Crowds part the wine-dark sea—to coin a phrase. Shoppers with expensive bags and cell phones and fancy coffee cups step out of the way as I hurry through the thickest of it, trying frantically to disappear. The street is bustling busy, but that’s to my advantage. The shoppers offer cover—he won’t touch me in front of them, and I can scream. I have one chance at an exit from this nightmare.
Freedom is ahead, I just have to grab it.
And then I stop dead.
“No sign of her yet.” Fat Lip’s back is to me. He’s talking on the phone, craning his neck to look in the wrong direction. Scouring. Hunting.
He’s going to turn to me in a split second, and that’s all the time I have to decide what to do.
I can cross the street or hide in another store until he’s gone, but what if he starts doing sweeps? Maybe one of these stores has a bathroom in it I can hide in for an hour. Not ideal, at all, but if I’m a ghost, maybe he’ll chase me somewhere I’m not while I slip out.
No time to plan, I duck into the store nearest me and hurry through the racks until I’m away from the windows and come face-to-face with a wall of lacy lingerie. In sexy, smoldering font, AGENT PROVOCATEUR is written across a mirror.
Oh, lovely. The fancy sex shop Scarlett always talked about visiting. Instead of browsing it and giggling and inspecting with my best friend, I’m hiding from the devil in his own hell.
“Hi there!” A perky girl with pushed-up breasts pops up in front of me. “Welcome to Agent Provocateur!”
My breath still constricts tight in my chest from the running and desperate fear. “Hi. There’s a man who is—” Speak of the devil and his minions shall appear. I’ve summoned him to the front of the store, where he stands outside, drenched in sunlight, framed by the window, looking in casually as if neither the tinting nor the glass itself is between us.
He isn’t searching, but there’s a definite sense of openness to his lack of commitment, like he heard a faint call from my direction.
I walk backwards, slowly, and with each step I take, Santino takes an identically measured one towards the door.
“Oh, Santino?” the girl says. I snap to look at her. She’s smiling like she’s about to make rent ten times over in commissions. “I know what he likes. I have it in the back.”
There’s no way he can see me. This is impossible. The store is dimly lit, dark, and sensuous, and it’s bright as the face of the sun outside. A beautiful day. I should be invisible past the reflection in the glass. Besides, it’s designed to show the mannequins, not the customers.
This is the kind of store that keeps quiet. And yet, even if he doesn’t actually see me, he knows. He knows where I am. He knows I’m here.
I want to scream. I should scream. But it’s like a dream, a fucking nightmare, where you open your mouth but you can’t hear yourself, and neither can the monster. No one can help you. No one can hear you. But the beast always knows where you are.
“There’s a lounge for the guys. He knows he can come in,” the salesgirl chirps. She’s entirely too happy.
Is it demons or vampires who need to be invited inside? I never remember. Whichever it is, Santino’s that, because he opens the door just after the girl says he can.
“This way!” She nudges me towards the back, and I follow her.
The store is luxurious and terrifying. All my mind can see is the red lingerie that wound up in my bag. Velvet couches and velvet carpeting fill the dressing room area. Dim lights and frilly lingerie cover the walls. A pole is anchored in the corner, surrounded by a cove of floor-length mirrors.
And he’s a regular here. Great. Great.
“Stay here and I’ll get something that’s right up his alley.” She winks at me with a wicked smile.
Shit. “Hey, uh...don’t tell him I’m here. It was supposed to be a surprise.” I try to wink back but my body is so frantic and anxious I probably look like I’m in mid-seizure.
“Your secret’s safe with me.” She winks again and disappears into the forest of lace and leather.
I peek around the corner, behind a tall rack of hosiery, to spy on the devil. Santino is standing casually in the store, hands posed demurely in his pockets like it was another day, nothing exciting happening.
But I can feel him the same way he must feel me, and he’s anything but calm.
“You sure you don’t want him to come in?” the girl chirps from the back room. I can hear the mischief and excitement in her voice. It’s only a matter of time before she blows my cover.
I have to get out of here.
This dressing room is nothing more than an elaborate trap to snare me. Just around the corner is the Employee Only door, tucked behind another mounted pole.
Jackpot.
The breakroom is dismal at best. A single table, two chairs, a tiny fridge. Sexual harassment posters over an expensive coffee machine no one’s cleaned in months. Where are the posters warning about mobsters forcing you into slavery posed as marriage?
