by LJ Shen
“Miss me?” he asked flatly, brushing past me and moseying deeper into the room. I let out a shaky laugh of dread when I realized he might notice the broken facedown framed picture I’d knocked over in my bid to escape and the ruined clothes waiting for him in his closet. The second his back was to me, I began to tiptoe out of his room.
“Don’t even think about it,” he warned, his back still to me as he poured himself a generous drink at the bar by the window, overlooking the main street. “Scotch?”
“Thought you said I couldn’t drink,” I mocked, surprised at the sarcasm that dripped freely from my voice. This mansion was changing me. I was hardening, inside and out. My soft skin clung to rigid bones, my attitude turned from bright to cynical, and my heart frosted over.
“You can’t outside these walls. You’re about to marry a senator and have yet to hit twenty-one. Have you any idea how bad that would look for me?”
“How is it fair that you can marry at eighteen but not drink until twenty-one? One life choice is significantly more monumental than the other,” I blabbed nervously, rooted in place and watching his broad back. He worked out regularly, and it showed. I heard his personal trainer singing songs from the eighties as he walked into the foyer at five o’clock every morning. Wolfe exercised in his basement for an hour every day, and when time permitted it, he went for quick runs before dinner.
He twisted toward me, two tumblers of scotch in one palm. He handed me a glass. I ignored his peace offering, folding my arms.
“Are you here to discuss the legal age of alcohol consumption, Nem?”
There went that stupid pet name again. It was ironic he’d called me Nemesis. Because he was vain as hell, and just like Narcissus, there was nothing I’d love more than to throttle him to his eternal slumber.
“Why not?” I continued talking in a bid to distract him from his walk-in closet and the mountain of destroyed ties and clothes at the center of it. “You can change things around, right?”
“You want me to change the law so you can legally drink in public?”
“After yesterday, I think I earned the right to a stiff drink anywhere you’d be.”
Something glimmered in his eyes before he turned it off completely. A hint of a pleasant feeling, though I couldn’t detect what it was. He slammed the glass he’d poured for me on the bar behind him, leaning a hip against it and examining me. Swirling the amber liquid in his tumbler, he crossed his legs at the ankles.
“Was it to your satisfaction?” he croaked.
“What?”
“My walk-in closet.”
I felt myself reddening and hated my body for its betrayal. Wolfe slept with someone else yesterday, for goodness’ sake. And had quite a bit of fun rubbing it in my face. I should be yelling at him, hitting him, throwing things at him. But I was physically exhausted from the lack of food and mentally beat from the news of our engagement. Throwing a fit, appealing as it might be, was something I did not have the energy to do.
I shrugged. “Seen better, bigger, and nicer walk-ins in my life.”
“I’m glad you’re underwhelmed since you will not be moving to this bedroom after the wedding,” he delivered the news wryly.
“But I suppose you do expect me to warm your bed when you’re in the mood for some domestic bliss?” I stroked my chin thoughtfully, giving him the same sardonic sass he dished at me. I enjoyed a moment of triumph when his eyes skimmed my fingers, only to find that his engagement ring wasn’t there.
“I take it back. You do have a bit of a spine. Granted, I could snap it like a wishbone.” He smiled proudly. “Nonetheless, it’s there.”
“Why, thank you for the recognition. As you know, there is nothing I value more than your opinion of me. Other than, maybe, the dirt under my fingernails.”
“Francesca.” My name slid from his mouth smoothly as if he’d said it a trillion times before. Maybe he had. Maybe I’d been his plan since before I came back to Chicago. “Go into my walk-in closet and wait until I finish my drink. We have much to discuss.”
“I don’t take orders from you,” I said, elevating my head.
“I have an offer for you. One you’d be a fool not to accept. And since I do not negotiate, it will be the one and only offer I make to you.”
