Page 39 of Gamble of the Mafia Fixer
"But you are not walking out," he continues, his tone shifting from a statement of fact to a dark, possessive vow. "Because I am keeping you. I calculated every angle of my life. I planned for every contingency. I never planned for a chaotic, cynical, fiercely beautiful lawyer to stride into Il Corvo and ruin every plan I thought was perfect."
He takes my bare left hand. He presses a hot, firm kiss to my knuckles.
"I do not want a variable," Enzo says. "I want a constant. I want my woman. I want you terrorizing my brothers, stealing my shirts, and telling me I am wrong for the rest of my miserable, violent life."
He looks directly into my eyes. The calculation is still there—every variable, every angle—aimed exclusively at me now. The man and the fixer are the same thing in this room.
"Marry me, Natalia. For real. Let me build this house for you. Let me give you everything."
A single tear escapes my eye. It tracks hot and fast down my cheek. I wipe it away aggressively. I am Natalia Kim. I do not swoon.
"You are a menace, Enzo Costa," I manage to say. A watery, brilliant laugh bursts out of my chest. "You walk into a collapsingmultimillion-dollar transit hub, you ruin six months of mafia strategy, and then you try to bribe me with a custom library?"
"Is it working?" he asks, deadpan.
"Yes," I say. I drop to my knees right in front of him. I fist both hands in the front of Enzo’s black button-down—his shirt, now mine—and use my grip on the fabric to drag myself flush against his bare chest, pulling him into a fierce, desperate kiss. "Yes. God, yes. Put the ring back on."
Enzo groans into my mouth. He slips the diamond back onto my left ring finger. He pushes it past my knuckle, seating it firmly where it belongs. It fits. It always did.
He wraps his arms around my waist, pulling me tight against him. We kneel together on the floor of the empty ballroom. Sunlight floods through the windows, bathing us in bright, golden warmth.
I look at the ring. Then I look at the man who gave it to me.
I spent my career dealing in contracts, loopholes, and escape clauses. I always looked for the exit. But sitting here on the floor of a mafia fortress, wrapped in the arms of a man who would burn a city to the ground to keep me warm, I finally realize the truth.
There are no escape clauses here. There is no exit.
And for the first time in my chaotic, cynical life, I do not want one. The Fixer built a trap, and I walked right in, and I am never, ever leaving.
The End
