Page 47 of Vicious Temptation
I haven’t been back here since I picked up Bella for that dinner. I haven’t needed to. Masseo and I settled most of our business for the foreseeable future that day. Since then everything has been handled over email. Walking back into the house brings back sharp, visceral memories of the first day I met Bella, of that sharp collision when she crashed into my chest, how soft she felt in the moment before she wrenched away from me, even under her layers of clothes. The memory of her wide, tearful eyes and her panicked expression and how, from that very first moment, I felt the urgent need to sweep her away and protect her, like a knight rescuing a princess. The kind of man I’ve never been before.
I’ve always preferred independent, even bossy, women. Women with sharp tongues and sharper opinions, who stood up to me and my own strong personality, who weren’t intimidated by what I did for a living or cowed by it. Delilah was that kind of woman, the kind who fought and loved with equal ferocity, who had her own life before she fell in love with me, and kept as much of it as she could. She and Bella are so far apart in the type of woman that they are that they might as well be from two different planets—Bella’s strength is a quieter kind, a sort that comes from within herself, an ember that needs to be nurtured instead of a crackling blaze. It doesn’t make Bella any less strong, but it’s an entirely different thing. And I admire it just as much.
But it doesn’t change the fact that Bella is also different from anyone I’ve ever wanted before. That my desire to protect her, to keep her safe, this feeling that snags on my physical desire for her until it becomes a kind of possessiveness that could be obsessive if I allowed it, is a feeling I’ve never experienced before.
It’s confusing and difficult to sort out, and so instead, I keep walking, all the way to Masseo’s office. This, I know how to handle. This—a confrontation with another powerful man, is comfortably within my skill set.
Masseo is sitting behind his desk when I walk in, sorting through something in a folder in front of him. He doesn’t look up until I sit down, a subtle power play, but I’m beyond caring about the games of powerful men right now. I have to focus on keeping my anger in check, so that I can have a civilized conversation with this man that I very much want to punch in the face at this moment.
“What do you need, Gabriel? If it’s about the next shipment?—”
“It’s not.” I take a slow breath, tempering both my words and my tone. “I wasn’t aware Bella was at one point engaged to Pyotr Lasilov.”
Masseo pauses for a moment, visibly startled by the statement, but he collects himself quickly. “I see no reason why you needed to know that.”
“You don’t think I needed to know that the woman I hired to care for my children was brutally tortured by the Bratva?”
Masseo snorts, and at that moment, it takes every fraying thread of self-control I have not to come over the desk and grab him by his collar.
“She wasn’t tortured,” he says dismissively, and another of those threads frays a little more. “She was frightened. Handled roughly. Treated abysmally, for certain. But?—”
“She was raped, from the sound of it,” I say bluntly. Harshly, because Masseo needs to hear it. If no one else will hold him accountable for his actions?—
Why me? Why do I need to? I don’t have a firm answer for that, other than the fact that I’ve given Bella a job and a place to live, that it feels as if she’s under my protection now, and I want to keep her there. I want that protection to extend to making sure that no one can hurt her, ever again.
“The doctors saw no evidence of that,” Masseo said, with the same dismissive tone.
“Assaulted, at the very least.” My jaw tightens. “Which is no better.”
“I’d think it is. At any rate, Gabriel, that past has no bearing on her job with you. I didn’t see that it was necessary to share such an—unfortunate incident with you. For her own sake, if nothing else.”
I feel my teeth grind together, I’m clenching them so hard in an effort to keep control. I don’t believe for one fucking second that Masseo cared about his daughter’s privacy, when he kept these details to himself. He cared about his bottom line. About the possibility of collecting Bella’s paycheck from me, until she could be convinced to go along with another arranged marriage, for which he’ll collect more money.
She’s a tool to him. A means to pad his wealth and increase his power. He’s hardly the first mafia father to see a daughter in such a way, but it makes me angry in a way that it never has before—viscerally, as if it’s personal. I’ve always disapproved of the treatment of daughters in mafia families, always felt it was archaic and unnatural, and promised myself that my own children would never participate in any of it. But now, it feels much more immediate.
And it makes me fucking furious.
“They hurt her,” I say quietly, fighting to keep my voice even. “She was promised marriage and safety, by the don, but first and foremost by you. Her father. And instead, she was—what? Kidnapped, abused, and violated? And you think that’s not a form of torture?”
Masseo snorts again. “You’re familiar with the brutality of the circles we move in, Gabriel. There are things far, far worse than what Pyotr and his men did to her. But I raised Bella gently, kept her sheltered, and I think the shock of it was truly what made her collapse like that for months. It was all a bit dramatic—still is—but I do agree she must have been traumatized. But she has the best psychiatrist, access to medications, anything she could need to move past it. And she will, in time.”
His carelessness about all of it makes me see red. “And the ramifications of this?” I ask tightly. “The fact that the Bratva must be angry that their pakhan’s son was killed, that so many of their men are dead after this debacle? Did you not think it was worth warning me that I was taking a woman into my home, around my children, who was at the center of all of this?”
“Truthfully, it wasn’t her at the center. She was a consolation prize, to make up for the loss of the woman Pyotr Lasilov was promised.” Masseo steeples his fingers. “But no, I don’t believe the Bratva are of any concern to you. If anything, they’ll focus in on the don and his family, if there’s retribution to be had. Bella was incidental to them. They treated her as if she were incidental. I have no worries in that regard.”
He says it so confidently that I want to believe him. But a small part of me clings to the concern that’s sprung up and stayed with me since Bella told me who it was that hurt her.
The Bratva are not to be toyed with. Even I, who have worked with both them and the Italian mafia, as well as having done business with other criminal organizations on the East Coast, know that it’s wise to step carefully with them. More so than anyone else, other than perhaps the yakuza. I can’t be as sure as Masseo seems to be that there’s no danger.
But I also don’t think it’s so immediate, or so likely to be a problem, that I feel that it’s necessary to remove Bella from my household. A small part of me does wonder how much of that is because of how I feel about her, because of this odd, possessive protectiveness that’s all wrapped up in a complicated tangle of feelings that I can’t begin to know how to sort through.
I would do what was necessary, though, if I really thought that there was danger. If I thought my family was in danger. I would send Bella home, and it would hurt to do it, but my family would always come first.
I believe that.
“Is this the only reason you asked for this meeting?” Masseo taps his fingers irritably against his desk. “This—interrogation about my daughter’s past?” His mouth forms a thin line. “If so, I’ll have to ask you to please excuse me, Gabriel. I have a lot of work on my desk today.”
I very much doubt that. But it’s a curt way of telling me that he feels I’ve wasted his time, and I force myself to stay polite, to nod and push my chair back, all the while I’m seething inside with rage.