Taken For A Debt: A Mafia Romance (The Taken Duet 1)

I took a step towards the couch, then froze, the picture of Devin staring down his own faint reflection in the blackened TV screen just a little too much for me to get past.

“Yes?” Devin still hadn’t turned his head.

“Am I… interrupting something?”

There was a flicker of the eyes away from me. To the phone sitting on the arm of the couch closest to him.

Of course: the staring at the TV screen was just Devin being Devin, or something. He really was doing something else behind the scenes… something I knew better than to ask about.

“Sit down, Julia,” Devin told me.

“I was curious if you were interested in my company, not looking to be commanded.”

“It’s bound to end the same way, isn’t it?”

I scowled at him, but when he just kept staring at me I shrugged and sat down. I wasn’t going to be a coward like him and avoid the things that would help me get to know him.

“You mentioned another cousin the other day,” I started. “Are you closer to her?”

“Jellie? No, I don’t have much to do with the Torro side of my family.”

“Because of your mother?” I leaned closer, but Devin wouldn’t even turn his damn head.

“Because their interests are very different to mine. Not everything I do has some mafia politics purpose behind it, Julia.”

“I was more thinking it might be a personal, emotional thing for her,” I said, but my words got caught up on his finger over my lips. I poked my tongue out at it, which made him recoil fast with a grimace he couldn’t hide, and before he retaliated over that move I got in another question. “Will any of the Torro side be coming to the wedding?”

“It would be incredibly rude to leave my own father and his family out of the festivities.”

I scoffed at him in the way that had always gotten Daddy in a huff with me. “That’s not an answer, and you know it.”

“It would be enough of an answer for the average person with half a brain.”

“Insults, always the best way for an intellectual to shut someone else down.”

Well, he was looking at me now, at least. “Would you like to trade further insults, or would you rather see what I was doing today?”

“I didn’t think it was something I should know about,” I admitted.

Something about the way his expression changed made his eyes not seem so big and childish to me any more. “You thought it was going to be business matters.”

“It seemed like a reasonable assumption.”

He shifted sideways so he could draw something out of his pocket. Without showing me, he took up one of my hands and placed the object inside. I uncurled my fingers immediately, because I knew it by shape.

The jewel Angel had given us was completely transformed in a setting that clasped it in a manner so intricate I could barely focus on the details. There were carvings along the band as well, inside and out.

“This was a premade band, right?”

Devin pointed to a symbol carved near the setting. “With the O’Hare symbol?” I saw the matching but differing carving on the opposite side before he indicated it. “And the Torro one? I don’t think the average jeweller has a band like this in stock.”

There was something that really bothered me about those symbols. Where had I seen them before? “But it’s too much. Even if you got the design in the instant I was out of here, surely you couldn’t have had it done in a few hours.”

“Now that,” said Devin, “is where you’re completely correct… except when you happen to be talking about someone with the sort of connections and power I have.”

And there we were back in territory I didn’t want to explore. I turned the ring over in my hand. “It’s really beautiful. Thank you for going to all this trouble for me, I guess.”

“It’s what’s expected,” Devin said. “You need to be wearing a ring worthy of symbolising the commitment we’re going to make.” He took it back from me and slid it on my finger, having apparently gotten enough encouragement.