Page 72 of Wicked Mafia Mistake
Kon nods. Once. No judgment in it. He has been in my position. Paid the price. Come out the other side with scars he doesn't hide.
"Then fix it," he says simply.
Rafael stands. Buttons the cuff of his sweater. "I'll have Drake and Rowan in the boardroom by six. Full strategy session. Every resource we have. But Massimo." He pauses at the door and looks back at me. "Tell her before someone else does. She deserves to hear it from you, not from Lorenzo."
They leave. The office settles back into silence and the weight of what I've done presses down on me until my shoulders ache and my jaw throbs from clenching.
My phone buzzes on the desk. An unknown number. I answer because at two thirty in the morning, unknown numbers are never good news.
"Mr. Santoro." Lorenzo Ferraro's voice slides through the phone like oil on glass. "I hope I'm not interrupting."
My hand tightens around the phone until the case creaks. I press my back against my chair and feel my pulse kick hard behind my ribs. My free hand curls into a fist on the desk, my nails cuttinginto my palm. His voice makes my skin crawl the same way his cologne did when he stood in Harrison's study. "What do you want?"
"A dinner. Tomorrow evening. The four of us. You, your lovely wife, Harrison, and myself. Somewhere public. Somewhere civilized." A pause. "I think it's time we discussed the terms of this arrangement like adults, don't you?"
Every instinct I have screams trap. Lorenzo doesn't do civilized. He does calculated. A public dinner means witnesses. Witnesses mean he's planning something he wants seen.
"Why?"
"Because I'm a reasonable man, Massimo. And reasonable men settle their differences over a good meal." The smile in his voice makes my stomach turn. "Shall we say eight o'clock? I'll send the details. Bring Sloane. I insist."
The line goes dead.
I set the phone on my desk and stare at it. A public dinner. Lorenzo, Harrison, Sloane, and me at a table together. Three days before the Genesis deadline. He wants Sloane there because he's planning to detonate something in front of her and he wants to watch it land.
I should tell her now. Walk upstairs, wake her up, sit on the edge of the bed and tell her everything. The deadline. The runners. The Society 69 file. Her father's willing participation. The gambling debts with her name on them. All of it. Every ugly truth I've buried under the floorboards of this marriage while she trusted me to keep the house standing.
I should tell her.
I stand up. Walk to the door of my office. My hand rests on the frame and I hold my breath and listen. The penthouse above me is quiet. No footsteps. No running water. Just the low hum of the building settling and the faint scent of lavender drifting down from the bathroom where she takes her baths. I can picture her in our bed, blonde hair spread across the pillow, her face bare, her body curled around the pillow she stole from my side because she always steals my pillow. Her lips parted on slow, steady breaths. Trusting the silence. Trusting me.
Tell her.
My hand grips the doorframe hard enough that the wood bites into my fingers. My chest aches with the weight of what I'm choosing.
I close my office door. Go back to my desk. Pick up the Ferraro file and start reading it again because maybe on the hundredth pass I'll find what I missed on the first ninety-nine.
The next twenty hours blur. Strategy sessions, phone calls, dead ends. By the time the building goes quiet again, the clock on my wall ticks past midnight. Two days left.
I still haven't told her.
Twenty
Sloane
I'm having dinner with the man who wants to own me, the father who sold me, and the husband who's been lying to me.
I can’t prove it yet, but I know he is.
If that isn't a party, I don't know what is.
The restaurant is upscale River North, all dark wood and candlelight and the hushed reverence of people who pay two hundred dollars for a steak and act like the cow died for a noble cause. I sit in a fitted black dress that I pulled from the back of my closet because cherry lipstick goes with everything but war requires something sharper. Massimo is beside me, his hand on my thigh under the table, his thumb tracing slow circles that are supposed to calm me but his fingers are pressing too hard and his jaw hasn't unclenched since we got in the car.
Something is wrong. Something has been wrong for days and tonight feels like the night it stops hiding.
Lorenzo sits across from me with a glass of red wine and the same dead smile he wore the day he walked into my boutique and complimented my dresses while two men bled out in myparking lot. His suit is charcoal. His hair is slicked. His cologne reaches me across the table and my stomach turns the same way it did the first time he touched my arm in my father's study.
Harrison sits beside Lorenzo. My father. The man who raised me. He's on his third whiskey and the bread basket hasn't been touched, and his eyes darting between Massimo and the exit, desperate, calculating, looking for a door that doesn't exist.
