He studied her, not saying anything for several long minutes. She didn't interrupt the silence as she suspected he was gathering his thoughts. He seemed like a man that didn't often speak without thinking, a quality that she could appreciate. She had never really been one to speak out of turn, unless she was fired up about something.
"You are an interesting young woman. Your boldness is both infuriating and refreshing, but there is a fine line between the two. I fear your youth could lead to an impetuosity that could get you killed in this world… the underground I mean. And that would be a shame." He seemed to debate with himself on what to say next, perhaps on whether or not to speak his mind. Finally, he nodded to himself and continued, "If anyone else came to me with your demands, your blackmail –"
"Information, not blackmail," she hurried to assure him.
"Do not interrupt me again." His voice rang with steel. She shivered and sealed her lips. "At best I would have given you a few dollars and had you shown back onto the street to deal with the fallout of my son. At worst I would have had you killed myself."
He sat staring at her and when a long enough period of time passed, Raina felt it was safe to speak without being accused of interrupting. "And what made you change your mind? Made you decide to take me on as a charity case?"
He tilted his head, his strong hawk-like features cast in flickering shadows from the fireplace. "The most truthful answer is your stepfather. Sotza carries a lot of weight in the circles we share; he could make my life extremely difficult if I was involved in the disappearance of his daughter.”
Raina narrowed her eyes at him. Though Giovanni respected Sotza, he also seemed to have a lot of power in his own right. Having gotten to know him a little, she suspected he wouldn’t normally help someone in her position, despite her relation to Sotza. “Is that the only reason you brought me here?”
His sharp gaze roved over her face as he contemplated his answer. "I wish for you to marry my son.”
Luckily, she was too stunned for her face to match her inner thoughts. There was not a snowball’s chance in hell that she was going to marry Giovanni's son. She’d kill him herself first.
Giovanni continued to speak. "You seem cool and collected, but I will know better as I get to know you. Must be reasonably intelligent to carry on your business as a forger. You would be a good wife for my son. You’re beautiful and frankly, it would help forge a relationship with your stepfather. I am getting older, but I need my son settled before I can hand my empire to him. You are just the woman to do it.”
The word “no” wanted to burst forth from Raina so badly that she had to bite down on her soft lower lip to stop it from flying out. Giovanni didn't like being interrupted when he was speaking. She also suspected he didn't like hearing the word no. As far as he was concerned the future bride of his son had walked up to him in his club with a gunshot wound and begged for his help.
Before Raina could say much of anything, Giovanni stood and held his hand out to her. She slid her hand into his and allowed him to help her stand. "I will have someone show you to your room."
Raina had no doubt that there was a lock on that door too. She was definitely rethinking her decision to enlist Signore Savino’s help. Her recklessness could lead to an all out mob war if things didn’t end well.
Mateo would want revenge if anything happened to her. There was something about his attachment to her, their mutual attraction. Raina didn't believe in soulmates, but she didn't know how else to explain Mateo. It was part of the reason why she ran from him; to protect herself. His passion, his obsession, everything about him, it was too much. She couldn't handle that kind of love.
No, she didn’t have any choice but to trust Giovanni. For now.
Chapter Six
Finding Raina was the easy part, figuring out how to get her back was an entirely different matter. Mateo had been on his feet for nearly seventy-two hours. No sleep, little food – a shit ton of aggravation. As much as he wanted to go after Raina without delay, he knew he needed sleep first. He wasn't getting her back if he couldn't use his brain.
Mateo was sitting in a booth in the restaurant located in the lobby of his hotel. It wasn't exactly an upscale hotel. He needed to try and blend while in Italy. He couldn’t toss his money and weight around, raising questions about who he was and where he came from. As a result, the restaurant was low-quality, overpriced, and dingy.
Sitting with him in the booth were two of his people, Thomas and Angela. Angela acted as Mateo’s second when he left Sotza's sphere of influence and went to work on his own. Mateo had Sotza's blessing when it came to working outside of Venezuela, trusting Mateo to make decisions based on Sotza’s best interest. Despite being raised in an underworld filled with men, Angela was as bloodthirsty and skilled as any of them. She was the shadow in the dark that no one saw coming. A cute, innocent looking young woman who could take a man out as easily as smile at him. In fact, Mateo dared any man to tell Angela to smile. It would be the last thing he did.
Thomas was another who Mateo trusted implicitly. He’d been with the Sotza cartel for a decade, living on the compound and working his way up through the ranks. He often chose to work with Mateo so he could travel the world.
"Thomas, I want you and the rest of our men to sit on the house. Make sure you track any and all of Raina's movements if she leaves the grounds. Try not to be seen by Savino's men, but if you are, tell them the truth. I have a hunch that Raina told Savino the truth about who she is and that's why she's being kept at his estate." Mateo downed the rest of the water in his cup and threw a few french fries into his mouth. He turned Angela. "I want you to go and talk to Savino at his club, arrange a meeting."
She snorted. "He won't talk to a woman. Venezuela is bad enough when it comes to getting men to treat me like an equal, but Italy? The Sicilian Cosa Nostra? Not a chance."
