Chapter 3
Blood and Buttercream
Marcus
Four forty-three AM and I'm sitting in my car outside Celeste's bakery like a fucking stalker. Which, technically, I am.
The street is empty except for a few delivery trucks and one drunk college kid stumbling home. Baltimore at this hour is a different creature—quieter but more honest. The monsters don't hide when they think no one's watching.
I should be at my restaurant, prepping for the morning rush.
My sous chef is probably having a panic attack right about now, wondering where I am and why the special board is still blank.
But I can't shake this feeling in my gut.
The same feeling that saved my life in half a dozen kitchens and back alleys.
The feeling that says something's wrong.
My phone shows Celeste's apartment cameras—she left twenty minutes ago, earlier than usual.
Probably couldn't sleep after our messages last night.
I know I didn't. Just kept replaying that livestream, that moan, the way her tongue swept across her finger like she was tasting something far better than frosting.
Cazzo, I'm hard again just thinking about it.
I'm forty-seven years old. I've had my share of women—rough women, soft women, women who knew exactly what they wanted from a man with hands like mine.
Hands that have broken bones and crafted soufflés with equal precision.
But this slip of a girl with her romance novels and her innocence has me acting like a teenage boy with his first crush.
Movement near the bakery's back entrance catches my eye. Someone in a dark hoodie, fumbling with the door. Too tall to be Celeste. Too nervous to be a professional.
I'm out of my car before I consciously decide to move.
The figure doesn't hear me coming—my father taught me how to move silently before he taught me how to hold a knife. By the time they realize I'm there, my hand is already around their throat, slamming them against the brick wall.
"What the fuck—" The voice is young, male, scared.
I rip the hood back. Pretty boy face, probably twenty-five, with the soft look of someone who's never had to fight for anything. There's a backpack at his feet and something metallic in his hand—lock picks.
"You have three seconds to tell me why you're breaking into this bakery," I say, my voice deadly calm. The voice that's made grown men piss themselves in restaurant kitchens and back rooms.
"It's... it's none of your business, man. Let go!"
I squeeze harder, feeling his pulse rabbit against my palm. "Two seconds."
"I'm... I'm Celeste's boyfriend! Ex-boyfriend. I just need to get something I left—"
The word "boyfriend" hits like cold water, but I don't let it show. Celeste had a boyfriend. Of course she did. Beautiful girl like that, sweet, innocent...
"She's never mentioned you." I lean closer, and he flinches at whatever he sees in my face. "And I would know."
"We broke up six months ago, right after her grandmother died. Look, I just need to get my stuff—"
"At five in the morning? With lock picks?"
His eyes dart away. "She won't return my calls."
I notice the backpack at his feet is already partially full. This isn't his first visit. I kick it open with my foot, and its contents spill across the alley—some men's clothes, a laptop, and...
A journal. Small, leather-bound, with butterflies on the cover.
That's not his.
I release him just long enough to grab the journal, flipping it open. Celeste's handwriting fills the pages—not recipes or business plans, but dreams. Lists. Places I Want to Visit. Books to Read. Things to Do Before 30.
And then I find it. The page that makes my hands shake.
Baby Names I Love:
For girls: Sofia, Isabella, Rose
For boys: James, Michael, Alexander
Sofia.
My vision blurs. Sofia was the name we'd chosen. Seven months, two weeks, four days. The longest I'd ever hoped for anything. Then the bleeding started, and the doctors couldn't stop it, and she was born too early, too small, too still.
Sofia Benedetti. Who lived for three minutes. Who I held while she tried to breathe and couldn't. Whose tiny fingers wrapped around mine as she died.
"That's... that's hers," the ex-boyfriend is saying, but his voice sounds far away. "She's always writing in it. Stupid dreams and shit. I told her it was childish."
The rage that fills me is ice cold and familiar. This pathetic creature had Celeste and called her dreams stupid. Had access to this beautiful, innocent girl and made her feel small.
"What's your name?" I ask, my voice deceptively soft.
"Br-Brandon."
"Brandon." I test the name, then grab his throat again, slamming him harder against the wall. "You're going to leave Baltimore. Tonight. You're going to forget Celeste exists. You're going to forget this bakery, this journal, everything."
