Mafia Princess: An Arranged Marriage Mafia Romance (Valenti Family Ties Book 1)

by Selena

  That’s not gonna happen.

  Guilt flares inside me when I think of the last night of our honeymoon, when I all but forced her to suck my cock. She said she’d do it again, that she didn’t mind, but considering her aversion to sexual contact, god knows what she’ll tell her father about me. And if she tells him that I know about the abuse, and he really is the one who hurt her, I’m as good as dead.

  Both Als are watching me, and I give my head a little shake to clear it and grab a sandwich off the tray in the middle of the table. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Hey, why doesn’t he go with you?” Little Al asks his grandfather. “He can give Anthony a first-hand account of the honeymoon.”

  I want to punch the guy when I see the glimmer of humor in his eyes, like he has some idea that things aren’t too peachy between Eliza and me, and he thinks it would be just hilarious for Mr. Pomponio to grill me about my treatment of his daughter. He did seem to know an awful lot about her upbringing when I asked him about her, even the goings-on of her family. Does he know more than he let on? He told me there was no way she had trauma, that she was lying to me.

  Was he lying? Maybe they have a history I don’t know about. Or maybe he’s just being a garden variety asshat and knows exactly how uncomfortable that situation would be. After all, he thinks she was fucking with me about having trauma.

  “Not a bad idea,” Uncle Al says.

  Is he fucking serious? I could strangle the shit out of Little Al for suggesting it.

  But I’m not going to argue. I’m responsible for bringing peace between the families, and if I fail, I always knew what would happen. Might as well get it over with. The question is, will he chop off my head, or just my dick? One thing’s for damn sure. If he’s the one who abused my wife, I’m taking him down before I die. If he’s not, and he’s the one who took care of the guys, then I owe him a debt of gratitude. It’s pissing me off that I don’t know if I should want to murder the guy in the worst way imaginable or thank him. Which means Eliza’s going to have to fucking talk, whether she wants to or not.

  Since Uncle Al decided I was a good person to report to Anthony about our honeymoon, and I have a bunch of jobs with Little Al that day, I don’t get a chance to talk to Eliza before meeting him. Which means I’m going in blind. Not only am I not sure if I should want this guy dead, I’m not sure if Eliza did talk to him, and if he wants me dead. I’m jumpy as fuck by the time we arrive at Jean-Jean in the early afternoon as arranged.

  No one else is in the place, as it’s a sweet spot between lunch and dinner. A bored-looking college student stands behind the counter, waiting for customers. Uncle Al and I order and take our seats near the windows while two of his men take theirs outside at the table directly on the other side of the glass. They’ll see anyone coming in, but we’ll have privacy to talk to Anthony Pomponio, who chose the meeting point.

  We’re halfway through our paninis before Uncle Al speaks. “I’m glad we got here before them,” he says. “Gives us a minute to talk.”

  I nod, my throat tightening. “Oh yeah?”

  “How you liking things?” he asks. “You doin’ okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say. “Job’s good.”

  “How you liking your partnership with my grandson?”

  “Good.” Little Al is not my favorite person, but I’m not going to complain to his grandfather, that’s for damn sure.

  Uncle Al nods, taking a bite before speaking again. “I know he’s somethin’ else. You kids… This generation.” He breaks off and shakes his head, smiling ironically. “I sound like an old man now, don’t I?”

  “Nah, he is something else,” I agree, and we both laugh.

  I’m just starting to relax when he asks, “How’s things with the wife?”

  “Fine.”

  “Marriage is hard even for people already in love when they start out,” he says, his watchful gaze on my face. “It can take a while to figure out your places, your roles, how you fit together.”

  I nod. I’m not used to talking about this kind of thing. The only time Dad talked to me about women was when he needed me to seduce one. But Uncle Al is the closest thing to a confidant I have now, and he’s asking me to open up. Truth is, I’m not exactly equipped to handle all that Eliza told me. I could use some advice.

  “It’s been tough,” I admit. “Eliza’s had some hard times. She’s still working through it.”

