THE MAFIA KINGS FORSAKEN BRIDE

chapter 6: Claimed

*Elara's POV*

The door clicked shut and the noise of the club disappeared like it had never existed.

Just like that it was only us and the dim light and the leather and whiskey smell of the room and the sound of my own breathing which was louder than I wanted it to be. I pressed my back against the wall nearest the door and looked at him and tried to remember every useful thing I had learned in the last three months about staying calm in rooms where calm was the only advantage I had.

It was harder than usual.

He stood near the center of the room like he had been placed there, like the space had been arranged around him rather than the other way around. Completely still. Those obsidian eyes on my face with the same quality of attention I had felt from across the club floor, focused and unhurried, the look of someone who has already decided they have time.

He did not speak first.

Neither did I, for a moment, because I was using that moment to breathe and think and stop my hands from shaking visibly.

Then I thought about the handler's words moving through the club. Moretti claimed the Ice Princess. The way the room had rippled, the way the handlers had grabbed my arms with the specific urgency of people who were now afraid of something other than me.

"You bought me," I said.

It came out steadier than I felt. Good.

"I did," he said. His voice was low and even, the voice of someone who had never once needed to raise it to be heard.

"Like livestock." I pushed off the wall. My legs held. "Like something with a price tag. You sat in your booth and you pointed and you paid and you think that means something."

"It means you are leaving this place tonight," he said. "Whether that matters to you is your business."

"Don't." The word came out sharp. "Don't make it something it isn't. You didn't buy me out of this place. You bought me into yours and the difference between one cage and another is just the quality of the lock."

Something moved in his eyes. Not anger, not the amusement I had seen in other men's faces when they thought my defiance was entertaining. Something more careful than either of those things.

I crossed to the door anyway. The handle did not move.

I had known it would not move, but tried it anyway because not trying felt like giving something up, and I was done giving things up without making it cost someone something first. I turned back to face him and saw that he had not moved at all, had simply watched me try the door with that same patient attention.

I picked up the glass ashtray from the side table.

He tilted his head very slightly.

I threw it at him.

He moved faster than a man his size had any right to move and then his hand was around my wrist and my back was against the wall and both my wrists were pinned above my head in one of his hands and the whole thing had taken about two seconds and cost him no visible effort at all.

I did not stop fighting. I twisted and pulled and got one knee up before he shifted his weight and made that impossible, and through all of it his breathing stayed steady and his grip stayed firm without tightening past the point of pain, which was the thing that confused me most because every other man in that club who had ever put hands on me had wanted me to feel it.

He just wanted me to stop.

"Enough," he said.

Our faces were very close. His eyes were level with mine and up close they were not simply dark, they were the specific dark of someone who had seen too much and made a decision about what to do with that a long time ago. There was no heat in them, no cruelty, just that absolute steadiness that was somehow more unnerving than either of those things would have been.

My chest was heaving. His breathing had deepened but stayed controlled.

"You're going to break my wrists," I said.

"I'm not." He said it like a fact rather than a reassurance. "Stop fighting and I'll let go."

"And if I don't stop fighting."

"Then we stay like this until you do." He said it without any particular interest in which outcome I chose, which was the most infuriating possible response.

I stopped fighting.

He released my wrists and stepped back and straightened his jacket with the calm of a man returning to a meeting that had been briefly interrupted. I stayed against the wall and breathed and watched him and tried to understand what I was looking at because I had spent three weeks reading men in this club and he did not fit any category I had built.

The door opened. Two of his men, moving with the quiet efficiency of people who did it professionally.

"The car's ready," one said.

Vince looked at me. He did not ask, neither did he explain. He simply held out the long coat his man was carrying and waited.

I looked at the coat, then at him. I thought about Lila, somewhere in this building, who I was not going to be able to say goodbye to. I thought about three months of surviving this place and what it had cost me and whether walking out of it into his car was better or worse than staying.

I took the coat.

They walked us out through a back exit, away from the main floor and the staring eyes and the whispers that were still moving through the club like smoke. A black SUV waited in the alley, engine running. He put me in the back seat and got in beside me , closing the door ,the car moved and the Velvet Eclipse disappeared behind us into the city dark.

I stared at my hands in my lap.

Bought, claimed, and pulled from one nightmare directly into the orbit of the most dangerous man in this city. The silk was thin against my skin and my wrists ached faintly and the city lights blurred past the tinted windows and I had nothing. No phone, no shoes, no Lila, nothing except the thing I had kept through three weeks of that place, the part of me that had refused to go quiet.

"You bought a corpse," I said into the silence. My voice came out raw but steady. "I'll make sure it haunts you."

The silence held for a moment.

Then I heard it. Low and rough, like something that did not get much use. A laugh. Brief and genuine and completely unexpected from a man who looked like he had not found anything funny in a very long time.

It sent something racing down my spine that was not only fear.

I kept my eyes on the window and did not let him see that.