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“No?” He jerks me closer to his body, his eyes piercing into mine. “You jump from Scalera’s property. You’re Scalera’s property,” he sneers, revealing perfect teeth and the tip of a pink wet tongue that he sweeps over the line of his upper teeth as he waits for me to react.
“I—”
He shoves me so hard that I stumble and fall to the upholstered seat of the boat, grappling for the railing. Before I can even think, he has his knee pushed into my pelvis, pinning me to the seat as he ties my hands to the railing with a cable tie. I wince with the pain as the plastic cuts into my skin.
“Puttana,” he hisses, and his spit splatters my face. “Randazzo sarà felice di avere in casa la puttana di Matteo Scalera.”
I close my eyes, wanting only to weep. Puttana. Matteo Scalera. Words that need no translation. I kick at him, but he laughs.
“American whore,” he says as he forces my legs open and ties them each to some hook on the boat’s floor. When he’s done, he points his gun at me, pushing at my wet skirts, his intent clear. I scream, but my voice is lost in the noise of the boat’s engine and the vastness of the ocean.
For my efforts, I get a backhand over the cheek. My head whips to the side, and my wrists jerk at their constraints. I gasp in pain as blood seeps between my teeth, the taste making bile rise in my stomach.
The other man glances at me, a smile playing on his lips.
“Stop, idiota, leave the fun for later. Once Randazzo has seen her.”
His perfect English rings in my ears with the force of the slap I got dealt.
Randazzo.
I have no clue who that is. All I know is that I’ve jumped into something without thinking. That I’ve gone from the frying pan into the fire.
These men weren’t catching fish. They were spying on Matteo, waiting for a stupid woman to jump off the cliff. A woman Matteo doesn’t care for. I’m just merch. Exchangeable for cash.
A virgin to be sold to the highest bidder.
For some reason I don’t think that matters anymore. “A whore for life, or a whore for one night, Tasha. Choose.”
A whore until I’m dead.
By jumping off that cliff, I’ve sealed my fate.
32
MATTEO
“What. The. Actual. Fuck?” I bite into the phone as I close my eyes, leaning back against the headrest of the back seat. “Say that again?”
“She jumped, boss, off the fucking cliff like— like?—”
Like a woman running for her life. Visions of Tasha flying, shattering, plunging into the water and never surfacing again fill my mind’s eye and they make a surge of bile push up my throat. “But she got picked up?”
“Yes. Yes, boss.” Burley, who is as steady and stable as a surgeon’s hand with that first cut, has a tremor in his voice. He’s gone soft on her. And then there’s the matter of losing my wife while he’s supposed to be guarding her. In the Don’s Il Consiglio, that would be an automatic execution.
But Tasha’s a wife that won’t be guarded.
She actually fucking jumped.
She could have fucking died.
“A speedboat picked?—”
“You said so already. I’m there in ten.” I kill the call and strangle my phone. I don’t move, I don’t blink. I stare out of the window, waiting for the rage in me to still.
I don’t lose control. Not when it comes to shit like this. When everybody’s in a fucking panic, that’s when I keep shit together. A lesson hard learned with Alex’s death.
When the car drives into the estate, I glance around, looking for the security detail Dominic had diligently posted to protect me and my wife. I went rogue last night, risking it in some random hotel, but fuck knows, I couldn’t come home. Not to her sassy tongue that only tempts me with her teasing. Not to her and that hot body and sweet pussy that begs and begs and then begs some more.
