A Submissive For The Beastly Mafia

Chapter 1

RUSSEL

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"You killed the guy," said Kegan Gaetano, my best friend and personal police. Hell, I could even call him brother or a father, depending on what mood suits him for the day. "Iverson."

I ignored that, my fingers drumming against the leather armrest of the Bentley. "How many men do we have positioned?"

"Twenty. All loyal to your cause. All very loyal to you." Kegan's tone was mocking. He'd been by my side since we were kids, long before I took over from my father.

"Sent my package to those fuckers yet?"

"Arriving in thirty minutes. Everything's in place." He hesitated. "Let's talk about Iverson."

"What's there to talk about?" I asked, irritated. "The idiot asked for it and he got it."

"How about asking me before pulling a hit like that? That guy has an army of miscreants who'd die going to war for him right now."

Thankfully, the car door opened, and Luca, my head of security, slid into the backseat beside me. "Building's secured. But there's something you should know."

I raised an eyebrow. "Go on."

"Shadow was spotted in Milan earlier."

The temperature in the car seemed to drop ten degrees. Kegan and I exchanged glances. If he was in Milan, then there's a good chance Iverson met with him behind my back.

I reached for the decanter of scotch in the car's built-in bar and poured myself a glass. "Loyalty is such a rare commodity these days."

"Be on the lookout." Kegan instructed Luca, who nodded and slid out of the car.

When Luca was safely out, I eyed Kegan. "Are you going to scold me for killing the idiot?"

He rolled his eyes. "No. I'm going to give you something to do."

My eyes lit up. "A girl?"

"More like an interview. And after that, there's a place we need to be tonight."

My brows creased in a disappointed frown. "Interview? Is it a girl?"

Kegan eyed me. "This one looks too innocent."

"Oh, so she's already here." A small smirk played on my lips. "Well, does she have a clean pussy?"

"Eww." Kegan pretended to gag. When I rolled my eyes at his dramatics, he scoffed. "Cut it out, she's not going to fuck you. She's here for work."

My shoulders slouched in disappointment. "Then whoever fixed that interview should be fired."

It was Kegan's turn to smirk. "Well, I did."

"Fuck you," I muttered.

Reporters were a constant in my life, had been since the day I inherited an empire before I'd even finished growing into my own name. They came in waves, some hoping for a headline, some hoping for a story that would make their careers, a rare few hoping I'd notice them in a way that had nothing to do with journalism. 

Young, disgustingly wealthy, and better-looking than any man in my line of work deserved to be— I'd stopped counting how many of them tried to angle their questions into an invitation. I'd also stopped pretending I minded.

Today's, apparently, was different. 

༺❦༻

When I entered my study fifteen minutes later, I was surprised to find a blonde woman sitting in the seat across from mine. I hated blondes. Not the mild, take-it-or-leave-it kind of dislike. My hatred had roots I didn't feel like excavating for an audience. But the second her hazel eyes lifted to mine, something in my chest rearranged itself without asking my permission first.

She was shaking. A fine, involuntary tremor in the hands folded too tightly in her lap, the kind a body produces when some animal part of it understands, correctly, that it is sitting in a room with something that eats things like her for breakfast. 

Well, I'd have been almost insulted if she wasn't. 

I couldn't help but notice the way her composed face tensed the moment I sat down across from her. Kegan knew I didn't touch blondes, hadn't in years, which was exactly why it was strange that he'd put one in my study to begin with. Stranger still that I wasn't ordering her out.

She had one of those faces men wrote bad poetry about— wide-eyed, angelic, an innocence that could make a man like me want to hold a lighter to it just to watch it catch. And that mouth. Christ, that mouth. I let my eyes rest on it a beat longer than professional courtesy allowed and thought, with a clarity that should have concerned me, of at least four uses for it that had nothing to do with journalism.

She wasn't looking at me like she wanted a story.

She was looking at me like she wanted to disappear, and something ugly and pleased unfurled low in my chest at that. I wanted, very badly, to be the reason she couldn't.

I reminded myself, with real effort, that she was work. Kegan's idea of work, which usually meant I kept my hands to myself and my opinions about her tits unspoken. I leaned back instead, folded my arms, and let the silence stretch, the way silence does to nervous people.

It did something to her, all right. She opened her mouth, lost her nerve, closed it, then knocked her elbow into the armrest hard enough that she winced and rubbed at it before she managed to speak at all.

"Good afternoon, Mr—"

"Mancini," I supplied with a light smirk. "You must be the reporter."

"Oh, not me," she said quickly, and in her hurry to correct me, the pen in her other hand slipped from her fingers and clattered off the edge of the desk. She dove for it, missed, then bent to retrieve it from the floor, color climbing up her throat. "Sorry. My friend was supposed to be here, but she fell sick, and I have to stand in for her."

I said nothing, just watched her resurface with the pen clutched like a lifeline. That must explain Kegan's cryptic comments. He would never have deliberately handed me someone like her.

"So you have a name?" I asked, my hand outstretched for a handshake.

A handshake wasn’t necessary, if anything, I’d very much prefer a hug where I could press my hands to her ass, but since I couldn’t get that, I was dying to see if those palms would be as soft as her skin looked. 

She looked at my hand like it might bite her, which was fair, then took it too fast, gripped too hard, and let go a second too soon, as if my skin had scalded her. "Allesia Guerrero."

The name rolled off my tongue slower than it needed to. "Allesia."

"Yes, Mr—" She caught herself. "Mancini."

"Oh, just Russel," I said, waving a hand. When she only shifted, notepad sliding half off her knee before she caught it against her chest, I added, "Let's get to it, then."

She blinked at me. "Huh?"

