2. Dante
Dante
Present day
“You'll want to sit for this.” Luca enters my office without knocking.
“I am sitting."
He drops a photograph on my desk.
A young woman smiles shyly at the camera. She’s pretty. No, she’s beautiful. Golden blonde hair, pale blue eyes, and cupid’s bow lips.
Something about her face captivates me, and I can’t seem to pull my eyes away.
I must stare for a while, because Luca clears his throat.
"Polina Lebedev," he explains. "Twenty-one. Daughter of a Bratva officer. She vanished ten days ago. Kidnapped.”
"Tragic. Why is it on my desk?"
"Because she surfaced." His voice stays even. "In a trafficking cell tied to Lombardi."
“Fuck.” I close my eyes as I process this development.
After taking over as Don of the Chicago outfit when Alessio Moretti was killed, I faced two main challenges.
First, I shut down human trafficking operations, but not all members of our organization are happy about that. Moretti loyalists, led by Tommaso Lombardi, continue to operate trafficking cells under my radar, despite us working to stomp them out.
The second challenge has been making peace with the Bratva. Not easy after Moretti painted kill room walls with Russian blood for sport.
Now Lombardi may have a Bratva daughter in a shipping container in my territory, bound for god knows where, and every Italian-Russian bridge I've built is at risk of burning.
“Do we have a location?"
“Meatpacking district. A place off Pulaski."
“Intel?”
“We need to move asap. Get me Mattia and Dario and eight more. Silencers. I want it clean. I don't want to be inside longer than necessary. I’ll lead.”
Luca looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.
"Peace is at stake.” I run a hand down my face. “Volkov needs to hear that I came for her myself. Not that I sent men. We’ll recover the girl, patch her up if necessary, and return her to her father wrapped in apologies and the heads of the men who took her.”
He doesn’t argue. That's why he's my underboss.
When we arrive at the Pulaski site, my men take the exterior guards without a sound.
Inside, gunshots last for no more than twenty seconds, and then it's done. I step over the body of a mafia soldier I've been paying wages to for two years—fucking traitor—and follow Mattia’s flashlight down a corridor of chain-link holding pens.
Empty. Empty. Empty.
I start to think they got the drop on us when Mattia stops at the last pen, his eyes widening.
I step briskly to the pen and look through the chain link.
There's a girl on the concrete.
She's pressed into the corner, knees to her chest, arms wrapped around them, and she’s folded so small that for a moment I don't see her.
Her feet are bare and filthy. There's a yellow-green bruise on her cheekbone, and fresher ones on her neck and shoulders. Her wrists are ringed raw where she was clearly bound. She’s been through two weeks of hell.
Luca takes bolt cutters to the lock. The sound makes her flinch so hard her shoulder hits the wall.
She tucks her body tighter, and goes completely still—eyes down, breath shallow, braced for whatever's coming.
I realize she thinks I'm either one of her captors or a buyer. And she's preparing to endure me.
I feel…uncomfortable.
What the fuck?
Uncomfortable is not in my repertoire. Not until now.
Mattia attempts to enter the pen, but I stop him. “I got this.”
But do I? Something is happening to me that I don’t have a name for.
I look at her curled on filthy concrete in a torn ballgown, hair matted, skin bruised, and a thought slams into me—mine to protect; mine to keep; mine to care for.
Hollow-eyed and trembling and mine. I have never once in my life had thoughts like it about any living soul.
I don’t know her. I don't know how her voice sounds. I don't know whether she prefers tea or coffee or any of the ten thousand things I’d suddenly, insanely love to spend the rest of my life learning.
Then I remind myself of my strategy: recover, repair, return.
Return.
I crouch slowly, both hands where she can see them. Her eyes come up and meet mine for less than a second before dropping again.
"You're safe. No one will hurt you.”
One eye finds me through the gold curtain of dirty hair. Even filthy and half-starved on the concrete floor of a cage, she is so beautiful it hurts, and I hate myself for noticing.
"Okay," she whispers, but she doesn't raise her eyes to mine again. She doesn’t believe me. She thinks it’s a cruel trick. "Thank you."
Thank you. Ten days in a holding cell, and this girl thanks me.
"Can you stand?"
She doesn't answer, but feebly attempts to get to her feet.
Slowly, so as not to scare her, I reach out my hand to help.
I can see the hesitation in her face, but before she has a chance to come to a decision, her eyes roll back in her head and her knees give out.
I catch her, cradling her to my chest.
She weighs almost nothing, and that fact alone makes me want to revive her captors and kill them again—slower this time.
Outside, Mattia offers to take her from me, and I hear myself growl—actually growl. I’d sooner take a bullet to the abdomen than hand her over.
Nobody else touches her.
She remains unconscious as I carry her to the car. Holding her on my lap, I maneuver us into the back seat and instruct Luca to drive.
"Northwestern Hospital has a private wing standing by," he says.
"My home."
A long pause. He doesn’t speak, but his eyebrow climbs a full centimeter, which says volumes.
The plan I walked in with—patch her up, hand her back, keep peace with the Bratva—is still in the forefront of my mind. It’s the best course of action.
But I already know I'm not going to do it.