens as she moans for me discreetly, just enough to titillate and not interrupt, something she’s perfect at. I’ll hold to that promise later. After I work.
“What job?” Bonita snaps, her gaze still latched on me, though her fingers curl at her side when my wife moans.
I smile inside. The courtesan doesn’t like someone other than her running the show and Willow has command of us all, even if she doesn’t know it.
“I need you to seduce one of my lieutenants.”
Her flattened mouth curves up. “I can do that.”
“Information. Everything you can find. Good, bad. All of it. I want to know if he uses hand soap to wash his ass and all the ways he can be a liability. Weaknesses. Secrets.” I step forward and raise my hand. A wad of cash that could buy her brothel sits in my palm.
Ever the professional, Bonita ignores the temptation on display. And the cash.
“I can do that, too. More, for a long-term job. I need to close shop. You can pay my rent.”
“My dear, you can pay your own. I’ll cover the cost of your business and more. You’ll need a new name and identity. Can you make the act stick?”
The frown is back.
“Of course. For how long?”
Willow’s drawn-out moan and that wet sloshing sound of her fingers working her juicy as fuck cunt has my cock in my hand as I turn away from the madame and place the cash on her table.
“Forever. You’re marrying him.”
Silence falls between us, loud enough to hear her jaw hit the floor.
“Whose family, Rafe?”
“Mine.”
Willow smiles and opens her mouth as I approach, sucking on the head of my engorged cock as she works her fingers frantically between her legs. I catch her creamy, plush thigh and hold her open, reaching for her clit and swirling my fingers around sensuously. Her back arches.
“No fucking way.”
“I’d do it if I were you.”
“Why would I marry into your fucking family, Rafe? No one leaves alive. No. One. Remember?”
I do remember. The same as her. Her mother screaming as she held a six-year-old Bonita to her chest over the blood splattered bodies of her son and husband dead at the hands of an old enemy my father dispatched too late.
“I remember your mother’s new husband sold your father’s debt—along with you—into a sex trade. Let me make up for losing your brother, Bonita.” And the rest.
Willow’s lips do terrible things to my cock. I throw my head back, slinking my fingers into her hair as I pull her closer. She gags prettily for me, saliva and tears mingling in my precum bubbling around her lips.
“You think you can make up for that? For any of it?”
“I just bought your freedom, this house, and the entire fucking block. Every whore on it. Do what you want with them, and the land. Make it a halfway house. A respite. A care center. I don’t give a fuck. It’s all yours, and yours alone under your legal name. Just ... do the job.”
Bonita is beside me before she speaks again. “Which one?” Her fingers trail across Willow’s cheek, sliding down to play with her nipple. “I told you I’d do her for free.”
She kneels between Willow’s legs, licking and nibbling while my wife moans freely on my cock.
Unable to tear my eyes from her face, I release her hair and lock my fingers through the collar that adorns her neck and use it to choke her on my cock.
“Let’s play your favorite game, wife. Can you come before me? If not, then she stops. And I’m very close.” I breathe heavily and enjoy the panic that flares in Willow’s forest-green eyes as my balls tingle.
She’s shaking and screaming before the first stream of my cum paints her throat.
It’s a good business day.