Chapter 3
The ride to the Bronx took forty minutes, and Arya spent most of them watching Dante check his weapon.
It should have frightened her. It did frighten her, in the abstract, in the way a gun always frightens a person who has never held one. But there was something else underneath the fear that she did not want to look at too closely: the fact that she felt safer in this armored car with this man than she had ever felt in her own apartment.
They pulled up outside a grimy dive bar called the Shamrock. Green shamrocks peeling off the window. A neon sign with two letters dead.
“Stay,” Dante said.
He got out. Luca and two guards followed.
Arya watched through the tinted glass as they went in.
Five minutes passed. Then ten.
Then the back door of the bar kicked open, and a man came stumbling out clutching a bag.
Mick.
Mick the Rat, running for the alley, and in his hands a battered metal lock box.
Her father’s lock box.
Arya did not think. She did not remember the warning. She saw the photographs of her mother — the only pictures in the world of the woman who had given her the ring and the name and then died — running away down an alley, and she opened the car door and ran.
“Hey!” Mick saw her. He stopped, and his face twisted, and he pulled a knife. “You little— you brought the heat on me.”
Arya froze.
The knife glinted. She was ten feet away from him, in a dirty alley, with nowhere to go.
Mick lunged.
*Bang.*
The knife clattered to the ground. Mick screamed and clutched his hand, which was now a ruin of red.
Dante walked calmly out of the back exit of the bar with a smoking gun in his hand.
He did not look at Mick. He looked at Arya, and his eyes were blazing.
He walked past the screaming loan shark, grabbed Arya by the arm, and pinned her against the brick wall of the alley. His body was hard against hers. His face was inches away.
“I told you,” he snarled, “to stay in the car.”
“He had my things—”
“I had it handled.”
“Do you have a death wish? Because standing in an open alley in the Bronx is a good way to get it granted.”
“I’m not your prisoner,” she yelled back.
Dante stared at her.
The adrenaline was moving through both of them, and the air between them had changed — it was not just anger anymore. It was electric. He looked at her lips, and then back at her eyes.
“No,” he said, and his voice was rough. “You’re not a prisoner. You’re mine to protect. And you are making it very difficult.”
Then tires screeched at the end of the alley.
A black van. The side door slid open. The barrel of a submachine gun came out.
“Get down!”
Dante threw her to the ground and covered her body with his own as the brick wall above them came apart.
The world collapsed into noise.
Arya pressed her face into the grit of the alley floor and felt Dante’s weight on top of her — an immovable shield of muscle and expensive tailoring — and felt him jerk once, sharply, and heard him make no sound at all.
“Luca! Return fire!”
He rolled off her and came up with his own weapon in one motion. Luca and the other guard, behind the armored Rolls, opened up. The alley became a deafening echo chamber, and then the van’s tires squealed and it peeled away, and the smell of burnt rubber and cordite hung in the air.
Dante was on his feet instantly, pulling her up.
“Are you hit? Check yourself.”
Arya patted her body, hands shaking. “I think I’m okay. My knee—”
She had scraped it badly when he tackled her. Blood ran down her shin.
“We have to move. They’ll circle back, or the cops will come. Neither is good.”
He shoved her into the back of the Rolls.
As they sped away, leaving the groaning Mick O’Connor and the chaos of the Bronx behind, Arya noticed a dark stain spreading across the left shoulder of Dante’s gray jacket.
“You’re shot,” she whispered.
He glanced at it. “It’s a graze. A through-and-through. Ruined a five-thousand-dollar suit. The bastards.”
“We need to go to a hospital.”
Dante laughed — a harsh sound. “The kind of hospitals I go to don’t ask questions. But we aren’t going to the city.”
“Why not?”
“Because the penthouse is compromised.” His eyes were terrifying when he said it. “They knew we were in the Bronx. That means I have a leak.”
A leak in the Moretti organization was a death sentence waiting to happen.
They drove for two hours, east, out of the city and into Long Island. The landscape changed from urban decay to manicured wealth — hedges, gates, long driveways, everything quiet and enormous.
They arrived at a sprawling modern estate behind high hedges and iron gates, right on the ocean. Southampton. Stark, cold, and beautiful, much like its owner.
The house was staffed by a silent elderly couple who did not blink at the sight of a bloodied mafia don and a disheveled waitress coming through the door at two in the morning.
Upstairs, in a master bedroom overlooking the churning Atlantic, Dante finally took off his jacket and his shirt.
Arya gasped.
The graze was an ugly furrow carved through the muscle of his deltoid, still oozing sluggishly. And beneath it — and around it, and across the whole of his torso — was a map of scars. Knife wounds. Bullet holes. Old burns. Stories of a violent life written on skin.
“There’s a medical kit in the bathroom,” Dante said, sitting on the edge of the bed, pale but composed. “Luca is securing the perimeter. You have to help me.”
Arya hesitated.
An hour ago she had wanted to run from him. Now she was standing in a bedroom on the ocean holding a roll of gauze.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“Clean it. Pack it. Wrap it. It’s not brain surgery, Arya. Just don’t faint on me.”
Her hands trembled as she cleaned the wound. He hissed through his teeth when the alcohol touched raw flesh, and his muscles bunched under her fingers, and being this close to him — touching his bare skin, feeling the heat of him — was overwhelming in a way she did not have words for.
“Why did you save me in the alley?” she asked quietly, taping the bandage into place. “You could have stayed behind the car.”
Dante looked up at her. His eyes, usually so guarded, were hazy with pain and adrenaline.
“I don’t let what’s mine get broken.” A pause. “You’re under my protection, Arya. Until I say otherwise, you are the most valuable thing in my life.”
The intensity of it made her breath catch.
May you like
It was not a declaration of love. It was a declaration of ownership.
But coming from a man like Dante Moretti, it felt terrifyingly similar.
