CHAPTER 3

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ELYSIA 

The phone slipped from my fingers and clattered to the floor like a gunshot. Lisa’s voice cracked through the silence. “What the fuck just happened? Who are those people?”

My knees buckled. I couldn’t breathe.

That voice on the line, low, amused, lethal, had curled around my name the same way it had curled around my body last night when he was buried deep inside me and I was begging for more.

Valente. Adrian Valente. The man every whisper in this city warned you about. The man whose name made grown gangsters piss themselves. The man who had kissed me like he was starving and fucked me like he was punishing the world.

And I had run from his bed this morning without even knowing who he was. “Elysia!” Lisa grabbed my shoulders, shaking me. “Talk to me!” I stared at her, terror clawing up my throat. “If that was really him… I’m dead. We’re all dead.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The man from last night,” I whispered. “The one I… the one who…” I couldn’t finish. “It’s him. Adrian Valente. The Mafia King. My father—he must have—he stole from him. From the Valente family. We’ve been hiding from them for years.”

Lisa went white. “The debt rumors… that was real?” I nodded, tears burning. “Dad always said if they ever found us, they’d take everything. Including us.”

“We’re going to the police,” Lisa said immediately, already reaching for her own phone. “Right now.”

“Are you insane?” I snatched it from her hand. “You don’t go to the police about Adrian Valente. Half of them are on his payroll. The other half disappear. We go to the station, we’re gift-wrapped for him.”

Lisa dragged both hands through her hair. “Then what the hell do we do? We can’t just sit here!”

I closed my eyes. My mother’s sobs still echoed in my ears from the call. Valentina screaming.

“I have to go home,” I said, the words tasting like poison. “Alone. He said alone.”

“No.” Lisa’s voice cracked like a whip. “You are not walking into that house by yourself.”

“I have to.” I was already moving, grabbing my coat, sliding into sneakers because my feet were still bare and torn from running this morning. “If I don’t go, they start cutting pieces off my family. You heard him.”

Lisa swore, long and vicious, then snatched her keys. “Then I’m driving. And I’m waiting outside. If anything happens, I call every contact I have.”

There was no arguing with her when she used that tone. I didn’t have the strength left anyway.

The drive was twenty minutes of hell.

Every red light felt like a countdown. Every glance in the rear-view mirror, I expected black SUVs to appear and run us off the road.

When we turned into my street, my stomach lurched so hard I gagged. Six black cars lined the curb like a funeral procession. Tinted windows. No plates. Men in suits standing beside them, hands inside jackets, eyes hidden behind sunglasses despite the grey morning.

Lisa slammed the brakes. “Elysia—”

“Stay here,” I croaked. “Promise me. Do not come in.” She looked like she wanted to argue, but the sight of those men silenced her. She nodded once, grip white on the steering wheel.

I stepped out.

The November air bit my skin, but I was burning, shaking, as I walked up the path to the front door that had been our home since I was twelve. It hung open. I crossed the threshold and the world narrowed to a tunnel.

Living room The couch where we used to watch movies. Now occupied by him. Adrian Valente sat like a king on a throne, legs crossed, black suit immaculate, not a single strand of that ink-black hair out of place. One tattooed hand rested on his thigh, the other lazily spinning a gold lighter—my lighter, the one I’d seen this morning—between long fingers.

My mother and Valentina were on their knees in front of him, faces streaked with tears, wrists zip-tied behind their backs. Two armed men stood behind them, guns glinting.

The second Valentina saw me she sobbed, “Elysia!” Mamma tried to stand. “Baby, run—”

A guard shoved her back down so hard her knees cracked against the hardwood. She cried out.

Something feral roared awake inside me. But then Adrian unfolded himself from the couch, slow, deliberate, and every instinct in my body screamed predator.

He was taller than I remembered. Broader. Crueler in daylight.

His gaze locked on me and the air left my lungs. Those eyes—black, bottomless, amused—raked over me from head to toe. Taking in the hoodie, the borrowed sweatpants, the bruises on my throat that his mouth had put there.

A slow smile curved his lips. The same lips that had been between my legs hours ago. “Ciao, piccola,” he said softly. “You ran away this morning.” My back hit the doorframe. I hadn’t even realized I was retreating.

Valentina thrashed against the guard. “Let me go! Elysia, help us!” The guard pressed a boot between her shoulder blades and she screamed into the carpet.

Anger flooded me so hot I tasted metal. I took a step forward. “Get your hands off her!” Adrian tilted his head, studying me like I was an interesting new toy. “Temper. I like it.” He flicked a finger. The guard stepped back. Valentina sobbed in relief.

I couldn’t look away from him. My heart was trying to punch through my ribs.

He walked toward me, each step measured, until he was close enough that I smelled smoke and that dark cologne that had soaked into my skin last night.

“Why did you run, Elysia?” he asked, voice low enough that only I could hear. “After you begged so prettily. After you came on my tongue and cried my name.” Heat and horror crashed over me. My cheeks flamed. “I—I didn’t know who you were,” I whispered.

He leaned in, lips brushing the shell of my ear. “You didn’t ask.” I jerked away, but he caught my wrist before I could flee, thumb pressing over the pulse that was racing for him. “Didn’t know I’d be the daughter of the man who betrayed you?” I managed, voice shaking.

His smile sharpened to something lethal. “Marco Moretti stole fifty million euros from me. Then he vanished like a rat. Blood debts don’t disappear, amore. They’re inherited.” He released my wrist only to slide his hand up my arm, possessive, branding.

My mother coughed, a wet, terrified sound. I tried to go to her—Adrian’s grip tightened, yanking me back against his chest. “Your father isn’t here,” he murmured against my temple. “So the debt falls to the next generation. And luckily…” His hand slid down to rest over my stomach, fingers splayed wide. “I already sampled the collateral.”

Shame and fury choked me. “Let them go. They didn’t do anything.” “No,” he agreed mildly. “But you did. You put that sweet little body on my cock and screamed for more. That makes you mine now. And I protect what’s mine.”

He turned to his men, voice switching to clipped Italian. Two words. They hauled my mother and sister to their feet. “Wait—” I lunged, but Adrian’s arm locked around my waist like steel.

“They’ll be guests at my estate until the debt is settled,” he said. “Comfortable. Safe. As long as you behave.” My mother’s terrified eyes met mine. “Elysia, no—” Valentina was crying too hard to speak. I looked up at Adrian, hating him, hating how my body still remembered the drag of his teeth on my skin.

“What do you want?” I asked, barely a whisper. He smiled, slow and dark and inevitable. “You, piccola. Married to me. My ring on your finger. My name on your tongue. My children in your belly. That’s the new price.” He cupped my chin, forcing me to hold his gaze.

“Say yes, Elysia. Or I start collecting in blood right now. And we both know whose blood I’ll take first.” His thumb traced my lower lip, the same thumb that had been inside me last night.

The room spun. I was twenty years old. I was a virgin this morning. Now I was staring at the devil who owned half the country… and he owned me too.

I swallowed the scream clawing up my throat. Because my mother was crying. Because Valentina was trembling. Because the barrel of a gun was pressed to my mother and sister’s spine. And because some traitorous part of me—God forgive me—still remembered how it felt when he kissed me like the world was ending.

I met his eyes. And I lied with everything I had left. “Yes.” His smile could have cut glass. “Good girl.” He kissed me then, right there in front of my sobbing family and his armed soldiers. Hard. Possessive. A brand.

When he pulled back, he licked the taste of me from his lips and said to his men, “Take the mother and sister to the coastal house. Separate wings. No harm.” Then to me, soft as a lover, deadly as a blade,  “Welcome home, Mrs. Valente.”