Chapter 4 FOUR

༺ KAELITH ༻

The music from the floor of The Nero Lounge was really loud and I could feel it through my custom-made leather shoes, a steady, rhythmic heartbeat that I had paid fifteen million euros to own. I walked down the private, soundproofed corridor toward the prison chambers, my footsteps were totally silent and my mind entirely consumed by the girl lying in Room 3. 

When I opened the door, the air inside smelled of lavender. There was also a smell of dried blood, from where they took out teeth or something.

Vae was sprawled across the velvet chaise, entirely unconscious. The bright lights above had been turned down low to a yellow color making long shadows on her face. Even in the pale, vulnerable state of a forced slumber, she was fucking breathtaking. Her mousy blonde hair, which I can’t recall her having the last time I saw her, was fanned out across the dark cushions, a stark contrast to the bruised, angry red mark on her wrist where Saki's men had grabbed her during the crash and a thin line of dried blood traced the curve of her hairline above her ear.

I walked over, stopping just inches from her body. I reached out, my gloved fingers hovering for a fraction of a second before I gently brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead. Her skin was fever-warm, flushed with the aftershock of trauma. 

"Fuck! " I said to myself quietly. I was talking to the part of myself that had thought of this woman as a work thing for a long time, almost five years..  

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It was six years ago. I was thirty years old, eighteen months into the Don's seat, still in the phase of leadership where you spend seventy percent of your energy working out which of the men smiling at you have already made calls to your enemies. My right-hand man, Mirus, was my consigliere. Tasso, my sottocapo was on my left. We were at a Commissione summit in Palermo — the Hotel Villa Igiea, on the Corvanis family's ground, which is the kind of deliberate humiliation the Commissione specialises in, making the rival families come to the table on someone else's soil and smile about it. 

They brought her in with her uncle, Don Aldric Corvanis. He was a shot from Palermo and looked like a dark box. When he walked into a room people listened. He had a way of making you feel small and behind him was Vaelia, his niece. She was seventeen and dressed in something dark and sort of appropriate and designed to make her invisible, which it almost did, which is the only reason I noticed it.

She knew how to be in a room without drawing attention to herself. Her eyes were focused on something in the distance. She didn't look down which would have shown weakness or at the table, which would have been like staking a claim. She was good at being invisible. I could tell she had learned this skill from an age. That she shouldn't take up space in a room full of men. 

I clocked her in the first thirty seconds. I looked away and did not look at her again for two hours because I was thirty years old and newly Don and I had seventeen things on that table more urgent than understanding why a seventeen-year-old girl in the wrong dress had snagged something in my peripheral vision and refused to let it go.

But when the summit broke and the men dispersed and I was standing at the window with a glass of water — I don't drink at Commissione meetings, information is already traveling faster than it should be and I'm not giving it a vehicle — she walked past, three steps behind her uncle, and for exactly two seconds I saw her face in the window's reflection.

She was exhausted. Not because she had been running around or anything. Throughout, she stood up like a soldier and her face did not show any emotions. But under that seal, in the quality of her eyes, was the specific exhaustion of someone who has been performing for so long they can no longer remember the version of themselves that existed before the curtain went up.

I finished my water. I did not go after her. She was seventeen and Corvanis and both of those things were, in different ways, lines I did not cross.

What I did was remember her face well even though I had not thought about it much for six years. I had not really looked back at a lot of things I did. 

I was good at forgetting things on purpose. I guess you could say I was really good at amnesia.

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Could she really still remember me after those years? I was a person, from a life she had put behind her.. But I remembered her. I had remembered the shade of her eyes every single fucking day since then. The color of her eyes was something that stayed with me always. 

"She hasn't changed," I murmured to the empty room, "Still hiding her tears and pretending she isn't made of the same ruthless shit as the rest of her bloodline." 

I dropped my hand, "Send in Adela, one of the whores," I commanded to the guard standing rigid outside. "The one in the red dress. And make it fucking quick." 

A moment later, a young woman stepped in with a heavy eyeliner, red lipstick, and in a dress so tight it was practically painted on. She was one of the whores who worked the upper floors, women who spread their legs for any man with a wallet and a pulse, who got fucked and discarded before sunrise. She looked at Vae's unconscious body, then at me, her eyes wide with the submissive terror I demanded from every living creature in my employ.

"Boss?" she whispered,

"When she wakes up," I said, "you will bring her a tray of food. Hot soup, fresh bread, fruit. If she refuses, you bring it again in an hour. If she throws it, you clean it up and bring another. You do not speak to her unless she speaks to you first. You do not touch her. You do not look at her longer than necessary, just do your fucking job."

"Yes, Don Vespero," she breathed, her hands shaking at her sides.

I looked past her to Titus, one of my most ruthless soldatos, who was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his bulletproof vest. "Titus. You are on this door. You let no one in. Not even Mirus. Not even the Pope himself. If she wakes, you watch her hands. She's a Corvanis. They teach their daughters to slit a man's throat with a fucking hairpin before they teach them to walk." 

Titus nodded sharply, his dead eyes were fixed on mine. "Understood, Főnök." 

I stepped into the hallway, pulling my leather gloves off one finger at a time. The corridor was lined with four of my men, their eyes dropping to the floor the second my shadow touched them. 

"Listen to me very carefully," I said. "The girl in that room is not for your amusement. She is not a toy. She is not a whore you can bend over after a few drinks. If any of you even think about crossing that threshold with anything other than a fucking tray of food, I will skin you alive, staple your hide to the wall of the main bar, and let the whores upstairs piss on your corpse. We have more than enough whores in this building to take your money and your cock. Go fuck them until you're numb. But if any of you so much as breathe in that girl's direction, I will gouge your fucking eyes out with a rusted spoon and mail them to your mother. Are we clear?" 

"Crystal, Boss," they muttered in terrified unison.