Chapter 3
"I mean... it will help with the shock. The body needs fuel after trauma."
I suppressed a wave of dark, delicious amusement. The Capo of the Castiglione family, the man who had personally dismantled fourteen rivals during the Great Lakes territory dispute three summers ago, was flustered because he had overstepped a boundary with an imaginary victim.
I picked up my fork, deliberately letting it tremble until it tapped against the porcelain, then took a small bite of the beef. It was exquisite—tender, rich with garlic and smoke, melting like butter on my tongue. I closed my eyes and chewed slowly, letting out a soft sigh that sounded like fragile relief.
"It's... it's very good," I admitted, looking up at him with wide, watery hazel eyes that I had spent years training to reflect innocence.
A ghost of a smile touched Renzo’s lips—the first true smile I had seen on his face all night. It transformed him entirely. The brutal, hard angles of his face softened; the deep cleft in his chin and the slight crook of his nose—broken once in a street fight in Little Italy—made him look breathtakingly handsome. Dangerous, yes, but magnificent.
"Good," he said, pouring a measure of the dark red wine into his glass. He didn't drink, though; he merely swirled the liquid, watching the legs cling to the crystal. "Tomorrow morning, I’m putting you on a private jet out of O'Hare. I have a friend who owns an estate near Lake Tahoe. Nobody knows the property exists. You’ll stay there for a month, two months—however long it takes for things in Chicago to settle down. I’ll make sure your father’s debts are wiped clean."
My heart gave a slow, deliberate thud against my ribs.
He was already moving pieces on the board to protect me. He was offering to clean up Clara Vance’s non-existent life, to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own private reserve to squirrel an innocent witness away where his family’s enemies couldn't reach her.
He wasn't thinking like an enforcer. He was thinking like a protector.
And that made him infinitely more useful than I had ever dared to hope.
"You would do that?" I asked, my voice barely audible above the low jazz drifting through the hidden speakers in the ceiling. "Why? You don't even know me, Renzo. I'm just... nobody."
Renzo set his wine glass down with deliberate precision. He leaned forward across the white linen, resting his forearms on the table, closing the distance between us until I could feel the heat radiating from his chest.
"You aren't nobody," he said, his voice dropping into a register so dark, so heavy with repressed intensity that a real chill swept down my spine. "You survived something that breaks most men. And I brought the violence into your life the moment I kicked that door down. In my world, Clara, we have a rule. When you pull someone out of the fire, their life belongs to you to protect. Nobody touches what is under my guard. Not Sal’s crew. Not the Don. Nobody."
The sheer arrogance of it was intoxicating.
He was declaring ownership, cloaked in the language of chivalry. He thought he was saving a lamb from the wolves, entirely blind to the fact that the lamb had bought the wolves, marked the killing field, and hired the hunter to pull the trigger.
"What if..." I began, letting my eyes drop to his hands, staring at the scarred knuckle of his right index finger—the trigger finger. "What if they come looking for you because of what you did tonight?"
Renzo let out a low, humorless chuckle. It was a dark, dry sound, full of iron and cold ash.
"Let them come," he whispered. "I’ve been waiting for them to try."
I looked at him through my lashes, allowing myself to admire the lethal symmetry of his neck, the way his dark hair curled slightly at the nape, damp from the rain outside.
He was perfect. The contract was proceeding without a single flaw. Sal Valenti was dead; Frankie and Matteo were finished; the balance of power in the syndicate was teetering on the edge of the blade, exactly as I had calculated three months ago when I transferred the first two million dollars through the anonymous Swiss escrow accounts.
All that remained was the final phase. The delivery of the remaining balance, the dismantling of the Don's inner circle, and the coronation.
I reached across the table, my small, seemingly defenseless hand hesitating an inch above his scarred knuckles.
Renzo looked down at my hand. His eyes widened slightly.
With agonizing slowness, I let my fingertips settle against the rough skin of his wrist, right above the heavy gold watch that ticked with rhythmic, mechanical precision.
His skin was burning hot against mine. Beneath his pulse point, his blood was racing—hard, heavy, and undeniably alive.
Renzo held his breath, as if terrified that the slightest movement would scare me away. He turned his palm upward, his thick fingers curling slowly, tenderly around mine, enveloping my hand in a grip that was so gentle it felt like a prayer.
"I won't let anything happen to you, Clara," he swore, his voice thick with an emotion he clearly couldn't control. "I swear it on my mother’s soul."
I squeezed his fingers back, letting a fresh tear trace a path down my cheek, smiling at him through the trembling sorrow of my mask.
"I know you won't, Renzo," I breathed.
*I know you won't. Because you still have one more man to kill for me.*
The black Lincoln Navigator purred like a sleeping beast as it pulled away from the curb of Castiglione’s. Rain lashed the tinted windows in slanted sheets, dissolving the halogen glare of Chicago’s streetlights into smudged streaks of gold and neon red.
Renzo drove with one hand draped over the steering wheel, his knuckles pale where the skin pulled tight over bone. The other hand rested low between the bucket seats, mere inches from where my fingers were curled into the hem of his oversized coat.
Every three blocks, his amber eyes flicked to the rearview mirror.
"Three car lengths," he muttered, more to himself than to me. "A silver sedan turned twice behind us on Wabash."
I huddled deeper into the leather passenger seat, drawing my knees up toward my chest. I allowed a soft, anxious whimper to vibrate in my throat. "Are they... are they following us?"
"No," he said, taking a hard, sudden right onto an alleyway paved in slick cobblestone, cutting the headlights to amber running lamps. We slipped through the dark corridor between brick facades, emerging two streets over into a quiet commercial avenue. The silver sedan did not follow. "Just an Uber driver missing his exit. You're fine, Clara. Breathe."
I took in a shaky, obedient breath.
In truth, I had spotted the sedan before we even crossed the intersection. It was an unmarked city cab, not a tail. But seeing Renzo’s instincts fire at full capacity was like watching a racehorse champing at the bit. The man lived in a perpetual state of tactical paranoia. That paranoia had kept him alive through five years of mob war; tonight, it was the exact rope I intended to hang his syndicate with.
