by LJ Shen
“This sounds a lot like you don’t respect me as an equal,” I hissed, holding the phone between my ear and shoulder and stabbing the trowel in the mud and wiping my forehead simultaneously.
“That’s because you’re not my equal, my dear Frankie.”
The line went dead on the other side.
I planted twenty pots of flowers that day. Then went to my room, took a shower, and started filling out my application to Northwestern. Political Science and Legal Studies, I decided, would be my major. In all fairness, I always thought gardening was my calling, but since my father infuriated me to no end, sticking my major in his face was worth going through years and years of studying something I doubted would interest me much. I was Petty McPetson, but I was gaining an education, and it felt good.
I hunched over my oak desk when something in the air changed. I didn’t have to lift my head to know what it was.
My fiancé was here to check on his prisoner bride.
“You have your first dress fitting tomorrow. Go to bed.”
From my peripheral, I could see he was not wearing a suit. A white V-neck shirt that highlighted his tan, lean but muscled body and dark denim that clung low on his narrow hips. He looked nothing like a senator, acted nothing like a politician, and the fact I couldn’t box him this way or the other unsettled me.
“I’m filling out my application to Northwestern,” I replied, feeling heat coating my face and neck again. Why did it feel like he dipped me in liquid fire every time his eyes were on me? And how could I make it stop?
“You’re wasting your time.”
My head snapped up, and I granted him the eye contact he’d been looking for.
“You promised,” I growled.
“And I shall deliver.” He pushed off my doorframe and stepped into my room, sauntering toward me. “You don’t need to fill out an application. My people have already taken care of that. You’re about to become a Keaton.”
“Are Keatons too precious to fill out their own college applications?” I could barely keep myself from snapping at him.
He plucked the documents from my desk, balled and slam-dunked them in the trash can by my desk. “It means you could’ve drawn dicks in all shapes and sizes on the document, and you’d still get in.”
I shot up from my chair, putting some much-needed distance between us. I couldn’t risk another kiss. My lips still stung every time I thought of his rejection.
“How dare you!” I thundered.
“You seem to be asking this question a lot. Care to change your tune a little?” He shoved one hand into the front pocket of his jeans and picked up my cell phone on my desk, scrolling through it with his thumb with easy monotony. My parents forbade me from having a passcode. When my mom gave me back my phone, protecting my privacy was low on my to-do list, seeing as the majority of it had already been taken anyway.
“What are you doing?” My voice turned eerily calm and shocked at the same time.
His eyes were still on my phone. “Go ahead. Ask again. How dare I, right?”
I was too stunned to form words. The man was a savage in a suit. He taunted and aggravated me at every turn. My father was a stubborn jerk, but this guy…this guy was the devil who returned to my nightmares every night. He was hell wrapped in a heavenly rugged mask. He was fire. Gorgeous to the eye, lethal to the touch.
“Give me my phone right now.” I threw my open palm in his direction. He waved a dismissive hand my way, still reading my text messages. Angelo’s text messages.
“You can’t do that.” I launched at him, raising my arms to reach the phone. He raised his arm, grabbed me by the waist with his other hand, capturing both my wrists and plastering my hands to his lower stomach over his shirt.
“Move, and you’ll see what your anger does to me. A friendly hint: it thrills me and in more ways than you’d like to know.”
A part of me wanted to defy him so he would push my hands down. I’d never touched a man down there before, and the idea of it excited me. My life was already in shambles. My morals were the last things I’d clung to, and frankly, my fingers were tired from holding them.
I moved on principal, and he smirked, scrolling down my texts and tightening his hold on my wrists. He didn’t make good on his promise to put my hands on his manhood.
“Are you going to answer lover-boy?” he asked conversationally.
“None of your business.”
“You’re about to become my wife. Everything about you is my business. Especially boys with blue eyes and smiles I don’t trust.”
He dropped my hands, pocketed my phone, and cocked his head, scanning me through his scorn. I wanted to cry. After yesterday’s humiliation, not only did he not apologize, but he also taunted me twice today—both by throwing my application in the trash and by reading through my messages.
He confiscated my phone as though I was his daughter.
“My phone, Wolfe. Give it.” I took a step back. I wanted to hurt him so bad, it hurt to breathe. He stared me down, calm and quiet.
“Only if you delete Bandini from your contacts.”
“He’s a childhood friend.”
“Out of curiosity, do you fuck all your childhood friends?”
I flashed him a sugary smile, “Afraid I’ll run off and have sex with Angelo again?”
The tip of his tongue darted out to lick his lower lip sinisterly, “Me? No. But he should be. Unless, of course, he wants his dick cut off.”
“You sound like a mobster, not a future president.” I jutted my chin out.
“Both are positions of extreme power executed differently. You’d be surprised how many things they have in common.”
“Stop justifying your actions,” I said.
“Stop fighting your fate. You’re not doing your father any favors. Even he wants you to submit.”
“How do you know that?”
“One of his Magnificent Mile properties caught fire this morning. Fifty kilograms of cocaine straight from Europe—poof! Gone. He can’t contact the insurance until he cleans up the evidence, and by then, they’ll figure out he tampered with the scene. He just lost millions.”
