The Debt.A MAFIA ROMANCE

Chapter One: The Woman at His Table Avery Bennett had been warned about Marco Rossi before she ever set foot in the restaurant. Not directly. Her aunt had never been the type to sit her down and explain things plainly — that wasn't how the women in her family operated. Instead, over the phone, in a voice too careful to be casual, she'd said: "Whatever they offer you there, don't ask where the money comes from. And don't sit at his table." Avery hadn't understood what she meant. She'd assumed it was one of her aunt's usual warnings, the kind meant to keep a young woman cautious in a city she didn't know yet — don't walk home alone, don't trust men who buy you drinks, don't sit at his table. She'd filed it away with the others and boarded the bus anyway, because rent didn't care about warnings, and her aunt's favor was the only job offer she had. She understood now. She'd been inside Rosalinda's for less than ten minutes — hired that morning as a favor to her aunt, thrown into a black dress two sizes too formal for waiting tables, her hair still damp from a shower she hadn't had time to properly dry — when the hostess grabbed her elbow hard enough to leave a mark. The hostess didn't answer right away. She glanced toward the back corner of the dining room, where the lighting dropped lower and the tables sat farther apart, as if the architecture itself understood that certain conversations needed distance from the rest of the room. A man sat there alone, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, a folder of paperwork in front of him that he wasn't reading. He sat like the restaurant existed for his convenience and not the other way around — like the walls themselves had been built around whatever schedule he kept. "Just go," the hostess said, and let go of Avery's arm like it had started to burn her. Avery picked up the bottle. She'd learned a long time ago that people underestimated you faster when your hands shook. Hers didn't — not because she wasn't nervous, but because she'd spent years teaching her body not to advertise it. Fear was information. She preferred to keep hers private. She crossed the floor, aware of every set of eyes that tracked her without seeming to. Two men stood near the entrance to the back hallway, not eating, not drinking, just watching the room the way men watch rooms when watching is their entire job. She didn't look at them directly. She'd learned that too, somewhere along the way — don't look at the men who aren't supposed to be looked at. The man at table six didn't glance up until the wine was already tilting into his glass, dark red catching the low light. Then he did. Marco Rossi wasn't what she expected. She'd built a version of him in her head on the walk over — loud, flashy, the kind of man who wore his power like cologne, thick and impossible to ignore. The real one was quieter than that. He had the kind of stillness that made a room quietly rearrange itself around him, the way water finds the lowest point without being told to. His eyes were dark and unhurried, moving over her face like he had all the time in the world to catalogue it, and no particular urgency about doing so. "New," he said. Not a question. "Observant." Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. A down payment on one. "You're not afraid of me." "Should I be?" "Everyone else is." "I've been here ten minutes. Give me time." He almost laughed. She watched him decide not to, watched the impulse cross his face and get filed away somewhere, the way she imagined most of his impulses got filed away — carefully, deliberately, nothing wasted. "Sit down," he said. "I'm working." "You're standing at my table holding a bottle of wine I didn't order for myself. Sit down." Avery set the bottle down with more force than necessary, the base clicking hard against the white tablecloth. "I was told not to sit at table six." "By who?" "Everyone." "And you always do what everyone tells you?" She looked at him properly then — the calm in his posture, the watch on his wrist that probably cost more than her aunt paid in rent for a year, the way the two men near the door hadn't stopped watching the room since she walked in, clearly not diners, clearly not decoration either. She thought about the warning her grandmother — no, her aunt — had given her on the phone. Don't sit at his table. "No," Avery said. "I don't." She sat down. His name meant something in this city. She learned that within the hour, in fragments — a busboy who went pale and nearly dropped a tray when he saw Marco stand to stretch his legs, a manager who personally refilled his water rather than sending a server, the way conversation at the surrounding tables dropped half a register whenever he so much as shifted in his chair, like the whole restaurant had been tuned to his frequency. Avery pretended not to notice any of it. It wasn't difficult. She'd spent a lifetime pretending not to notice things that would have been easier to simply react to. "You're doing the thing," Marco said, watching her over the rim of his glass. "What thing." "Refusing to ask." "I don't need to ask. I can see it." "See what?" "That you like people being afraid of you. It's efficient. Saves you the trouble of being polite." His eyes narrowed — not with anger, she realized, but with attention, focused and sudden, like he'd just found something in the room worth paying real attention to for the first time all evening. "You have no idea who I am." "I have some idea," Avery said, holding his gaze. "I just don't think it should change how I talk to you." "Everyone changes how they talk to me." "Then I'll be the exception. Congratulations — you get to feel special tonight." He set the glass down slowly, deliberately, like he needed both hands free for whatever came next. "What's your name?" "You didn't ask before pouring judgment on me. Why start now?" "Your name," he said again, quieter. "Avery." "Avery what?" "That's enough for a man I met four minutes ago." The almost-smile returned, fuller this time, reaching all the way to his eyes. "Careful, Avery. Men like me don't usually get told no." "Then it's about time someone started." Her aunt found her in the kitchen an hour later, white-faced, her hands twisting a dish towel like she wanted to wring something else entirely. "You sat down. You sat down with him." "He told me to." "Marco Rossi does not ask people to sit, Avery, he tells them, and people who get told don't say things like whatever you just said to him, because I could hear you from the kitchen —" "I was polite." "You were not polite, you were —" Her aunt pressed a hand flat to her chest like she needed to physically hold something in that was trying to get out. "Do you understand what his family does? What this restaurant is a front for?" "I have a guess." "Then start acting like it." Avery glanced back through the small round window in the kitchen door. Marco was still at his table, alone again, turning his wine glass slowly by the stem, his eyes already lifted toward the kitchen — waiting, she realized with a small, unwelcome jolt, for her to come back out. "Too late for that," she said. When her shift finally ended, well past midnight, the dining room emptied and quiet, he was waiting by the back exit — jacket back on now, the two men from the door nowhere in sight, as if he'd sent them away for this specific conversation. "You're following me," Avery said, pulling her coat tighter against the sudden cold of the alley. "I own the building. Technically you're the one leaving it." "Semantics." "I prefer 'accurate.'" She adjusted her bag on her shoulder, buying herself a second to think. "What do you want, Mr. Rossi?" "Marco." "What do you want, Marco?" He considered the question longer than it seemed to deserve, his eyes moving over the empty alley like he was checking it out of habit rather than concern. "I want to know why a woman with nothing to prove decided to prove it to me anyway." "Maybe I just don't like being told where to sit." "Maybe," he said, stepping half a pace closer, "you liked it more than you're admitting." Avery didn't answer that. Mostly because he wasn't wrong, and she'd rather freeze on the sidewalk all night than tell him so out loud. "Goodnight, Marco." She walked. Three steps. Four. "Avery." She stopped. Didn't turn around, though every instinct told her to. "Table six," he said, his voice carrying easily in the quiet street. "Same time tomorrow. Ask for it yourself." "I don't work tomorrow." "You do now." By the time she turned around to argue, his car was already pulling away from the curb, taillights disappearing around the corner — and Avery stood alone on the sidewalk with the uncomfortable, unwelcome certainty that she had just walked into something with no clean way out of it.