CRAVED BY THE DON

Camille Okoye had spent six years teaching numbers to confess. Numbers always did, eventually. They bled out in the margins, in the rounding errors, in the small, tidy lies people told themselves at two in the morning. That was why the firm sent her to the worst files, the ones with perfect spreadsheets and no soul. And that was why, at 9:47 on a Thursday night, she was alone on the fourteenth floor of Ravello Maritime Holdings, staring at a shipping manifest that did not exist. "Eleven containers of citrus," she murmured, scrolling. "Out of a port that has no citrus." The building hummed around her, glass and steel and money. Every other desk had gone dark hours ago. She had told herself she was staying for the work. She had not told herself she was staying because the man whose name was on the building had walked past her glass-walled office twice that evening, slowly, without once looking in. She had noticed that he did not look. That was the problem. Men who didn't look were always the ones paying the most attention. She saved a copy of the file to an encrypted drive. Then a second copy. Then she reached for her coat. "Leaving so soon, Ms. Okoye?" The voice came from the doorway, low and unhurried, with the faint rasp of a man who rarely had to raise it. Her pulse jumped before her mind could stop it. Dante Ravello leaned against the frame like the room had been built around him. Dark suit, no tie, the top button of his white shirt undone. Black hair pushed back as if he had dragged his hand through it all day. Grey eyes, the colour of a blade held to the light. She had met him exactly once, at the gala, three weeks ago. He had looked at her for eleven seconds. She had counted. Then he had walked away, and the very next morning her firm had received a request for her specifically to handle the Ravello audit. "Mr. Ravello." She slid the drive into her pocket, slow and casual, and hoped her hands were steady. "I didn't realise anyone was still here." "I'm always here." His gaze dropped, deliberately, to her pocket, and came back up. "You've been in my files for nine days." "That's what an audit is." "Is it?" He stepped inside and the door clicked shut behind him. She had not heard him close it. "Because I've seen a great many audits, and none of them ever asked about the citrus." Cold slid down her spine. She lifted her chin. "The citrus doesn't add up." "No," Dante agreed softly. "It doesn't." He crossed the room in four unhurried strides. She should have backed away. She stood her ground instead, which was the first mistake of the night, and he stopped so close that she could smell him, cedar and smoke and something darker underneath, something that made the back of her knees feel strange. "You're very good," he said. "I want you to know I respect that before I tell you what happens next." "Is that a threat?" "It's a courtesy." His eyes moved over her face, unhurried, like a man reading a contract he already planned to sign. "You're going to delete what you copied. You're going to write me a clean report. And you're going to stop looking at the citrus." "No." The word hung there. Something flickered across his face, and it wasn't anger. It looked, absurdly, like delight. "No," he repeated, tasting it. "Say it again." "You're out of your mind." "I've been told." He tilted his head. "Say no again, Camille." Her name in his mouth did something unfair to her. She took a step back, and her hip met the edge of the desk. He closed the distance without touching her, one hand braced on the wood beside her, caging her without a single finger laid on her skin. "I could have you removed from this building," he murmured. "I could have your licence pulled by morning. I could do a great many things." "Then do them." "I don't want to." His voice dropped lower. "That's the trouble. Three weeks, Camille. I've sat through six board meetings, and I couldn't tell you what a single person said. I kept seeing a woman in a green dress who looked at me like I was a column that wouldn't balance." Her breath caught. She hated that it caught. "You're a criminal," she said. It came out thinner than she meant. "I'm going to take everything you have and put it in a federal file." "Try." His mouth curved, slow, dangerous, almost tender. "I'd enjoy watching you try." "You're enjoying this." "God, yes." Heat rushed up her throat and into her face. She shoved at his chest, and it was like shoving a wall that happened to be warm. Under her palm his heart was going hard and fast. Not calm at all. He was not as controlled as he looked. The realisation was a mistake, because it made her look up. Their eyes locked. The room went very quiet. His gaze flicked, once, to her mouth, and that tiny betrayal undid something in her stomach. "Step back," she whispered. "Tell me you want me to," Dante said. "Tell me, and I'll walk out that door and you'll never see me alone again." She opened her mouth to say yes. She truly did. What came out was nothing at all. His hand lifted, slowly enough that she could have stopped it. His knuckles brushed along her jaw, barely there, and every nerve she owned lit up like a switchboard. His thumb traced her lower lip, and her eyes fluttered shut before she could prevent it. "That's what I thought," he breathed. His hand slid from her lip to her jaw, then lower, a slow, deliberate trail down the side of her throat. Her pulse leapt under his fingertips and he felt it, she knew he felt it, because his mouth curved in the darkest, softest smile she had ever seen. "There," he murmured. "That's the only honest thing in this room." He bent his head. He did not kiss her. He only let his lips hover at the edge of her ear, close enough that his breath ghosted over her skin and sent a shiver racing down her spine to the backs of her knees. "Tell me you haven't thought about this," Dante whispered. "Tell me that every night for three weeks, you haven't lain awake and imagined my hands on you. Tell me that and I'll believe you." She could not breathe. The desk pressed into the small of her back. His body was a wall of heat inches from hers, close enough that she could feel it through the thin silk of her blouse, and when his thumb moved to the hollow of her collarbone, her fingers curled helplessly into his lapel. Somewhere inside her, a very small, very sensible voice screamed run. The rest of her leaned in. His lips brushed hers, just once, barely a kiss, a question asked in the dark. Her whole body answered before her mind could object. A tiny, unguarded sound escaped her throat, and Dante's eyes flared like a struck match. "Camille," he said, hoarse, wrecked, the control in his voice splintering. "Say my name like that again and I won't be able to stop." She jerked away so hard she nearly knocked the lamp over. "Don't." Her voice cracked. She cleared it, furious. "Don't you dare touch me like you've already won. I came here to bury you, Ravello. I'm not going to be one more thing you collect." For a moment he said nothing. The hunger in his face did not fade. It sharpened, settled, became something patient and terrifying. "I don't collect," he said at last. "I keep." The lights went out. Not a flicker. A clean, total dark, and somewhere beneath them the building's generators groaned awake. Camille's heart slammed. Before she could move, a hand closed around her wrist, not rough, but absolute. "Stay close," Dante said, and the amusement had gone from his voice. "That isn't the building." Glass shattered on the floor below. Footsteps, heavy and fast, then shouting in a language she didn't know. Her blood turned to ice. "What did you do?" she hissed. "Nothing." He pulled her against him in the dark, one arm locking around her waist, his other hand drawing something cold and metal from beneath his jacket. His mouth was against her ear. "Which means someone else read your citrus file before I did." She should have been terrified. She was. But pressed against his chest, his heartbeat steady now, his breath stirring her hair, she was also aware of every inch of where their bodies met, and that awareness was its own kind of emergency. "Dante," she whispered. It was the first time she had said his name. He went completely still. "Say it again," he said, rough as gravel. "Is this really the time?" "Camille." His arm tightened. "Whatever happens in the next ten minutes, I want that to be the last thing I hear." The stairwell door crashed open down the hall. He moved. One hard pull and she was behind him, pressed to the wall, his back a barrier between her and the dark. Over his shoulder, a thin beam of light swept the corridor. Someone was searching floor by floor. Someone who knew her name was on that file. She had meant to destroy this man. Now the only thing between her and a stranger's bullet was his shoulders. "If we live," Dante said quietly, not turning, "I'm going to take you to dinner, and you're going to tell me exactly how much you hate me." "If we live," she shot back, shaking, "I'm going to testify against you." He laughed, low and breathless and wild. "That," he said, "is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me." The beam found the door of her office. And the handle began to turn.