There’s another door in the back, with a big metal bar across the middle and a big, fat red EXIT sign shining above another that screams EMERGENCY ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND.
What good will an alarm do if I’m already a store’s worth of steps ahead?
“This is your only chance, Violetta.” I grit my teeth. My heart is trying to shatter my rib cage, my stomach clenches down attempts to upheave the coffee I had earlier, and the air around me feels like cotton in my lungs.
I take a running start and slam into the metal bar. It buckles under me with a clack and the alarm shrieks.
The world shifts from velvet and lace to metal and dirt. The back alley has a roof over top and is wide enough for a Rolls Royce to be parked back there. I can squeeze past it to the right. To the left is dumpsters, a plastic chair with a spray of cigarette butts at the feet. A stack of shoeboxes marked PRADA.
Past that, past the mess of filth and luxury, people walk in blissful ignorance. The sky. Freedom. My way out of this fucking nightmare.
I turn to run, make it two steps, and the world moves sideways as I’m grabbed by a thick, powerful hand. The door slams shut and the alarm cuts out, then I see him.
Santino.
The king.
He’s more regal in rage.
I want to squirm, for my body to respond to my brain’s desperate, frantic pleas. To run. Be safe again. Ever again. But he holds me against the brick wall with a vise grip that’s nothing compared to the intensity of his wine-dark eyes.
My chance at freedom disappears in a blink.
“Please,” I gasp. Tears threaten to peel off my skin and my body threatens to combust. Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe I’m just better off dead. “Set me free. Please.”
His eyes are on fire. He’s the living embodiment of Hades. He takes me by the throat and pushes me against the filthy alley wall. His scent fills my nostrils and all the air around me.
Rage. He smells like rage.
His nose presses against my cheek and his breath freezes my jaw. He isn’t hurting me, he isn’t choking me, but he’s in control and he wants me to know it.
Why is this suddenly so arousing?
Why did my heart start beating differently, just as fast, but in a different rhythm?
What. The. Fuck. Is. Wrong. With. Me.
“You’ll be dead long before you’re free.”
He means it. I can feel it. This time, it’s not a threat, but a warning. I don’t understand it. He’s threatened me plenty of times.
“Why?” I let out a shaky breath. Each movement of my mouth undulates against his hands. “Why me?”
“It’s always been you, Violetta.”
His lips graze my cheek, my forehead, my nose. He’s activating paths along my skin, mapping the way to my own damn womanhood in electrical current. Intoxicating. Between his hands and his lips I can’t see or feel anything else. We are trapped in this moment between worlds, where only he and I exist.
A whoop of a police car slices cleanly through the moment, and I’m no longer embraced by a powerful lover, but a horrible captor.
Santino takes his hands off my throat and takes a step back. For just a second, one heavy breath, a flash of humanity wipes out the regal rage in his features. Guilt. Like the better part of him caught the demon manhandling me.
Then we both look down the alley to the street, see the police car pass as it whoops again to part the thick traffic, and the moment is fully, completely dead.
“You’re coming with me.”
The Rolls blocks one direction, leaving me with only one way to run.
“Okay.”
Santino turns, arms out. One arm to me, one pointing to the store, commanding me to follow him back inside, back to my prison, back to the life I’d rather die in than continue.
Not a chance in hell.
I fake a step forward, then cut away and run back down the alley. If I run hard enough, if I press enough, maybe I can catch that police car. I can be free.
“No!” Santino barks.
I run harder than I’ve ever run before, not looking back. I’ll never, ever look back. My legs burn, my lungs sting, and still I push.
I make it to the end of the alley.
A black Suburban blocks my way. I bang on the window.
“Help!” Nothing. I bang like I’m going to punch through the glass. “Please. Help me!”
I spin around, looking for another door, another alleyway, anything. All I see is Santino, running towards me with something more than rage.
Is it fear?
Another black Suburban pulls in behind the Rolls, blocking the other direction.
Something is very, very wrong.
I bang on the window, still watching Santino behind me as he stops running, but my fists don’t hit glass. They fly through the space, into the car. For a moment I think I punched through, but it’s just an open window. A hand grabs my wrist.
Not one of Santino’s goons. The guy in the back seat is grittier, dirtier, with a greased-back widow’s peak and a thin wedge of a nose.
Behind me, Santino growls, a powerful roar that would terrify lions on the savannah.
“I got her!” Wedge Nose says to someone in the front.
