He laughed again. “If I wasn’t bein’ paid a pretty penny to take you to the duke, I might just be tempted to keep you for myself. Already got a mistress or two, but I have a feelin’ you’d be worth the high maintenance.”
“Aww, shucks,” I said with a thin slice of a smile served up on my cold, immovable face.
Giuseppe’s smile dissolved like a pearl in vinegar, revealing the emotionless heart of him. “As it is, you’re goin’ to the duke, and I’m goin’ to pocket the small fortune he’s paid me to use to go to war against your man, Dante Salvatore. Howdya like that?”
“You hurt him, and I’ll kill you,” I told him calmly. “In fact, you threaten him or anyone else in my life again, I’ll kill you.”
“Cosima,” Mason barked out, reaching across the table to squeeze my wrist painfully. “Shut up.”
Something cold and hard pressed to my knee under the small, circular table, and for a moment, I was confused by the misdirection. Then I realized, Mason was offering up the butt of a gun against my thigh, unseen by his uncle.
We locked eyes so quickly, it was just a flash, a lightning strike of connection, but it offered up a wealth of information.
Mason didn’t want this.
He was just another pawn pressed into service in a greater game being played by Giuseppe di Carlo, and he was done being controlled.
He was done because even though our friendship was based on betrayal, it still meant a lot to him, and he didn’t want to see me pressganged back into sexual slavery.
So Mason had a heart then, even if he didn’t have a spine.
On the table, I wrenched my hand out of his grip even as the one below it wrapped fingers around the small firearm and pulled it up into the bowl of my lap.
“Fuck off, Mason,” I snarled.
Pain exploded in my right cheek so bright it robbed my vision. When I was able to blink away the black spots and turn back to the men, Giuseppe was fixing the angle of one of his gold rings on his finger, clearly having been the one to deliver the blow.
“Talk back again,” he said without looking at me, instead taking the Chinotto Neri I’d bought for Mason and drinking from it. “I will kill you and screw the duke.”
“Do you really think I’m just going to go quietly with you into the good night?” I demanded, indicating the busy streets outside and Ottavio behind the counter. “People will notice. The cops troll the streets of the Bronx like ants, and they’ll come guns blazing if they think you’re committing a crime they can pin you for.”
“Clearly, your experiences in the motherland didn’t teach you much.” Giuseppe held up a hand and the door chimed open the next instant, a suited man stepping up to the counter to speak hushed Italian with Ottavio before blatantly handing over a thick roll of cash. The shopkeeper’s eyes shot to me, his mouth a wavy line of worry.
After a moment, though, he pocketed the cash and went into the back.
I allowed myself a slow blink and a moment to swallow back the bile rising in my throat before I reaffixed my game face.
“Here in New York,” Giuseppe told me with great relish, “we own everybody. Don’t you worry that pretty head about anything but coming with us nice and easy so we don’t have to deliver you broken up to your new master.”
“In your dreams.”
“No.” Giuseppe leaned forward to speak into my face, spittle flying over my cheeks. “Not in my dreams. In yours. Because if you don’t do what you’re fucking told, I will hunt Dante Salvatore and Alexander Davenport down, tie them together so they can die as brothers, and then I will beat them into mulch so you can’t tell where one guy starts and the other ends.”
“You could try,” I seethed, moving even closer so that my nose was nearly pressed to his bulbous, porous nostrils. “But they would take you down.”
“For that, I think I’ll kill them anyway,” he decided, licking his wide, rubber smile.
I’d had enough.
There was no way this man was taking me away from everyone I knew and loved after we had finally taken down the Order and happily ever after or something like it was finally in my sights.
I pushed away from the table with my thighs, still leaning into Giuseppe to obscure his view of my lap so I had time to raise the gun and push the barrel of it to his chest. It happened so fast and without any deliberate thought running through my mind, only the survival instinct that curled my finger back over the trigger.
I smiled at him as I pulled it, as the gun jarred back into the junction between my index finger and thumb so hard I thought my hand fractured. Giuseppe was shocked in that brief pause, his eyes wide, his elastic mouth gaping open like the wound I’d blown clean through his upper left chest.