Chapter 6 #2
But home feels like the wrong word tonight. Home implies warmth, belonging, the presence of someone waiting on the other side of the door. What waits for me in my penthouse is silence and expensive furniture and the echo of my own footsteps on marble floors.
Luca doesn't move. He knows me too well for that.
"Get out," I say finally, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears. Rougher than usual. Stripped of the careful control I've spent decades perfecting.
He studies my face for a long moment, reading something in my expression that I'm not sure I want him to see.
The dashboard lights cast his features in shades of blue and amber, making him look like a portrait painted in shadow and flame.
Then he gathers his phone and reaches for the door handle, pausing with his fingers wrapped around the chrome.
"Have fun fucking up your peace," he says.The words carry the weight of genuine affection beneath the mockery — a blessing disguised as a warning, the way brothers who have bled together learn to say I love you without ever speaking the words.
The car door opens with a soft click, letting in a rush of cold October air that smells like rain and exhaust and the particular metallic tang of the city. Luca steps out, his movements fluid and unhurried, and pauses to look back at me through the open door.
"She's not going to fall into your arms, brother. You’ll have to work for it." His voice is softer now, stripped of mockery. "Women like her don't break easy. That's probably why you want her so badly. Keep in mind Jonah tried and she’ll make you pay for his sins."
He closes the door before I can respond, and I watch him disappear through the glass doors of Redthorne Holdings, his silhouette swallowed by the warm light of the lobby.
The doorman greets him with a nod, and then they're both gone, and I'm alone in the car with the engine humming and the wish burning against my heart.
I pull away from the curb and point the car toward Katriana’s place.
The drive gives me too much time to think.
The neighborhoods transform as I travel, the sleek glass towers giving way to brick buildings with their fire escapes clinging to facades like metal vines.
The streets narrow, the streetlights grow dimmer, and the air through my vents carries different scents now.
Cooking oil from late-night restaurants.
Cigarette smoke drifting from open windows.
The musty sweetness of old buildings holding their breath against the weight of years.
I imagine the moment she opens the door and sees me standing there.
In my mind, the fear in her eyes transforms into something softer when she realizes I've come to save her.
Her shoulders drop from their defensive position near her ears, and her hands stop trembling, and she looks at me with gratitude so pure it makes my chest ache.
She falls into my arms the way women do in the movies Persia watches on Saturday nights, grateful and relieved and trembling with the knowledge that someone finally came for her.
She smells like vanilla and cotton and the particular sweetness of surrender.
She looks up at me with those brown eyes behind those cute glasses, and she says thank you in a voice that is sweet only for me.
She lets me carry her weight for once, lets me be the strength she's been searching for, lets me prove that not all Moses men are like my worthless brother.
In my imagination, this is easy.
The fantasy warms something in my chest that has been cold for so long I'd forgotten it could feel anything else. I let myself linger in it for a few blocks, savoring the sweetness of a scenario where I'm the hero instead of just another powerful man taking what he wants.
But I've been in this business long enough to know that nothing worth having ever comes easy. Luca was not wrong.
Years of experience tells me that Katriana Bellrose, with her quiet defiance and her battered pride and her refusal to crumble even when a monster had his hands around her throat, is not the kind of woman who falls into anyone's arms without a fight.
The memory of her face surfaces unbidden.
The way she stepped sideways to break my hold on her arms, her chin lifting even as her voice trembled.
The steadiness in her gaze when she told me the bruises were from an encounter, nothing more, her words saying one thing while her eyes screamed something else entirely.
She's a fighter. She's been fighting alone for five years, carrying a burden that would have broken most people, and she's still standing. She’s a woman who doesn't surrender easily. A woman like that might not surrender at all.
The thought should worry me. Instead, it sends a pulse of heat through my veins that has nothing to do with the climate control in the car.
I think about the contract I have tucked inside my breast pocket.
It’s a draft at best. Something we had on hand that Massimo wrote up as a base to work off of back when we started the Red Letter Syndicate.
Last night I used my restlessness to make some changes.
I added provisions for her family's protection and made damn sure they are ironclad and comprehensive.
The arrangements for her mother's care, the best facilities money can buy.
The stipulation that she will live under my roof and answer to my authority until such time as we've fulfilled the obligations we've agreed to.
The heir clause.
My mother's watch presses against my wrist, grounding me in the present even as her voice echoes through my memory. Build something that lasts.
