Chapter 3 - He ignored Carlo’s men and their guns.
“Emily manages the logistics, Carlo. She’s here to explain exactly how stupid you are.”
Carlo’s face flushed purple.
His men tensed.
“Careful, Dante. You’re in my house.”
“I’m in a health-code violation that serves overpriced veal.”
Dante did not blink.
“Show him, Emily.”
Her hands trembled, but Emily stepped forward and placed the iPad on the table.
A map of Chicago appeared, overlaid with red and blue lines.
“These blue lines are the Marino syndicate’s distribution routes as agreed upon in the 2021 territorial treaty.”
Her professional tone returned.
Data was safe.
Data did not shoot people.
“These red lines represent GPS pings from your trucks over the last month.”
She enlarged the map.
“As you can see, Mr. Moretti, your trucks have detoured into our designated logistics corridors 34 times in the last 30 days, specifically diverting onto the I-55 corridor that bypasses our toll operations. You’ve undercut our shipping fees by 14%.”
Carlo glared at the screen.
Then at Emily.
“You going to let a broad talk to me like this, Dante?”
Dante did not move.
“She’s not a broad, Carlo. She’s my logistics director, and she’s telling you that you owe me $800,000 in lost revenue by tomorrow morning.”
Carlo laughed harshly and slammed his palm against the table.
“I don’t owe you—”
He gestured toward his men.
The man closest to Emily, a wiry thug with a scarred cheek, stepped forward and grabbed her upper arm.
It happened too quickly for Emily to process.
1 second his hand was on her.
The next, there was a deafening crack.
The thug screamed and fell backward, clutching his face.
Blood sprayed across the white tablecloth.
Emily gasped.
Dante had moved with violence that seemed to defy physics.
He had seized a heavy glass water pitcher and shattered it across the man’s jaw in a single motion.
Now he was standing.
The calm was gone.
The monster was out.
Tommy and the other Marino enforcer drew their weapons and aimed directly at Carlo.
Carlo’s men drew theirs, but froze.
Dante caught Emily around the waist and pulled her behind him.
His body became a wall between her and the guns.
He leaned over the table.
“You don’t touch her.”
The words came as a quiet, demonic hiss.
“You look at her again, you speak to her again, and I will burn this restaurant to the ground with you inside it.”
Carlo was sweating.
“$800,000, Carlo. By 9:00 a.m., or I send Tommy back here to collect it in teeth.”
Dante straightened.
His hand found Emily’s arm and pulled her against his side.
“Walk.”
They backed out of the restaurant while Tommy covered them.
Outside, Dante pushed Emily into the waiting SUV and climbed in behind her.
The door slammed.
Adrenaline crashed through Emily.
She shook uncontrollably, holding the iPad against her chest.
Dante was breathing hard.
“Are you hurt?”
His hands moved over her arms.
“No. I’m fine.”
Dante stopped.
He saw the fear in her eyes.
Not only fear of the Morettis.
Fear of him.
He slowly withdrew his hands and closed his eyes.
He took a deep breath, forcing the violence back behind the machine.
“I’m sorry.”
His voice was rough.
“I shouldn’t have brought you. I overestimated my own restraint.”
Emily looked at him.
The mob boss who had shattered a man’s face was gone.
In his place was an exhausted man desperately trying to maintain control.
She understood then that Dante Marino was not waking up because the world had changed.
He was waking up because of her.
And however much she wanted to remain safely behind her spreadsheets and cold coffee, she could not deny the terrifying thrill running through her veins.
The boundary had not merely been crossed.
It had been burned to ashes.
The ride back to the glass-and-steel monolith was suffocatingly quiet.
The partition separating Emily and Dante from Tommy remained firmly closed.
Dante stared through the window at the passing Chicago streetlights.
Emily clutched the iPad, her knuckles white.
Her mind, usually a carefully organized filing cabinet of numbers and protocols, had become a mass of shredded paper.
She had watched a man’s jaw pulverized over a map she created.
She had watched the untouchable Dante Marino put himself between her and a loaded gun.
The SUV entered the underground garage.
Tommy killed the engine.
Dante finally turned toward her.
“Tommy will drive you home. You have the weekend off.”
He reached for the door.
“I have the quarterly payroll reconciliations to finish.”
Dante stopped.
“Emily, you were nearly shot.”
“I was nearly shot because you brought me to a mob dispute under the guise of an audit.”
Shock sharpened into anger.
“I don’t want a weekend off. Payroll is due Tuesday. If I don’t run the numbers tomorrow, the offshore accounts won’t sync and the men won’t get paid. Unpaid men are angry men.”
She pushed open the door and marched toward the private elevator.
Dante followed.
The 42nd floor was empty.
The administrative staff had left at 5:00 p.m. Only emergency lighting and the city glow illuminated the office.
