Page 39 of Auctioned to the Mafia Don
“What do you actually plan to give her?”
I say nothing, and his face tightens. “You told her you’d give her the children and Leon.”
“I did.”
“She wants him alive.”
“I know.”
“Are you planning to give him to her alive?”
I don’t answer, a sly smile crossing my face, and the color drains from his by a fraction. “Christ. This is going to get ugly.”
Chapter Seven
Maya
Iknow how to act as someone else.
It is not magic. It is work. Shoulders lower. Breathing evens. Eyes soften or sharpen depending on what the room expects. Fear becomes calculation. Anger becomes a smile. Disgust becomes interest.
I have worn names that were not mine in hotel bars, private offices, back rooms, dockside warehouses, and dining rooms where men with expensive watches discussed women the way other people discuss shipment delays. I have flirted with criminals, laughed at jokes that made me want to draw blood, accepted drinks I didn’t drink, and let men underestimate me.
I know how to walk into the private club tonight and make Leon O’Reilly believe exactly what Stefano needs him to believe. I know how to play the woman who survived an auction because the right dangerous man bought her before the federal raid destroyed everyone else’s plans. I know how to look relieved. Iknow how to look owned. Captivity beside Stefano Savarese is better than whatever waited for me in Leon’s hands.
What I do not know is how to do any of that with Stefano close enough to touch me.
That is the complication I keep refusing to name while I stand in front of the mirror in another dress he sent upstairs.
This one is black.
Not plain. Nothing he chooses is plain. It fits close through the hips and falls smoothly to my knees, with a slit just high enough to make walking easier and a neckline severe enough to make the whole thing worse. There is less exposed skin than last night’s red dress, but the shape is sharper. Colder. More expensive. A woman doesn’t wear a dress like this by accident. Nor does a man send it unless he wants the room to understand he has taste and ownership.
I hate that it fits so perfectly, but I hate that I look good in it even more.
Erin told me so twenty minutes ago, sitting cross-legged with her dog-horse drawing in her lap. Heath didn’t say anything, but he looked at the dress, then at the guards, then at my face. Measuring the same thing he measures every time I leave him now. Whether I am coming back.
I promised him I would. Apparently, I have quit pretending I am intelligent when it comes to those children.
A knock sounds on the door.
Not Omar’s. He has a way of knocking that sounds like he is disappointed the door exists.
“Come in,” I say.
The door opens, and Stefano steps inside.
I should have known.
He pauses just past the threshold, closing the door behind him with one hand while his eyes move over me. Slowly. Not like the men at the auction, and not even like he looked at me last night in the red dress. This is more precise. More controlled. Worse, because nothing on his face gives away what the look does to him.
But his silence does.
It stretches too long.
I lift my chin. “If you hate it, blame yourself.”
His mouth curves faintly. “I don’t hate it.”
