Collateral

by Natasha Knight

  I swallow.

  “How did you get up here?” There are guards everywhere.

  He lets what he’s holding dangle and my gaze shifts to it, to the pendant hanging off a gold chain. It’s too dark to make out the details.

  “You shouldn’t be up here. The party—”

  “I’m not here for the party. I’m here for you, Gabriela.”

  My blood runs cold at his words.

  My father, as much as I hate to admit it, scares me. But this man is terrifying.

  His lips curve into something wicked. A grin. A sneer. I wonder if he can feel my fear. Maybe smell it coming off me. Men like this can, can’t they?

  “Turn around.”

  “Why?” I ask weakly.

  “So I can give you your birthday present.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “I said turn around.”

  I should scream. Alert a guard. There are plenty of them. But I just keep staring up into his hazel eyes and I think how strangely beautiful he is, even for as fucked up as he looks. As drunk as he obviously is. As crazed.

  “Please just go,” I manage.

  “Turn. Around.”

  It’s an order.

  I swallow. Turn.

  He moves his hand from above me once my back is to him, so when he lifts the chain over my head and brings it down to set the pendant against the swell of my breasts, I smell that smell again. On the sleeves of his suit. On the skin of his hands.

  I look down at the pendant, but he pulls it higher so I can’t see it. Instead, I notice the ring on his finger, a heavy, dark ring.

  But then those fingers touch my skin and it’s like touching a live wire. I gasp, listen to the hammering of my heart, wonder if he hears it. If he feels that shock of electricity.

  I don’t move as he pulls the chain tight, the pendant at my throat. He tugs and a new panic takes hold. I think he’s going to strangle me with it.

  I make a sound, a pathetic whimper. I should scream but it’s like my throat has closed up.

  “It’s broken,” he says. “That’s rude, isn’t it? To give you a broken gift?” His deep voice is low, his breath on my neck sending a strange sensation down my spine. “But that’s how I got it, too.”

  I realize what he’s doing. He’s tying the chain. He must be.

  I reach my hand to touch the pendant and when I do, something crusty flakes off.

  A glance at my fingers shows a flake of dark red and I know it’s blood. I know it.

  My stomach heaves and I tighten my muscles, trying to quell the urge to vomit.

  “There,” he says. I smell whiskey on his breath now that he’s closer and hear him inhale as the scruff of his jaw scratches my bare shoulder and I shudder.

  Undeterred, he tilts my head to the side and presses his lips to the curve of my neck. To my pulse.

  My breath catches and I can’t move.

  It’s not a kiss, this.

  This man isn’t kissing me.

  But his lips, they’re warm. And that disgusting smell of chemicals and death, it’s going to make me sick. He must feel my knees give out because he wraps one powerful, muscled arm around my middle, tightening his grip as he holds me against him.

  He brings his mouth to my ear, breathes in a deep breath.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asks in a whisper that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

  I give a little shake of my head.

  He turns me so I’m facing him, presses me against the door with one hand on my belly as the fingers of his other hand trail the line of my collarbone and touch the pendant.

  When I finally meet his gaze, what I see in his eyes makes me go cold.

  “Stefan Sabbioni,” he says. “Antonio’s brother.”

  Those names mean nothing to me. Should they mean something?

  “And I want you to give your father a message for me,” he starts, pausing for so long that it feels like the air is heavier for the unspoken words. For those that are still to come. “Tell him I’ll be back to take something precious too.”

  An eternity passes before he steps backward.

  My knees buckle, and I catch the doorknob to remain upright. It’s suddenly freezing in my room and I’m shivering.

  “You won’t forget to give him my message, will you?”

  I shake my head. It’s all I can do.

  He nods, eyes narrowing, a smile that’s not a smile at all turning the corners of his mouth upward.

  “Happy birthday, Gabriela,” he says, and with that, he’s gone.

  3

  Gabriela

  My father barely acknowledges me after Stefan leaves.

  I walk out of the study and turn to the front doors as I listen to the sound of the SUVs pulling away. I wonder what just happened. I wonder how this man walked into our house and had my father sign a contract to give me up. How he made me sign the same contract that bound me to him.

  Marriage.

  I will be forced to marry him.

  A shudder runs through me and I hurry up the stairs to my room. This one isn’t nearly as nice as my suite of rooms in Rome. Just a large bedroom. Still luxurious, still beautiful, and still without a lock on the door. At least not on the inside.

  But none of that matters anymore because I won’t be here for much longer.

  I stand for a full minute with my back against the door and listen to the pounding of my heart.

  “I’ll be back for you early in the morning. Be ready.”

  When this was happening with McKinney, it felt different. Not so real. Like I could somehow control it.

  Although my running away to avoid being forced to marry McKinney’s son lasted less than forty-eight hours so maybe I was fooling myself all along. I had no control then and I have no control now.

  At that, my thoughts wander to Alex. I guess he’s at the hospital now. I guess they would have taken him there.

