Page 46 of Mafia Bride
If this man is in any cage, it’s from his own doing and he can deal with it.
Still, I want to know why he looks this way. Why he sticks men in front of my door, why he swims like the world is too small.
“I’m fine.” He looks at me and then looks at the door. Pointedly. “I told you—”
“You sent me to my room and split like you had to stop world war three.”
Dripping wet, he plucks a pack of cigarettes from the table.
“What if I did?” He pokes out a cigarette and puts it between his lips.
“Good job?”
He smiles around his smoke, and cups his beautiful hands around a lighter. With a scrape, his face flickers in firelight, and with a snap, he’s in the darkness again.
“The danger’s passed, for now.”
“What danger, exactly?”
Smoke pipes out his nostrils. He’s a dragon looking down at me as if he just roasted an army to protect his treasure—and the treasure is me. It’s not just that I’m his wife or his property. I’ve seen that in his face, but this is different. It’s more fervent and more still. He’s a particle moving so fast it stays in the same place.
If I find out what is making him feel this way, maybe I can find a way to use it against him. A weapon. My curiosity is less painful when I can find a use for it.
“You’re not going to answer me,” I say.
“No.” He throws himself into the chair on the other side of the patio table.
“Why not?”
“Because I say.” He flicks his cigarette and takes a drag. “When I want you to know something, I’ll tell you.”
I murmur the wordassholetoo low for him to hear, which makes me a coward.
“I need your rings,” he says with his hand out. I follow his gaze to my left ring finger. At the weighty chains that have tied me to him and this place for a week now. They are still beautiful but they are also still chains. Chains I was told to never take off.
“Why?”
“I’ll give them back.”
Fine. He can keep them forever. I would happily never see them again. They’re a constant, uncomfortable reminder of the life I’ve been thrust into. I all but rip them off my finger and dump them into his outstretched palm.
This life is like a slow death. Given everything I ever dreamed of but nothing I ever wanted, somehow the bareness of my finger forces a question to the front of my mind, and I have no idea if he’ll even answer it any more than the last two I asked.
“Why me?” I ask, looking down at my naked hand.
“Why you what?”
“Why did you marry me? You’re the king. You can have your pick of women who wouldn’t ask any questions.”
It’s not a lie. He’s beautiful. Carved from marble. Tall, lithe, masculine. The most beautiful women in town—many of whom were trained to do nothing but run a rich man’s house—would jump at the chance to marry a man like him. They’d say “I do” without having the words squeezed out of their faces.
I ignore the memory of him manhandling me flaring up in my brain, filling my veins. I can’t fall victim to charms I never found appealing.
“My pick, eh?” He leans back, leveraging a heel on the matching footstool. “I never had my pick. Same as you, the choice was taken from me before I knew I had one.”
“How?”
He shrugs, looking over the pool because he won’t look at me.
