Chapter 4
Four
Massimo
My cock throbs with the need to be inside her again. I've barely closed my eyes for a moment and I'm already hungry for another taste of my fairytale princess.
That thought brings a curve to my lips. When was the last time I woke up wanting someone?
I can't remember. I've woken up alone so many times the absence of another body became background noise, something I stopped noticing the way I stopped noticing the city lights outside my window.
One night with this woman and the background noise is deafening.
I reach for her before I'm fully awake.
My hand slides across the sheets and the cold hits my palm first. Cold cotton where warm skin should be. Empty space where her body curved against mine. I spread my fingers wide across the mattress, pressing into the fabric, searching for any trace of the heat she left behind.
Nothing.
I open my eyes. Moonlight still floods the bedroom.
The pillow next to mine holds the dent of her head and the scent of her skin clings to the fabric, clean and floral.
The sheets are tangled from where we slept wrapped around each other, my arm across her waist, her back pressed to my chest, her fingers threaded through mine over her stomach.
"Tesoro?" My voice comes out rough, cracked with sleep, and the word fills the penthouse and dies without an answer.
I sit up. Drag my hands over my face and press my palms into my eyes until the pressure releases.
The room smells like her. Like us. Like sex and the warmth that happens when two bodies spend hours tangled together in the dark.
Every muscle in my body carries a pleasant burn I haven't felt in years, and the ache between satisfaction and loss sits so close together under my skin I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
She's gone. I know it before I check the entire floor. The air in the penthouse has changed. That fullness, that charged, alive warmth I felt when she walked through my elevator doors, has drained out of the rooms and left behind the same hollow silence I've been living in for fifteen years.
Fifteen years of silence and I never minded it. Not really. I told myself it was the price of the life I chose and I paid it without complaint. One night. One woman. And the silence sounds like a fucking accusation.
I swing my legs over the edge of the mattress and my bare feet hit cold hardwood. The chill shoots up through my soles and I'm moving, pulling on my boxers, walking through the penthouse with my jaw locked and my fists tight at my sides.
"Tesoro?"
The bathroom door is open. Light off. The warm cloth I used to clean her still drapes over the nightstand.
The kitchen is dark. Two whiskey glasses sit on the island, her glass still holding the ghost of her scent along the rim.
I pick it up. The crystal is cool in my hand.
I bring it close and breathe in, catching the faint trace of warm skin and that floral sweetness that's been wrecking me since she walked through my door.
My chest constricts hard enough to make my ribs ache.
Her baby blue panties are still on the counter.
I pick them up and press the silk to my face before I can talk myself out of it.
Her scent fills my lungs, faint and warm and intimate, and my eyes close.
If Luca could see me right now, he'd have me committed.
And he'd be right. A Harvard-educated attorney standing in his kitchen in his boxers sniffing a stranger's panties.
This is not in any professional development plan I've ever written.
I keep moving. Past the sofa, past the scattered contracts on my desk, past the hallway where I carried her with her legs around my waist and her mouth on mine.
The foyer stops me cold.
A red heel lies on its side on the marble floor in front of the elevator doors. Through the fog of sleep, I called out and heard the elevator chime and the sharp clatter of something landing on marble.
I drop to one knee and pick it up. The leather is worn smooth, still warm from her skin. I press it against my bare chest and kneel there on my own marble floor holding a woman's shoe like it's worth more than everything else in this penthouse.
Because right now it is.
"No." I grit through my teeth and my voice sounds dangerous even to my own ears. "You don't just leave."
I don't chase women. I have never chased a woman in my life.
Women come to Scarlet Thorn, the night happens, and everyone goes home with the understanding that it was what it was and nothing more.
That has been my arrangement for years and it has never bothered me.
Not once. So someone needs to explain to me why every cell in my body is screaming at me to go after a woman whose name I don't know like my life depends on catching her.
I'm on my feet. I slam my palm against the elevator call button.
The mechanism hums to life far below and I wait, jaw grinding, pulse hammering in my neck, counting floors as the box climbs.
