Page 83 of Forsaking All Others

It was a narrow restaurant filled with scarred, even slightly wobbly wood tables and a long bar that took up the length of the space, behind which soared glass shelves of liquor. A blue neon sign read Raven’s amid the bottles.

A woman appeared at our elbow just as Dario sat down after pulling out my chair. She had purple hair and a bar through her nose.

Alice, I thought dazedly, in Wonderland.

“Hey, D.” She greeted my husband with a friendly smile while she flipped open her little notebook and clicked her pen against her cheek. “What’s shakin’?”

“I thought it was time to introduce my wife to your famous food,” he replied mildly, but there was a little smirk tucked into his cheek as the woman raised both brows and turned to stare at me, and I shot him a bewildered look.

“You have a wife?” she repeated, clearly flabbergasted. “Man, you usually come in here all broody and lone wolf, I never could’ve imagined you had a wife at home. Especially one looking like this. Hot damn.”

I blinked as Dario let out a rusty chuckle and leaned forward, drawing her attention back to him. “I’m turning over a new leaf.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said with a firm nod before leaning back to manspread in his seat, making the small wooden chair look like a goddamn throne. “I had a bad habit of forsaking all sorts of pleasure. I’m done with that.”

Her eyes crinkled with a big grin as she looked between us. “Good for you, big guy. I take it indulging in this pleasure includes two orders of our world famous with all the fixings?”

“You bet,” he agreed. “And two lagers.”

My eyebrows were so high on my head I thought they might propel off my face.

The woman nodded, flipped her notebook shut without writing anything down, and strutted off toward the bar.

“What the hell is happening?” I asked.

Dario’s eyes creased into a smile that didn’t meet his mouth but was still absolutely the most gorgeous expression I had ever seen. I knew without looking that people were staring at him, wondering what a man like that was doing in a place like this.

Me fucking too.

“I heard through the grapevine that you have an addiction for burgers,” he explained, opening his big hands as if that was answer enough. “This place serves the best I’ve ever had.”

I wondered if smoke was coming out from between my ears because my brain was stuttering like a broken engine.

Dario chuckled again, clearly enjoying throwing me off kilter. “The lager was more of an educated guess, but I’ve seen bottles of Goose Island in the cooler and figured you might like it. A good burger demands a cold beer.”

“Does it?” I asked, a little breathless as if the air had been punched out of my lungs. “I honestly can’t even imagine you eating a burger. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat with your hands.”

“It’s not exactly a skill,” he drawled.

“Why did you bring me here, really?” I demanded, suddenly ill at ease, as if I was being pranked.

No, worse.

As if I was being set up at the edge of a cliff to admire a spectacular view before someone pushed me over the edge to tumble a long, long way to my death.

Somehow, getting a burger in a dive bar with Dario felt like the most dangerous thing I’d ever done.

Which was saying something given I’d hurt, killed, stolen, and traded secrets for a living for the past two years and grew up in the Italian Mafia.

Dario didn’t try to evade my question the way he had for the last twenty-four hours. Instead, he propped his square chin in his hand and studied me with serious eyes.

“If there is an unofficial motto in the Family, it’s honor, duty, loyalty,” he explained. “I was spoon-fed this ideal as a child and, when I started to choke, it was shoved down my throat, injected in my veins, beaten over my head. In our world, we have our own religion, and I had no choice but to subscribe.”

He wasn’t saying anything I didn’t know.

It was all too easy to recall how excited and nervous, how happy I’d been to marry someone just to please Papà, especially when I thought it would be Niccolo. Even when he had changed his mind, I hadn’t thought to run away with my true love or seriously defy my family. It was my duty to do as my family said. There was no such thing as independent choice in the Mafia unless you were the capo. As a woman, that was hardly possible, though Nella with the Camorra was capo dei capi in the Midwest. Even for a man, no one was born capo. You had to work your way up from associate to soldier to capo. Dario had to put in his own shift of subservience before he’d been given the keys to the kingdom, and though I didn’t know much about that time, I did know marrying me was the final step in his ascension to king.