Page 55 of Auctioned to the Mafia Don
Her mouth curves against mine.
Vicious little thing.
I kiss the satisfaction off her lips.
The car slows somewhere outside the gates, but I do not release her. Not yet. My hand moves beneath the fall of her hair, thumb resting just below her ear where her pulse betrays every lie she has ever told me. Fast. Hard. Mine for this second, whether she admits it or not.
She pulls back first. Far enough to breathe. Far enough to remember herself. Her hand still on my chest.
The car turns through the manor gates, lights sweeping across the windows. She should move away before the driver stops. Before Omar sees her mouth and my collar and the way her hair is no longer as carefully styled as it was when we left.
She doesn’t move quickly enough. And I lift my thumb and brush it once over the corner of her mouth, wiping away evidence only I am close enough to find.
Her eyes narrow, but she doesn't stop me.
“Now,” I say, voice lower than I intend, “tell me again you aren’t mine.”
Her palm remains against my chest. My heartbeat is steady beneath it. Hers is not. Outside, the manor lights spill across the windows, bright and unforgiving. For once, Maya says nothing which makes me smile. Because her silence is the first truly honest answer she has given me all night.
Chapter Nine
Maya
The first rule of avoiding a man is not to know where he is.
I break that rule before breakfast.
Stefano is in the east corridor, speaking to Omar near the base of the stairs, and I know this because I hear his voice before I see him. Low. Controlled. Too calm to carry, and somehow still impossible to miss. I stop halfway down the landing with one hand on the banister and tell myself I am being tactical. Listening matters. Information matters. If Stefano is talking to Omar, there may be something useful buried between all that Italian restraint and mutual disapproval.
That is the lie I choose.
The truth is worse.
The truth is that my body recognizes his voice before my brain can tell it not to.
I see him through the break in the railing. Black suit. White shirt. No tie this morning, which should not matter and immediately does. One hand in his pocket, the other holding a phone he is not looking at because Omar has his attention. His face is turned slightly away from me, showing the bruise along his cheekbone, darker at the edges now, fading slowly where my hand left proof that I had once been smart enough to hit him instead of kiss him.
My mouth remembers the kiss at the exact moment I tell it not to.
Heat crawls up my throat.
Absolutely not.
I turn around before either of them can look up.
Then I take the long way to the children’s sitting room like a reasonable adult who definitely has control over her own body and is absolutely not avoiding the mafia don whose tongue was in her mouth two nights ago.
By the time I reach the children, I am irritated enough to blame Stefano for things he has not done.
Erin is on the carpet with a pile of colored pencils, three picture books, and a stuffed rabbit someone in this house has decided makes the room child-friendly instead of hostage-adjacent.Heath sits in the chair closest to the window with one knee tucked up, a book open in his lap and his attention on the door.
Always the door.
That is the first thing I noticed about him after the shock of seeing Alice in his face wore off. Heath never fully enters a room. Part of him stays at the exit. Part of him counts steps. Part of him keeps Erin in reach at all times, as if his body has decided being eight years old is irrelevant when no adult can be trusted to stand between his sister and harm.
Erin looks up when I walk in and immediately smiles.
“You came back.”