“You did that,” I accused, narrowing my eyes at him. He shrugged.
“Drugs kill.”
“You did that so they’d tell me off,” I said.
He laughed. “Sweetheart, you’re a nuisance at best and entirely not worth the risk.”
Before I slapped him—or worse—I stormed outside, my anger following me like a shadow. I couldn’t leave the house since I didn’t have a car or anywhere to go, but I wanted to disappear. I ran out to the pavilion, where I broke down, falling to my knees and bawling my eyes out.
I couldn’t take it anymore. The combination of my father being a tyrant and Wolfe trying to ruin my family’s and my life was too much. I rested my head against the cool white wood of the bench, wailing softly as I felt the fight leaving my body.
A calming hand caressing my back. I was afraid to turn around even though I knew in my gut that Wolfe would never seek me out and try to make things better.
“Do you need your gloves?” It was Ms. Sterling, her voice soft like cotton. I shook my head between my arms.
“You know, he is just as confused and disoriented by your situation. Only difference is he’s had years of perfecting how to hide his emotions.”
I appreciated her trying to humanize my fiancé in my eyes, but it hardly worked.
“I had the pleasure of raising Wolfe. He was always a clever boy. He always wore his anger on his sleeve.” Her voice rang like bells as she drew lazy circles on my back, like my mom used to do when I was young. I kept quiet. I didn’t care that Wolfe had his own baggage. I’d done nothing to deserve his treatment.
“You need to weather the storm, my dear. I think you’ll find, after your adjustment period, that you two are so explosive together because you finally met your challenges in one another.” She sat on the bench above me, removing traces of my hair from
my face. I looked up and blinked at her.
“I don’t think anything can scare Senator Keaton.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. I think you give him a healthy dose of things to worry about. He did not expect you to be so…you.”
“What does that mean?”
Her face wrinkled as she considered her next words. Seeing as Wolfe had obviously hired her because he felt attached to her after raising him, I at least had the hope in believing that one day, he’d warm up to me, too.
She offered me her hands, and when I took them, she surprised me by pulling me up and standing up at the same time, drawing me in for a hug. We were both the same height—tiny—and she was even scrawnier than me. She spoke against my hair.
“I think your love story started off on the wrong foot, but it will be magnificent precisely because of that. Wolfe Keaton has walls, but you’re already starting to break them. He is fighting it, and you. Would you like the secret to disarming Wolfe Keaton, my dear girl?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that. Because a part of me sincerely feared that I would tear him to shreds given the opportunity. And I wouldn’t be able to live with myself knowing I’d hurt someone so profoundly.
“Yes,” I heard myself say.
“Love him. He will be defenseless against your love.”
With that, I felt her body disconnecting from mine, and she retreated to the glass doors, the vast mansion swallowing her figure. I took a deep breath.
The man had just destroyed a building in which my father processed drugs. And half-admitted it to me. That was more information than my father ever offered or admitted to. He also let me go to school. He also allowed me to leave whenever I pleased.
I glanced at my wrist watch. It was two in the morning. Somehow, I’d spent two hours in the garden. Two hours Wolfe must’ve spent reading through every message I’d ever received.
The late-night chill was seeping into my bones. Dejected, I turned to head back into the house. When I’d made my way back inside, I spotted Wolfe standing on the threshold of the open door. He had one arm propped against its frame, blocking me from getting in. I took measured steps toward him.
I stopped when I was a foot away.
“Give me my phone back,” I said. To my surprise, he reached into his back pocket and tossed it into my hands. I clutched it in my fist, still reeling from our latest fight but also oddly touched by the fact he stayed awake and waited for me. He started his days at five in the morning, after all.
“You’re in my way.” I rustled, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.
He stared at me blankly.
“Push me away. Fight for what you want, Francesca.”
“I thought that’s what made us enemies.” A vicious smile found my lips. “Because I want to break free from you.”
It was his turn to smirk.
“Wanting and fighting are two different things. One is passive, the other active. Are we enemies, Nemesis?”
“What else can we be?”
“Allies. I’ll scratch your back. You’ll scratch mine.”
“I’m all for not touching you ever again after last night.”
He shrugged. “You might’ve been more believable if you hadn’t grinded on me before I kicked you out of my bedroom. At any rate, you’re welcome to come in. But I won’t be making it easy for you, unless you give me your word Bandini is deleted from your phone and your life.”
I got why he did that. He could have done it himself, but he wanted it to come from me. He didn’t want another battle—he wanted my complete surrender.
“Angelo will always be in my life. We grew up together, and just because you bought me doesn’t mean you own me,” I said evenly even though really, I had no intention of responding to Angelo’s texts. More so since I’d heard that he was going on a second date with the vile Emily.
“Then I’m afraid you’ll have to show some of your temper and fight me.”
“Can I ask you something?” I rubbed my forehead tiredly.
“Certainly. Whether I’ll answer or not is a completely different story.” His smirk grew more smug and mocking.
“What’s your leverage over my father? He obviously hates your guts, yet he won’t claim me back, even after I told him I’m going to college. That’d put a huge strain on his reputation as people will know that I am going against his wish. It must be quite substantial, then, if he’d rather have me in your bed than have you dish out the goods on him.”
