Page 141 of Ruthless Contract
"Rome..."
He pressed a button on the laptop.
"Camera four," he said. "What's going on at your location?"
A man's voice came through the speakers.
"Nothing much. My target just entered her home with another woman. I think they're on a date."
My heart lurched. Camera four? That was Dayana's house.
"Should I move in and make the kill?" the man asked.
"Should he move in?" Rome asked me, his expression and tone void of emotion.
The room suddenly felt too small. Too hot. I couldn’t breathe. I looked back at the screen. Dayana had no idea someone was outside her house. She was inside, enjoying her night with her new love interest.
And outside, death was looming. He had to have hacked her also, because her cams would’ve picked up on someone being close toher property. All of their cams would have. My gaze moved from one house to the next. Tracy, Kelly, and Dayana had no idea they were in danger.
"Kneel, Juliet." His voice remained calm. Controlled. "I won't ask again. If you don’t kneel, the next words I utter will be for car four to move in for the kill."
My throat tightened. Every instinct I had screamed at me not to give him what he wanted. But my pride wasn't worth risking Dayana's life. Keeping my eyes on his, I lowered myself to the floor until I was kneeling in front of Rome Cattaneo.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
BLOSSOM
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The plush carpet cushioned my knees, but there was nothing soft about this moment. Nothing gentle. Nothing loving. This was not Romeo and Juliet. This was Rome and Blossom, and one of us held all the power while the other had gunmen waiting outside the homes of the people she loved.
Rome leaned back in his chair, his gaze locked on me. For a moment, he didn’t look pleased. He didn’t look victorious. Somehow, that made this worse. If he’d smiled, if he’d looked smug, I could’ve let that fuel my anger. It would’ve helped erase the love I had for him and replace it with pure hatred.
But instead of looking like the victor, he looked...empty. Like a shell of the man who’d walked into my store, smiling at me. He looked lost. Desperate. Then the moment passed, and determination settled over his features once again.
Without taking his eyes off me, he reached toward his desk and picked up a black folder. The bastard tossed it onto the floor in front of me. It landed against the carpet with a soft thud. My gaze dropped to it before slowly lifting back to him.
“Open it,” he ordered.
I wanted to throw that folder right back at him and tell him to go fuck himself. Better yet, I wanted to shove it down his throat, knock out a few of his perfect teeth, then use the pen on his desk to pierce his jugular.
My gaze drifted to his laptop, a reminder of why I couldn’t act rashly. A reminder of what was at stake here. A pen landed on the floor next to the folder.
“Open the folder,” he told me.
Swallowing down every curse sitting on the tip of my tongue, I reached for the folder and opened it, expecting it to be proof of what my team had done to Marcel. The first page made my stomach drop.
A sarcastic laugh slipped from me before I could stop it. It wasn’t because any of this was funny. Nothing about kneeling on the floor in front of the man I loved while he threatened my people was funny. This was insane. All of it. Especially the shit he had in this folder.
“Is this some sort of contract?” I asked, looking up at him.
“Read it carefully,” he told me before taking another sip of his whiskey.
My fingers tightened around the edge of the folder as my gaze dropped back to the page. I started reading.Carefully. At first, my mind refused to absorb what my eyes were seeing.
I had to go over the first section twice before I could truly believe what I’d read. The more I read, the angrier I became. No fucking way did he expect me to sign some shit like this. Heat crawled up my neck, and my eyes burned, but I refused to let those tears fall.
I would not cry over this. Not in front of him. Not while he sat there drinking whiskey as though the terms of my captivity were just another business deal. This would not break me. But damn, this was too much.