It's too slow. She could be in a cab already.
She could be halfway across the city while I'm standing here in my goddamn underwear.
I spin toward the kitchen and grab the house phone and punch the code for the lobby desk. It rings. And rings. And rings.
No answer.
"You have got to be kidding me." I check the clock on the microwave. 4:12 AM. The night doorman should be at his post. I jab the code again. Ringing. Nothing. My blood pressure spikes and I make a mental note to fire whoever left that desk unattended.
My thumb hovers over my cell. Luca. One call and every camera in the building lights up on his screens. Kon. One text and the Beast covers every exit in three minutes flat.
But I can see Luca's face already and I know what he'd say. The slow grin spreading beneath those gold-flecked eyes. "You're texting me at four in the morning because a woman left you after a one-night stand? Massimo Santoro got ghosted? Hold on, let me get Rafael in on this. He'll flip."
Screw that.
And Kon. Kon would just show up like he always does. Silent. Massive. Standing in my foyer like a concerned wall. He’d say nothing while his dark eyes cataloged the whiskey glasses, the wrinkled sheets, my bare chest, and then fill in every detail I wouldn't offer.
It makes me almost prefer Luca's loud mouth.
I can't. Not tonight.
I stalk to the bedroom. Yank open a drawer and pull on gray sweats. Fuck the shirt and shoes. The red heel goes in my left hand, phone in my right. The elevator doors stand open from the call and I step inside, hit the lobby button, and the descent begins.
I call the front desk while the floors tick down. The phone rings twice.
"Front desk."
"Santoro." My voice is hard. Clipped. "There's a woman who just left the building. Blonde hair. Baby blue dress. Stop her."
A pause. Rustling. "Mr. Santoro, there's a woman matching that description outside right now. She's... it looks like she's getting into a taxi."
Every muscle in my body coils tight. "Stop her. Go outside and stop her right now," I howl.
"Sir, I..."
"Now!" I roar.
The elevator hits the lobby. The doors part and I'm through them before they finish opening, bare feet slapping cold marble.
The lobby stretches empty and gleaming ahead of me and I can see through the glass entrance doors to the street where a taxi idles at the curb, amber light glowing against wet pavement.
When the fuck did it rain? I was so damn consumed by the woman I lost all sense of my surroundings.
I shove through the doors. Chicago's predawn air hits my bare chest and every inch of exposed skin contracts.
Goosebumps rip across my arms and shoulders.
The concrete is rough and freezing under my feet, biting into my soles with every stride, and I don't slow down.
I don't care about the cold or the concrete or the fact that I am running shirtless and barefoot down Michigan Avenue at four in the morning chasing a taxi like a man who has completely lost the plot. Because I have.
"Wait!" My voice tears across the street. "Stop!"
The taxi's brake lights glow red. She's just gotten in. The rear door is still closing and I'm sprinting, feet pounding wet sidewalk, lungs burning with cold air.
The dome light inside the taxi is still on. For one second, maybe two, I see her face through the rear window and my heart contracts. Blonde hair falls across her cheek. The line of her jaw. The curve of her nose in profile.
My stride breaks. My bare foot catches on a crack in the sidewalk and I stumble forward, catching myself with one hand on the rough concrete. Pain flares across my palm but I barely register it.
Smooth, Santoro. Very fucking smooth.
I right myself but my brain is still tumbling along the floor. I blink a few times. That face. It couldn't be. The dome light is too dim. I'm seeing things.
I take several more steps, but Chicago's main drag is busy and even at this hour several cars cut my line of sight.
But that face. My eyes narrow. I know that face.
Not from tonight. From before. The recognition hits fast and then slips away before I can pin it down.
I've seen her before. I'm sure of it. But where?
Those blue eyes. That jaw. The way her hair falls across her cheek like she's been doing it her whole life to hide behind.
I've seen that before. Across a room somewhere.
A table. A conversation I wasn't paying enough attention to because I was buried in someone else's contract.
The connection is right there, hovering at the edge of my thoughts like a name on the tip of my tongue, and it won't land.