My mind began to reel. Was he letting me go? He slept with someone else. He saw me nearly making out with my childhood sweetheart. And surely, after he’d seen the mess I’d made in his closet, his feelings toward me would only take a nosedive, if that were even possible. I made my way to the walk-in closet, crouching down and grabbing the shears for protection, just in case. I plastered my back against a row of drawers and tried to regulate my breathing.
I heard the clink of his tumbler as it hit the glass bar, then his approaching steps. My pulse kicked up a notch. He stopped on the threshold and stared at me emotionlessly, his jaw granite, his eyes steel. The pile underneath me mounted up to my lower thighs. There was no mistaking how I’d spent the better half of my afternoon.
“Do you know how much money you just destroyed?” he asked, his tenor reserved and detached as ever. He didn’t care that I ruined his clothes, and that made me feel hopeless and lost. He felt completely untouchable and out of reach, a lonely star hanging in the sky, twinkling bright, galaxies away from my violent hands that demanded retaliation.
“Not enough to cost me my pride,” I snipped the air with the shears, feeling my nostrils flaring.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets, leaning a shoulder against the doorframe.
“What’s eating you, Nemesis? The fact that your boyfriend had a date yesterday, or the part where I fucked said date?”
So now I got an admission out of him. For whatever reason, part of me wanted to give Senator Keaton the benefit of the doubt about what happened with Emily behind closed doors. But now it was real, and it hurt. God, it shouldn’t hurt as much as it did. Like a punch to my empty stomach. Betrayal, no matter by whom, cracks something deep inside you. Then you have to live with the pieces rattling in the pit of your stomach.
Senator Keaton was nothing to me.
No. That wasn’t true, either.
He was everything bad that’d ever happened to me.
“Angelo, of course,” I huffed incredulously, my fingers tightening around the shears. His eyes darted to my white-knuckled grip over my weapon. He shot me a smirk that said he could disarm me with only a blink, let alone his entire body.
“Liar,” he said tonelessly. “And a lousy one at that.”
“Why would I be jealous of you being with Emily when you were hardly jealous when Angelo cornered me?” I fought the tears that clogged my throat.
“For one thing, because she was a fantastic lay, and Angelo is a very lucky guy to have her sweet, expert mouth at his disposal,” he taunted, unbuttoning the first button of his dress shirt. Heat slashed through my veins, making my body hit temperatures more fitting for a furnace. He’d never spoken any sexual words to me, and until now, our marriage felt more like a punishment than a real thing. When the second button released, a hint of dark chest hair peeked back at me.
“Second, because I was not, in fact, happy with your little display of affection. I gave you a chance at a proper goodbye. Which, judging by the way you two held each other when I left the restroom, you took in both hands. Did you enjoy it?”
I blinked, trying to untangle the meaning of his words. Did he think that Angelo and I…? Christ, he did. His passive expression did nothing to hide the earlier emotion I caught in his eyes. He thought I’d slept with Angelo at the wedding, and he was reacting against a crime he did not even try me for.
Fury gripped every bone in my malnourished body. Walking into this room today, I couldn’t believe I’d ever hate him more than I did. But I stood corrected.
Now this? This was real hatred.
I didn’t correct his assumption. It made the humiliation of being cheated on a tad less painful. The balance between our sins now more even. I squar
ed my shoulders, owning up to this for no other reason than wanting him to hurt as much as I did.
“Oh, I’d slept with Angelo plenty of times,” I lied. “He’s the best lover in The Outfit, and of course, I personally checked.” I laid it on thick. Maybe if he thought he’d gotten himself a rotten deal with an easy woman, he’d let me leave.
Wolfe cocked his head, his stare stripping me of whatever leftover confidence I’d had in me.
“How peculiar. I could have sworn you said that you wanted to kiss him at the masquerade and nothing more.”
I swallowed, trying to think fast. I could count on one hand the amount of times I’d lied in my life.
“As per the note. I was only following tradition. I’d kissed him a thousand times before,” I quipped. “But that night was about fate.”
“Fate brought you to me.”
“You stole my fate.”
