A Vow of Lust and Fury (Underworld Kings)

Jackson and I were in the car before I spoke again.

“I’m going to arrange a meeting with the Pérez brothers,” I said.

He pulled out of the parking garage, fingers tightening perceptibly on the steering wheel. “Now we’re bypassing Rafe and getting coke from those shady little shits?”

“Just one shipment. I can’t trust Chicago right now with our fucking rat.” I’d gotten one shipment through in the last week by telling no one but the guys moving it, but two others had been taken with the same tactic. I couldn’t afford to play Russian roulette with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product. Rafael might well bitch, but he’d bitch a whole lot more when I couldn’t pay him.

“You know Rafe won’t ship elsewhere, either.”

Because the cartel leader had some weird little bubble of FBI protection in Chicago. Hence why we never lost product and why Sergio Donato was so keen to get coke from us. Between whoever Rafe had bought off and all the people in my pocket, we were untouchable. At least from anyone on the legal side of things. The mob would soon learn exactly how untouchable we were.

“Let’s go pay the councilman a visit.” I was going to wrap Patrick O’Hara up in so much red tape, he wouldn’t be able to shit without someone breathing down his neck. Licenses, planning applications, business rates, the IRS…I would drown his legal stuff while The Outfit hit their warehouses and killed their soldiers. “Then I have a meeting with Roberto Donato.”

“We could just handle this all ourselves, you know. We don’t need the fucking Outfit.”

“We’re above fighting in the streets like petty criminals, Jackson.”

“Speak for yourself,” he mumbled. “I’d happily gut Sergio Donato and the fucking mob. Still can’t believe he tried to kill his own niece.” He shook his head, and if Jackson thought something was screwed up, it was bad.

Rage simmered through my veins, but I kept a handle on it. “His time will come.”

At the mention of Emilia, I took out my phone and pulled up the feed for the cameras in my apartment. It had become almost habitual over the last forty-eight hours since she’d been in my space. I was rarely there and had men guarding the penthouse and the building, but I still kept checking. I told myself it was to make sure she didn’t escape, but it was more than that, some twisted curiosity she’d ignited in me.

The screen showed her walking into her room from the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her body. When she dropped it and gifted me a view of her bare back and ass, my dick hardened against my fly. Fuck. My teeth ground together, and I turned the phone screen down in my lap. Not because I was decent but because I needed to focus. Clearing my throat, I looked at Jackson.

“We just need to wait for Paddy O’Hara’s house to catch fire.” My voice had a slight rasp that I couldn’t quite cover. “Contact the Pérez brothers and organize a meeting. The last thing we need is a war on our own turf because we can’t supply.”

I turned my phone over again and found Emilia’s room empty. I thought she might be in the bathroom, where I wasn’t perverse enough to have a camera. A choice I was regretting right now. I could imagine how good she’d look in the shower, water cascading over those perfect curves. I switched cameras and found her in the kitchen. My shirt once again drowned her body and left her legs bare. The bandage on her thigh peeked out from beneath the material, reminding me that she was a bird—whose wings I had personally clipped—trapped in my cage.

She crept through the space like a flighty prey animal, limping slightly. I couldn’t deny that I wanted to chase her, take her, taste her. She opened a kitchen drawer and took something out. A knife? Then closed it and darted back to her room. I couldn’t help but smile. Was she going to try to kill me? I wouldn’t put it past her.

Emilia Donato did not know how to submit. She sure as hell wasn’t willing to marry some guy her daddy, or more specifically her uncle, had picked out for her. I’d never bought into the mafia tradition of arranged marriages and only agreed for a quick fix to an irritating problem. But she was no longer the annoying consequence of an Outfit alliance. Rather, the alliance was the cherry on top, and she was the best sundae I was ever going to taste.

I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had changed, maybe the very second I’d heard that she’d run. It was unexpected, impulsive, and defiant. And despite the inconvenience of it, she had me intrigued right then. Who was this girl who would defy the leaders of two mafias? The moment I looked into those pretty eyes of hers and saw nothing but pure venom shining back at me, her fate was sealed. And when I felt the erratic thrum of her pulse beneath my lips, it was set in stone. She could run, and I would chase her to the ends of the Earth on pure principle. Her submission would be a brutal battle of will and lust, and the thought made my cock painfully hard. In the space of a week, Emilia Donato had become an obsession, and I would have her.