"Watch your tongue with me,” Mateo snapped, his voice hard. “You don't get to argue with my orders."
Angela had a chip on her shoulder a mile wide and she wasn't afraid to mouth off her opinion. They were of a similar age and had worked together from their teen years on. Mateo was willing to take more lip from her than he did most people. But not in this instance, not in Italy. He needed a tight crew here.
“A beautiful woman is more likely to get close to Savino, maybe convince him to drop his guard."
Despite his order that she shut up and do as he says, Angela couldn't help but voice one more opinion. "That's easy for you to say. We don't know what Raina said to him to get him to adopt her. What if it was something else about her that drew him, besides her beauty?" Her lip curled in disgust as she said the last word.
"Then I guess we'll find out when he sends your body back to me in pieces. Now get out of here and go deliver my message. I want a meeting with Savino at his earliest convenience. Use Sotza’s name if you have to."
Mateo didn't give her another opportunity to argue. He pulled out his wallet, opened it and tossed a few bills on the table, then shoved his chair back and stood. The room swam for second. Fuck, he needed to get some sleep.
He strode away from the pair and out of the restaurant into the hotel lobby. He bypassed the elevator and took the stairs up three flights. He strode down the hallway to room 407 and used his key card to open it. He didn't care about the shabbiness of the room; he'd slept in worse places. Swamps, jungles, Siberia. He was dead on his feet. At this point he would sleep just about anywhere.
But as he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, Raina's face emerged. It was pale and pinched. No less lovely than usual, but worried. Terrified even. Though she had been brought into the world of the mafia via her mother and stepfather, she had never experienced the kind of violence she’d seen earlier that day. She'd been shocked into the reality of the lifestyle in a brutal way. Mateo couldn’t blame her for running from the clinic. She probably saw him as another gun-toting mobster, like Antonio Savino and his posse.
Before falling asleep, Mate
o vowed to hunt down the fucker that had made her world a little bit darker. He didn't give a shit if the man who had Raina shot was also the son of the most powerful man in Italy. If Mateo had to, he would slaughter them all.
With that thought he allowed sleep to overtake him. He dreamed of Raina. Her soft skin, shining hair, deep blue eyes that a man could get lost in for days and a grin that spelled all kinds of trouble for the man in her life. For Mateo.
Chapter Seven
Raina woke suddenly from a sharp stabbing pain in her back. She gasped and bolted upright, then immediately regretted the action as she cried out in pain.
"Ow, shit!" she yelped reaching around to touch her back. She must've rolled over onto the wound or stretched funny in her sleep and the pain woke her up.
That was a hell of a way to greet the day. She took several deep breaths trying to regain her composure. Tears burned behind her eyelids, but she quickly dried her eyes. There was nothing to cry about. It was just a little pain, nothing she hadn't dealt with before.
When she managed to pull herself together, she inched her way to the edge of the bed and gingerly placed her feet on the floor. She decided to take a short rest rather than stand up immediately and risk falling over if she happened to receive another jolt of intense pain or a wave of dizziness.
She hated that she was in such weak condition while sheltering in the home of someone who might be an enemy. It made her vulnerable and Raina didn't like feeling vulnerable. She was pretty sure she got that personality trait from her tough as nails mother. Vee also hated feeling vulnerable.
But Diane, Raina's adoptive mom, always wore her feelings on her sleeve. Everyone knew where they stood with Diane. She was the kindest hearted person Raina knew. Sometimes Raina wished she was more like her adoptive mom than her birth mother. Yet, she was also able to recognize that each woman had given Raina unique characteristics that made up her whole person. She couldn't regret something like that.
She gripped the edge of the nightstand and slowly pulled herself up onto her feet. Motherfucker, her back was on fire. It hurt much worse than it had the night before. Was it infected? Had she somehow managed to tear the stitches in her sleep?
She thought about it and decided the wound was probably sore from being slept on. After she'd had her kidney transplant, she’d had good days and bad days, depending on what her body decided to throw at her. There were definitely times where the incision site hurt much worse than other times.
Raina wasn't one to seek drugs, but if anything was going to drive her out of that bedroom and in search of civilization within Giovanni’s great mausoleum of a house it was her need for painkillers. She tugged at the T-shirt that she'd been given to sleep in. She thought it might belong to one of the Italian men guarding the estate. It was a plain black T-shirt that covered her up for the most part, though it bared her legs more than she was comfortable with.
She gave her pile of clothes on the floor a disparaging look. She hated the thought of putting them back on. They were dirty, they were bloody, and they represented her trauma of the day before. She wanted nothing more than to bury them in a deep hole and never look at them again. Which sucked, because those had been her favourite jeans and the leather jacket had been specially made for her in France.
Another thing Antonio owed her.
She made her way carefully down the hall toward the bathroom that she’d been shown the night before. She relieved herself, washed her hands and attempted to put her hair into some semblance of order. The fine blonde strands were not usually difficult to arrange. A quick finger comb and some fluffing and she no longer had a wicked case of bedhead.
She went through all the drawers and the medicine cabinet searching for ibuprofen or Tylenol but came up empty. Dammit, she was actually going to have to go look for someone.