“Perhaps, yet it doesn’t make it any less mine. Consider yesterday a one-off. I let you get the little menace out of your system. An engagement gift from yours truly, if you will. From here on out, I’m your only option. Take it or leave it.”
“I suppose the rules do not apply to you,” I arched an eyebrow, snapping the shears again. He glanced at them with an expression dripping of boredom.
“Quite clever, Miss Rossi.”
“Then, Senator Keaton, I’ll have you know they do not apply at all. I will sleep with whomever I want, whenever I want, as long as you continue to do so.”
I was arguing my freedom to sleep around, when in practice, I was more virginal than a nun. He was the only man I’d ever even kissed. This, however, wasn’t about my right to sleep my way through Chicago’s elite—but merely a principal. Equality mattered to me. Maybe because for the first time, I thought I might be able to achieve it.
“Let me be clear.” He stepped into the walk-in closet, erasing some of the distance between us. Though he was not close enough to touch me, sharing a space with him still sent a bullet of excitement and fear down my spine.
“You’re not eating, and I’m not going to back down from this arrangement, even at the cost of burying your pretty little corpse when your body finally gives in. But I can make your life comfortable. My problem is with your father, not you, and you’d be wise to keep it that way. So, Nemesis—what could I give you that your parents wouldn’t?”
“Are you trying to buy me?” I snorted.
He shrugged. “I already have you. I’m giving you a chance to make your life bearable. Take it.”
Hysterical laughter bubbled up my throat. I felt my sanity evaporating from my body like sweat. The man was unbelievable.
“The only thing I want back is my freedom.”
“You were never free with your parents to begin with. Don’t insult both our intelligence by pretending so.” His flatlined tenor whiplashed on my face. He took a step deeper into the room. I cemented my back to the drawers, their bronze handles digging into my spine.
“Think,” he enunciated. “What can I give you that your parents never will?”
“I don’t want any dresses. I don’t want a new car. I don’t even want a new horse,” I cried out, waving the shears in my hand desperately. Papa said whoever decided to marry me could buy me a horse to show his good faith. And to think I was devastated then.
“Stop pretending to care about materialistic things,” he snapped, and I twisted around and threw an Oxford shoe at him to stop him from getting any closer, but he just dodged it and laughed.
“Think.”
“I don’t have any wants!”
“We all have wants.”
“What’s yours?” I was stalling.
“Serving my country. Seeking justice and punishing those who deserve to be brought to justice. You do, too. Think back to the masquerade.”
“College!” I yelled, finally cracking. “I want to go to college. They’d never let me get a higher education and make something of myself.” It surprised me that Wolfe caught the fraction of the moment in which I had to school my face from being both embarrassed and disappointed when Bishop asked me about college. My grades were great, and my SAT scores were glorious. But my parents thought I was wasting my energy when I should be focusing on getting married, planning a wedding, and continuing the Rossi legacy by producing heirs.
He stopped his stride.
“It’s yours.”
His words shocked me into silence. My quiet inspired him to resume his steps. He smirked, and I had to admit, albeit begrudgingly, that he was always raggedly stunning—his face all sharp edges like an Origami figure—but especially when his lips were curled in an Adonis-like grin. I wondered what he looked like with a full-blown smile. I hoped I’d never stick around to find out.
“Your father has explicitly asked me not to send you to college when we get married to maintain The Outfit’s status quo in regard to women, but your father can also go fuck himself.” His words stabbed me like knives. He spoke completely different than he did in public. As if he was another person with another vocabulary. I could never imagine him dropping the F-bomb anywhere but here. “You can go to college. You can go horseback riding, visit friends, and go on shopping sprees in Paris. Hell if I care. You could live your life separately from mine, play your part and, when enough years go by, even take on a discreet lover.”
Who was this guy, and what made him so ice-cold? In all my years on Earth, and all my time spent with the ruthless men of The Outfit, I’d never met anyone quite so cynical. Even the most horrid men wanted love, and loyalty, and marriage. Even they wanted children.
“And what do I give you in return?” I elevated my chin, pursing my lips.
