BROOKLYN
The man is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and he is going to be a problem.
That’s the first whole thought I manage, surfacing out of a thick, cottony dark with a skull two sizes too small and a mouth like I’ve been chewing sand. The lights are knives and my forehead is the dartboard. My eyes won’t focus on anything—except him.
Some animal part of me decided he was the most important thing in the room before the rest of me was even awake.
Deep brown eyes, nearly black. Black hair.
A thick beard over a jaw cut from something harder than bone, and below it, climbing his throat and disappearing behind his ear, ink.
A tattoo I can’t read and want to, which is its own brand of insane, considering I have no idea where I am or how I got here.
He’s everything I have ever been stupid for. Down to the snarl on his too-pretty mouth and the flat black nothing in his stare that should send me running and instead pins me to the mattress like a moth to a board.
That alone tells me how much trouble I’m in.
Because I don’t look at men like this. I size them up.
It’s the first thing I do, every time. Can he hold his own, or is he one more boy who folds the second a girl hits back?
It is always the latter. And the ones who weren’t afraid of my fists were afraid of my last name, and somewhere between those two facts is the reason I’m nineteen and still, technically, a virgin.
Technically because there’s exactly one exception and I’ve only ever seen him in a mask.
A stranger who learned my body in the dark better than any boy ever earned the right to, who I’ve been quietly, stupidly his for longer than I’d admit out loud.
The one I was baiting to come find me when I was texting Tyler to see if we were still on for later—before whoever this is turned my whole life inside out.
When I was little I had the biggest, dumbest crush on my mom’s broody older brother. I thought Dom was the prettiest thing alive. I even had a private name for him, one I will be taking to my grave, back before he became my uncle, back before I grew old enough to be horrified by my own memory.
This man makes that look like what it was. A warm-up.
“Who the fuck are you?”
It comes out cracked and furious, and I’m proud of it, because my heart is slamming so hard I’m half-sure he can see it through my shirt. I’m not much of a cusser, but in this case, it feels warranted.
“Such a filthy tongue,” he murmurs, “inside that pretty mouth.” He shakes his head, but his lips curve, like I’ve delighted him. “Tsk, tsk.”
“Who. The. Fuck. Are. You.” I punctuate every word, slow and even as my Uncle G’s voice is right there in the back of my skull the way it always is, warning me like experienced old people do—your stubbornness is going to get you bitten on the ass one day, girl, and leave a scar.
There is something about this stranger’s eyes that makes me want to bite first.
“Who do I look like?” he says, which is not an answer.
“A date rapist with special needs.”
Somebody snort-laughs.
My head whips right, and pain detonates behind my eyes, but I clock him.
A second man, just as obnoxiously good-looking, brown hair grown out past his jaw, jeans, a plain black tee, both arms inked all the way to his fingers.
He’s got a crystal glass of something amber in one hand and he’s wiping his mouth with the back of the other, like my describing his friend as a special-needs predator is the funniest thing he’s heard all year.
“That was rather mean, don’t you think?” the first one says, unbothered, drawing my eyes back to him whether I want them there or not. He’s older than me. They both are, late twenties, maybe, but not my parents’ age. “Not to mention immature.”
“Because kidnapping is so sophisticated.” A spike of pain drives through the back of my head, and the dryness in my mouth goes from bad to last-Sunday-morning-after-the-worst-hangover-of-my-life. I narrow my eyes. “Did you drug me too, you psycho?”
“Be a good girl and do as you’re told,” he says, rising, “and I’ll give you something for the pain.”
There’s a flash of metal at his side, a weapon, dark and shining, before he slides it home into a holster and pulls a suit jacket off the bed behind him I hadn’t even noticed.
He’s tall. The dress shirt strains across his shoulders when he shrugs into the jacket, but he isn’t thick like my dad.
Most men aren’t. He’s built more like Dom, like my Uncle Ren; long, lean, and lethal.
“Be a naughty girl, and you’ll have more to worry about than a headache, brat.” His eyes cut to his friend. “Dim the lights.”
The room sinks into a kinder gray. It helps. I hate that it helps.
My head’s clearing by degrees, and the part of me Domenico helped build starts doing what it always does when the rest of me is losing it. Counting.
Two men. The talker with ink I’m going to pretend I didn’t notice, and the laugher with the glass and even more ink.
One door I can see. A wall of windows to my left, curtains half-drawn over a smear of city lights too low and too sprawling to be New York.
Wherever I am, I’m high up, and I’m far from home.
I’ve been on the mats since I was five. I’ve put grown men twice my size on their backs and walked away smiling; the arm bar is my favorite thing in the world.
