With This Ring
To Have and To Hold Duet Book One
Natasha Knight
Copyright © 2020 by Natasha Knight
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Image by Wander Aguiar Photography
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Contents
About This Book
Prologue
1. Scarlett
2. Cristiano
3. Scarlett
4. Cristiano
5. Cristiano
6. Scarlett
7. Cristiano
8. Scarlett
9. Cristiano
10. Cristiano
11. Cristiano
12. Scarlett
13. Cristiano
14. Scarlett
15. Cristiano
16. Scarlett
17. Cristiano
18. Scarlett
19. Cristiano
20. Scarlett
21. Scarlett
22. Cristiano
23. Scarlett
24. Scarlett
25. Cristiano
26. Cristiano
27. Scarlett
28. Cristiano
29. Scarlett
30. Cristiano
31. Cristiano
32. Scarlett
33. Cristiano
34. Scarlett
35. Cristiano
36. Scarlett
Also by Natasha Knight
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About the Author
About This Book
When I rescued Scarlett De La Cruz from her tower it’s not like her prospects were looking so great.
You’d think she’d show a little gratitude. Thank me for putting my ring on her finger and marking her as mafia property.
My property.
I’ll keep her safe. And the trade-off isn’t so bad. Most women would jump at the chance to sleep in my bed.
Not Scarlett, though.
My Cartel Princess has a big mouth and an even bigger attitude. But it’s her furious caramel eyes that keep me coming back for more. That and the way her body bends to mine like it already knows it belongs to me.
Scarlett is my enemy. She’s also the one woman I can’t keep my hands off.
But if I don’t keep my head on straight, everything I’ve worked for all these years will have been for nothing.
Prologue
Scarlett
Lace falls across my face. It’s yellowed over the years and the smell that clings to it is musty. Old. But it’s my mother’s. The one she wore on her wedding day.
Baby’s breath and discarded lilies litter the stone floor as the woman grumbles behind me. She’s annoyed at having to work with the old veil when a brand new, prettier one sits unused in its box. I move my foot, crush the delicate baby’s breath, impaling the fallen petal of a pale pink lily with my heel.
Funeral flowers for a wedding. An omen.
Not that I need one.
The stink of them turns my stomach. This isn’t how I imagined my wedding day.
“Finished,” the woman announces.
I stand, the petal sticking to my heel. I don’t care. I look up to meet my reflection in the mirror.
“He won’t like the veil,” she says. She’s a blur beside me.
I shift my gaze, letting my eyes focus on her. She’s plump and short and has a wart on the side of her face with a thick black hair growing out of it. Don’t judge a book by its cover has nothing on this one. She is as much a bitch inside as she looks on the outside.
“I guess he’ll have to get over it.”
“You should wear the one he sent.”
I don’t bother to answer her, although I agree. The veil was a gift from my brothers.
Gift.
No, not a gift.
Just another cruelty to make me wear my mother’s veil for this sham wedding.
She snorts, turns to gather up the dress, the keys jangling on her belt. I could take them. Overpower her. That part would be easy. It’s the men with the guns outside the door who’d be the problem.
Noisy footsteps on the hundred stairs announce the approach of soldiers to my tower room.
A tower. They locked me in a fucking tower. My own fucking brothers.
From the sound of things, they’re expecting me to put up a fight. They’ll take me kicking and screaming if I do. Besides, I know better than to waste my energy on them. I’ll need it after. For the wedding night.
A man says something, another one laughs, just before I hear a loud crash, like something smashing hard against the wall.
It’s then that it happens. Gunfire explodes just beyond my room. A bullet splinters its way through the thick wooden door and shatters the mirror, breaking my reflection into a thousand pieces, sending me backward into the stone wall.
The woman with the wart screams.
I right myself. Touching the back of my head with one hand, I somehow still manage to keep hold of the lilies. Suddenly, the door is kicked in, banging against the wall as heavily armed men in military fatigues raid my room. A cloud of smoke follows behind them, seeping into my circular tower.
They fan out, a dozen of them and I don’t recognize a single one. These aren’t my brothers’ men.
The woman is on the floor blubbering something, sobbing.
I just stare at the door as another set of footsteps approach, quieter now. This one isn’t in a hurry. And I know the instant he steps into my line of vision that he’s in charge.
He’s the one to worry about. The only one who’s masked.
He stops just inside the room, surveys it, eyeing every soldier, every stone, every cobweb. And when deep blue eyes land on me, a weight drops in my belly, a hundred-pound cement block.
The woman with the keys stands, tripping over her words as she walks toward him. He looks down at her like he’s irritated, and she doesn’t get far. An echo of bullets shuts her down, splattering blood like paint on my neck, my face. The shots put her back on the floor.
