Page 54

It hadn’t been Maksim behind the emails about Fiammetta’s schedule.

And how could it have been, for the information was too intimate.

Her school schedule, the times she spent at the dojo, volunteering, at lunch with various society ladies, when she liked to get up in the morning.

This was intimate knowledge only someone in our inner sanctum could have obtained.

It took me three months to personally interrogate every member of my organization in Chicago, and I had come up with nothing.

My soldiers and capos were loyal.

The ones who had pandered to Lando had been shoved out on their asses the moment I returned home with my Sicilian bride.

I had heard whispers about a fixer and information dealer in Chicago who could be retained for exorbitant amounts of money if you could hunt down their contact information, but the source known only as “the Oracle”—fucking pretentious shit—refused to work with the Outfit.

I was left with no trails to fucking follow, no heads to smash together to bust open secrets that had been hiding from me.

Two years later, I was still at a loss.

Only, my little Sicilian wife had somehow uncovered a fucking rat in my own organization.

Fiammetta, who spent most of her time playing at her offices as a freelance graphic designer. Fiammetta, who barely deigned to speak two words to me unless we were playacting for our family or at business events. Fiammetta, who was so friendly, she was like a fucking Disney princess. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find her talking and singing with fucking birds in the mornings, she was that ridiculously lovely. There was not a man or woman in the Chicago Cosa Nostra who didn’t love my wife, except, perhaps, for me.

That was the woman who had found out Tony Accardi, my backroom manager, had coordinated a cheating racket through my own casino.

I stared at my wife across from me in my office at the casino, watching as she stared out the one-way mirror at the activity on the floor. She was wearing a black dress, cut low in the front and back to reveal the heavy swells at the inside of her breasts and the delicate arch of her spine under the creamy olive-toned skin of her back. All that heavy mahogany hair was the same texture of the dress, satin smooth as it brushed over her arms and pooled at the top of her curvy ass.

I was half hard just from looking at her, even knowing a man was tied up in the underground rooms waiting for my fists to free him from his secrets. Someone else could have done the heavy lifting there, but I so rarely got my own hands dirty, I always relished the opportunity when it presented itself.

“Serena Nenci is the one behind everything,” Fiammetta said finally, after being silent for some minutes even though she had been the one to ask to speak with me.

My brow raised of its own volition. “Serena? Why would she act against me after everything I have done for her?”

She sighed, facing me for the first time since entering the room. Cerberus, her loyal shadow, followed her as she moved forward to sink into the chair across from me as if she was suddenly exhausted.

“I don’t know, and I don’t have the answers yet.” She sounded frustrated, as if she had been searching for them for a long time.

It almost made me smile to think of my sweet wife applying herself to Mafia business. She spent her time making pretty websites, for fuck’s sake, not delving into the minds of criminals.

“While I appreciate you discovering Tony’s duplicity,” I said carefully, because she had a temper and I had things to do that did not include taming that temper with orgasms, the only surefire method to placate my wife. “I do not for one second believe Serena would have reason to blow up her own operation. She is the queen of her domain. What more could she want?”

Fiammetta pursed her pink mouth. “Love or power are usually the best guesses.”

“Her lover is a happily kept woman living in a four-million-dollar apartment on the Loop,” I countered.

“More power, then,” she pressed. “Now that she’s had a taste, she wants more than you can give her.”

“I couldn’t give her more unless I gave her my throne,” I pointed out.

“Exactly!”

Her enthusiasm should have been irritating, but as with most things, I found Fiammetta distractingly endearing.

I hadn’t tasted that mouth in ten days.

A lifetime.

Going to bed in the same house as such a siren took the kind of iron willpower I had been accumulating my whole life. If it wasn’t for that, I would have sunk beneath her charms and happily drowned a long time ago.