Chapter 4 #2
I watch her go. I stand in the corridor and watch Antonia Castillo walk away from me, and the thing happening in my chest is not strategy and it's not anger.
It's the realization that I want to fuck her.
Not gently. Not romantically. Not the way a groom wants his bride.
I want to pin her against the concrete wall she just walked past and find out if the fury in her voice translates to the rest of her body.
I want to know what she sounds like when the control breaks.
I want to put my hands on her hips where the karambits sit and find out whether she'd draw on me or pull me closer, and the fact that both outcomes are equally likely is the thing that's making my blood run hot.
She’s a fucking wild card. The first woman I’ve encountered who hasn’t been affected by my charm, or good looks. The first woman I want to wrap my hands around and bring to her knees, stuffing her mouth with my cock until that hostile little tongue is silenced.
She's infuriating. She's hostile. She read me down to the bone in a corridor and told me the truth about myself with the detached precision of a woman who has spent her entire life surrounded by angry men and has stopped being impressed by any of them.
And my body doesn't care about any of that. My body looked at Antonia Castillo and her blades and her fury and decided that the appropriate response is to get hard in a corridor, which is exactly the kind of complication I don't need and can't afford to want.
The marriage is a tool. She is a mechanism. The arrangement serves the plan, and the plan ends with me in the chair.
I go back to my room. Close the door. Sit at my desk and stare at the documents I was working on before she arrived, the construction contracts and the shell companies and the intel that is my leverage and my weapon.
I can't focus. The numbers won't line up. The part of my brain that runs on logic and law is being overridden by the part that is replaying her voice saying you're not special, Billone while standing close enough that I could count the freckles on her collarbone.
Fuck.
I push the documents aside. Splash water on my face in the bathroom.
Look at Aurelio's jaw in the mirror and tell myself that she is a means to an end and the tightness in my pants is a biological response to an attractive woman standing too close, nothing more, and if I need to blow off steam I'll find a gym, not fuck my bride.
The mirror doesn't look convinced.
Leone calls the formal meeting for seven. The war room, full attendance, the proper introduction with witnesses and protocol.
I dress for it because presentation is ammunition. Different suit from the one I arrived in, darker, shirt open at the collar, no tie. The first suit was for Leone. This one is for the room.
I need every person at that table to see a man who belongs there, not a visitor, not the bastard standing at the edge hoping to be invited in.
The war room is large, functional, dominated by a table covered in maps and laptops. Leone is at the head. Claudio against the wall. Charlotte beside him with her laptop. Alexandra has her tablet. Emilio stands near the door, arms crossed, bandage on his bicep, the grin on low.
Carmelo is in the corner. I've been avoiding Carmelo since I arrived, not out of fear but out of respect for a predator's territory.
The man occupies space with the constant implication that things could change very quickly if someone makes the wrong move.
He hasn't spoken to me. He's looked at me twice, both times with an assessment so thorough that I felt it on my skin.
Savannah is behind a side table in the back of the room nursing a drink, because the woman has claimed every surface in this compound that holds a bottle and a glass.
I take a seat at the table. Not at the head. Three seats down from Leone, close enough to participate, far enough to observe.
She walks in at seven on the dot.
Black. All black. The karambits on her belt, the handles visible. Her hair is pulled back now, tight, off her face, and the look says she's not here to be admired. She's here to see what’s up.
Giada is behind her. She's changed into something that shows more skin than the arrival outfit, and she surveys the room with the quick assessment of a woman deciding which man in it she's going to make the most uncomfortable tonight.
Her eyes land on Carmelo for one second too long.
Carmelo doesn't react, which on Carmelo could mean he didn't notice or could mean he noticed everything and doesn't consider her worth a response.
Antonia takes a seat across from me. Directly across. She doesn't look at me when she sits. She looks at Leone, at the maps, at Alexandra's tablet, at everything in the room that isn't me, and the deliberateness of the avoidance is grating.
"Thank you all for being here," Leone says.
"I'll keep this brief. The marriage between Matteo Billone and Antonia Castillo is a condition of the treaty between both families, mandated by authorities above both organizations.
Neither party chose this arrangement. Both parties have agreed to it.
The ceremony will take place in this compound in eight days, and I'll officiate. "
"Do we get a say in the ceremony?" Antonia asks in a bored tone. The corridor fury is locked down for the meeting, but I can feel it radiating off her from across the table.
"Within reason," Leone says. "The ceremony is private. Compound residents only. No outside guests, no Castillo presence beyond yourself and Giada. The marriage is legal and binding. After the ceremony, you'll remain in the compound as part of this family."
"As part of this family," Antonia repeats. "Not as Matteo's property."
"Nobody in this compound is anyone's property.
" Leone's voice carries the strength of a man who has dealt with trafficking cases and means the word property with his entire chest. "You're a person, Antonia.
Not an asset. Whatever the arrangement says on paper, within these walls you have autonomy, freedom of movement, and the full protection of this family. Is that clear?"
"Clear."
"Matteo. Anything to add?"
Every eye in the room shifts to me. Antonia's included. She looks at me for the first time since she sat down, and the look is the corridor all over again, the assessment, the dismissal, the fury of a woman who was traded to a man she considers beneath her.
"Your terms in the corridor were noted," I say.
"I have my own. I don't touch without permission.
I don't demand what isn't offered. And I don't pretend this arrangement is something either of us wanted.
" I pause. "But I'm here, and you're here, and the people who put us in this room are counting on us to tear each other apart because that's what makes us easier to control.
I don't intend to give them the satisfaction. "
The room is quiet. Antonia holds my gaze across the table, and the thing between us isn't warmth and it isn't respect and it isn't the beginning of anything that resembles affection.
It's hostility with a pulse. Two people who despise each other and the arrangement that made them, sitting across a table, performing civility because the room demands it while the corridor version of them is still standing fifteen feet apart ready to draw blood.
She doesn't respond. She turns back to Leone and the meeting continues. Security protocols, daily schedules, the rhythm of compound life. Charlotte takes notes. Alexandra pipes in every few minutes. Carmelo watches everyone.
Emilio catches my eye at one point and raises an eyebrow. The eyebrow says: you handled that better than I expected. Or maybe it says: you're fucked, man.
The meeting ends. People file out. Giada leaves first, pulling Antonia by the elbow toward the corridor, already talking, filling the silence with noise. Antonia goes with her, and as she passes my chair, she doesn't look at me.
But her hand goes to Vita's handle. The finger ring slides onto her index finger as she pulls it out.
She's spinning as she walks away from me, and I recognize it for what it is.
A tic. She's off balance. She won't admit it, won't show it, won't give me the satisfaction of knowing that the corridor rattled her the way it rattled me.
But the blades are spinning because something disrupted her rhythm, and I'm the only new variable in her environment.
I sit in the empty war room and listen to the spin fade down the corridor and I think about the marriage and the seat and the Replication Initiative and the six-year plan that was supposed to end with me in the chair at the head of this table.
The plan accounted for a bride. A Castillo asset. Resistance, hostility, the standard friction of a forced arrangement between two unwilling participants.
The plan did not account for the fact that the bride would stand six inches from my face, call me ordinary, and make me hard in the same sixty seconds.
It did not account for the fact that I'd spend the rest of the evening thinking about what her voice sounds like when she loses control, or what would happen if I pushed her past the point where the blades come out and into the space where something else takes over.
She's a tool. The marriage is a mechanism. I need her name on a document and her presence in this compound and nothing else.
But the part of my brain that runs on logic keeps getting interrupted by the part that remembers the way she smelled when she stood too close, and the interruption is going to become a problem if I don't get it under control.
I will get it under control.
I always do.