Chapter 4
Marcello
The Mayfair penthouse rises twenty-seven floors above the street and the street is already a different world from that club—the low thrum of traffic, the amber wash of London at midnight through floor-to-ceiling glass, the particular hush that only obscene money can buy.
I have stood in this room a hundred times.
Tonight, with a trembling Russian angel planted in the center of my white marble floor, it feels like somewhere I have never been before.
She doesn't look at the view. Smart girl.
Her eyes move the way mine do when I enter an unfamiliar room—not admiring, assessing.
Exit to the left. Kitchen to the right. Two men visible, Faustino near the bar, Donatello at the hallway.
Her gaze clocks each of them, measures them, files them.
Then it returns to me, steady as a compass needle, and I feel it like a thumb pressed to the center of my chest.
Dio. She is something.
Ash blonde hair—waist-length, tangled from being thrown over my shoulder like cargo—falls in curtains around a face that belongs on the altar of a church, not in a Mayfair auction room or in the sights of every man with a paddle and a sick appetite.
Oval face. Cheekbones like carved ivory.
Lips pressed together so firmly they've gone pale at the edges.
And those eyes—dove gray, still and deep and full of a calculation so precise it makes my cock stir and my jaw set in equal measure.
Terrified. She’s not showing it, and I respect that more than I can say.
The demi-cup babydoll and G-string are still what she wears. The stilettos make her nearly my height, which is an unexpected problem because it puts her mouth at exactly the wrong level for a man trying to think clearly.
My suit jacket is off my shoulders before the thought fully forms. I cross to her in four strides and drop it around her shoulders.
She flinches at the sudden proximity, that pale throat working as she swallows. Then she pulls the lapels together with both hands. Her knuckles are white.
“Thank you.”
Her English is excellent, the accent soft and precise, the kind that comes from books and a careful teacher rather than television. Something about that detail lodges in me like a splinter. I file it and pull out my phone.
He materializes at my shoulder—six-four of calm lethality, mahogany hair, obsidian eyes already reading the situation beneath the shadow of a jaw that hasn't seen a razor in three days.
The Romano brothers are built from the same mold: broad, olive-skinned, the kind of men a room notices and then reconsiders.
Donatello is the sharper edge of the two—imposing where Faustino is watchful, a withering stare where his brother offers a raised eyebrow.
My right hand. My brother in everything but blood.
He has been at my side since before I could shave, and he has a gift for knowing what I need before I ask for it.
Almost before I ask for it.
A pause. Barely half a second, but I know Donatello well enough to read the entire sentence he doesn't speak out loud.
Another pause. Then he nods once and steps away, phone to his ear, and I catch the quiet warmth that moves through his voice when the line connects—the particular softening that only happens when he speaks to Paolina.
It used to irritate me how thoroughly that woman rearranged him. Standing here watching this pale girl grip my jacket lapels like armor, I find I have slightly less room to be irritated about it than I used to.
Faustino pours two glasses of water and sets them on the coffee table without being asked.
His expression communicates nothing except that it has already assessed everything and found it acceptable.
My left hand. Steady as stone, sharp as a blade, lucky as his name promises.
The three of us have been the point of every operation for four years.
We don't need words for the fundamentals.
The angel—Gala—watches Donatello move to the window with his phone and Faustino retreat to the kitchen, and I see her recalibrating.
She expected something else. Chaos, perhaps.
Cruelty. The kind of room where men shout and grab and take what they want with their hands, because that is the only kind of room she has ever been inside.
I want to know who built that expectation into her. And I want to break their hands.
The thought is immediate and disproportionate, and I am a man who does not do disproportionate. I set it aside.
Donatello returns with a folded stack of clothes—one of my shirts, a pair of Gemma's sweatpants left here from her last London visit, thick socks.
He sets them on the arm of the sofa with the wordless precision of a man who grew up in service to this family and has long since understood that service has nothing to do with submission.
He catches my eye and tips his head toward the hallway.
I grunt.