  I want to call, to check on him, but how? I don’t have a cell phone—another means for my father to control me—and there’s no phone in my room.

  But I doubt his family wants to talk to me anyway.

  I look down at myself. I should shower. I should throw away these clothes and pack. Is that what he meant by be ready?

  This makes no sense. I can’t wrap my brain around it.

  I push away from the door and go to the dresser. I don’t glance behind me before kneeling down to pull out the bottom drawer then reach my arm to the back until I feel the bundle and peel it off. The tape comes away easily and I look at the dusty little pocket of tissue paper that fits in the palm of my hand.

  That night two years ago, he’d told me to give a message to my father. To warn him that he’d be back to take something precious.

  I hadn’t, though.

  I hadn’t gone to my father.

  If I had, would he have been able to stop this?

  What I did instead was look up Stefan Sabbioni and learn everything I could about him. But nothing I found gave me any clues as to why he’d come after me or my father.

  The Sabbioni family is a mafia family from Sicily. From what I learned, they essentially owned the island and had some territory in the states, New York mostly.

  But just as their power here was growing, Stefan’s older brother, Antonio, had turned over evidence against his father about which I could find nothing online. The father was extradited to the states and Antonio taken into protective custody. Stefan’s father, also named Antonio, was killed shortly after in an American prison. He never even made it to trial.

  The family was weakened considerably, and Stefan Sabbioni was on a sort of house-arrest. At least, he wasn’t allowed to leave the island of Sicily under threat of arrest and extradition to the states.

  So how was he able to get here tonight?

  I know they’d been regaining their power over the last two years but it’s not like the mafia posts their business on Google, so I don’t know any details and have no clue how powerfu
l he is or what he’s capable of.

  Well, I have one clue.

  I mean, tonight is a pretty big clue.

  I shake my head, still trying to wrap my brain around this. Around why and how.

  Footsteps on the stairs have me up on my knees. I quickly put the drawer back in place and rush into the bathroom. It’s the only room with a lock, so I lock it and switch on the shower before sitting down on the closed lid of the toilet.

  I touch the dusty tissue paper for the first time in two years and unwrap it, tearing it a little where the tape is stuck.

  I kept the broken necklace in a nest of paper, this gift Stefan gave me on my sixteenth birthday. I don’t want to touch it. I never cleaned off the crusted blood. I didn’t have to. I know what it is. I knew the moment after he left when I tore it off my neck to study it for all of two seconds.

  The Marchese family crest.

  Yes, we’re that pretentious.

  My father wasn’t the one who built the shipping empire, but he did grow it to what it is today. The company isn’t his technically, even though he took the Marchese family name when he married my mother. She’s the blood Marchese.

  The keeping of the Marchese name is a requirement of the inheritance that’s always passed down to the first-born on his or her twenty-first birthday. My father is a sort of warden until I come of age, even though I’m not first-born. My brother, Gabe, is in no condition to run a company like this. To run much of anything.

  I know how my father has grown it into the empire it has become. His hands are in no way clean.

  What does that make me if I live off that money?

  I think about that a lot and as much as I know how powerless I am, as many times as my father has proven he will drag me back kicking and screaming when I try to run, I’m still guilty.

  “Gabriela?”

  I startle at his voice. My father is just on the other side of the door.

  “I’m having a shower,” I call out.

  “I’ll wait.”

  “It’ll be a while.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Fuck.

  I get up, stash the necklace in the cabinet under the sink and strip off my clothes to shower. I don’t hurry, hoping he’ll get tired of waiting, but when I’m finished a full half-hour later, my hair towel dried and wearing a bathrobe, I find my father sitting on the chaise looking uncomfortable among the too-delicate, too-feminine furnishings, none of which I chose.

  He gets to his feet and comes toward me. I try to read him but can’t. I’ve never seen him like this.

  “There’s a full month before the wedding has to happen,” he says.

  To hear him say that word, it’s almost surreal.

  “I will find some way to stop it,” he promises.

  “Why is he doing this?”

  He raises his head a little and his lips tighten. That’s guilt. Well, not that he feels guilty. It’s more acknowledgement that yes, he did something bad and whatever Stefan has on him, is bad.

  “What happened to McKinney?” I ask because he’s not going to answer that first question.

  “Sabbioni owns the docks now.”

  “What?”

  “He took over McKinney’s territories.”

  Abe McKinney owns docks in several ports where my father’s ships land. He and McKinney had reached an agreement several years ago that made him the powerhouse he is today.

  “What do you mean took it over? Like bought McKinney out?”

  “Don’t worry yourself with the details. I came to give you something.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out a small revolver.

  I shake my head. “I don’t want a gun.”

  “It’s for your protection. Our soldiers won’t be there.”

  “They’re your soldiers. Not ours.”

  “They’re your protection too.”

  My father has a very different perspective than I.

  “So you’re giving me that as protection against Stefan Sabbioni? What do you think, I’m going to shoot him?”