Eighteen years of failing to keep that promise.
Eighteen years of empty beds and emptier conversations, of women who saw only the power and the money and never thought to look beneath.
Eighteen years of watching my brothers find what I've been searching for, one by one falling into love and partnership and the kind of bone-deep belonging that makes a man soft and fierce all at once.
This isn't love. I'm not foolish enough to call it that.
This is business. A transaction. Mutual benefit disguised as salvation.
She needs protection from a monster who wants to sell her body.
I need an heir to carry forward everything I've built.
Simple. Clean. The kind of arrangement men like me have been making for centuries, trading power for protection, security for servitude.
I tell myself this as I navigate the narrow streets that lead to her neighborhood, watching the buildings grow smaller and shabbier with each passing block.
I tell myself this as I note the graffiti on the walls, bright splashes of color that speak of desperation and defiance in equal measure.
The bars on the windows. The particular quiet of a place where people have learned not to ask too many questions about the sounds they hear through thin walls at night.
This is business.
The lie tastes like ash on my tongue.
Her building appears on the corner ahead, a five-story walkup with fire escapes that look like they haven't been inspected since before I started shaving and windows that glow with the particular warmth of lives being lived in small spaces.
The brick is worn but maintained, scrubbed clean in places where someone took pride in what little they had.
A pot of dying flowers sits on one of the lower windowsills, a splash of color fighting against the gray October chill.
She's been surviving here for years. Scraping by on tips and minimum wage, stretching every dollar until it screamed, paying a debt that was never hers to carry while the world turned its back on her.
Not anymore.
I find a parking spot half a block away and kill the engine, sitting in the sudden silence while the cooling metal ticks beneath the hood.
The streetlight above me flickers with the particular rhythm of a bulb that's about to die, casting shadows that dance across the dashboard like restless spirits searching for peace.
I pull out her wish and unfold it one more time. The paper is soft from handling, the creases worn smooth from all the times I've traced her words with my fingertips.
Save my family from the debt that's destroying us. Please. I'll pay any price. - Katriana Bellrose
Any price.
The words blur slightly, and I blink hard against the sudden burning behind my eyes. When did I become this man? This desperate, hungry creature who pins his hopes on a woman who doesn't even know his name means anything beyond the brother who broke her heart?
I fold the wish carefully and slip it back into my breast pocket, pressing my palm flat against my chest to feel it settle into place. Then I step out of the car and button my jacket against the chill of the October night.
The air smells like rain waiting to fall, thick with moisture that clings to my skin and settles into the wool of my coat.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks twice and falls silent.
A television murmurs through an open window three stories up, the canned laughter of a sitcom drifting down to the street like confetti from a party I wasn't invited to.
I cross the street with measured steps, my leather shoes clicking against the cracked pavement, and push through the front door of her building.
The hallway swallows me in a cocoon of flickering fluorescent light and industrial cleaner.
The linoleum beneath my feet is worn thin in places, showing the darker subfloor beneath like bruises on pale skin.
Someone has taped a handwritten sign to the wall near the mailboxes, reminding residents about quiet hours, the letters faded and curling at the edges.
The stairs creak beneath my weight as I climb, each step carrying me closer to the moment I've been imagining since I watched her walk through that velvet curtain at Scarlet Thorn.
The railing wobbles slightly when I grip it, the bolts loose in their housings, and I make a mental note to have someone fix that once she's no longer living here.
Once she's mine.
Her door appears at the end of the third-floor hallway, the number hanging crooked on its single remaining nail.
The paint is chipped around the frame, and I can see where the lock has been replaced at least twice, the newer hardware gleaming against the older wood.
A thin strip of light glows beneath the door, warm against the dirty linoleum.
She's awake.
I stand there for a moment, my hand raised to knock, my heart pounding against my ribs with a force that surprises me. When was the last time anything made me nervous? When was the last time I stood before a closed door and worried about what waited on the other side?
The wish burns against my chest. My watch ticks steadily against my wrist, counting down the seconds of a life I've let slip through my fingers for too long.
This is it. This is the moment everything changes.
I imagine her opening the door and falling into my arms.
I imagine gratitude and relief and the beginning of something I've spent eighteen years being too afraid to name.
I'm so goddamn wrong about all of it.
But I don't know that yet.
I knock, the sound sharp and final in the quiet hallway, and I wait for Katriana Bellrose to open the door and show me exactly how wrong a man can be about the woman he wants to save.