The Mafia’s Auctioned Bride

Renata's POV My wrists were hurting before the bidding even started. The woman who'd been assigned to walk me to the stage grabbed a fistful of my hair instead, yanking my head back hard enough that my whole body fought against gravity just to stay upright. "You're worthless," she hissed against my ear, dragging me forward another step. "Nobody in this room wants damaged goods. You should be thanking me for finding you a buyer at all." "Let go of me, you miserable witch!" I twisted against her grip, and it cost me a fresh handful of hair for the trouble, but it was worth it just to watch her flinch. "Hey!" She yanked harder, forcing a hiss of pain out of me before I could stop it. "You better stop resisting! This auction is your only hope of being worth anything. Nobody wants a useless orphan anyway!" "Then it's a good thing I never asked for your opinion." I dug my heels in anyway, if only to make her drag every inch of it, and she cursed under her breath in a language I didn't bother translating. She shoved me the last few feet onto the stage, and I caught myself before I fell, spine straight, chin up, because Pa León hadn't raised a daughter who let anyone see her hit the ground. "Do I hear one million?" The auctioneer's voice sliced through the room the way a scalpel opens skin, clean, practised, indifferent to what it was cutting into. The air reeked of cigar smoke and expensive cologne, the kind of room where men with more money than conscience gathered to buy whatever the underworld decided was for sale that night. Somewhere close, a woman laughed at something that wasn't funny. Nobody in that room was there for anything as simple as furniture."One million, going once… going…" "Ten million." The room went dead silent, the particular silence of a crowd recalculating exactly how much danger it was standing next to. Nobody bid against it. Nobody even breathed too loudly. You could have heard a pin drop, and every single person in that room understood, faster than I did, that the bidding was already over. Around me, men in tailored suits who'd flown in from three different countries to buy a piece of my father's legacy suddenly found their shoes very interesting. A few of them actually looked relieved, the particular relief of men who'd almost drawn the short straw and hadn't. Whoever had just spoken, everyone in that room seemed to already know better than to test him. "Sold." The woman who'd dragged me onto the stage reappeared to haul me off it, her fingers biting into my arm hard enough to bruise, and she didn't bother lowering her voice as she pulled me toward the man who'd just paid ten million dollars for me. "Ten million," she said, half laughing, shoving me forward like I was something she couldn't wait to be rid of. "For her? She isn't even worth half a dollar." "That's the second time you've put your hands on something that belongs to me," Lorenzo said, and though his voice never rose, the entire room seemed to flinch along with her. "There won't be a third." She let go like my skin had burned her. Two men in black closed in on either side of me instead. When one of them dug his fingers into my arm hard enough to bruise, I drove my elbow back into his ribs and felt him fold with a grunt loud enough to turn heads. "Enough." One word, and the guard let go like I'd caught fire. I hadn't looked at the man who'd said it yet. I kept my spine straight anyway, my dark hair, damp with sweat and hanging in loose waves halfway down my back, stuck to my neck as I turned to face him. He was younger than I expected. Dark hair cut close at the sides and left just long enough on top to run his fingers through it, which he did once, almost absently, the way a man smooths down something that's already perfectly in place. A suit that had never once had to explain itself. The kind of stillness that came from a man who had never needed to raise his voice to be understood. He looked at me the way a man looks at a lock he already owns the key to. My pulse should have spiked from fear. It spiked for an entirely different reason, and I hated myself for it instantly. "Untie her," he said. Not to me. To the guard. "Sir, protocol…" "I said untie her." They did. I yanked my own wrists free before the guard's hands finished the knot, and it cost me a strip of raw skin, and it was worth it. "Ten million dollars," I said, "for a woman you've never met." "I didn't buy a woman." His voice was quiet in the way that's louder than shouting. "I bought Pa León's daughter." The floor tilted. "You don't know who I am," I said, too fast. "I know exactly who you are. I know what your father built before somebody he trusted put a bullet in the back of his head. I came here for a logbook that doesn't exist on paper, every route, every supplier, every shipment he ever moved. And I think you're going to tell me where it is." "And what if I decide not to?" Something shifted behind his eyes. "You don't have the luxury of deciding whether or not. You only follow my command." I didn't answer with words. I answered by stepping close enough that the guards behind him tensed, and holding his stare until he was the one who had to decide whether to move first. He didn't. Neither did I. Lorenzo Cruz. Diabol's nephew. The one who didn't need to raise his voice to be obeyed. They shoved me into the back seat of his car, and the drive out of the city gave the shock time to curdle into something colder. Phoenix thinned out behind us, the skyline giving way to flat brown desert and the kind of silence that made every mile feel longer than the last. "You've been quiet," he said. "I'm deciding how much of what you said back there was true." "All of it. Marcus Webb was your father's partner for eleven years before he took a bullet and half a territory that wasn't his. My uncle's been running product through your father's old corridors for eight months since. Diabol saw dead ground and decided a dead man wasn't using it." "That's an act of war." "That's exactly the kind of insult that burns families down," Lorenzo said. "Your father's logbook isn't money to me anymore, Renata. It's the only thing that tells me which routes are safe when that wall comes down." "You're speaking in riddles." "I'm speaking in facts. You'll learn the difference living in my house." A ghost of something that wasn't quite a smile crossed his mouth. "Better sooner than later. Old habits die hard in Culiacán." "Applied Mathematics at sixteen," I said, before he could ask. "Financial Forensics at twenty one. My father didn't collect a daughter, Lorenzo. He collected an asset who could trace ten shell companies without blinking. He didn't need me to smile. He needed me to remember." Lorenzo went quiet for a moment, studying me the way a man studies something he's suddenly less sure he got a bargain on. Then he glanced toward the front seat, where his driver hadn't so much as blinked through the entire exchange. "Rafe, " he said. "Remind me to double what I paid, if anyone ever asks." The driver's eyes flicked once to the mirror and said nothing. "She's got a razor for a mouth." Lorenzo's gaze came back to me, something dangerously close to admiration in it now. "I like this one." Heat crawled up my neck that had nothing to do with the desert outside the window. He'd said it like a threat and a compliment in the same breath, and I couldn't decide which one unsettled me more. "Careful," I said. "Liking me has gotten better men than you killed." "Then I'll add it to the list of reasons I don't sleep well." Something almost like a smile ghosted across his mouth before it vanished. "Where is the logbook?" "I don't know," I said, and turned to the window, and let the lie sit between us as a blade neither of us had drawn yet. He didn't push. He watched the road instead, and I understood the silence wasn't belief. It was patience, and patience from a man like him was its own kind of threat. Somewhere past the window, the last lights of Phoenix gave way entirely to open desert, and I understood there was no turning back from whatever this was becoming. What he didn't know, what none of them knew, was that there was no logbook anywhere on paper. Every route, every supplier, every name my father ever trusted, locked behind my own eyes because paper could be seized but a daughter he groomed could not. I wondered what Lorenzo Cruz would do when he found out that I am the logbook. In flesh and blood.