"You can't—"
I pull out my knife—the one I use for fish, curved and wickedly sharp. Press it against his cheek, just hard enough to draw a single drop of blood.
"I know people who make other people disappear. The kind of disappearing where they never find the body. Are we understanding each other, Brandon?"
He nods frantically, tears streaming down his face.
"Say it."
"I'll... I'll leave. Tonight. I'll never come back."
"Good boy." I release him and he collapses, gasping. "Run."
He scrambles to his feet and takes off down the alley, leaving his backpack behind. I wait until his footsteps fade, then sink down against the wall, the journal clutched in my hands.
Sofia.
My baby girl's name in another woman's handwriting. A woman who dreams of children, who picks names for babies she doesn't have yet. Who has no idea that one of those names belongs to a ghost that haunts me every fucking day.
That's how Celeste finds me at 5:17 AM—sitting on the dirty alley ground outside her bakery, a knife in one hand and her journal in the other, crying like I haven't cried in years.
"Marcus?" Her voice is uncertain but not afraid.
I’m sure she recognizes me from the photo.
"Oh my God, are you hurt? Is that blood?" She drops to her knees beside me, her hands immediately going to my face, checking for injuries. The touch breaks something in me.
"Not mine," I manage.
She sees the journal then, recognizes it. But instead of demanding answers, instead of asking why I have it or what happened, she does something I don't expect.
She sits down beside me on the filthy alley ground and takes my hand. Doesn't speak. Doesn't push. Just holds my hand while I struggle to breathe through thirteen years of grief that her handwriting ripped wide open.
"Sofia," I finally whisper. "You wrote Sofia."
"It's a beautiful name," she says softly.
"It was my daughter's name."
Was. Such a small word for such an enormous loss.
"Tell me about her?"
And God help me, I do. Right there in the alley, holding this girl's hand, I tell her about the blood and the hospitals and the three minutes that destroyed me.
About my ex-wife Isabella, who blamed me, blamed herself, blamed God.
About the divorce that followed, inevitable as gravity.
About how I haven't said Sofia's name out loud in five years because it hurts too fucking much.
Celeste doesn't offer empty platitudes. Doesn't say she's sorry or that it wasn't my fault or any of the useless things people say. She just listens, her thumb stroking over my knuckles, until I run out of words.
"Your ex was here," I finally manage. "Brandon. Trying to break in."
"That asshole," she sighs. "Let me guess—he wanted his laptop back. The one he definitely didn't leave here because he was never actually my boyfriend, just a guy who hung around and criticized everything I did until I believed I was as boring as he said."
"You're not boring." The words come out fierce, angry. "You're extraordinary."
She laughs, but it's sad. "I read romance novels alone on Saturday nights and my biggest adventure is trying new frosting flavors."
"You dream of babies named Sofia." My voice cracks on her name.
"You dance when you think no one's watching.
You cry over fictional characters because you have so much empathy it spills out of you.
You moan when you taste something sweet because you experience joy with your whole body.
You're the least boring person I've ever watched—met. Met."
She stares at me, those hazel eyes wide in the dim light. "You really have been watching."
"For six months. I told myself it was protection. What your grandmother asked. But..."
"But?"
"But the first time I saw you cry over that book—'Savage Prince,' chapter twenty-three, where he chooses revenge over her—I wanted to comfort you.
The first time I saw you dance, I wanted to dance with you.
The first time I saw you lick frosting off your finger.
.." I trail off, my cock hardening at the memory.
"What?" she whispers.
"I wanted to know what you taste like."
The air between us crackles. She's still holding my hand, and I can feel her pulse racing where our wrists touch.
"Marcus—"
"I'm not a good man, Celeste. I've done things that would terrify you.
Violent things. Necessary things, but violent all the same.
I'm forty-seven years old, divorced, and I wake up most nights dreaming about a baby who never breathed.
I run restaurants by day and handle… less legitimate business interests by night.
I'm everything your books warn you about. "
"My books don't warn me about men like you," she says softly. "They promise me men like you."
Before I can process that, she leans in and kisses me.
