Chapter 8
His dark eyes were devoid of the arrogant, mocking glint he had worn during the ceremony. The mask of the Don was gone, peeled back to reveal a man whose gaze was searing, raw, and completely unguarded.
"Do you know why I took you?" he asked, his voice low, vibrating straight through my ribs.
"Because my uncle offered me as a tribute," I said, reciting the lie that had bought my way through his gates. "To save his own neck."
Matteo let out a short, humorless breath through his nose.
"Silvio offered you because he is a coward who thought tossing a sheep would satisfy the wolf," he said, his fingers sliding down to the nape of my neck, tilting my face toward his. "He expected me to throw you in the East Wing cellar. He expected me to use you as a bargaining chip, to beat you down until the Marchesi had no pride left."
"And aren't you?" I asked, my heart hammering against my chest like a trapped bird.
"No," Matteo said fiercely, his thumb coming up to trace the curve of my bottom lip. "I took you because I've spent six years watching you from across the river, Sienna. While your uncle drank away his territory, you were the one balancing the docks' books. You were the one who negotiated the union contracts in Jersey. You have more iron in your spine than every man in your pathetic family combined."
I stared at him, my breath catching in my throat.
*He knew.*
He hadn't seen the forged letters, but he had recognized the mind behind them.
"I don't need a victim in my bed, Sienna," Matteo continued, his voice dropping into an intimate, velvet whisper that felt dangerously close to a confession. "I don't need an abused prisoner to prove my strength. I am surrounded by traitors. Vittorio is sharpening a blade for my back. The Brooklyn families are waiting for me to bleed. The council wants an old man on the throne who can be bought with envelopes of cash."
He stepped closer, closing the last fraction of an inch between us, his broad chest pressing against my back, his breath fanning hot against my temple.
"I need a Donna who knows how to rule," he said, each word vibrating through my marrow. "I gave you the co-sovereignty at the altar not to spite Vittorio, but because I want you beside me. True power. Equal standing. If you give me your loyalty, Sienna—if you swear your blood to me tonight—I will burn every man who ever looked down on your family, and I will hand you half of this city."
The intensity in his voice was terrifying. It was the offer of an emperor laying his kingdom at the feet of a captive, blind to the knife hidden behind her back.
For a second, a sharp, suffocating ache flared in my chest.
He meant every single word.
Matteo Falcone was not the monster my uncle had painted him to be. He was a predator, ruthless and lethal, but he was honorable in his own brutal code. In another life, in a world where my father hadn't burned in that twisted wreckage on the highway, this man would have been everything a woman could ever desire: fiercely protective, unshakeably loyal, an unyielding shield against the darkness of the underworld.
*But the blood is already spilled,* the cold voice in the back of my mind hissed. *The trap is already set.*
I closed my eyes for a single heartbeat, then turned around to face him.
I let the silk gown slip from my fingers.
The heavy dress pooled around my ankles with a whisper of ivory fabric, leaving me standing before him in nothing but a sheer lace chemise that hid nothing of the curves beneath.
Matteo’s breath hitched. His pupils dilated until his eyes were almost entirely black, the muscles in his jaw clenching as he took in the sight of me.
I took half a step forward, closing the distance between us until my bare feet were standing on the tips of his leather oxfords. I looked up into his fierce, hungry gaze, letting my eyes soften with a surrender that was so exquisitely painted it looked like salvation.
"You really mean it," I whispered, reaching up to lay my hands against the open collar of his shirt. Beneath my palms, his heart was hammering with a violent, reckless rhythm. "You really want me beside you."
"More than I've wanted anything in this cursed house," he rasped, his arms coming around my waist, lifting me against him until my hips met his.
The contact was searing. The raw heat of his body, the hard lines of his frame, the desperate, unmasked hunger in his eyes—it pulled at something primal within me, a dangerous, intoxicating tide threatening to drag me under.
He lowered his head, pressing his lips to the hollow of my throat, tasting the salt of my skin. A low, gravelly groan rumbled in his chest as his hands slid up my back, pulling me impossibly closer into an intimate embrace.
"Swear it to me, Sienna," he murmured against my pulse point, his voice thick with a vulnerability he would never show another living soul. "Swear that you are mine."
"I am here, Matteo," I breathed, sliding my fingers into his thick, dark hair, tilting my head back to give him whatever he wanted. "Where else would I go?"
He pulled back, his dark eyes ablaze with triumph and possessive fire.
"Nowhere," he said softly, a dark, possessive smile returning to his lips. "Because tonight, the cage closes forever."
He set me down on the floorboards, taking my hand in his. He led me out from behind the cedar screen, back into the vast, shadow-drenched expanse of the penthouse.
He didn't touch the light switches. The room was illuminated only by the dying embers of the fireplace and the pale, ghostly glow of the Manhattan skyline through the glass.
Matteo walked over to the blast doors by the elevator entrance.
Mounted on the titanium frame was a secondary biometric console—a heavy, matte-black steel panel with a rotary lock and an iris scanner.
"Protocol requires that on the wedding night, the master sanctum is completely isolated," Matteo said, his voice returning to the deep, resonant cadence of authority. "No signal gets through these doors. No frequency. No radio waves. Even if Vittorio decided to fire a mortar at this floor, Sector Zero remains an impenetrable tomb."
He leaned forward, aligning his eye with the optical lens.
*Chirp-hum.*
Then, he pressed his thumb into the heavy center dial, turning it three clicks to the right until a loud, pneumatic hiss echoed through the suite.
*Thud-clack-clack.*
Three sets of three-inch titanium blast gates descended from the ceiling, slamming into the granite floor with the deafening weight of an avalanche. Heavy magnetic locks engaged with a bone-rattling drone, hermetically sealing the penthouse from the rest of the world.
The Bastion had just swallowed us whole. We were sealed inside the belly of the beast.
Matteo turned back to me, an expression of total, unshakeable satisfaction on his rugged face. He walked to the obsidian desk, picking up the antique silver chalice we had used in the chapel earlier that morning.