  “If he forces himself on you, you’ll be in your right.”

  “But you were okay with McKinney’s son forcing himself on me?”

  “He’s not a dirty Sicilian mobster.”

  “No, he’s a dirty Irish one.” McKinney is as much a crook as Stefan Sabbioni. As my father. “I don’t want it.”

  “Don’t make this hard. You’ll take it.” He puts it on the bed and I notice my duffel bag that John had taken before is there too.

  I look up at my father. “I want to see Gabe.”

  My father’s expression tightens. He turns and walks to the window. The topic of my brother is never an easy one.

  “Tomorrow’s my day to visit. If I’m going to be gone for a month or more—”

  “It’s not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s the middle of the night and Sabbioni will be here first thing in the morning.”

  “And if I’m not here, he’ll wait.”

  He turns to me and exhales, shakes his head with an almost amused little smile. “Things don’t work that way and you know it.”

  I do.

  “What does he have on you that you agreed?” I ask, not sure I want to know.

  He shifts his gaze back to the window and just keeps looking out over the distance of our land, dark and wooded, the street too far to see.

  “You have to tell me that at least,” I press.

  He turns, looks at me, studies me as if he’s never going to see me again and for as little affection as I feel for this man, in that moment, he’s my father.

  “Every day you look more like her,” he says.

  It takes me a moment to process but when I do, that affection I felt a moment ago dissipates.

  Mom.

  He’s talking about mom.

  “I won’t remarry, you know,” he says. “Never.”

  My mother drowned when I was eight. She’d taken my brother and I camping, and she drowned in the lake. She was only twenty-nine years old. Ten years younger than my father.

  I watch my father, study his face when he talks about her and every time he does, something inside me hardens.

  He doesn’t know what I saw that morning. Doesn’t know I bore witness to it all.

  “Maybe you should,” I say, turning my back on him. “I’m tired.”

  He comes up behind me. When he puts his hands on my arms, I stiffen. It takes all I have not to pull out of his grasp.

  “You’re owed a punishment,” he says, his voice different again.

  At that, I pull out of his grasp and take several steps away before I face him.

  “I don’t belong to you anymore,” I accuse, using language he understands, hating what I feel when I say it, hating how disgusting I feel.

  I remind myself that I am only a thing to him. A possession. Something he can barter with and trade.

  And tonight, someone beat him at his own game.

  “Get out of my room,” I tell him.

  My father shifts his weight to one foot and cocks his head to the side, studying me. He gives me a sneer.

  “Always the princess in the tower, aren’t you? You’re like your mother in that sense too. Ever the victim. You don’t know what you have.”

  “Your thugs broke both of Alex’s legs tonight.”

  “He tried to steal you from me.”

  “I went to him. He didn’t steal me. Do you even hear how you sound?”

  “Our family is different. You know that. You, Gabriela, should know it better than your mother or brother ever did.”

  My heart twists.

  I wonder how he can have no idea of the pain he causes with his careless words.

  Or maybe they’re not careless.

  Maybe he means to twist the knife lodged in my heart.

  “Sabbioni is stealing from me now.”

  “And you can’t break his legs. Why?” I spit. “What does Stefan Sabbioni have on you?” There’
s only one way to deal with my father. He has no compassion. No empathy. I wonder sometimes if he isn’t a sociopath.

  That twitch is back. Whatever Stefan has, it’s big.

  He walks to the door but stops when he opens it. “Remember who you are. Remember where your loyalties lie.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek and we stand like this, silent. I think my father is taking my measure, determining if I’m ally or foe.

  What I want is to be neither and, in a way, Stefan taking me, it’s a sort of freedom, isn’t it? A sort of escape.

  My father grins like he’s just read my mind.

  “You take care, Gabriela. And don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s a white knight come to rescue you from your tower. He’s as much a monster as I.”

  4

  Gabriela

  It’s still early when I wake the next morning. Well, I guess it’s only a few hours later, not morning at all. The birds aren’t singing yet, that’s what gives away the time.

  Because even before I open my eyes, I know I’m not alone.

  I don’t move and I know I should try to keep my breathing even, but I can’t seem to breathe at all right now.

  Aftershave.

  My mind immediately goes to the night of my sixteenth birthday party. To the smell then.

  Morgue.

  At least it’s not that smell.

  But it is him. I recognize the scent of his cologne from when we were in the study earlier. Recognize my inability to breathe when he’s in a room with me.

  I turn my head to find him standing over my desk, finger holding my book open, reading in the little bit of moonlight that’s coming through the windows. I hadn’t closed my curtains before going to bed.

  “Morning,” he says, startling me that he knew I was awake without even having to turn around.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I sit up and switch on the lamp beside my bed.

  He closes the book, turns to look at me, his gaze roaming from my face down.

  I touch my hair, still damp from my late shower, and glance down at my nightie, a dark blue silk tank that leaves little to the imagination.