Fuck.
I don’t spare her a glance. I don’t need to, to know she’s dead.
The man’s eyes return to mine. They narrow. And when he takes a step toward me, I take one back, knocking the chair behind me to the floor, panicking then. Animated then.
I turn to run but see a dozen sets of eyes staring back at me. The masked intruder, the biggest of them all, blocks the only exit. I can’t even jump from the window. They’re barred. Suicide was never an option, not for my brothers. They needed me.
But something’s gone wrong.
And before I can decide what to do, before I can make up my mind to try to charge him, to risk bullets putting me down like they did the woman on the floor, he’s got my wrist in his right hand and he’s squeezing it.
My hand opens. Flowers scatter to the floor. I watch them, then watch him lift my hand to his face. His thumb comes to my ring finger where the hideous diamond catches the waning sun. For a moment I think he’s going to break my finger. But he twists and forces it off. It’s tight but he manages. He pockets the ring then shifts his gaze to mine again.
I swallow hard.
He cocks his head to the side, one hand still locked around my wrist. He spins me around.
I scream as he jerks me to him, his body a solid wall at my back.
; He releases my wrist and bands his arm beneath my breasts. With the other, he pushes the veil off my neck, his hand rough against my skin, fingers digging, bruising. I think he’s going to snap my neck. One quick twist is all it would take. He’s a fucking giant.
But he doesn’t.
Instead, the moment I turn my face up to his, he squeezes and instantly, my knees give out. My arms drop uselessly to my sides. He shifts his grip and as I slip, he lifts me up, hauling me over his shoulder, turning the room upside down before it goes black.
1
Scarlett
I feel like I’m going to vomit. The smell is musty and damp, like an old basement. Cold is seeping into my body, making my muscles ache.
“Get up!”
Pain in my right side. I curl away from it, but it comes again. I groan.
“Fucking get the fuck up!” It’s Diego. My brother. You’d think I’d know the feel of his boot by now.
“That’s not going to help,” another voice says.
Angel. My other brother. The slightly less insane one.
“There’s no way out,” he adds, voice oddly resigned.
“There’s a window,” Diego says before digging the toe of his boot into my ribs. “Up you fucking worthless piece of—”
“Leave her alone, you idiot.”
I blink my eyes open, roll my head and stop instantly, the pain sharp at the back. I bring my hand up to touch the spot, feeling the bump as I try to remember.
Lilies and baby’s breath on the floor. Shattered shards of the mirror crunching underfoot as I ran. Or thought about running before he grabbed me.
I look at my hand. The ring is gone. He pocketed it. I’m glad. My wedding day. My forced wedding. It never happened.
I push myself slowly up to a seated position. The musty smell, it’s not only the room. It’s the veil somehow still on my head.
The room spins and I close my eyes until the dizziness passes. When I open them again, a dark shadow looms over me. Leers down at me.
Diego.
“About fucking time.”
I look past him to see Angel sitting across the room, his back against the far wall. Noah’s head is on his lap.
“Hurry up, untie me,” Diego says. He’s been beaten. His lip is cut and there’s blood and numerous bruises on his face. He crouches down with his back to me.
I see that Noah’s hands are bound and Angel’s must be too. They’re behind him. I’m the only one they left unbound.
The white satin of my dress is smudged with dirt and blood, the hem black and the skirt ripped. I reach up to pull the lace off my head, the sound of hairpins dropping to the ground too delicate in this dungeon room. That’s what this is. A cell in a dungeon. With three stone walls, the fourth a wall of bars. The window my brother mentioned is about the size of a shoebox and too high to reach. That’s where the light is coming from. A too-bright square in the otherwise darkness. Daylight. I’ve been passed out since last night?
I wonder where we are. In the cellar of the compound where I was first imprisoned in the tower? I prefer the tower.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Diego barks, spittle landing on my face as he cranes his neck. I’m sure if his hands weren’t tied, he’d have slapped me a dozen times by now.
I meet his dark, hateful eyes.
Without a word, I reach to untie him. Ever obedient. Christ. What the fuck is wrong with me?
I look over at Angel. He’s younger than Diego by a year. He looks sad, and like I heard in his voice, resigned. He’s also got bruises along his jaw and dried blood by his nose, but his face isn’t as bad as Diego’s.
“Is Noah okay?” I ask. Noah, our youngest brother, is still passed out.
“Yeah,” Angel says, looking down at him.
“Not for long if you don’t get these fucking ropes off me,” Diego interjects.
I look at the knot, shift my gaze back to Angel.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“We were betrayed.”
“Marcus?” My would-be husband?
He shakes his head.