  He shakes his head. “Her brother dying, her mother running off. Can’t be easy.”

  I nod, but I’m frustrated as hell. I can’t tell him what happened to her. That’s not my place. But she’s suffered more than anyone knows. What he’s saying, that would be hard on anyone. Abuse on top of that is too much.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Death’s a bitch.”

  “That’s right,” Al agrees. “You got some sad history in common.”

  “I guess so,” I say, though mine seems trivial in comparison to hers. My mother didn’t leave us, at least not in the physical sense. My sister wasn’t murdered.

  “How you doing with that?” Al asks, his eyes serious. “Your ma says you took Crystal’s disappearance pretty hard. It’s only been a few months. You okay?”

  I shrug, avoiding his eyes. “Like you said, it’s never easy.”

  “You talk to Eliza about that?”

  “No.” The last thing she needs is to deal with my shit on top of her own. It’s not something I want to dwell on, and she has enough reasons to distrust me and all men. The last thing I need is for her to know that I got my own sister killed. That Dad entrusted me to watch out for her, and I didn’t. I left her with her boyfriend. I didn’t want to, but I told myself he’d look after her. But it wasn’t his job to watch out for her. It was my job.

  I failed. And she died.

  It’s as simple as that.

  Al seems to get that I don’t want to talk about that anymore. He wads up his napkin and drops it on the plate before reaching for his coffee. “You settling in since you got home?” he asks. “How’s she like the new place?”

  I shrug. “To be honest, we haven’t spent much time together. Eliza stays up half the night and sleeps half the day, and I’m working all day. When I come home, she’s getting ready to go meet her friends. Once we get used to each other’s schedule, it’ll be easier.”

  Al cocks a brow and takes a drink of his coffee. “You know, she’s not a child or a free woman anymore,” he says. “It’s not outta line to expect her to act like your wife.”

  Before I can answer, I see one of Al’s guys slump over the table outside.

  I don’t think. I just act.

  I dive across the table, tackling Al and crashing to the floor with him. At the same moment, the sheet of glass fractures into a million pieces, raining down over the table and the floor around us. Al curses and rolls away, leaping to his feet with his gun already in his hand before I can even scramble up. The dude may be pushing sixty, but he’s still fit as fuck and quick on the draw.

  He fires as a figure dressed in all black jumps through the window onto our table, a ski mask pulled over his face and a gun with a silencer aimed at us. Outside, I can see two figures on the ground, and the remaining Valenti man aiming to fire again. The masked guy on the table crashes to the floor, and I yank my gun from my belt and release the safety, aiming at the window as two more men duck into view, both of them with guns raised. I pull the trigger without thought, without hesitation, and one of the men falls. A bullet ricochets off a nearby table and buries itself in my thigh, but I hardly feel it. Steadying the gun with one hand, I turn it on the other guy, but he falls before I can squeeze the trigger.

  Al pivots toward the edge of the building, where the guys appeared from. We wait, our guns cocked and ready. The only sound is the gurgle from one of the bodies on the floor as he tries to speak. I swing my gun in his direction and squeeze the trigger, putting a bullet in his head before turning back to the corner. This time, we see the guy edging around the
side of the building. I fire, but he ducks back, and I can’t tell if I hit him.

  Al leaps up onto his chair, takes one step on the table, and is out the window in another. I glance back toward the counter. There’s no trace of the guy working there, which means he’s smart enough to have ducked behind the counter or gotten the fuck out through a back door when shit started going down. That, or he knew ahead of time.

  I don’t have time for maybes, though. Leaping onto the table, I propel myself through the window and land in a crouch. Outside, I follow Al around the corner. I scan the area, on full alert.

  Al jerks his head in the direction of a black SUV parked on a side street. He creeps toward it, gun at the ready. I follow, a few steps behind him. We’re almost to the vehicle when I hear the scuff of a shoe on pavement. I turn and see a man with his hands up, wearing plain clothes instead of the black disguises the others wore.

  “Don’t shoot,” he says. “I ain’t involved. I—I got a family. I’m just going to my car.”

