Page 70 of The Kingpin’s Bride

One of the regulars had gotten too close. Too sure she was on the menu. I was dancing with chains on my wrists, but I stepped between them anyway. Told him she was spoken for. Made it sound true enough that he backed off.

Later, when the immediate danger had passed, she grabbed my wrist hard enough to leave marks.

“Thank you so much,” she said, voice raw. “My name is Bella. Last name is Dolce. If you ever need something… I owe you.”

She never finished whatever else she meant to say. Someone called for her from the front and she ran. I never expected to collect on her favor. Now I had no one else.

Finding her took the rest of the night and most of the cash in my pocket. I started with the limited information I had overheard in the penthouse. Matteo’s voice on the phone. Expanded radius. Private airstrips.

I turned those scraps over in my head while I moved through the parts of the city that knew my face from the club. Girls who used to dance remembered other girls. Some of them owed me small favors from the years before the auction. I asked quiet questions in quieter places. One of them knew a driver who moved people for the lower-level crews. The driver knew an address on a residential street that smelled like old money and private security details.

I was exhausted. Angry. Still half in shock. But I was moving.

By the time I reached the house they said was Bella’s, the sky was starting to pale at the edges. My feet were cut and filthy. My body ached in every sensitive place.

I rang the bell.

Bella opened the door in an oversized sweater and sleep shorts, dark hair loose around her shoulders..

For a second she only stared. Then recognition hit her hard enough to make her suck in a breath.

“You,” she whispered. “The dancer. From that night!”

“I need help,” I said. My voice came out low and scraped. “I wouldn’t be here if I had anywhere else.”

She looked past me into the empty street, then back at my face. Something complicated moved behind her eyes. Fear. Debt.

The memory of a hallway and a lie that had bought her time to run. “Come in. Quickly.”

The house was warm and quiet and expensive in a way that didn’t need to perform. Bella led me through a marble foyer into a kitchen that smelled faintly of the night before. I stood there like something that had tracked the street in with me.

Bella wrapped her arms around herself. “You’re Matteo Ventura’s wife now. Everyone’s talking about the auction. About how much he paid.”

“Wife. Because he paid for me,” I said. “Not because he loves me. There’s a difference.”

She flinched like I had slapped her. “My father works for men like that. He’s a doctor. He examines the new ones sometimes. When they need medical clearance for the Families.”

My stomach turned cold.

I knew the shape of those gloved hands. I had felt them on me in the first days after the auction while I was trying not to cry. Clinical. Detached.

“I think I remember him,” I said quietly.

Bella’s face went pale. “Oh my God.”

“I helped you once,” I reminded her, because I needed the debt between us to stay solid. “At the club. You were in over your head. I got you out.”

Her voice was small. “I told you my name that night because I meant it. If you ever needed something… I owed you. I still do.”

She moved then. Practical in the way girls who grew up around dangerous men learned to be practical when the danger finally arrived on their doorstep. She gave me soft pants and a high-necked sweater. She gave me a burner phone with a small amount of credit loaded. She gave me cash.

More than I expected from a girl who lived in her father’s house and operated on his gold Amex.

“I can’t hide you,” she said while I changed in the powder room. “If Matteo is looking, and he will be looking, I can’t be the one who kept you. My father answers when those men call.”

“I don’t need hiding,” I said. “I need information.”

She hesitated in the doorway, arms wrapped around her middle. Then she told me what she had overheard two nights earlier.