It's soft, tentative, inexperienced. Her lips are trembling against mine, and I realize—fuck—this might be her first real kiss. The thought makes me groan, and she takes that as encouragement, pressing closer.
I cup her face with my free hand, the one not still holding the knife, and show her how to angle her head. How to part her lips. How to let me in.
She tastes like vanilla and coffee and something uniquely her. But more than that, she tastes like absolution.
The kiss is salt-sweet from my tears, gentle when everything in me wants to be rough. I could devour her right here in this alley, press her against the brick and show her exactly what those books she reads are really about. But she deserves better than that for her first everything.
"Bella," I murmur against her lips. "Beautiful girl. You have no idea what you're starting."
"Maybe I do," she whispers back. "Maybe I've been reading about it for years, waiting."
A car door slams nearby, making us both jump. William and Jake are striding down the alley, their faces tight with concern.
"We saw Brandon on the cameras," William says, then stops short when he sees us on the ground, Celeste in my arms, my face a mess of tears and her lipstick. "What—"
"He's gone," I say simply. "Encouraged to leave Baltimore."
Jake takes in the scene—the journal, the knife, our position. "You told her?"
"About Sofia," Celeste says quietly, and both men go still. They know what that name means to me. What it costs me to say it.
"And she’s still here?" William's voice is carefully neutral.
"Why would I leave?" Celeste stands, brushing off her dress, then offers me her hand. "My grandmother left me more than recipes, didn't she? More than a bakery?"
The three of us exchange looks. This isn't how we planned to tell her, but then again, nothing about this is going according to plan.
"Yes," William says finally. "Much more."
"Criminal more?" she asks, and there's something in her voice that isn't fear. It's... curiosity. Maybe even excitement.
"Yes," Jake confirms.
She nods, like she'd already suspected. "The locked room in the basement. The weird recipe measurements that don't make sense. The fact that three dangerous men have been watching me for six months on a dead woman's orders."
"You're not scared?" I ask.
She looks at me—really looks at me. Sees the blood on my hands (Brandon's). The knife I'm still holding. The tears drying on my face. The violence and vulnerability all tangled together.
"I've been reading about men like you my whole adult life," she says simply. "Dark men. Dangerous men. Men who do terrible things for the right reasons. I thought they were fantasy."
"We're not fantasy," William warns. "We're real, and the danger is real, and once you know everything, you can't go back."
She walks to the bakery door, unlocks it with steady hands, then turns back to us.
"Then I guess you'd better come in and tell me everything."
We follow her inside, and I can't help but think about how this started—with me protecting her from an ex-boyfriend—and how it's evolved into something else entirely. I pick up the journal, handling it like the precious thing it is. A record of her dreams, including ones that mirror my nightmares.
Sofia. Maybe the name doesn't have to belong only to grief anymore. Maybe it can belong to hope too. To futures imagined by beautiful girls who read dirty books and dance alone at midnight.
As I follow them inside, I catch William's eye. He nods once. He sees it too—how she's already handling us, already managing three dangerous men with an instinct that would make her grandmother proud.
"So," Celeste says, flipping on the lights and starting the coffee maker like this is any normal morning, "who wants to tell me how my sweet grandmother built a criminal empire while teaching me to make cannoli?"
Jake laughs, dark and appreciative. "Oh princess, you really have no idea what you've inherited."
"Then educate me," she challenges, and there's steel in her voice now. Steel and curiosity and something else.
Hunger.
The same hunger I see when she reads those books. The hunger for more than ordinary. More than safe.
"Careful what you ask for, bella," I warn, setting the journal on the counter. "Once you know, everything changes."
She meets my eyes, unflinching. "Everything already changed the moment you three decided to watch me. Now I want to know why."
And so, as dawn breaks properly over Baltimore and the bakery fills with the smell of coffee and rising bread, we begin to tell her the truth about Rosalie Moretti.
About the empire built in flour and blood.
About the inheritance that's going to make her the most powerful woman in Baltimore's underworld.
If she wants it.
Looking at her now—fierce and unafraid, demanding answers from three men who could destroy her—I think she does want it.
God help us all, I think she was born for it.
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