Owned By the Mafia Don (The Devil Kings #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Nathalie

Two years ago

"I'm going home," I announce to no one in particular.

"Boo! You're no fun," Alana says, not even looking up from her champagne, one perfectly manicured hand flipping dismissively in my direction.

"Get home on time," I tell her, reaching for my clutch.

That earns me an eye roll dramatic enough to qualify as a sport.

I don't wait for anything else. I turn and walk away from the booth, from the bass vibrating through the soles of my heels, from Alana and her circle of perfectly curated friends who have spent the better part of the evening finding creative new ways to jab at my father's campaign.

I'm not worried about Alana. She has her friends, she has her champagne, and she has a driver who will have her home before midnight because her father runs a tight ship.

And her friends — well, they have never liked me.

The feeling is mutual and has been since we were children.

I only showed up tonight because my father wanted me gone.

I push through the side door and the night air hits me, carrying the distant smell of rain that hasn't come yet. New York in late September has that quality to it, everything on the edge of something.

I start walking toward the parking garage and let myself think about it properly now that there is no one watching my face.

Dad had a meeting tonight. He was running for City Comptroller not the top of the ladder, not yet, but it mattered.

It was a stepping stone and I knew it and I wanted, more than I wanted almost anything in recent memory, to be inside that room.

Not to sit at the table, I wasn't naive enough to think that was possible.

Just to be present. To hand someone a folder, to bring coffee, and exist in the same square footage as something my father considered important.

I told myself he would see me and think: she wants to help.

Instead, his right-hand man, Gerald, had appeared at the study door before I even reached it and looked at me with the blankness that all of my father's people had perfected and said, "Mr. Keller asks that you enjoy your evening elsewhere, Miss Nathalie."

I was twenty-two. I had just come back for college break.

I had a 3.8 GPA and I read every article published about his campaign since he announced it and I had thoughts, actual coherent thoughts, about his policy positioning and the demographic gaps in his outreach strategy. I had written some of them down.

Then Alana appeared at the front door like a summoned creature, already dressed, and said come out with me and I went because what else was I going to do. I knew my father had sent her to collect me because she looked annoyed even when asking me to come.

I hoped to at least get properly drunk. That plan had also failed.

I reach my car, an expensive dark grey thing, and fish my keys out of my clutch. The garage is quiet at this end. A few other cars, yellow overhead lights, the distant sound of the city doing what the city always does.

I'm reaching for the door handle when the shot rings out.

It cracks through the space and I spin before I've made the decision to, my hand moving, fingers finding the long pin I keep tucked into the knot of my hair.

It is an old habit. One of the bodyguards my father had briefly assigned me when I was sixteen taught me that a hairpin at the right angle is a strong weapon.

I pull it free and hold it and get into the car and I have the door halfway shut when he appears.

He comes from between two parked cars, moving wrong, one shoulder dropped and his hand pressed flat against his chest. Dark shirt, dark pants, and even in the flat yellow garage light I can see the blood spreading beneath his palm.

He looks at me through the gap in the door and I look at him and for one suspended second neither of us moves.

The light is poor but it is enough. He is tall, the kind of tall that makes the low ceiling of the garage feel smaller, with dark hair that falls just slightly across his forehead and a jaw that looks like it has been put together with the sole purpose of making people feel intimidated.

Even hunched against the pain, even bleeding, there is a broadness to his shoulders, a density to him that suggests the suit he is wearing has been made to contain something that doesn't particularly want to be contained.

His eyes, when they find mine, are pale. Green maybe, or something close to it.

Then I hear them. Footsteps, more than one set, fast and getting faster, echoing from somewhere behind him.

The gun he is holding is pointed at the floor. His jaw is set. He is losing blood fast.

I reach across and push the passenger door open.

"Get in the back."

He doesn't argue. He folds himself into the backseat with a controlled kind of agony and I hear him exhale hard as he lies down. I pull my door shut.

I don't know why I told him to get in. A smarter, more self-preserving version of me would have put the car in reverse the moment I saw him. But I hadn't and now he is bleeding in my backseat and I can hear voices getting closer and it is too late for sensible decisions.

They will search the car and there is nowhere to hide a man of his size. What will they do to me if they find him here? I can't cause any trouble for Dad.

I climb between the seats and his eyes open properly for the first time since he got in, finding my face immediately.

"Follow my lead," I whisper, already reaching for the buttons of his shirt. "And when I signal you — pretend to be sick."

