Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Lorenzo
The whiskey burns as it goes down.
The glass is heavy in my hand as the amber liquid reflects the faint light. I sit in the armchair with one ankle crossed over my knee. My shirt sleeves are rolled up to my elbows, making me appear relaxed for the men stationed around the room.
It’s a lie, as every muscle in my body is coiled tight. Every breath feels constricted and too shallow ever since I found out that Isabella went to see her father.
I didn’t receive that information from her. One of my men informed me.
I knew Isabella was capable of defiance.
Fuck, I even admired it.
Wanted it.
Fed off it.
That fire in her eyes, that refusal to submit, that razor-sharp tongue that gets me hard in a way nothing else does. A woman with no fire is a corpse in silk, and Isabella has never been dead a day in her life.
But this is… different.
This is her taking my men and driving across the city to meet with her father. The same man who has his own agenda and reasons for wanting to know what goes on inside these walls.
The question that’s been eating at me since I found out is: why?
Maybe she wanted to shove my authority down my throat and watch me choke on it.
Or maybe because blood calls to blood, and no matter how much she hates him, he’s still her father. She’s feeding him information. Telling him what I’m doing, where I’m going, who I’m hunting, and if I’ve found Matteo yet.
I know I’ve been different with her since that night in the kitchen.
Since I fucked her against the counter and let something slip just enough for her to see underneath, to catch a glimpse of the man instead of the monster.
I don’t know what possessed me to show her softness when softness is where men get slaughtered.
Soft kings lose kingdoms. Soft men end up in shallow graves with bullets in their skulls.
But when she said she didn’t feel safe in my house, I heard the fear in her voice, and it affected me. I wanted to protect her from this world hurting her the way it’s hurt everyone I’ve ever cared about.
I can’t afford that weakness I have with her.
So I’ve been intentionally distant since then.
I make sure the space between us feels colder than the marble floors beneath her feet.
I pretend I don’t notice how she moves or breathes, and I keep my responses short and clipped, giving her nothing to cling to.
And I avoid her eyes because if I look too long, she’ll see that I’m not at all who I pretend to be.
I fuck her most nights because I want to.
Because my cock has no control when it comes to her, no discipline, no restraint.
It wants what it wants, and what it wants is her.
That fire. That defiance. The way she fights me, even when she’s underneath me, even when she’s coming apart on my fingers, my tongue, my cock.
That’s what makes it the best fuck I’ve ever had.
I have never fallen for anyone.
Women have always been bodies, heat, and distractions. A place to bury my cock when the pressure gets too loud and the ghosts start pacing the halls of my mind. I’ve fucked plenty. Enjoyed it, and forgotten their names by morning.
Then Isabella walked into my damn life, and everything fucking changed.
I hear her in the house, and my pulse changes—quicker, sharper.
My attention immediately shifts to her location, like a compass finding north.
I catch the sound of her voice when she’s talking to Carlo in the kitchen, and I have to stop myself from following it.
From seeking her out just to be near her.
It’s pathetic. It’s dangerous. And I can’t seem to stop it.
Men in my position keep a wife at home and a mistress in the city.
They fuck anyone they want and call it their right.
But I have no intention of looking elsewhere, because no one else would be her.
No one else would claw at my back and bite my shoulder, making me work for every moan, every gasp, every shudder.
Isabella doesn’t bend.
That’s what I love about her and that’s the fucking problem. She defies me in ways that would get anyone else killed. She mouths off when she should shut up, and still breaks into rooms I’ve told her to stay the fuck out of.
I take another drink, slower this time. Let it sit on my tongue before I swallow. Let the anger spread through me evenly, like a clean layer over the uglier stuff underneath. The gnawing question of whether I can trust her at all.
There is movement at the front of the house. Footsteps on stone, muffled but clear. The door opens. My men’s voices reporting in.
I remain seated in the armchair, a glass in one hand, the other resting loosely over the armrest with fingers arranged with practiced ease.
Anyone walking in would assume I’m calm and relaxed. Just a man enjoying a drink after a long day.
Anyone who knows me would know better.
The footsteps get closer.