The dome light clicks off. The taxi pulls from the curb and taillights shrink down Michigan Avenue. I'm standing on a Chicago sidewalk in the predawn dark, shirtless, shoeless, scraped palm bleeding, holding a cherry-red vintage heel and watching her disappear.
My lungs burn. My feet throb against cold concrete.
The sweat from the sprint cools on my chest and turns to a chill that makes my jaw shake.
And that face keeps flickering behind my eyes.
I know her. I've seen her before. But the taxi is gone and I was so distracted by that face that I forgot to get the damn number.
"Fuck." I grip the back of my neck and squeeze until the tendons protest.
The red heel dangles from my other hand, cherry leather dark against the gray light.
Shuffling of feet draws my attention to the entrance of the building. The front desk kid hovers just outside the doors. His wide eyes tell me I'm every bit the feral beast I feel like right now. I drop my attention to his name tag. THEO.
He's staring at my ink, the shoe in my hand and my bleeding palm with an expression that says he's reconsidering his career choices.
Or maybe it's the pissed-off scowl on my face that is putting the fear of hell into him.
"Mister...uh...Mr. Santoro. I, uh, sorry I missed your call. It was you, right?"
"Go back inside," I bark, not looking back. My eyes are still fixed on the empty stretch of road where the taillights were. The spot where she vanished. Theo's footsteps retreat across the lobby floor behind me.
I stand on the sidewalk until the cold turns my skin to concrete. Until the adrenaline bleeds out and leaves behind a shaking in my hands that has nothing to do with the temperature. Until the only thing left is the shoe in my grip and the ache behind my ribs that gets worse with every breath.
I go back inside. The marble floor feels warm after the sidewalk and the blood from my scraped palm leaves a faint smear on the elevator wall when I lean against it. My phone is in my hand. I call the security level.
One ring. "Security, Redthorne Holdings."
"It's Santoro. I'm on my way up." My voice is flat. Controlled. I sound like myself again. The rest of me will catch up eventually. "Pull the last fifteen minutes of footage from every elevator camera and every ground-floor entrance. Have it queued when I get there."
There's a two-second pause before I get an answer.
"Yes sir. What are we looking for?"
"A woman. Blonde. Baby blue dress. She left through the main entrance and got into a taxi on Michigan. I need that taxi's ID number."
A pause. "Filing an incident report?"
"No. This is personal."
The words hang in the elevator. Personal.
When was the last time anything in my life was personal?
Everything I do is for the Syndicate, for Harrison, for the brothers.
Every call I make, every problem I solve, every three AM contract review is for someone else's marriage, someone else's trust, someone else's future.
And now I'm pulling security footage at four in the morning because a woman I can't name made me feel alive and I can't file away.
The elevator rises. I press the red heel against my chest and the leather is cool now, all traces of her warmth gone.
My reflection stares at me from the polished doors.
Barefoot. Shirtless. Viper tattoo stark against skin prickled with goosebumps.
A scrape bleeding across my right palm. A woman's vintage shoe pressed over my heart.
I look like I've lost my goddamn mind.
I huff out a dry laugh. Maybe I have. A bit stalkerish, tracking a woman through security footage and taxi records.
Any client who described this behavior to me would get a firm lecture about boundaries and restraining order exposure.
I would sit them down in my office and use my measured, reasonable voice and explain that pursuing a woman who left of her own free will is not the behavior of a well-adjusted adult.
And then I'd go home to my empty penthouse and pour a whiskey and sit in the silence and wish I'd had the guts to do exactly what I'm doing right now.
Fuck that. Fuck boundaries. Fuck the measured, controlled existence that got me nothing but an empty penthouse and whiskey for company.
She chose me tonight. Walked through my door with nothing but her honesty and her trembling hands and gave me the one night I didn't know I was dying for.
I'm finding her.
The elevator opens on the security level. I step out barefoot and half-dressed, carrying a red heel and looking every inch the unhinged man I apparently am.
She made me feel chosen. And I will be damned if I let her disappear.