Page 34 of The Price of Power
It was nothing like my old one; that much was obvious. I liked my old apartment back in Milwaukee, but this suite of rooms alone put it to shame.
Despite the house’s age, everything was well-crafted and cared for. The bathroom was gorgeous and spacious—open and airy while still maintaining its antique charm. And the walk-in closet was easily as big as my whole living room.
I spent some time looking through the racks and drawers packed with bespoke suits and immaculately folded shirts. There were glass cases of expensive watches and cufflinks and silk ties. Everything the man owned appeared to be of the highest quality. Taken together, his belongings painted a picture of a man who never settled for second-best. Who never compromised. Someone who wielded power as if he was born to it.
Because he was, I realized.
The D’Angelo family was famous…well, maybe infamous was a better world. Maybe not as legendary as Al Capone or Machine Gun Kelly, but close. Hell, I’d heard of them, and I was hopelessly out of touch.
But even though, like most people, I’d heard the name, I didn’t know any details. I had no idea what actions had made them so well known.
On impulse, I reached into my right hip pocket, looking for my phone, but it wasn’t there.
Damn. I’d never picked it up after dropping it back in that dingy excuse for an office. It was probably still lying on the floor.
Not that I needed to search up all of Gabriel’s past deeds to figure out what kind of man he was. It wasn’t as if I’d find anything good. I might’ve been woefully ignorant about criminal enterprises, but I was reasonably certain they didn’t earn their notoriety by holding bake sales for the local children’s hospital.
Suddenly, everyone’s fear of him last night in the hotel lounge seemed totally reasonable. The only rational response to a man like Gabriel—a man whose hands were no doubt dripping with blood—was to put as much distance between yourself and him as quickly as possible.
How naive I must have seemed to everyone else last night, sitting with him, laughing with him as if nothing was wrong. Sharing a drink with a stone-cold killer as if I somehow wasn’t in danger.
And strangely, I never felt like I was.
Not even now—trapped in his private suite of rooms, held under the threat of my brother’s life. Not even when he’d had me pinned to the wall, his hands all over me, a constant stream of threats and warnings falling from his lips.
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe that he was capable of violence. I’d stared into his gaze too many times now to pretend his soul wasn’t every bit as dark as the obsidian eyes it hid behind. The man was a killer—there was no denying that—but not a sociopath.
Every interaction with him had been rational and calm. Well…at least the ones that didn’t end with his hands down my pants. If he was the kind of guy who got off on hurting people, he could have easily roughed me up last night. If he was a blood-thirsty monster, he would have jumped at the chance to snap my neck the moment he saw me this morning. And if he was a short-tempered, vindictive bastard, he would’ve done a hell of a lot more than leaving me panting and frustrated when I didn’t immediately cower in front of him.
Even though I was clearly out of my depth, I could still tell there was an order to Gabriel’s world. A sharp, bloody, painful order—but an order all the same.
The rules are very simple. It’s an eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.
His brutal words echoed in my head, and I believed he meant every one of them. Anything I did to him would be done back to me. Somehow, I knew there were no loopholes for lovers in his code. If I fucked up and did something stupid, I or my family were as good as dead. There wouldn’t be any exceptions for me.
But that meant the opposite was also true. If I played by his rules and honored the deal we’d made (screwed up though it might be), I would walk out of this house a free woman in three months.
Three months.
Ninety days.
Somehow, it managed to seem like both a mercifully light sentence and an endless eternity at the same time.
With a resigned breath, I went to the only doors I hadn’t opened yet—a pair of arched double mahogany ones right behind me—and threw them open.
There were no great surprises in the bedroom beyond. Gabriel’s private space seemed like a perfect reflection of the man. Everything was dark and luxurious. The paneled walls were slate and inlaid with gold accents. All the other furnishings—the chairs and rugs and carved wooden side tables—ran the spectrum from coal black to pale gray. The fireplace, set across from the end of the bed, looked like it had been handcrafted from dark stone tiles. The only bright spots in the room were the natural light streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows along the outside wall and the glistening crystal chandelier hanging in the center.
Even the bed itself looked like a darkening storm cloud, thick and imposing and dripping in linens that were just as dark and foreboding as everything else in the room. Hesitantly, I walked over to the far side of the massive mattress and pressed my hand down on the comforter.
Damn, it didn’t just look like a cloud; it felt like one too.
A dreamy sigh escaped my lips before I could stop it. Even though I was totally alone, and there was no one to shame me, it still felt somehow wrong to find pleasure in any part of this arrangement.
No matter how opulent my cell might be, this was still a prison, I reminded myself.
And that made me a prisoner.
One who was at the mercy of a man who didn’t make empty threats. Who expected his commands to be followed to the letter. A man who didn’t have a drop of compassion in his heart.