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More than.

In my four years in Chicago, I had amassed my own network of power that had little to do with my husband’s.

If I wanted to teach Hewitt a lesson the way my father would have, I could have reached out to Booker or Hank’s boys at The Fallen motorcycle gang. Even Elijah, Akira, and Finn would have been down to dirty their hands roughing up a man who thought he could blackmail students into sleeping with him.

But I was a woman who enjoyed a subtler brand of vengeance.

Katya, who happened to attend one of his other classes, had agreed to my plan with a dark smile.

In fact, this very morning she was scheduled to visit Hewitt during office hours with a hidden camera in her book bag and a microphone taped under her low-cut sweater provided by yours truly and my favorite bodyguards, Luigi and Stefan.

Entrapment could be so cruel.

But effective.

I didn’t need Dario to take care of me.

And I never, ever asked.

So how the fuck had he known what happened?

And why did he suddenly care enough about me to do something about it?

“So you knew Fiammetta was mine?” Dario said. “You knew she was married to me, and you still thought you could get away with this shit?”

Hewitt made a wet, gurgling noise, and I realized someone else was in the room with them, doing Dario’s dirty work.

“I always look into the girls,” Hewitt whimpered. “I-I knew you were married to her, but everyone said you didn’t give a fuck. I didn’t even do anything! Why are you doing this?”

“You know why,” Dario said with a tsk, prowling forward out of sight.

I pressed closer to the door to watch as he stalked up to Hewitt where he was bound to a steel chair over the drain in the center of the floor. He grabbed the older man’s chin, wrenching it up at a painful angle so he could sneer down into his face.

“It doesn’t matter whether I like my wife or not,” Dario hissed. “She is my wife and mine to protect from the scum of the earth. Even if you’d looked at her the wrong way, I would cut out your filthy fucking eyeballs. As it is, you touched her, didn’t you? Hmmm. Her lovely backside, I heard.”

Another whimper, this one so filled with fear it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

I’d never witnessed raw violence like this. Savagery for the sake of savagery.

Dario wanted to fuck this man up, so he would, consequences be damned. No fear, only fury.

It shouldn’t have been as wildly arousing as it was, but I found myself squeezing my thighs together.

Hewitt’s face was bloody, almost pulpy from the beating Dario and his associate, one of the guards named Spiros, had already meted out.

But even that, apparently, wasn’t enough.

“You touched her,” Dario said, almost regretfully. “So I’ll have to take your fingers.”

“What the fuck?!” Hewitt started to thrash in the chair.

Spiros stepped forward to hold him still.

Hewitt’s hands were already wrapped firmly around the chair with rope, but Dario had to pin his fingers to the flat metal by the tip with his own.

“Maybe this will remind you not to touch what doesn’t belong to you,” he mused before bringing the sharp tip of his dagger down straight at the bottom joint of Hewitt’s finger.

My professor’s scream echoed off the walls, but I didn’t flinch or walk away.