On a good day, in a fair fight, I could make at least one of these two regret meeting me.
But the talker has a gun and the easy hands of a man who’s used it, the laugher is watching me the way you watch a dog that hasn’t decided whether to bite, and I’m dizzy and drugged and barefoot on a stranger’s bed.
Throwing myself at either of them right now is how I end up dead instead of just stolen.
So I do the second-hardest thing my father ever taught me, after taking a hit without flinching. I wait. I keep my mouth running and my hands still, and I wait for the opening. Because there is always an opening, and when it comes, I won’t miss it.
The laugher’s eyes flick to the talker every few seconds. Checking. Deferring. So the beautiful one gives the orders and the heavily inked one takes them. Partners, but not equals. I tuck that away with the rest and keep my face bored.
“I’m not the one who should be shaking in their shoes right now.
” I arch a brow even though it makes the spike behind my eyes twist deeper.
“Do you have any idea who you’ve messed with?
” Then the rest of it lands, all at once, and the fury that’s been simmering under the fear boils clean over.
“And you made me miss my dad’s last match, you asshole! ”
It’s the wrong thing to be angry about. There are about nine more pressing items on the list. I’m angry about it anyway.
His expression doesn’t change, but his head tilts a degree. “He lost, in case you were curious.”
“Bullshit. He doesn’t lose.”
Matteo De Salvo is the greatest boxer in the history of the sport. He has never lost a match. The one exception was the time my mom put him flat on his back when I was five, but that was before she was my mom, and it doesn’t count, they were flirting, and flirting in my family involves concussions.
This was supposed to be his last fight. The whole point was to go out on top. There is no way, no way, he lost. Not unless someone—
“Yes,” the man says, almost gentle. “He was distracted. When he couldn’t find his baby girl or his wife in the stands.”
Everything in me goes cold.
Mom.
“Where was my mom?” My voice has gone somewhere small and dangerous.
She’s Sienna Caputo De Salvo. She is a badass.
She has survived worse men than the one in front of me.
But the thought arrives anyway, ugly and complete, every worst possibility at once.
“If you did something. If you touched her.” I shove myself fully upright, the room lurching, and I do not care.
“I will end you. Do you hear me? I will kill you if you laid one finger on her.”
He sighs like I’m a child throwing a tantrum, while his friend folds nearly in half laughing.
And it’s only then, finally, that I let my eyes find the third person in the room.
He’s tucked into a winged-back chair in a small dark alcove across from us, and he is the single most out-of-place thing I have ever seen. Older than me by a lot of years, soft and round and gray. And dressed, unmistakably, as a Catholic priest.
His eyes are huge and locked on me, his mouth hanging open in pure horror, at my language, probably.
Seriously, my guy, I only dropped the f-bomb twice. But I imagine, he isn’t used to women swearing. Then again, he’s the one keeping company with kidnappers.
What in God’s name is a priest even doing here?
“Your stepmother is fine,” the man says, irritation finally bleeding into his tone. “I don’t have time for your outbursts. Pull yourself together. We have a wedding to attend.”
That’s the moment I notice the weight on my hand.
I look down. At my left hand, where there’s a ring on it—a real one, heavy and cold and so far from cheap it makes my stomach turn over.
A pink diamond, teardrop-cut, big enough to be obscene, ringed by a halo of smaller stones that catch even the dimmed light and throw it back at me.
The band is some pale silver metal, the kind that doesn’t make my skin crawl, the kind I can actually wear, which I would not expect a stranger to know any more than I’d expect him to know that pink, not red, never red, is my favorite color.
That it’s the only color I’ve ever wanted anything in.
It is, without exaggeration, the most beautiful thing anyone has ever put on me. And it is on the wrong hand, in the wrong room, while a gun cools in a holster six feet away.
A fresh, full-body wave of wrong rolls through me.
Because this isn’t random.
You don’t drug a girl, fly her God-knows-where, and lock a six-figure stone onto her finger on a whim. This is aimed. It’s about my last names, about some debt or grudge I’ve never heard of coming due on my hand.
Somewhere right now my father is taking that venue apart stud by stud.
Somewhere my mother is white-knuckling her phone, pissed, and wanting someone’s blood.
My baby brother is likely asking anyone who’ll listen where I went.
And the man standing over me is going to use every bit of it, use me, like a blade held to the throat of every person I love.
“I don’t give two shits about somebody’s wedding, you dick.” I close my fist, like I can hide the ring from my own eyes.
Who is this guy? And why does it feel like he already knows me?
“You should,” he says, and the dark drops into his voice so completely that a shiver runs the length of my spine and takes every bit of fight in my body with it.
“It’s ours.”