  I almost drop my weapon, but then I see the pile of black clothes discarded behind him in the little nook he stepped out of. In the instant it takes me to glance there and back again, he snatches a gun from his belt. I squeeze the trigger instinctively, without taking the time to aim correctly. The man grunts as the bullet buries itself in his belly. Two gunshots ring out at the same moment. A bullet grazes my shoulder, and one makes a hole right in the center of his forehead, so clean and crisp it almost looks fake. He crumples to the ground, and I turn to see Al behind me.

  He grabs my arm and hustles me down the street and into his car. We sit there for a minute, both of us breathing hard and cursing plenty.

  “What the fuck was that?” I ask after a minute.

  Al claps a hand on my shoulder. “That was your first shootout, son.”

  I start laughing like a fucking idiot, and I know Al’s going think I’m unfit for the Life and put a bullet between my eyes like I’ve got a fucking bull’s eye painted on my forehead, but I can’t stop even when I try. Al looks at me for a second, and then he throws his head back and starts laughing, too. We just sit in his SUV letting out big guffawing belly laughs that make us look like we’re crying like a couple of pussies.

  Finally, Al wipes his eyes and shakes his head. “You know, I fucking needed that right now, King,” he says, turning on the car and lowering the visor against the afternoon sun. “You’re a good kid.”

  “You get hit?” I ask.

  “Not a scratch.”

  I wipe my face, then pull off my shirt to wrap my arm where I got hit. My thigh hurts like the devil, but it doesn’t seem to be losing much blood. I use my tie to secure my shirt in place around my shoulder, then press my palm down on my thigh, gritting out curses until I get used to the pressure.

  He’s got blood splattered all over him, but he shakes his head. “How bad’s that one?”

  “Didn’t even feel it,” I admit. The adrenaline was too much. The pain’s only now setting in.

  We drive in silence for a minute, back toward home. My stomach knots up, and I glance at Al from the corner of my eye. “Was that a set-up?”

  “Had to be,” he says. “It isn’t like Anthony to be so sloppy, sending guys in broad daylight. He’s making a statement.”

  “Fuck,” I say, clenching my hand around the door handle. This must be my fault. Eliza told him that she’d told me, and he didn’t want anyone knowing what kind of sick pervert he is, so he came after us.

  I shouldn’t say anything, it will spell my doom, but Al should know why. I have to know for sure before I tell him, though. “How fast can you get me home?”

  Al grimaces. “Not fast enough, kid. If he went after us, the deal is off. He won’t have made a move without getting his daughter out first. If he did, she’d be left to answer for it.”

  “She told me some things he probably doesn’t want me to know,” I admit quietly. “That must be why they attacked.”

  Uncle Al doesn’t say anything for a long minute. He’s probably deciding whether to dump me in the river while we’re out.

  “Did you tell her about this meeting?” he asks at last. “Or anyone else?”

  “I told her to call her father.”

  The Life is my life now. I don’t have friends here, or a girlfriend, or anyone I would tell besides Eliza. I probably would have given her more detail if it had been scheduled for a few days from now, but I only sent her a text after Al told me she should put in a good word for me.

  “You weren’t even supposed to come along on this,” Al says. “They might not have known you were coming. Or they could have been planning it before we decided to involve you. They’re not going to pass up a chance to knock down one of the families if they can get me alone.”

  “Maybe.” He’s definitely a more desirable target than me. As Eliza likes to remind me, I’m no one. But I did tell her we were meeting today. It was vague, but she could have found out from her father.

  Fuck. A funny little knot forms in my belly. Does she hate me enough to have set this up herself? I thought we were past that, but maybe she was faking it. I’ve seen how good an actor she is. And she loves to talk about her obsession with freedom. What better way to attain it than to get rid of the one person she perceives as an obstacle?

  “So, Eliza knew we were meeting,” I say. “She could have found out the time and place when she talked to her father. Some of the Pomponios obviously knew. On our side, there’s the two of us, your consigliere, and Little Al.”

  My mind circles back to my “innocent” little wife, who I put on the Pomponio’s side without even thinking. Did she try to fucking kill me?