Donatello retreats.
Gala watches this exchange. When I turn back to her, those gray eyes are slightly less flat than before. There’s a thread of confusion in them, like a woman who walked into a room expecting one mathematics and found another.
Her chin lifts. A fraction of an inch—a tell so small most men would miss it.
I don't miss tells. ‘What’s that about’ is what the lift of that chin says, and we both know she's right, and we both know I'm also right, because the first thing a girl on an auction stage understands is hierarchy.
She takes the clothes. She doesn't thank me this time.
I don't want her to. Instead, I point to the powder room.
She returns. The shirt—charcoal, my monogram at the cuff, sized for my chest—swamps her to mid-thigh.
My sweatpants bunched at her waist, tied in a knot to keep them up.
The stilettos are gone, her feet bare on the marble, and without those four inches of heel she is smaller than she looked on the stage, softer, younger, and so heartbreakingly out of place in this penthouse that something in my ribcage does something I choose not to examine.
The stage makeup is gone, and what's underneath it is extraordinary—not the performance of beauty the auction dressed her in but the real thing, unadorned.
Clear skin. The faintest shadows under her eyes.
A lower lip with a healed split at the corner, old enough to have faded to a thin white line but recent enough to tell me it happened within the last year.
Someone hit her. Someone hit her mouth.
My molars press together. I keep my face blank.
Faustino laid the coffee table with food—Donatello called ahead to the restaurant two blocks over, the one that owes the family a significant favor and doesn't ask questions. Roast chicken. Bread. Roasted vegetables. Simple. Real. Food that feeds a person rather than impresses one.
She stops at the edge of the rug and looks at the table. Something flickers across her face. It’s there and gone in under a second, but I catch it. Not greed. Not appetite. Something more complicated than either. A wariness, as if abundance is the setup for something worse.
Christ. What did they do to her?
She glances at me. Then at the food. Then she sits on the edge of the sofa—not settling, perching, ready to move—and she begins to eat.
Slowly. Controlled. Small bites, deliberate chewing, like someone rationing a resource that has always been scarce.
She eats the way people eat who have learned someone may take the plate away.
I drink my espresso and don't watch her. Or I watch her the way I watch everything I need to understand—peripherally, steadily, building a picture.
When she's eaten half of what's on the plate, she stops and sets down her fork. Not because she's finished, but because she's decided half is sufficient; taking more than half is dangerous.
I want to tell her she can eat all of it. Let her know there’s more in the kitchen. I don't, because she will read it as pity and close back up like a fist, and the small opening she has allowed is worth more to me right now than her being fed.
She absorbs this. Her eyes do that cataloguing thing again—reading me, reading the room, reading the quality of the silence and what it means. She isn’t a woman who takes statements on faith. She wants the architecture of certainty, not just certainty itself.
Good. That will keep her alive.
“Who are you? Why did you take me?”
The question lands flat and direct, with no tremor in it. Those dove-gray eyes are steady on mine.
I could say no. It would be the simple answer. But she’s too intelligent for simple answers, and lying to a woman who reads rooms the way she does will cost me more than the truth.
“Marcello Lucchese. I took you because I wanted you. That’s reason enough. You were in the wrong place, owned by the wrong men who can no longer touch you. Now you’re not. You’re here. With me. And you’re not leaving.”
A long pause. The city hums twenty-seven floors below. Somewhere in the penthouse, Donatello speaks in low Italian on his phone, and from the softness of his voice, I know it's Paolina again.
Gala blinks. She expected me to argue, to override, to deploy the weight of my name and my organization and my fifty kilos of tactical advantage.
Instead, I gave her acknowledgment, and she doesn't know what to do with it.
The wariness flickers back. This time aimed not at the food or the room but at me specifically.
Smart girl. I am the most dangerous thing in this apartment.
I look at her for a moment. The honest answer is that I don't know yet.
That something happened when she walked out from behind that curtain, trembling and defiant in equal measure, and my body decided before my mind had the paperwork ready.
