THE DON’S CAPTIVE

7

Chapter 7

He told me at breakfast that I was going with him that night.

No lead up. No explanation. He put a coffee cup in front of me, sat down across the table and said, “There is an event this evening. You will come.”

I looked up from my plate. “An event.”

“A dinner. Hosted by an associate of mine. You will be present as my companion.”

The word companion sat in the air between us with several layers underneath it that I was not ready to examine before I had finished my eggs.

“And if I say no,” I said.

He looked at me with those dark eyes and said nothing.

“Right,” I said. “Companion it is.”

He almost smiled. Almost.

A woman arrived at the house at two in the afternoon with garment bags and a case that turned out to contain more makeup than I had owned in my entire life combined. She introduced herself as Sofia, said nothing else, and proceeded to do her job with the focused efficiency of someone paid too well to make small talk.

The dress was black. Of course it was. It fit like it had been made for my specific body, which given the precise wardrobe already in my room I was starting to suspect it had been. Long, with a low back and a slit that was just past tasteful. Heels that added four inches I did not need but that changed the way I stood, the way I took up space.

When Sofia was done I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and looked at the woman looking back at me.

She looked like she belonged in his world.

I was not sure if that terrified me or not.

He was waiting at the bottom of the staircase when I came down. Suit tonight, dark, immaculate, the kind of tailoring that made him look like he had been assembled with deliberate intent. He had his phone in his hand and was reading something and he did not hear me start down the stairs.

Which meant I had three full seconds of watching him before he looked up.

He went still when he saw me.

Not the calculating stillness I had come to recognize. Something different. Something that moved through his features and was gone before he locked it back down, but I had seen it and I was keeping it.

“You look,” he started.

“Thank you,” I said, before he could finish. Because whatever he said next I was not ready for it. Not on a staircase, not with his eyes doing what they were doing.

His mouth closed. He looked at me for a moment longer. Then he offered his arm.

I took it.

The car ride was mostly silence, which I had come to understand was his version of comfort. He did not fill space with noise. He let it exist. I watched the city lights streak past the window and thought about the last time I had been in this car, frightened and calculating and pressed against the opposite door.

I was still calculating. The fear had just changed shape.

“Tell me what I need to know,” I said. “About tonight. Who these people are. What my role actually is.”

He looked at me. “Your role is to be present. Poised. To say very little and observe everything.”

“I can do that.”

“I know you can.” A pause. “His name is Caruso. He has known me for eight years. He will try to read you. He is good at it.”

“What does he want to find out.”

“Whether you are real.”

I turned from the window to look at him directly. “Real.”

“Whether you are a woman I brought because I wanted to or a woman I brought because I needed a prop.” He held my gaze. “The distinction matters to him.”

“Which one am I,” I said.

The question came out before I could stop it. The car felt suddenly smaller. He looked at me for a long moment, the city light moving across the planes of his face, and when he spoke his voice was lower than usual.

“The night is not over yet,” he said.

That was not an answer. It was something worse. Something that landed in the center of my chest and radiated outward and was still doing it when the car stopped.

The venue was all dark marble and candlelight and the low hum of serious money in a room together. Caruso found us within minutes of arriving. Shorter than I expected, silver haired, with eyes that did exactly what Dante had warned me about. He looked at me and I felt him taking inventory, not of my body, of my function.

I smiled at him and let him look and gave him nothing useful.

Something in his expression warmed. He approved of whatever he found or did not find. He kissed my hand and told Dante I was lovely and moved away, and I felt Dante’s hand press briefly into my lower back.

“Well done,” he said, close to my ear. His voice was low and the warmth of his breath against my neck sent a current straight through me.

I turned my head and his face was very close. Too close for a public room if we were pretending to be anything other than what we apparently were.

“I have not done anything yet,” I murmured.

“You looked at him like you were not afraid of him,” he said. “In this room that is everything.”

His hand stayed at my back and we moved through the room and I understood within the first twenty minutes why he had brought me. In this world a man arrived alone when he had something to prove or something to hide. He arrived with a woman when he was settled, secured, untouchable. I was not a companion tonight.

I was a statement.

The evening built slowly. Wine and conversation and a tension under everything that had nothing to do with Caruso or the room or the careful social performance we were both putting on.

It was us. The small of my back under his hand. His arm against mine at the table. The way he turned toward me slightly when he spoke, not for the room’s benefit, just because that was the direction his body kept choosing.

It was in the car on the way back that it broke open.

I do not know who moved first. I think it was me. I think I turned toward him in the dark of the car and said his name, just his name, and something in the way I said it crossed whatever line we had both been carefully not crossing.

He kissed me.

Not soft. Not a question. His hand came up to the side of my face and he kissed me the way a man kisses something he has been keeping himself from, with the full force of everything that had been building since the alley, since the staircase, since every charged moment in every room of that house.

I kissed him back. I kissed him back with everything I had and my hand was in his shirt and his mouth was hot and certain and the city streaked past the windows and I forgot every careful calculated thought I had ever had about this man.

He pulled back.

Both of us breathing. His forehead against mine, his hand still cradling my jaw, his eyes finding mine in the dark.

“Aria,” he said. Low and rough and wrecked in a way I had never heard from him before.

“Do not apologize,” I said. “Do not you dare apologize for that.”

His thumb moved along my cheekbone.

“I was not going to apologize,” he said.

The car stopped. We were back at the compound. He got out and held the door and offered me his hand and when I took it he did not let go as we walked inside.

He did not let go at the bottom of the staircase either.

He looked at me in the entrance hall light and I looked back at him and the question between us was enormous and unspoken and entirely mutual.

His hand tightened around mine.

“Come with me,” he said quietly.

Not an order. Not this time.

And that, more than anything else, was what made me say yes.

What happened next was something I was not prepared for.

Not because of what it was.

Because of what he said afterward.

Three words, spoken quietly into my hair in the dark, that changed every single thing I thought I understood about Dante Romano.

Three words he would spend the next week pretending he had never said.