The Don’s Craving

He paid two million dollars for my father's debts. He swears he didn't buy me.

I was twelve when I learned that wanting something is how you lose it. So when my imprisoned father hands me to Cesare Mancuso — the most dangerous Don in Chicago, twice my age, with a ruined knee and a dead wife and eyes like quarried stone — I do what I've always done. I count the exits. I want nothing. I survive.

Then I make my mother's dumplings in his cold kitchen because my hands need something to do, and the man who feels nothing watches me from the doorway like I'm the first warm thing he's seen in three years.

"I chose you," he tells me. "I did not buy you."

I almost believe him.

But Cesare's family is rotting from the inside, his own blood is hunting his throat, and the safest place for a woman he's started to crave is as far from his heart as he can push her. He thinks distance will keep me alive. He doesn't understand that I was raised in a life like this — that I don't need a wall. I need a man brave enough to stop building one.

And when the blood finally comes, I'll learn the thing I've spent eighteen years running from: that the cold is already in me. That this terrible, beautiful house doesn't break me.

It fits me.