Page 9 of Claimed Through Deception

I let out a ragged, muffled sob.

It makes me sick. It makes me want to rip my own skin off. I spent my entire life building an impenetrable fortress around my body and my autonomy, specifically to keep men like him out. Men who use their physical size and their power to subjugate the weak. Men who smell like violence.

And yet, when he caged me against that booth, when his overwhelming dominance completely swallowed me, I didn't just feel terror.

I felt a dark, violent rush of arousal.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see stars.

"It's just adrenaline," I whisper fiercely to the empty bathroom. "It's just the fear. That's all it is."

I repeat the lie over and over again in the dark, trying to force my racing heart to slow down. I try to focus on the seaside bakery. I try to picture the white subway tiles and the smell of yeast.

But all I can see are pitch-black, soulless eyes.

All I can feel is the rough scrape of a calloused thumb against my mouth.

4

Niccolò

The imported cigar burns down to the band between my fingers. Ash drops onto the polished mahogany of my desk, scattering over the syndicate ledgers. I don't brush it away.

My office is dead quiet. The Severato estate is a fortress of stone, glass, and armed men, designed specifically to keep the world out. I control the eastern seaboard from this chair. Usually, I find clarity in this room.

Tonight, it feels like a cage.

I stare at the open ledger in front of me. Three hundred thousand dollars recovered from Pietro. The rat is bleeding in a soundproof basement cell, waiting for Alessio to finish interrogating him about how he pulled this off. Beside the ledger sits a heavy, cream-colored envelope bearing the Falco family crest. The details of my arranged wedding to Caterina. I look at the crest and feel absolutely nothing.

I crush the cigar into a crystal ashtray, close my eyes, and the sterile walls of my office vanish. I am back in the suffocating heat of that dive bar. I feel the exact pressure of two small, shaking hands pressing flat against my chest. I see the rapid, frantic beat of a pulse hammering at the base of a pale throat. I can taste the sheer, reckless defiance in that pair of wide, terrified eyes.

Either she didn't know who I was or she didn't care. It doesn't matter. She belongs to me now.

The heavy oak doors of my office swing open. Enzo walks in. He always moves as silently as a ghost. He stops in front of my desk and drops a thick manila folder onto the wood.

"You asked for a thorough sweep," Enzo says in a flat, icy monotone. "I’m giving you one. Here is everything there is to know about the woman." I open the folder.

"Livia Marino," Enzo states. "Twenty-two. No siblings. No criminal record. Bank accounts hold practically nothing. She lives in a rundown apartment complex on the South Side."

I flip the page, scanning the black ink. "Parents?"

"Dead," Enzo answers. "Father was a drunk. Beat the mother for years. He wrapped his truck around a pole when the girl was ten. The mother died of a failing liver three years later. Since then, the girl has worked every legal, under-the-table job she can find. Waitress, cleaner, food delivery, whatever pays cash. She saves every dime. She is trying to buy a commercial lease on the coast. I hear it is for a bakery."

I stare at the bleak, miserable summary of her life.

She is a survivor. She clawed her way out of a house soaked in violence and alcohol, and she built a fortress around herself. That explains the fire. That explains why she looked at the violence in my hands and didn't run. She grew up watching a monster.

I flip to the final page. There is a surveillance photo of her walking out of a bank. She is wearing a worn coat, her head down, clutching a cheap canvas bag securely to her chest.

My jaw tightens, she looks so small.

"There is a complication," Enzo says.

I look up. "A complication?"

"Marco Rossi," Enzo says. "He is a trust-fund prick she humiliated at the bar. His ego is bruised. He wants to teach her a lesson. He bought off two lower-level street pushers and a pair of dirty cops in the twelfth precinct."

A cold calm settles over my skin. "What is he planning?"