  Rage swells inside my chest, closing off everything else, even the pain throbbing in my shoulder. If she did this…

  This week, the house was a fucking disaster of dirty dishes and takeout boxes and wine bottles from her friends coming over and hanging out all day. When I told her to clean up after herself, she said she wasn’t a fucking maid. And when I told her to hire one, she looked at me with these big, dumb eyes and said, “I don’t know how to hire a maid.”

  I let it go, even though I wanted to tell her to figure it out. After what she’s been through, she probably insists on having her own way in everything because in that one thing, she had no choice. Or maybe I’m a fucking gullible idiot.

  I know she’s not dumb. She may not know how to hire a maid, but I’d bet she knows how to hire hitmen.

  “Look, kid,” Al says as we approach my place. “I know you’re blaming yourself, but Anthony wouldn’t do something like this just because his daughter complained. He might come talk to you, and if you were hurting her, he’d hurt you. But he wouldn’t come after both of us like that—not for a personal matter. This has business written all over it.”

  “I’ll call Eliza,” I say. After confirming that she’s home with her friends like usual and not off with the Pomponio’s waiting to hear if their assassination plot worked, I hang up and text her bodyguard, who says everything’s been quiet at home. Eliza hasn’t gone out since this morning when she visited the salon. That puts my mind at ease a bit, and I relay the news to Uncle Al.

  “It don’t look good,” he says. “The Pomponios don’t show up, and we get ambushed? It’s got all the makings of a setup. I just don’t know yet, kid. Why come after us, knowing the war would be back on? And why leave Eliza with you?”

  “To throw us off,” I say. “To make us think it wasn’t them.”

  “I don’t see the benefit,” Al says, frowning at the road ahead.

  “Who benefits from our families going back to war?” I ask, turning to him.

  He nods slowly, his eyes narrowing as he thinks through the possibilities. “One of the other families. Luciani’s messy like this.”

  I nod, hoping it’s that and not Anthony, even though I don’t believe it. Anthony set the meeting up, and then he tried to kill us. Is he so confident that I’d be dead after the attack that he didn’t bother
getting his daughter out?

  Of course he is. I’m the new kid, green as fuck, with no experience. What chance do I have of making it out alive when a half dozen seasoned killers ambush us?

  Uncle Al pulls up to my building and scans the area before stopping. “Let me worry about this,” he says. “You take care of that shoulder and leg. Have your wife take a look at them. I know a man has his pride, but don’t be too proud to let her take care of you when you need it. It might help things between you.”

  I don’t think looking weak in front of Eliza, being at her mercy, is going to make things better, but I nod and thank him before reaching for the door handle.

  “Oh, and King?” Al says, putting a hand on my good shoulder.

  I turn back.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You saved my life back there. I won’t forget that.”

  “I just did what anyone would do,” I say before climbing out of the car.

  As much as I’d like to take the credit, I’m no hero. I acted on instinct alone. And in the end, when there was one guy left, I shot too soon. I was sloppy the whole time. But it’s nice of Al not to mention that, to focus on the one thing I did right, even if it’s not entirely true. I pushed him to the floor when the first shot came, but that doesn’t mean it would have killed him. Hell, if it was Eliza’s doing, the shooter wasn’t even aiming for him.

  I ask the doorman for a report, since he’s Al’s man, and thinking my wife is trying to kill me has me a little paranoid. Her bodyguard came with her. He’s on my payroll now, but he might retain ties and loyalties to the Pomponio’s. After hearing the doorman confirm the details Eliza’s bodyguard already gave, I head upstairs.

  sixteen

  Eliza

  The door of our penthouse swings open, and King stands there with a shirt tied around his shoulder and a limp when he takes a step inside. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happened. Someone shot him, and I should be used to that, living the life I do. I am used to it. But I’m suddenly, horribly ashamed. This is my husband. He could have died. And he was never anything to me but someone to fuck with, to push his buttons and see if he’d snap. I don’t know the first thing about him. I never tried. Our marriage has been nothing but a game to me.