Emily went directly to her desk, dropped the iPad onto the blotter, and switched on her computer.
Her hands still trembled.
She cursed quietly and shoved them into her pockets.
Dante stood nearby without his jacket, his collar loosened.
“You’re shaking.”
“It’s adrenaline. The cortisol spike triggers involuntary muscle tremors. It’ll pass.”
“Stop talking about cortisol, Emily.”
He crossed to the discreet wet bar and poured Macallan into 2 heavy crystal tumblers.
He placed 1 beside her keyboard.
“Drink.”
“I don’t drink on the clock.”
“You’re off the clock. Drink the whiskey.”
Emily understood the gesture.
It was not an order from a boss.
It was a lifeline from a man who understood the aftermath of violence.
She swallowed some.
The whiskey burned down her throat and spread warmth through her stomach.
“Thank you.”
Dante leaned against her desk.
“I meant what I said in the car. I shouldn’t have brought you.”
“Why did you?”
Emily looked up.
“You have 20 men who could have held that iPad. You didn’t need me there to prove a point to Carlo Moretti. So why?”
Dante swirled the whiskey and looked toward the city.
“For 9 years, I lived in a vacuum. Everything was a calculation. Every person in this building was just a variable in an equation.”
He looked at her.
“You broke the equation.”
The intensity in his gaze was staggering.
“I brought you because I wanted to see if you could survive in my world. I wanted to know if the woman who demands a biohazard fee for a fresh corpse could look the devil in the eye and hold her ground.”
He moved closer.
“You didn’t just hold your ground, Emily. You backed Carlo into a corner using a spreadsheet. It was the most magnificent thing I’ve seen in a decade.”
Emily’s breath caught.
“And when he decided to kill me?”
“I would have burned Chicago to the ground before I let a single drop of your blood hit that floor.”
There was no theatricality in the promise.
It was simply a fact.
“You can’t do this, Dante.”
Her voice trembled.
“You can’t wake up now. I can’t afford to be the reason you feel things again.”
“Too late.”
Dante wrapped his fingers gently around her wrist and drew her hand from her pocket.
His thumb rested over her racing pulse.
“I’m awake, Emily. And I’m not going back to sleep.”
The $800,000 arrived in a steel briefcase the next morning.
Carlo Moretti had paid.
But men like Carlo did not simply pay and walk away.
He paid the debt to save face with the commission, but the humiliation remained.
Dante had broken one of Carlo’s men in front of him.
Worse, he had done it over a secretary.
In the underworld, weakness was blood in the water.
Dante had demonstrated that he cared about something.
That made Emily a target.
On Tuesday evening, Emily returned to her modest apartment building in Logan Square.
The rent was cheap because the radiator knocked like a dying engine and the hallway perpetually smelled of boiled cabbage.
She unlocked her apartment while balancing groceries against her hip.
She was exhausted.
Payroll had synced.
The dummy accounts were flush.
Leo’s facility had sent her a photograph of him smiling in the courtyard.
For the first time in months, Emily’s chest did not feel trapped in a vise.
She opened her door and flipped the light switch.
Nothing.
Emily froze.
The switch clicked loosely.
The breaker had been thrown.
A draft moved over her ankles.
The fire-escape window was open.
Instinct took control.
Emily did not drop the groceries.
She did not scream.
She slowly reached into her purse and wrapped her fingers around the metal cylinder of pepper spray attached to her keychain.
“I know you’re in here.”
Her voice remained remarkably steady.
“If you break anything, my landlord is going to keep my security deposit, and I promise you I’ll make Dante deduct it from whatever debt Carlo thinks he’s settling.”
A low chuckle came from the darkness.
A flashlight snapped on.
2 men emerged from the kitchen.
Large men in heavy leather jackets.
1 carried a crowbar.
“You got a smart mouth for a dead woman.”
“And you have a profound lack of tactical awareness.”
Emily squinted against the flashlight.
“If Carlo wanted to send a message, he should have hit a distribution center. Killing an administrative assistant just makes him look pathetic.”
“Boss doesn’t want you dead. Just broken. A message to Marino about disrespect.”
Emily calculated the room.
She was trapped between the kitchen and the door.
“Listen to me. Dante doesn’t care about me. He paid my brother’s medical bills as a tax write-off. If you touch me, you won’t be sending a message. You’ll just force him to hire a temp, and he hates the temp agency. He’ll kill you simply for the inconvenience.”
“We’ll take our chances.”
The first man stepped forward.
Before he reached her, the heavy wooden door exploded inward.
Emily was thrown sideways.
The groceries scattered across the cheap linoleum.
Apples rolled through the darkness.
Harsh corridor light flooded the apartment.
Dante stood in the doorway.
He was not wearing a suit.