That the thought of another man's paddle going up for her made something in me go very cold and very certain.
Want it. Take it. has been the family's motto my entire life and tonight, for the first time, it felt like more than a transaction.
I don't say any of that.
The guest room is at the end of the hall—king bed, white linen, blackout curtains, its own bathroom. Understated and expensive, the way all of my spaces are. I push the door open and stand back.
She moves past me into the room, and I catch her scent—something underneath the auction's perfume, something that's purely her. Clean. Faintly warm. My hand tightens on the doorframe.
She turns to look at me, standing in the middle of the room in my shirt and her bare feet, and for one unguarded second something crosses her face that isn't calculation or survival or wariness. Something younger. Something that might, in a different life, in a safer world, have been relief.
Then it's gone. Her chin lifts.
"Thank you," she says. Precise. Neutral. The two words cost her nothing because she's decided they cost her nothing.
“Tomorrow morning we leave for Sicily.”
She flinches.
“I can’t leave without finding my sister,” she starts, then rushes on in my silence. “The Bratva have them too. They’ve stolen girls from my village.” Her eyes darken to steel before she spits out, “My father sold us to them. And I’ll make him pay.”
My eyebrow rises at her hatred, and inwardly I vow to get her revenge.
“I will handle it,” I respond as I pull the door shut.
Four seconds later, from the other side of the wood, I hear the snick of the lock turning.
I don't move for a moment. My hand still rests on the door handle, and the apartment is quiet around me, and Donatello's voice has gone silent from wherever he was talking to Paolina, and the city breathes twenty-seven floors below.
She locked it.
Good.
The corner of my mouth pulls. Just barely. I push off the door and move back toward the living room, rolling my shirtsleeves down, and I don't examine the fact that I want, more than I have wanted anything in recent memory, to be on the other side of that door.
Donatello is at the bar, pouring two glasses of Barolo. He holds one out as I approach. We drink in silence for a moment, the way men who have known each other since boyhood can.
A pause. He turns his glass, looking at the wine, not at me. ''You've never asked for Paolina before,'' he says. ''For any of them.''
He doesn't push it. That's what I value most about Donatello Romano—he knows the precise moment when a man needs space around a thought. He raises his glass instead. I raise mine.
We drink.
I refill my glass and take it to the window, looking out at the city—the orange-lit canyons of Mayfair, the distant black ribbon of the Thames, the indifferent glitter of a world that doesn't know or care what happened in a private auction room tonight.
My phone buzzes. A Bratva number—the third time in the last two hours.
I look at it. I set it face down on the glass.
Faustino appears at my shoulder. His voice is quiet, factual. The tone he uses when the information is significant and he wants me to have it without theater.
“They registered the number to a shell company tied to Yuri Sobol's London operation. He runs the Bratva's European auction network. Answers to someone above him, whose name we don't have yet.” A pause. “But we have Sobol.”
Sobol. His name lands, and I file it with the same cold efficiency I file all intelligence. The man who put her on that stage. The man whose crew Petrov belongs to. One name at the end of a thread I intend to pull until the entire network unravels.
They want her back.
They are welcome to come and try.
Somewhere down the hall, behind a locked door, an ash-blonde girl in my shirt is lying in a bed that isn't a barn floor or a trafficker's van bench or a stage in a Mayfair club.
The thought of what put her on that stage in the first place—the bruise on her wrist, the healed split on her lip, the way she ate like someone rationing a resource that has always been scarce—coils in my chest like a wire pulled tight.
She asked me why her.
I don't know yet. But I am going to find out.
I pick up my phone and dial Donatello. He answers on the first ring—he always answers on the first ring, as if sleep is something that happens to other people.
A beat of silence. Then, as quiet and certain as everything Donatello does, “Consider it done.”
I end the call. Set the phone on the glass ledge. Finish my wine.
Down the hall, the lock holds.
For now, let it hold. She has earned the night.
Tomorrow, we fly to Sicily. And then we begin.