“Lover-boy is gone,” Diego tells me. “Ran away like the fucking coward he is.”
“He’s not my lover-boy. I hate him.”
“Well, that makes two of us. Move.” He gestures to the knot.
I’m about to focus my attention on it, when I hear the sound of a door clanging open nearby. Light falls into the space outside the cell. Heavy footsteps follow and I hear a man’s voice. Another one that I recognize. One that makes my skin crawl.
“Fuck,” Diego mutters, awkwardly getting to his feet as the men come into view.
Soldiers enter first, automatic weapons on their shoulders. Three of them, one carrying a heavy-duty flashlight. They insert a key into the lock and open the door of our cage just as my uncle comes into view. He’s grinning like a fucking jackal.
His eyes fall on me first, skim over me. It would make my skin crawl if I wasn’t so afraid. His gaze bounces off each of my brothers. He’s clean-shaven, hair neatly combed back slick with gel. I can smell his signature overuse of cologne from here.
“Fucking traitor,” Diego mutters and spits in his general direction. It doesn’t touch him though.
My uncle looks at him, his lips turning down in disapproval. “Isn’t that what we all are?”
More footsteps.
I look beyond my uncle as he steps aside. Two more soldiers, another man I know isn’t a soldier just from the casual slant to his stance.
And then him. The one in charge. He’s no longer masked but I know it’s him. I’d recognize his eyes anywhere. I will never forget those eyes or the way they looked at me.
He stops just inside the cell, big frame taking up the whole of the entry, sucking up more than his share of oxygen.
My heart races at the sight of him.
The man I know isn’t a soldier slides his hands into his pockets. He leans toward the one in charge and says something too low for me to hear. He’s speaking Italian from what I can make out. I’d have known these weren’t Cartel men anywhere. He’s wearing a white button down and jeans. Casual beside the suited man who took my ring and somehow knocked me out.
The suited one scans the cell, taking in each of my brothers in turn and it takes all I have not to shrink away when his gaze fixes on me.
Instinctively, I touch my neck as I take in his head of dark hair, the shadow of a beard. The scar along his right cheek does nothing to take away from his features. The opposite. He’s dangerous, this man. Deadly. I’d know it even if I saw him out on a normal day in the normal world.
Not that I’ve ever lived a normal life in a normal world.
And even though I don’t know who he is, my brothers do. I see it in their eyes. Feel it in the anxiety coming off them, their fear stinking up the room.
“Look who’s risen from the dead,” Diego starts, taking a step toward the man like the idiot he is.
The man’s lip curls upward, and it takes the most minute gesture of his head to have a soldier on my brother, pushing him roughly to his knees.
The man’s eyes shift to me again as if he’s curious. He holds my gaze momentarily before scanning Angel and Noah, who is still passed out. What did they do to him?
“The boy,” he says. They’re the first words I hear from his mouth. His voice is deep and low. Quiet, but without a doubt, in control. I get the feeling he doesn’t waste words.
A soldier moves toward Noah, boots loud, echoing. I wonder how vast the darkness beyond our little cell is. In the distance I see glimpses of light. Windows like the one in our cell, I guess.
“He’s breathing,” Angel tells the soldier when the man bends to check if Noah’s alive, I’m guessing.
The soldier checks for himself, straightens and nods to the one in charge. He looks different out of his camo. Deadlier. His hair is a little wet. I guess he took the time to shower.
He nods to the soldier, shifts his gaze to me once more before
turning to my uncle.
“Get it done,” he tells him.
Jacob, my uncle, nods and reaches behind him to where he must have had his pistol all along.
“What’s happening?” I cry out, a new panic taking hold of me even though guns aren’t new to me. I live in a world of violence. It’s my inheritance. It will be my legacy. I am the princess at the heart of it. Or I was when my father was alive. Since his murder I’ve become a pawn.
I pull my legs back, readying to stand. I’m barefoot, I realize. I must have lost my shoes in transit.
All the men turn to me.
I only look at the one in charge. He appears taller than before but that’s because I’m still on the ground. He steps toward me. I scramble backward, my hand falling on the rusting metal frame of a cot. I pull myself up to stand, willing the nausea to subside. Willing my fear to.
I realize I still have my mother’s veil in one hand. It’s bloody too. Probably from the woman his men killed in the tower.
He stops when he’s only a few feet from me. He’s taller now than he appeared in the tower room. I’ve lost the four inches my shoes gave me. I have to crane my neck to look up at him and my gaze moves from his deep blue eyes, to the scar on his cheek, to his mouth, his neck. Another scar there. The edge of one. It disappears beneath the collar of his shirt.
With This Ring: To Have and To Hold Duet Book One Page 1