P R O L O G U E

Dangerous.

Patrons and staff of SubTerra used only one word to describe Jon Moretti; dangerous. He was one of many dangerous men who walked through the clandestine establishment, and yet Jon Moretti was the one they warned her about. Career criminals, thieves, arsonists, gang members, murderers… the club was a prestigious hub, built specifically to give these menacing people a place where, ironically, they could feel safe. A place they knew police officers wouldn’t be barging through the door to arrest them, thanks to a low-key business agreement between the owner, Frank Muscovado, and some crooked government officials with the power to sweep the booming business under the rug.

So, when people had warned Zoe about Jon, she had laughed. Not because she hadn’t believed it, but because they were hypocrites. They, themselves, conversed and associated with a vast array of these dangerous people. Hell, some of them were those dangerous people. It hadn’t mattered to Zoe anyway. She had had no intention of falling in love with Jon, but it had been inevitable. Her feelings for him had been an unavoidable tidal wave that had hit her with a force she could never have expected.

Cooped in a dingy train carriage, bars welded sloppily onto the windows and the door padlocked shut, Zoe realized all those people had been wrong. Yes. Jon was dangerous, but not in the way everyone thought. The dirt beneath her hands was damp, the lack of fresh air forcing the musty smell far up her nostrils. Curling her legs up beneath her, salty tears slipped down her pink-tinged cheeks. Her sniffling breath blew out coolly in front of her, a desperate attempt to calm herself down. The only sound permeating the quiet space was the intense thrumming of her heart, rattling against her rib cage. The eerie silence forced her to re-evaluate every decision she had made up to this point, analyze it, wonder if she would’ve done things differently.

She wouldn’t.

Jon Moretti was terrifying. He was a muscular monster of a man with dark eyes and a crooked nose. To most people, he was unforgiving; stern features on a hard face, but to Zoe, he was loving and gentle. He cared about her. It was obvious in everything that he did. Every single thing. There was not a fiber of her being that believed he could ever hurt her. Even now, somewhere beyond the steel bars and suffocating silence, in the midst of an unfeasible situation, Zoe felt her panic twist at the thought of Jon risking everything to save her. Because she had no doubt he would.  

Only now, locked inside the makeshift jail cell, did Zoe realize exactly how dangerous Jon could be. The danger was found in the precarious enemies Jon had amassed over the years; their complete lack of regard for innocent human life, their sheer determination to get him, hurt him in any way possible. 

The most dangerous thing about Jon Moretti was those who sought revenge on him.