Page 5 of Betrayal of the Mafia Rebel
Catalina Bellanti told the fucking truth.
My hands grip the edge of the rusted desk. The metal digs into my palms. I lean forward. My chest heaves. She handed me her family. She defected—ripped herself out of the blood-soaked machine of her ancestors and walked straight into the jaws of the beast. The courage it took to stand in that tunnel, staring up at me, demanding a space heater while offering me the keys to a major Bellanti route.
My blood boils. A fierce, possessive roar echoes in my skull.
Catalina.
The name tastes like danger. It tastes like war.
She defected. She is alone. She has nowhere to go. Her family will hunt her. The Bellanti strike teams will tear the city apart looking for the traitor who gave up terminal four. Catalina knows the stakes. She knows what happens to defectors.
A low growl vibrates in the center of my chest.
No. They will not.
They won't touch her. They won't look at her or breathe the same fucking air as her.
Because she is mine.
The realization snaps into place with terrifying certainty. Zero hesitation. Zero logic. Just pure territorial instinct. She's mine. I don't care about her last name, the feud, or the secrets she knows. I don't care that she smells like the other side. She walked into my speakeasy, surrendered to me, challenged me.
Mine.
The word bounces off the concrete walls of my skull. It settles in my marrow. My woman.
I'm not going to use her as bait. I'm going to build a fortress around her, stand at the gates, and slaughter any Bellanti ghost who dares to approach. Dominic locked me away with love to keep me safe.
I am going to lock Catalina inside violent obsession to keep her breathing. She thinks she made a business deal. Asylum for intel. She is wrong. She signed her soul over to a monster who has been starving for twenty years.
The pacing stops. Purpose replaces the chaos in my veins. My movements become sharp. Decisive. I grab my tactical jacket and shrug it on. The scent of her hits me again. This time, I don't fight it. I breathe her in until the sweetness coats my lungs. She belongs to me now.
I move to the storage locker in the corner of the office. The metal hinges scream as I yank the door open. I bypass the weaponry. I bypass the spare ammunition. I grab a small, heavy-duty space heater, black metal with an industrial coil, and a wool blanket from the top shelf. Then I send one order to the perimeter team.I pour the sludgy, boiling black coffee into a steel thermos.
She demanded a heater and coffee. She gets what she asked for. And she gets me.
I turn toward the door. The descent back into the earth feels different now. Before, I was walking away from an enemy combatant. Now, I'm walking toward my woman.
My boots hit the stone stairs. The thermos swings in my left hand. The space heater is tucked under my right arm. The air grows colder the deeper I go. The dampness presses against my skin. The River Speakeasy was designed to hide illicit alcohol from the feds almost a century ago. A labyrinth of limestone and iron beneath the water table. Now, it's my sanctuary.
I reach the bottom of the stairs. The iron door stands as I left it. The rusted deadbolt is engaged. No sound bleeds through the other side.
Is she pacing? Is she mapping the walls? Is she sitting on her leather bag, terrified of the man who locked her in?
My jaw tightens. She doesn't need to be terrified of me. She needs to understand that I'm the only thing standing between her and a shallow grave.
I set the space heater down on the stone floor. I set the thermos next to it. I grip the deadbolt.
My knuckles drag against the rusted iron. I pause. The feral energy inside me is barely contained. I need to get it under control before I open this door. If I walk in there looking the way I feel, she will run.
The instinct to back her into the limestone wall, to press against her curves, to bury my face in her neck and inhale until I pass out, hits me like a fist. It's overwhelming. It takes every ounce of discipline Dominic beat into me over the last two decades to keep my boots planted on the floor.
She is curvy. She is soft where I am hard. She is a Bellanti princess who grew up inside the machine. She knows their armory routes. She knows their schedules. She knows enough of their secrets to get herself killed. That knowledge is suffocating her. I see Maria in the set of her jaw. The same dead-end fight, the same locked spine. Terror masking itself as sass, desperation hiding behind sharp demands.
She is terrified. But she is doing it anyway. She is standing inside the fear.
That makes her stronger than half the men I have killed.
I press my forehead against the cold iron door. The metal leeches the heat from my skin. My chest rises and falls in slow, deep rhythm. Two decades of rage. Two decades of wanting to destroy the Bellanti name. It all evaporates the second thisparticular Bellanti looks at me. I am a traitor to my own grief. I do not care. I would trade every memory of the parents I buried for five minutes of Catalina's surrender.