Isabella’s halfway through the doorway before she sees me, her attention elsewhere, probably still preoccupied with whatever the hell happened at her father’s house.
Her hair is pulled back tight, and her lips are painted that bold red I both love and hate because it makes me think about smearing it, about marking her mouth with my thumb, my tongue, my cock.
She falters. It’s just a brief pause in her stride, a split second where her body notices my presence before her mind reacts. But I catch it.
Good.
At least she knows enough to be nervous.
Her eyes meet mine across the room. Surprise flashes first, quick and unguarded. Then caution as she reassesses the situation. Then that cool expression settles into place. The one she wears when she wants to pretend nothing gets under her skin, that she’s untouchable, unshakable.
“Lorenzo,” she says.
My name on her lips shouldn’t stir heat curling in my gut. Shouldn’t make me crave hearing her say it again, breathless and broken beneath me, but it still fucking does.
I don’t answer straight away.
I just sit here with the glass in my hand, letting my silence fill the room, spreading to every corner until it’s weighing down on both of us. Let her sense its weight and wonder what I know, what I’m thinking, what I’m about to do.
Her chin lifts slightly, defiant even now when she knows she’s walked into something she can’t talk her way out of.
That is when I notice him. Rico, one of the newer men on the inside rotation. Mid-thirties, well-built, quiet, and good with a gun. Better at following orders. Or so I thought.
He stands by the archway off the foyer, with a straight posture and his eyes fixed on Isabella.
Not on her face but lower, dragging over her body with the kind of greedy interest that belongs in a gutter, not under my roof.
Starting at her legs, crawling up her thighs, pausing at the curve of her hips, then climbing higher to her tits where his gaze fucking lingers, hungry and deliberate.
Up to her throat, her mouth, then back down again like he is memorizing every inch of her.
It’s the look of a man imagining things he has no right to imagine.
Undressing her with his eyes. Picturing her spread out beneath him.
Thinking about what her mouth would feel like wrapped around his cock.
Wondering how she sounds when she comes.
He is eye-fucking my wife.
In my house.
On my time.
With his blood still warm in his veins because I haven’t spilled it yet.
The disrespect is so fucking blatant and arrogant, that I can’t believe what I’m seeing for a moment. This piece of shit actually thinks he can stand there and mentally strip her down, imagine his hands where only mine belong, picture his cock inside her, and just walk away breathing.
Something inside me snaps so sharply it pierces right through my control, splitting it wide open and allowing everything I’ve been holding back to flood out.
The world narrows down to him. To the sheer fucking audacity of standing in my house, on my payroll, breathing my air, and looking at her as if she isn’t mine.
As if I haven’t marked her, claimed her, fucked her so thoroughly that my scent is still on her skin, my bruises still fading on her thighs, my cum still inside her from 4 am this morning when I took what is mine.
White-hot rage floods my system. It’s possessive in a way that blurs my vision at the edges, making every instinct scream to destroy the threat in front of me. To eliminate it. To make an example so brutal that no man will ever repeat this mistake.
Isabella is fucking mine. My wife. My woman. My property in the eyes of this world and every world that matters. And no man gets to look at her that way and walk out of here unscathed.
Isabella says something, but I don’t process her words. My entire focus is on Rico, on the man who just made the last mistake of his life.
His eyes flick to mine, and I see the exact moment he realizes his mistake.
I watch as the color drains from his face, as if someone pulled a plug.
Observe his posture shift from casual to rigid.
Watch as he comes to terms with the fact that he has just signed his own death warrant.
Whatever harmless fantasy he believed he could indulge in, it was fatal.
Fear flashes across his face—that expression men have when they know death is near and nothing can be done to prevent it.
Good. He ought to be fucking scared.
The whiskey glass touches the side table with a soft clink. Crystal against wood. It’s a controlled movement—the opposite of the violence coursing through my blood, coiling tight and lethal in my chest.
I stand up from the chair slowly and every muscle in my body tightens, wound up and ready to strike. Predatory. Controlled. The way I’ve moved a hundred times before I killed someone in back alleys, warehouses, and basements where screams don’t carry.
This is who I am. Not the businessman in the suit or a fucking husband playing house.