ROM
I hobbled to the bed, one hand wrapped around my aching balls, and sat down on the edge with a groan.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Tonight wasn’t going the way I’d planned. I was supposed to be sipping my future brother-in-law’s most expensive whiskey and gloating about the fact that my nightclub had been voted the number one spot in the city, beating out his.
Instead, Harper had shown up wasted and uninvited. That ridiculous love confession was bad enough, made worse when I realized someone was eavesdropping on our conversation.
Annoyance pulsed at my temples.
That girl. Something about her was awfully familiar. I hadn’t seen her earlier at the party—no, somewhere else. Somewhere I couldn’t place.
Thick dark hair, peachy skin, and lips the color of raspberries. Pretty. Very pretty. A tiny thing.
I was starting to enjoy our tussle until she kneed me in the damn balls and fled the scene.
She’d been gone a few minutes now, but her scent lingered. Floral. Sweet. Delicate. Something about it tugged at me. Like her face, it teased at the edges of my consciousness, a memory just out of reach.
I glanced down at the wrinkled duvet where I could still see the imprint of her small body.
Should I? Ah, fuck it.
I bent down and pressed my face into the fabric.
One deep inhale and…
My chest panged.
Lily of the valley.
The same flowers our old housekeeper used to leave in a blue vase in my room when she cleaned my parents’ penthouse on Wednesdays. That scent yanked me straight back to a different time—before I got made, before I became the man I was now.
She kept leaving the flowers even after I told her to stop. Even after I shouted at her that I didn’t need her fucking pity. She was the only one besides my mother who knew what had happened that summer.
My jaw clenched. Damn that girl for sending me down memory lane. It was an ugly place I had no interest in revisiting.
Shaking off the tension in my shoulders, I got to my feet.
The thrum of music filtered into the house through the open windows along the hall. I was about to turn the corner when another sound caught my attention—a movie playing in the background.
Taking a detour through Messeros’ living room, I smirked when I saw who it was. “Lasted all of two hours, huh?”
Alessio was sprawled on the sofa, a remote dangling loosely from his tattooed hand, the last few minutes of Good Will Hunting playing on the TV. “I needed a break.”
My brother hated socializing. He usually skipped out on these things, but Mother had insisted he show up today.
“Shove over,” I said, sitting down beside him. I fucking loved this film. “Did you figure out why Mother was so adamant about having you here?”
“Yeah. Something with Aunt Lisa. Mom told her I’m getting into plants.”
“Weed?”
“No, regular plants.”
I glanced away from Chuckie on the screen who’d just realized Will left. “Are you?”
He gave me a look like, what the fuck do you think? “Nero’s wife gave me a cactus for the palace. When Mom stopped by the other day, she saw it. Now she’s making out like I’ve got a green thumb or something. Told Aunt Lisa she should come by to drop off some trimmings and give me tips.”
I huffed a laugh, imagining Aunt Lisa—best known for her baked ziti and her love for gardening—showing up at Alessio’s “palace,” a twenty-thousand-square-foot warehouse decked out with every torture device imaginable.
Alessio was the family’s enforcer, responsible for the darkest parts of our business. The parts most of the family liked to pretend didn’t exist—especially now that we’d gotten so big, so legitimate on the surface. My uncle was a CEO, my cousin a COO, and so on and so forth.
Some of them could almost pretend they weren’t criminals.
Almost.
But no matter how buttoned-up we got, our empire was built on crime, and we’d never hesitate to commit more of it to achieve our goals.
“And what’s Mother’s aim with all this?” I asked as Sean—Robin Williams’s character—pulled out Will’s letter from the mailbox.
“You know her and Aunt Lisa never got along. Mom isn’t happy with how her and Uncle Mario have been running the packaging business. She probably figured if Lisa got an up-close-and-personal reminder of how I handle those who get on her bad side, they’d hustle a lot harder.”
That would probably work. That was the thing about my mother’s plans—most of the time, they worked. And in this business, the ends justified the means. No matter how ugly those means were.
We sat there and watched the last minute of the movie. When the credits started to roll by, Alessio tossed me the remote. “See if you can find anything good.”
I flicked through the channels.
“Look who it is,” he said when I hit the news. “Another day, another fucking rally.”
It was the mayor-to-be.
The camera zoomed in on Morales as he droned on about how my father deserved to be behind bars.
I swore under my breath.
“Still nothing?” Alessio asked.
“No.”
“If you elect me as the mayor of this great city, I promise to dismantle the organized crime networks that have plagued our community for far too long.”
“He’s a fucking broken record,” I muttered.
In our family, I was the one who got information. Seduction, blackmail, threats—whatever got the job done. I was an expert at figuring out leverage, uncovering weaknesses, and then using it all to my advantage.
And I was damn good at what I did.
Which made the current situation really fucking frustrating.
I hadn’t been able to find shit on Morales’s campaign.
Mother viewed him as an existential threat to us. My orders were to figure out who was funding him—because no way was it all grassroots donations. The man was too well-connected, too well-supported for that. None of us bought his sappy story about his dead brother being the real reason he was doing all this. Someone was using him to get to us.
The question was who.
Alessio rubbed his jaw. “He’s sticking to his message. If he gets elected, it’ll be bad for business.”
I wanted to believe otherwise. Just because Morales wanted to take us down didn’t mean he could.
We’d been exceedingly careful.
But all he needed was one weak link.
“If he is being funded with dirty money, they covered up their tracks well,” I said.
Harper’s husband was a banker at Credit First—the bank Morales’s campaign used. He liked to monologue Harper about his clients during dinner, spilling confidential details to a wife who hated his guts.
She told me everything she knew, but none of it was what I needed.
Which meant I had no use for her anymore.
With Harper officially out of the picture, I needed a new target—someone with insight into Morales’s finances.
“Now, I have a special guest I’d like to bring on stage. My beautiful, talented daughter, Mia. Can you please help me welcome her?”
The camera panned over the cheering audience.
“The daughter?” I asked. “Is this the first time he’s bringing her out?”
Alessio bumped me with his knee. “Have you been living under a rock? She’s always with him at these things.”
I hadn’t been watching the rallies. Why would I when Mother gave me what felt like daily updates on the future mayor’s statements? The last thing I wanted to do when I got home was hear more from him.
The camera panned back to the stage, showing someone walking on.
And the moment it did, the world around me fell away.
Alessio’s voice faded. The room disappeared.
It was just me, that TV, and her.
What. The. Fuck.
The girl I’d pinned beneath me five minutes ago.
Slowly, I opened my palm. The traces of her bite were still there. It was real. I hadn’t hallucinated having Mia Morales, the future mayor’s fucking daughter, biting me in Messero’s guest room.
“Dude, what’s your problem?” Alessio sputtered as I shot off the sofa. “Where are you going?”
I didn’t answer. I just ran.
Ten seconds later, I was tearing the front door open.
But she was already gone.