“You eat,” he bit out.
I could do that, I thought grimly.
“You play the dutiful wife role.” He took another step. I instinctively pressed myself harder against his drawers, but there was no escape and nowhere else to go. In two steps, he was going to be flush against me just like Angelo had been last night, and I’d have to meet the inferno of his body and the frost of his eyes.
He lifted the tips of a ruined, maroon-hued tie, eating the entire distance between us in one, purposeful stride, “I was planning a trip to DC, but seeing as your father is up to all sorts of trouble, I decided to stay in town. That means that on Friday, we’ll have guests from DC. You will dress impeccably, you will cut the engagement tales bullshit in favor of a proper, decent version, and you will entertain them flawlessly as you were brought up to do. After dinner, you will play the piano for them, and after that, you will retire to the west wing with me, seeing as they will be spending the night in the east wing.”
“Sleeping in your bed?” I barked out a laugh. Wasn’t that convenient.
“You’ll sleep in the next room.” His body was now hovering over mine, and he was touching me without really touching me. He poured heat my own curves drank thirstily, and even though I hated him, I didn’t want him to step away.
I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. I wanted to refuse, but also knew that by agreeing to his deal, I’d have the chance to actually live a decent life. But I couldn’t surrender to him willingly and completely. Not so fast. He laid down his rules, his expectations, and his price for his messed-up version of my freedom. We were striking a verbal deal, and the need to put a clause or two of my own was primal.
“I have one condition,” I said.
He curved one inquisitive eyebrow, the tip of the tie in his hand gliding its way to my neck. I raised the shears in a knee-jerk reaction, ready to stab his black heart if he touched me inappropriately. But not only did he not recoil, he actually awarded me with that smile I’d been wondering about. He had dimples. Two. The right one deeper than the left. The tie fluttered across my shoulder blade, making my nipples pucker inside my bra, and I prayed to God it was padded enough for him not to notice. I clenched from the inside, my stomach tumbling and dipping. A delicious ache spread in my womb like warm goo.
“Speak now,
or forever hold your peace, Nemesis.” His lips fluttered so close to mine for a split second, I wouldn’t object if he kissed me.
Jesus. What was wrong with my body? I loathed him. But I also craved him. Terribly.
I looked up, tensing my jaw. “I will not be made a fool. If I’m expected to be faithful, so will you.”
He moved the tie from my shoulder blade, dipping it down into the slit of my cleavage before moving it back up to my neck. I shuddered, fighting to keep my eyes open. A pool of wetness gathered in my cotton underwear. His eyes were dead and serious when he asked, “That’s your one condition?”
“And the notes,” I added as an afterthought. “I know you know about them because you ruined my kiss with Angelo. Do not read my notes. The wooden chest is mine to open, read, and explore whenever I’m ready.”
He looked so blasé, there was no way I could detect whether he tampered with the box or not. And by now, I knew my future husband would never willingly volunteer any information to me.
My future husband. It was happening.
“I take verbal contracts quite seriously.” He brushed the tie over my cheek, his smile still intact.
“So do I.” I gulped, feeling his hand prying my fingers open. The shears dropped to the floor beside us, and he squeezed my palm in his, his version of a handshake.
Our hearts were pounding together in a completely different way from when Angelo and I were tangled in the darkened alcove like two messy teenagers fumbling for their first kiss yesterday. This felt dangerous and feral. It felt exhilarating, somehow. Like he could tear me apart, no matter how many shears I arm myself with. I forced myself to remember that he’d slept with Emily yesterday while being engaged to me. To keep in mind his cruel words when he thought I’d slept with Angelo on the same night I presented my engagement ring to Chicago’s highest society.
He was not my playmate. He was my monster.
Wolfe picked up our entwined hands and brought them level with my chin. I watched in fascination as his dark, big hand enclosed my ivory, small one. Little, black hairs peppered each finger above his knuckles, and his arms were veiny, tan, and thick. Yet somehow, our size difference didn’t look ridiculous.
