Chapter 3: Give Me an Heir

He doesn't move away from me. He turns his head an inch and says, "Put her in the east wing. Lock it." "She'll scream the house down, sir." "Then let her." Footsteps retreat. The door shuts. And I'm still pinned between a wall and a half-naked man who buys people. I use the one second of distraction to run. I make it eleven feet. He catches me in the hallway, one arm across my waist, and walks me backward until my spine hits a carved oak door. "Don't," I gasp. "Please, don't—" He plants a hand on either side of my head and cages me in. "You want to know why you're still breathing," he says. "So do I." He looks at me the way men look at a problem they can't solve, and it terrifies me more than his hands did. "My name is Damiano Vitale." The floor drops out from under me. Everyone in this city knows that name. Mothers use it to make children behave. Men who cross him don't get found. He owns half the police force and all of the docks and the last person who stole from him was mailed back to his family in three separate boxes. The Devil of Chicago is standing six inches from my mouth. "You know it," he says, watching my face. "Everyone knows it," I whisper. "Good." He straightens slightly. "Then you'll understand what I'm about to offer you." He steps back — one step, just enough that I can breathe — and I see him fully for the first time. Broad shoulders. Scars like a map of a war. A tattoo over his heart of a black crown with a bullet through it. "I'm thirty-two years old and I have no son," he says flatly. "No heir. Six families are waiting for me to die so they can cut my territory into pieces. Every month one of them tests me. Last month they put a bomb under my mother's car." He says it like a weather report. "Blood is the only thing they respect. A Vitale heir buys me ten years of peace. Without one, I'm a dead man walking with a very expensive house." My mouth is dry. "Why are you telling me this?" He takes my hand. I flinch — I can't help it — but he only turns it over and looks at my palm, at the small crescent cuts my own nails left there tonight. "Because you don't want to die," he says. "Do you?" Something rises up in me, ugly and desperate and alive. Because he's right. I've spent nineteen years being small and quiet and useful, and I don't want to die on a marble floor in a house nobody will search. "No," I say, and my voice comes out steady for the first time all night. "I want to live." Damiano smiles. It's not a nice smile. It's a satisfied one, and it does something dangerous to my stomach. "Then here's the deal, piccola." He hooks two fingers into the torn side seam of my dress and tears it wider, baring a strip of skin from ribs to hip. I gasp. I grab his wrist. He doesn't stop and he doesn't hurry. He flattens his palm low over my stomach. His hand is enormous. It's hot enough to burn through me. "Give me an heir," he says quietly, "and you walk out of my world a rich woman with a new name and a new life. Nobody will ever sell you again. Nobody will ever touch you again." I can't breathe. "And if I can't?" "Then I have no reason to keep you." His eyes come up to mine, gold and absolutely without mercy. "And your father's debt goes back on the books." The room tilts. Because that's the trap, isn't it. That's the whole beautiful trap. If I refuse, they take Rosie next. "How long?" I whisper. "Two months." "Two months?" "I don't have ten." He leans in until his mouth brushes my temple. "One night, one contract, one heir. And in return I will burn this city to the ground before I let anyone hurt you." I stare up at him, this monster with a bomb under his mother's car and my whole family's greed written on my skin in bruises. And I hear myself say, "Swear it." His eyes flare. "On my blood," he says. Then he bends, catches me behind the knees, and lifts me off the floor like I weigh nothing at all. "Where are you taking me?" He kicks open the bedroom door. "To collect."