Raina wandered down the staircase to the lower level, looking this way and that at the house furnishings. She hoped they would be less gloomy than they had the night before, but her impression of an unloved and unlived in home was spot on. Dust covered pretty much everything and what the dust wasn't covering, drop cloths were.
It looked as though this place had been abandoned some time ago, but she knew otherwise. The library she'd been shown to the night before had been well used. The guest room she’d used hadn’t sported even a speck of dust.
She bypassed Giovanni's office in favour of searching for a maid or a guard instead. Though she felt relatively certain that Giovanni wasn't going to have her killed, at least not yet, she wasn't quite up for a conversation with the man. She had yet to truly absorb the fact that he wanted her to marry his son, the man who'd had her shot.
She shook her head at the strange logic and continued through the lower level of the home. Nothing she was seeing was convincing her that the home was used for more than sleep and time spent in that one office. A formal dining room boasted a gorgeous chandelier that was covered in filth and a massive table with ten chairs draped in cloths. Such a creepy old house. She was about to move on to the kitchen when a voice from behind her stopped her.
"No doubt you think my home is strange," Giovanni said. He waited until she turned to face him before continuing. "My wife died eleven years ago. She loved this home, decorated it, made it completely her own. Since her death I have been unable to love it the way she loved it."
And yet he hadn’t been able to move on and move out, Raina finished his thought silently. He must have been very much in love with his wife, she decided. It must've been completely heart-wrenching for Giovanni to have lost her.
Raina’s heart went out to him. But not his asshole of a son. She was still going to stab that loser the moment she laid eyes on him.
"I'm so sorry for your loss," she murmured, meaning it.
He nodded his thanks. "This is a big home, with much potential. It should be filled with love, light and laughter once more. The voices of children. The way it was always meant to be."
Raina said nothing to this; she didn’t want to encourage his delusion that she marry his son.
"In the city, in my business, I must be the Godfather. The big shot. Mafioso. But in my home, I have a heart."
And he was choosing to share that heart with Raina. It scared her that he was opening himself up to her, showing his vulnerabilities. She believed that this meant she would either have to die or become part of the family. The little she knew about these types of men, they had a code. Opening up, giving information to another person, was unheard of except with close family members. It frightened her that he was already considering her family. She wanted to disabuse him of the idea, but she also wanted to continue breathing.
She elected not to speak.
He seemed to realize that his nostalgia was somewhat out of place and a shutter dropped over his expression, pushing Raina out. "You were looking for something?" His voice was cool and steady once more.
"Yes, thank you. I was searching for some painkillers. My back is in rough shape this morning."
"My apologies for not getting them to you sooner. You are such a tough little creature that I'd forgotten you will feel pain like anyone else. Follow me." He turned and walked back in the other direction, toward his office.
Raina trailed after him thinking about the strange things he'd said. Why wouldn't she feel pain like anyone else? No matter how tough a person is, pretty much everyone felt pain. Had he been testing her? Testing her resilience?
Raina gave herself a mental shake. She was overthinking this. He’d already stated his intentions and she didn't think it mattered whether or not she was fainting or gritting her teeth and bearing the pain, he still wanted her for a daughter-in-law.
Strangely though, she was starting to soften towards the older man. He seemed lonely and somewhat out of touch. Brutal probably, though she hadn't seen any first-hand evidence. She wondered how she would be feeling right about now if he'd told her she would marry him rather than his son. Neither was a great option, but the older gentleman was f
ar more palatable then his weasel spawn.
After showing her into his office, he went to his desk and picked up a pill bottle. He shook a couple pills out into his hand and gave them to her. She looked at his hand with narrowed eyes. It probably wasn't smart to take drugs from someone she didn't trust. And right now, Savino was on the far end of her spectrum of trust.
He caught on to her hesitation. "The doctor left these for you last night. I forgot to send them up to your room. I assure you they are simply a strong dose of ibuprofen, for your pain. He says he can bring more if you need them."
Raina shook off her skepticism, reminding herself he had plenty of other opportunities to drug or kill her. She took the pills and swallowed them dry, a skill she’d picked up in her early years of kidney failure when she had to swallow many pills and got impatient with waiting for water. "I don't think I'll need any more." She gave him a smirk. "I'm a tough little creature."
He flashed her a quick smile and then arranged his face back into business mode. "I will have some proper clothes sent to your room. I'd intended to do that before you got up, but you were out of bed earlier than expected. I’ll show you our pantry while we wait for the clothing to arrive. After, we will attend a meeting."
"With your son?" she asked hesitantly, trying to keep the worry from her voice.
Giovanni shook his head. "No, Mateo Gutierrez. We will meet with him and discuss your future."
For a few seconds it felt as though all of the air was sucked out of the room. Elation crashed into terror and sizzled right through her body making her hair stand on end. Mateo was coming for her, exactly as she knew he would. Once more her flight instinct kicked in and it was everything she could do not to run. She didn't think she would make it far with both Mateo and Giovanni hot on her heels. How the hell was she supposed to get out of this?
Born a Queen (The Queens Book 3) Page 4