Chapter Nine Tom
Chapter Nine
Tom
I stared at the phone in my hand.
How did we get here?
From blocking him, I’d gone to flooding his damn inbox in the span of forty-eight hours.
Me: Hey, I unblocked you.
Me: I thought about your conundrum, and I am willing to fuck you to prove you’re a bottom.
Me: If you don’t want to talk about what happened today, we don’t have to. I already proved I can keep a secret.
The last one I decided to delete, though. Better not lay it too thick with my potential informant.
I thought he’d get a kick out of my hookup proposal, but it had been ten hours and he still hadn’t answered, even though the message box indicated he’d read my first two texts.
Despite firmly believing he deserved the death penalty, I was worried. Worried he’d done something to himself. Worried it was because of me. The guilt festering beneath my exterior bubbled to the surface.
Fuck it. I bit the bullet and picked up the phone to call him.
For work. Just for work.
The line went straight to voicemail without ringing once. I frowned at my phone.
Did he…?
I seized my work phone from my desk and called the same number. He didn’t pick up. This time, it rang seven times before going to voicemail.
“Hey, this is Enzo. If you’re hearing this, you’re pretty bad at social cues.
Or maybe you just want me too much to know when to quit.
Unfortunately, I’m not three hundred years old, so I’m never going to listen to your voicemail.
Guess you could text me, but if you got this far, you already did, and I ghosted you. Anyway, go METS. All my love. Bye.”
He blocked me.
He.
Blocked.
Me.
I sat back in my office chair, threading my fingers into my hair and tugging until my scalp burned.
At least he’d found his long-lost sense of self-preservation.
Only I didn’t actually care about his need to save himself. I needed to nail his ass and put him in prison. It frustrated me that I’d made a mistake. It was unlike me as an agent.
I always planned first and acted later.
Up until the night in the alleyway, I’d never miscalculated one step in my entire career.
I regretted the moment I made a comment about his scars. It wasn’t my place. But something kicked me into action. The same primal protectiveness that had sat dormant for eight years and woken up to the sight of Cash trying to ruin Enzo’s life because of his sexuality.
Maybe it was the fact that I felt anything at all. I planned every interaction in my life so cautiously, I rarely left room for surprises. Enzo hurting himself had surprised me.
He was the careless, sunshine one. He wasn’t supposed to be well rounded, deep, and haunted.
With any luck, he’d get over his freak-out and reconsider my proposition. Getting this man into my bed was the fastest, most pleasurable way to milk information out of him. Agents recruiting informants did a lot worse to get to their objective.
I was going to fuck the truth out of Enzo one way or the other. And he’d let me, because I was his safest bet. Anyone else would be too much of a risk. But the thing about us? We both had too much to lose.
Then I was going to collect all the information he’d give me and use it against him.
My phone beeped with a message. I looked down, expecting to see Enzo’s name, but it was just the airline company, notifying me about the option to check in early.
ALPHA AIRLINES: It is almost time for your check-in!
I had booked a last-minute trip for work. Nothing that’d keep me longer than twenty-four hours from my home turf, though.
I stepped in front of the pinboard in my office.
The one with the entire Ferrante family pictures laid out in hierarchical order.
I yanked Vello’s picture from the top of the pyramid, wrinkled the Polaroid photograph, and tossed it into the trash.
I pinned Luca’s photo instead. The new don. The king of the underworld.
Then I grabbed one of my darts and sent it straight into Enzo’s pretty face.
Three days.
I would give him three days to cool off before I started hunting my new favorite prey.