She looked so lost and so entirely out of her depth that some petty, ungenerous part of me enjoyed it. "Your questions, Allesia."

"Right. Right, of course." She fumbled the notepad open, flipping past two pages before finding the right one, and squinted down at whatever was written there. Her eyes went wide.

"Ah— I'm sorry, I didn't check these earlier," she stuttered, not looking up. "These look rather personal."

My face stayed impassive, though amusement tugged at the corner of my mouth, which only seemed to make her more uncomfortable. I liked making her uncomfortable. I liked it more than I had any right to.

"I'm not new to how frustrating and invasive people in your friend's profession can be," I said carefully. "So ask away."

"Even if they're— " she cleared her throat, "—very, very personal?"

"I don't mind."

She cleared her throat a second time, as if the first hadn't done the job. "Well— are you, by any chance, gay, Mr. Mancini?"

I drew in a short breath, more startled than offended. "No. Next question."

"She'd like an explanation," Allesia said, in a voice so small I almost missed it over the sound of her own knee bouncing.

I fought the urge to laugh outright. The question wasn't alien to me— men in my position rarely were allowed the luxury of privacy— but her delivery, all nerves and no confidence, made it land like something new.

"I'm not gay. My priorities don't leave room for romantic entanglements."

"So you'd consider yourself a Made Man, then?"

I let myself grin, fully, for the first time since she'd walked in. "In every sense of the word."

"Oh." She wrote something down, crossed it out, then wrote it again.

Sensing her fraying nerves, I rounded the table to stand in front of her. She flinched back so hard the chair legs scraped against the floor, and I had to bite down the satisfaction that gave me. Undeterred, I leaned against the table's edge instead, arms crossed, and let myself study her properly. The tremble in her hands, the too-fast blink, the way her tongue kept wetting her bottom lip like she didn't know she was doing it.

For reasons I didn't examine too closely, she looked familiar. Not her face, but something underneath it. Someone long dead, maybe, or someone I'd spent years trying not to remember.

Perhaps that's why she looks familiar. "What about you, Allesia? Any questions of your own?"

Her pen froze mid-stroke. "What about me?"

"Don't you have any personal questions for me?"

She shook her head fast enough that a strand of hair came loose from behind her ear. "Nothing I can think of." Then, as if reconsidering, she blurted, "There are rumors that you're in the mafia. Are they true?"

Given that I'd put a bullet in a man a few hours earlier and hadn't lost a minute of sleep over it since, the question hit differently than she meant it to. The distaste in her voice wasn't lost on me, though I wasn't surprised by it. Women like Allesia usually looked at men like me the same way.

"I already answered that." I closed the last of the distance and tipped her chin up with two fingers, holding her gaze there until she stopped trying to look anywhere else. "In the absence of your own questions, perhaps I should make you a proposal instead."

I didn't examine too hard why I wanted to. There was something about the woman in front of me, shaking like a leaf and refusing to run, that made we want to own every inch of that fear.

The second I released her chin, she slapped my hand away, then immediately looked horrified at herself and started to apologize, tripping over the word twice before it came out whole. I only nodded, filing the reaction away. I wanted her standing so I could look at her properly, but that request would have to wait.

"What proposal?" Her voice cracked on the last word.

"I'm looking for a new business associate."

Her brow furrowed, notepad forgotten in her lap. "What kind of business?"

I studied her the way I'd study a ledger I intended to buy outright. "I find you intriguing, Allesia Guerrero. I'm willing to pay two million dollars for your exclusive services."

Ordinarily, this was Kegan's job, vetting the people with potential I could bend toward something useful, in exchange for the kind of money that erased scruples overnight. But I'd grown bored of predictable, and a wildcard shaking apart in my study was, suddenly, worth the risk.

"Consider it a way to find out whether I'm as ruthless as they say."

She shot up so fast her chair toppled backward with a crack against the floor, and she startled at the sound of it as much as I did, hand flying to her chest. "I don't care about your reputation. I told you, those questions were my friend's, not mine."

I had every conviction, standing there, that I would have her anyway.

Christ, was she magnificent when she was rattled.

"Then perhaps you should care about the money, Allesia. The offer's for you. Not her."

"I'm not interested."

"You can think about it. I'll wait."

"No." She said it too fast, tripping slightly over her own feet as she stepped back from the fallen chair. "There's nothing to think about. I won't do it."

"Two million dollars is a great deal, angel. Imagine what it could do for you."

That line usually worked. Throw a little bait, watch the moral boundaries start to wobble, if the person in front of me had any left to wobble. My eyes dragged over her, and I found myself wondering, uninvited, how many men had been fool enough to touch what was so carefully hidden under that blouse.

Girls like her were always the most unpredictable. I knew that from experience, the way you know a scar by touch alone. It had been a long time since anyone unexpected had wandered into my particular corner of hell, and this one, trembling and stubborn in equal measure, was testing my curiosity more than I liked.

To my genuine disappointment, she turned on unsteady heels and made for the door, nearly catching her shoe on the edge of the rug in her hurry. "Goodbye, Mr. Mancini. I hope we never meet again."

Never tell a mob boss he'll never find you.

Now that was a challenge worth taking. "If we do meet again, will you accept my offer?"

She smiled, for the first time, revealing perfect teeth and no real humor behind it. "Unlikely. You'll be disappointed."

"Then I'll take my chances, Allesia. We'll meet again soon, and you'll accept my offer. I promise you that."

She vanished through the door, and I stared after it long after she'd gone. It wasn't every day that a blonde with hazel eyes, perfect tits, ass and more defiance than sense made me want to overlook a lifetime of good judgment, but this one had.

This city, and everything in it, already belonged to me.

Including her. I just hadn't told her yet.