Page 10 of Betrayal of the Mafia Rebel
A low growl vibrates in my chest. "Everything you own belongs to me now. If I want to rip the seams apart, I rip them apart."
"Territorial grunting." She crosses her arms tight over her chest, defensive. The visual is a direct assault on my sanity. "Very intimidating. Are we going to stand here measuring dicks all night, or do you want the rest of the supply schedules?"
The audacity of her defiance acts like a lit match dropped into a pool of gasoline. For two decades I've been a furnace looking for something to burn. Dominic built the walls. I raged against them. None of it ever had a target this sharp.
Now all of that displaced rage has a singular target. Her.
"Talk." My voice is smoke and broken glass. I step closer. The tread of my boots echoes against the stone.
She does not flinch. "The 43rd Street docks are just the diversion. You know that now. Whoever you sent verified theterminal. But the actual product doesn't sit there. They move it through the South Side transit corridors between two and four in the morning. Blind spots in the camera loops. Shift changes."
I close half the distance between us. "Who runs the rotation?"
"A lieutenant named Conti. He's sloppy." Catalina tilts her chin up. Her eyes flash with sharp intelligence. "He drinks on the job. He leaves the secondary gate unlocked for his bookie to slip in. You hit the gate at three-fifteen, you walk right past the perimeter."
"You have the access codes for the interior vault." It is not a question.
"Of course I have the codes." She huffs out a breath, a sarcastic edge cutting through the air. "I didn't just walk out the front door with a change of underwear and good intentions. I copied a partition of the South Side ops drive before I crawled through the ventilation shaft. I have the next quarter of their South Side supply schedules. I have the courier routes attached to that operation."
The intel is sharper than most of what we've pulled off them. The Bellanti empire is built on shadows. She just cracked open one of the doors. But I don't care about the routes. I don't care about the schedules. My eyes track the movement of her lush, pink lips as she speaks. The words fade into white noise. The shape of her mouth becomes the center of my universe.
"You crawled through the ventilation shaft." I repeat the words slowly. The image of her soft, curved body squeezing through jagged metal ducts sends a spike of territorial terror straight into my gut.
"It was the only route not wired to the silent alarms." She shrugs, feigning nonchalance, but her hands shake just enough to give her away. She grips the edge of the wooden crate. "I had a twelve-minute window during the server reboot."
"If they caught you in the shaft." My hands ball into fists. The tattoos on my arms flex and stretch. "If the servers came back online."
"They would have dragged me out and put a bullet in the back of my head." Her voice drops, then falters. The brutal reality of her world bleeds through her armor. "Just like Aunt Maria."
She drops her gaze to the stone floor. The defiant fire in her eyes extinguishes, replaced by the crushing reality of her bloodline. She's staring at the scuffed toes of her boots, trying to hide whatever she doesn't want me to see. The fear is there, under the bravado. She knows what she just signed.
The distance between us vanishes.
I step directly into her space. The heat radiating from my frame engulfs her. My boots bracket hers.
My hand settles at the side of her neck. My thumb rests beneath the sharp line of her jaw, holding her gaze to mine. It's not a request. It's a fundamental law of physics.
The collision is violent. The air in the tunnel combusts.
Her pupils swallow the brown of her eyes. Her scent sharpens, threaded with the tang of arousal. She is afraid. Not of the Bellantis. Of me. Of whatever she sees staring back at her in my face.
"You’re not Aunt Maria." My voice is a lethal, guttural scrape. With my free hand, I wrap my fingers around the soft curve of her thigh "You're not Bellanti collateral. You're mine."
She gasps. The sound is a broken hitch in her throat. The heat of her skin burns through the denim of her jeans, scorching my palm.
"You can't just claim me." Her voice shakes, but the defiance claws its way back up. "I'm a defector. I'm a tactical asset. You're supposed to be interrogating me, Costa."
"This is the interrogation." I slide my hand higher up her thigh. The muscle jumps under my grip. "And you already surrendered."
"I haven't surrendered a damn thing." She glares at me, her chest heaving. "You think you can just grunt and throw your weight around and I'll melt? I survived a lifetime with monsters. You're just a louder one."
"I'm the only one you need to worry about."
I grab her hips. My hands span her waist, my thumbs digging into the dip of her stomach. I drag her forward on the crate until she is sitting flush against the edge, then step between her spread thighs. The throbbing length of my cock presses directly against her soft center through the barrier of our clothes.
She lets out a high, desperate whine. Her head falls back. Her defenses break.
I take her mouth.