I scanned his face, expecting him to rebuke and belittle me as my father had done earlier that day.
Wolfe surprised me again.
“Whatever I have on him could take away everything he’s worked for, not to mention throw him in jail for the rest of his miserable life. But your father didn’t throw you to the dogs. He trusts me not to hurt you.”
“Is that foolish of him?” I looked up.
Wolfe’s muscular arm flexed under his shirt. A barely visible movement.
“I’m not a monster.”
“Could’ve fooled me. Just tell me why?” I whispered, the air rattling in my lungs. “Why do you hate him so much?”
“That’s two questions. Go to bed.”
“Move out of the way.”
“Accomplishments are so much more rewarding when obstacles are in the way. Fight me, darling.”
I snuck under his arm, ducking into the house and launching for the staircase. He caught me by the waist in one swift movement, pulling me into his arms and plastering me against his strong chest. His knuckles trailed down the length of my spine, and goose bumps burst all over my skin. His lips found my ear, hot and soft in contrast to the harsh man they belonged to, his breath tickling my hair. “Maybe I am the monster. After all, I come out to play at night. But so do you, little one. You’re out in the darkness, too.”
BLOWING UP ARTHUR’S PROPERTY SLASH meth lab—and the coke with it—was just another Tuesday. The work of saints was done through others, and mine had definitely been taken care of.
The next four days were spent bending White’s and Bishop’s arms until they snapped and agreed to assign over five hundred additional cops to be on duty at any given time to protect the streets of Chicago from the mess I’d created. It was going to blow up the bill to the sky, but it wasn’t the state of Illinois that was going to shell out the money. The money was sitting firmly in White’s and Bishop’s pockets.
Money given by my future father-in-law.
Who, by the way, changed his tune from trying to coax his daughter into warming up to me and decided to repay me by throwing hundreds of pounds of trash in parks across Chicago. He couldn’t do much more than that, considering all the juice I had on him. I was a power player. Touching what was mine—even scratching my car—came with a hefty price tag and would award him more unneeded attention from the FBI.
I had the trash picked up by volunteers and thrown into his garden. That was when the phone calls began to pour in. Dozens of them. Like a needy, drunk ex-girlfriend on Valentine’s Day. I didn’t pick up. I was a senator. He was a highly connected mobster. I could marry his daughter, but I wouldn’t listen to what he had to say. My job was to clean the streets he soiled with drugs, guns, and blood.
I made a point to be at home as little as possible, which wasn’t very hard between flying out to Springfield and DC frequently.
Francesca was still adamant about having her dinners in her room (not that I cared). She did, however, fulfill her commitments as far as cake-tasting, trying on dresses, and doing all the other bullshit wedding planning I’d dumped on her (not that I minded if she showed up in a goddamn oversized napkin). I didn’t care for my fiancée’s affection. As far as I was concerned, with the exception of amending the no-fucking-other-people clause before my balls fell off, she could live on her side of the house—or better yet, across town—until her last breath.
On the fifth day, after dinner, I buried myself in paperwork in my office when Sterling summoned me to the kitchen. It
was well past eleven o’clock, and Sterling knew better than to interrupt me in general, so I figured it was of critical importance.
Last thing I needed was hearing that Nemesis was planning an escape. It seemed like Francesca had finally realized she didn’t have an out from this arrangement.
I descended the stairs. When I reached the landing, the smell of sugar, baked dough, and chocolate wafted from the kitchen. Sweet, sticky, and nostalgic in a way that sliced through your body like a knife. I stopped at the threshold and examined tiny, fierce Sterling as she served a simple chocolate cake with forty-six candles on the long dining table. Her hands were shaking. She wiped them on her stained apron the minute I walked in, refusing eye contact.
We both knew why.
“Romeo’s birthday,” she mumbled under her breath, hurrying to the sink to wash her hands.
I ambled in, dragged over a chair, and sank into it, watching the cake as if it was my opponent. I wasn’t particularly sentimental and exceptionally bad with remembering dates, which was just as well as all my family members were dead. Their death dates, however, I remembered.
I also remembered the cause of their deaths.
Sterling handed me a plate on which she’d piled enough cake to clog a toilet bowl. I was torn between thanking her for paying her respects to the person I loved the most and yelling at her for reminding me that my heart had a hole the size of Arthur Rossi’s fist. I settled for stuffing my mouth with the cake without tasting it. Sugar consumption was not a habit of mine, but it seemed excessively spiteful not to take a bite after she went through so much trouble.
“He would have been proud of you if he were alive.” She lowered herself onto the seat in front of mine, wrapping her hands around a steamy cup of herbal tea. My back was to the kitchen door. She faced it—and me. I stabbed a fork into my cake, unfolding the layers of the chocolate and sugar like they were a human gut, digging harder with each motion.
“Wolfe, look at me.”
I dragged my eyes to her face, pacifying her for a reason beyond my grasp. It was not in my nature to be nice and cordial. But something in that demanded an emotion from me that wasn’t disdain. Her eyes widened, dotted sky-blue. She was trying to tell me something.