A dark Henley.
A tactical jacket.
A suppressed pistol in his hand.
He looked like the Grim Reaper.
The 2 Moretti men froze.
“I told your boss not to look at her again.”
The first man raised his weapon.
Dante fired twice.
The man dropped instantly, a neat wound above his left eye.
The man with the crowbar charged.
Dante sidestepped, caught his wrist, and twisted until bone broke with a sickening crack.
The man dropped to his knees screaming.
Dante brought the steel grip of the pistol down against the base of his skull.
The man collapsed.
Less than 5 seconds had passed.
Silence returned.
Cordite mingled with the smell of spilled groceries.
Emily sat against the drywall, staring.
Dante cleared his pistol, shoved it into his waistband, and crossed the room.
He dropped to his knees in front of her.
His hands checked her face, neck, and arms.
“Are you hurt? Did they touch you?”
The icy control was gone.
“No.”
Emily looked at the blood spreading across her linoleum.
“Dante, my security deposit.”
Dante stopped.
He looked at the bodies.
Then at Emily.
For 3 seconds, he simply stared.
Then, for the 2nd time in 9 years, Dante Marino laughed.
It was not the roar that had erupted in his office.
It was helpless and breathless.
He rested his forehead against hers, shoulders shaking.
“I will buy you the entire building, Emily. I’ll buy you the whole damn block.”
“I just wanted to make pasta.”
Her hands gripped his tactical jacket.
She clung to him as the reality of what had nearly happened finally broke through.
Dante wrapped her in his arms.
“Tommy is downstairs. He’s cleaning this up. You’re coming with me. You’re never sleeping in this apartment again.”
“I have work tomorrow.”
“You work from my house tomorrow.”
Dante stood and pulled her upright.
He did not ask.
Emily did not argue.
She leaned against him and allowed the monster she had awakened to carry her into the dark.
Dante’s private estate was an architectural fortress of glass and slate hidden on heavily wooded property in Lake Forest.
It was as clinical and sterile as his office.
No photographs.
No personal touches.
Only expensive, cold perfection.
Dante took Emily into the master bathroom and seated her on the edge of the marble bathtub.
“Stay here.”
He returned 2 minutes later with a heavy first-aid kit and pulled a stool in front of her.
Only then did Emily notice the blood on his knuckles.
The impact against the 2nd thug had split the skin over old scars.
Dante began removing antiseptic wipes.
Emily reached out and took his hand.
He froze.
“You’re bleeding.”
She soaked a cotton pad with alcohol and pressed it gently against his knuckles.
Dante did not react to the sting.
He watched her.
“How did you know they were there?”
“I didn’t trust Carlo. He’s a proud man, and I embarrassed him. I had Tommy put a detail on your building. They called me the second the Moretti car parked in your alley. I was 3 blocks away.”
Emily stopped.
“You were sitting in a car 3 blocks from my apartment?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Since you left the office.”
Dante showed no shame.
“I was doing paperwork on a tablet.”
“You are a terrifying micromanager, Dante.”
“I protect my investments, Emily.”
She dropped the bloody cotton into the sink but did not release his hand.
“I’m not an investment. I’m a secretary.”
Dante leaned closer.
“You haven’t been just a secretary since the day you ordered me to shoot Sal in the warehouse because of the rug.”
The space between them vanished.
“You broke the machine, Emily. You made me remember what it feels like to be alive. To be angry. To be amused.”
His free hand cupped her jaw.
His thumb moved gently over her cheekbone.
“I spent a decade in the freezing cold.”
His voice dropped.
“You are the only fire I’ve found, and I’m entirely too selfish a man to let you go.”
Emily’s breath caught.
She understood what choosing him meant.
The violence.
The spreadsheets.
The blood.
The paranoia.
She had managed the logistics of his world for 3 years.
Now she looked at the man who had killed to protect her, the man who laughed at her cynical deflections, and realized she did not care.
She was tired of being cold too.
“If I stay, I handle the household accounts. Your offshore guy is sloppy, and you’re buying a proper espresso machine for this kitchen. Not a drip brewer.”
Dante smiled.
A real smile that reached his eyes and made him look devastatingly human.
“Whatever you want, Emily.”
He leaned toward her.
The last remnants of the boundary shattered.
His kiss was not gentle. It was desperate, claiming, and fueled by the adrenaline of the night.
Emily met him with equal intensity.
Her hands tangled in his shirt and pulled him closer.
The sterile glass walls around them seemed to warm.
For 9 years, the boss had been a ghost.
He had ruled his empire in absolute, terrifying silence.
But as Dante pulled Emily into his lap, the cold void inside his chest finally closed.
May you like
He was alive.
And heaven help the Chicago underworld if anyone ever tried to take the woman who had awakened him.
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