"What—"

"Now is not the time." I get his shirt open and push it aside, exposing the wound, then reach back and unzip my dress at the side, pull it off my shoulders, and unhook my bra and drop it somewhere behind me.

I let my hair fall loose and position myself so that my body covers the wound at his chest completely, my bare shoulders catching the thin light from the street outside. "Do you understand me?"

Those pale green eyes move over my face with an expression I can't name and then he gives the smallest possible nod.

The voices sharpen outside.

"I told you he ran the other way." Frustration, barely contained, one man to another. "Now we've fucking lost him. We are cooked—"

"There's a car."

The footsteps resume.

I lean into him and moan and the footsteps stop.

"Are they—" A pause. A low sound of disbelief. "Are they fucking in there?"

I moan louder. His hands find my waist somewhere in the last few seconds and I feel them tighten slightly.

The knock on the window is hard enough to rock the glass. I keep going.

Another knock comes. "Open up. Open it now or we blow it open."

I scramble, performing humiliation, yanking my dress back up over my shoulders just enough to look decent, just enough to look caught, rolling the window down with wide eyes and flushed cheeks and one arm pressed across my chest. I make sure my body stays angled across him and that his face stays in shadow.

The man outside has a broad, close-shaved head, a torch in one hand and a gun in the other.

"Sorry to interrupt." He doesn't sound sorry at all. His eyes move over me and then drop, just briefly, to the shape of the man behind me. "We're looking for someone. A friend." The torch shifts. "Can we see his face?"

"I'm so sorry, he is drunk." I widen my eyes and turn back, pressing my hand to his shoulder. "Baby. Baby, hey—"

He makes an absolutely convincing sound. His whole body lurches forward and then he heaves directly onto my lap.

"Oh my God! Are you puking? Matt, you are so disgusting!"

I shove at his shoulders. With the corner of my eye, I see the man outside move the torch away in disgust, not wanting to see another man's vomit.

"Hey." His partner is further away. "You hear that? I hear something — come on, this way—"

The torch swings away and the footsteps break into a run, heading in the opposite direction, fading fast, and then the garage is quiet except for the sound of my own breathing.

I sit completely still for a moment.

Then I look down at myself and close my eyes briefly.

"That," I say, very quietly, "was deeply unpleasant."

His breathing is labored beneath me but when I look at him those green eyes are open and fixed on my face and there is something in them that might, under very different circumstances, have almost been amusement.

I climb back into the front seat, zipping up my dress and pulling it down.

He is bleeding worse than before. The composure he carries himself with is beginning to fray. His eyes are still open but working harder to stay that way.

"Shit," I say. "Shit, shit."

I start the car.

The pharmacy on 4th is open twenty-four hours. I park directly outside and walk in with my dress zipped back up and my hair as smoothed as I can manage it and find gauze and antiseptic and tweezers in the medical aisle and bring them to the counter.

The woman behind the register looks at me. Then her eyes drop, just briefly, to the smear of dark red at my hip where the fabric had pressed against him. She looks back up and rings everything through.

I get back in the car, turn the overhead light on, and do what needs to be done.

He makes almost no sound. That alone tells me a great deal about him.

I work as quickly as I can, the tweezers finding the bullet — luckily closer to the surface than I feared.

I pull it out and drop it onto the passenger seat.

I clean the wound as best I can.

"You need a hospital," I tell him. He is half-conscious, eyes at half-mast, watching me with an expression I can't quite read. "I know you can't go to a hospital. But you need to." I reach for my phone. "I'm going to call some of my father's people. They know how to handle things."

I step out of the car and press call and have just heard the first ring when the sirens cut through the street from two blocks away.

"Fuck."

I run back to the car, yank the door open ready to drive off quickly, and look at the back seat to find it empty.

I spin around. No one.

I look through the windshield in time to see a figure moving at the far end of the street, a limp carrying him toward the shadow of the bushes that edge the small strip of green between the pharmacy and the building beside it.

The police car screams past without slowing. They aren't coming here.

I sit there for a moment and let my heartbeat recover. Then I turn and look at the back seat properly. The only thing left is a small object on the leather, catching the thin orange light of the street lamp outside. I reach back and pick it up.

A crystal. Hexagonal, clear. It might have come off a watch or a ring or some piece of jewelry he wore.

I look at it for a long moment.

Then I look at the passenger seat. Then on the floor. My jaw tightens.

"My bra is gone," I say to no one.

I press my fingers against my forehead.

"Fucking pervert."