All Chapters of MAFIA CEO'S OBSESSION: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Valentina ReyesThe storm came out of nowhere, the way everything good and terrible had come to me that week.It started as a low murmur on the metal roof, a scatter of fat drops like thrown gravel. Then the wind hit, and the whole compound began to groan. The bulb above my cage swung on its cord. Dust sifted down from the rafters. A long roll of thunder shook the concrete under my body, and somewhere outside a door banged open and shut, open and shut, like a drum.I sat up.“Val?” Lucía whispered, from the dark of the next cage.“Listen.”The thunder rolled again, farther away. Then the light went out.It didn’t flicker. It simply stopped, the bulb ticking as it cooled, and the room dropped into a black so total that I couldn’t see my own hand. The generator’s hum, the buzz of the keypad at the far door, the soft whir of a fan somewhere behind the wall, all of it died at once.I heard Beto swear.“Chuy! ¡Chuy! Se fue la luz!”I had been counting sounds for two days. The key

Alessandro RossiThe mask was waiting for me in the truck.Ramon handed it across the seat without a word, a flat black package wrapped in tissue, and watched my face while I unwrapped it. Soft leather, smooth, cut to cover the eyes and the bridge of the nose. No decoration. No holes for ornament. Just a plain, expensive piece of darkness.I turned it over in my hands.It was the same make as the one I’d worn at Eclipse three years ago. Not similar. The same. The same stitching along the lower edge, the same faint scent of tanning oil, the same weight against the palm.“Señor Salcedo’s gift,” Ramon said. “Everyone at the sale wears one. Buyers do not like to be recognized.”“Where did he find it?”“I would not know.”His smile was perfectly pleasant. I stared at him for three seconds longer than politeness allowed, and he let me, which told me something.Then I put the mask on.The finca stood at the end of a dirt road a hundred and fifty miles from anything. We reached it a

Alessandro RossiI had seen the mark before she ever reached center stage.It was in the way the guard turned her, the careful, theatrical pivot of a man showing a prize cow to a crowd. His hand lifted the edge of the silk and drew it aside, and a pale crescent curved against her inner thigh, as delicate as a fingernail paring.The room made a low, appreciative sound.I made none.Three years rolled backward in a single breath. A hotel bed. Lamplight on a dark head. My mouth on that same small, strange curve of skin as she shivered beneath me, and the way she had gasped, What are you doing? And my voice answering, rough and unfamiliar, Learning you.I had told myself for three years that I’d imagined the mark. That a man could dream a thing so precisely it became a memory. That I was a fool chasing a ghost with a face I couldn’t draw and a mouth I couldn’t forget.I hadn’t imagined anything.The girl in the white dress, bound, blindfolded, bleeding at the lip, standing on a sp

Alessandro RossiI didn’t reply to Enzo for six hours. Then I sent one word.Done.Kira had flown into Tucson overnight and cloned the phone in the hangar before the sun was fully up, working with a cable and three monitors and the kind of mad focus that made her look twenty years older. She read the message thread twice and shook her head.“He’s careful,” she said. “No names. No numbers. Everything’s coded, tonight’s weather, packages, a pet. But the number he’s texting from is a burner Enzo bought in cash from a bodega in Staten Island eight days ago.” She tapped the screen. “And the messages go back three weeks. This man, Ramon, has been reporting on you since before you left New York.”“Since before I knew about the girl.”“Since before he did, I think.” Kira’s eyes were red. “Whatever Enzo wants, boss, it started well before the wallet.”I’d looked at that last line for a long time. Then I typed my answer. Four letters, a period.The reply came in under a minute.Good. C

Valentina ReyesThe cage had a view.That was the first thing I noticed, standing barefoot in a bandage on a floor of pale oak, a wall of morning sky that was somehow all glass. Seventy-two stories below, Manhattan lay like a toy city under a scrim of pearl-gray cloud. Central Park, a green rectangle. The Hudson, a ribbon of steel. The cars on Fifty-Seventh Street crawling like beads on a string.I’d stared up at this building a hundred times from a bench in Columbus Circle, eating a pretzel and wondering what kind of person lived behind the glass.Now I knew.A man who kept everything he owned where he could see it.“This is yours,” Alessandro said.He stood in the doorway of the guest suite with his hands in the pockets of a charcoal suit he’d changed into at the airstrip, hair still damp from a shower he’d taken in a hangar bathroom. He looked impossibly composed. If you hadn’t seen him cradle a girl in white silk in a ruined courtyard, if you hadn’t heard him breathe my nam