A loud bang echoes behind me.
I cry out and try to drop to the ground, but the man in the back seat has me. He pulls me in, grabbing my dress by the waist to hoist me up, and through the window.
“Santino!” The scream rips from my lungs. “Santino!”
“Shut up, whore,” the guy in the front says; he’s built like a hydrant, with a nose that looks like it had been broken a dozen times.
I scramble—kicking and screaming—trying to get a grip on the door handle, but he pulls and before I know it, I’m trapped in the back seat behind tinted windows.
“Shut her ass up!” the driver snaps.
I didn’t even know I was screaming.
Wedge pulls my hair and sticks a gun in my face. “Shut it.”
He and Fire Hydrant spit rapid-fire Italian until the driver flings his arm back, gun out.
“Scumbag at four o’clock.”
He squeezes the trigger as he swerves, and his bullet shatters the window, but not before hitting Wedge Nose in the head. Blood and brains spatter over the rear windshield.
“Fuck!” Fire Hydrant barks, veering right to avoid a city bus.
I’m screaming like I’m someone else, pinned down by a dead body with an exploded head over the neck as the car screeches away. There’s blood and gray mushy stuff all over my dress. Outside, shots are fired. I follow the sound to Santino’s Alfa Romeo.
The driver guns it, swinging his arm over the back seat to point his gun in my husband’s direction. Except, I’m in the way.
“Get the fuck down!”
He doesn’t want two bodies in the car, but I want to be dead. I want this to end right here, and either I’m going to die frozen in fear or die trying to be free.
Pushing the body off me, I leap for him with an ungodly scream and dig my nails into his eye. He swings his arm to get me off him, and the SUV rocks like it’s going to tip over.
He swears in Italian and tries to steady the car. I pull the door handle. It won’t unlock. I can’t fuck with it another second and try to crawl out the window. The shattered glass digs into my arms but I can barely feel it. My body works in autopilot—get out, get out, get out.
I offer up a silent prayer as I move, as frantic and desperate as the rest of me. Dear God, set me free or let me meet my parents and Rosetta in heaven. I don’t know if I have the right to pray anymore, if God still answers my prayers.
The car swings back and forth as the driver grabs for my legs. His hand slips on a lump of brain on my calf. The torque of the last swerve pushes me out of the broken window.
I land in the middle of the street with an unf and my head hits the concrete with a thick crack and an eyeful of stars.
The Suburban screeches to a halt and the driver comes stumbling out after me. I have to get up. My body screams, but adrenaline pushes me up to run.
A black Alfa Romeo screeches up next to me. Santino throws open the door from the driver’s seat.
“Get in. Now.”
Behind me, Hydrant lifts his gun. In front of me, my jailer is demanding I return.
I should run. I should keep running. I should run until a decent person finds me broken and bloodied and offers to save me. Run until I drop dead.
Run to...where? Zio and Zia will send me back. My friends have no idea what’s going on. My American friends would only make it worse and endanger themselves. I can’t do that.
Not. An. Option. Not anymore.
Santino gets out of the car without demanding anything else of me. His trust snaps my attention back to him, because I don’t need another word from him and he doesn’t need me to confirm I’ll do what he asks.
He was always my only choice. My only way to remain safe.
He told me that, didn’t he? Several times. I just didn’t understand. God, I wish I could go back to never understanding.
I dive into the back seat of the car, but Santino squares off with the thug. Guns are tucked back into their jackets because shooting in the streets is too risky, out here in the open. Too many innocents. Always a code of honor with these guys that I’d laugh at if I wasn’t fully fucking terrified.
Santino is an animal. He pulls the guy up by the collar and knees him in the groin. He throws him against the SUV and presses his face against the passenger window. He growls something I can’t hear, but can feel down to the nails on my toes.
He then pulls the guy’s head back and smashes it against the window, creating long, splintered cracks.
Like a textbook opening, I can see the catalogue of broken bones, the muscles torn, the nerves decimated. I can’t breathe. I can’t move.
The second guy drops to the asphalt, unconscious and broken. Half his face is covered in meat and blood. Santino walks back to the driver’s side of the Alfa, not paying the man any attention, then driving away before anyone can get a handle on what the hell just happened.
The devil, my only savior, pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, easing into the traffic he created as if he’s on his way to church on a Sunday morning.
I meet his wine-dark eyes in the rearview mirror and in that moment, I know I will never have the chance to run again.