We pull up outside my club. It’s downtown near the main strip. It’s not the most expensive building I own, but it’s my pride and joy. The architecture is modern with huge blacked out windows, four stories, and the single red circle with a cursive “L” inside to signify it’s part of the Luciani empire. Everyone just calls it “The Spot,” because if you’re anybody in this city, it’s the fucking spot to be. Simple as that.

“Where are we?” asks Neela.

It pains me to see the way she’s glaring at me, the glint of real hatred behind her eyes. “This is my club. The Spot,” I say simply.

She frowns in confusion. “You’re kidnapping me to a club?”

“I don’t think you can use kidnapping like that,” Niko notes, not looking up from his phone. “Sounds wrong.”

“You fucking serious?” Luke asks. “You’re the same one who tried to tell me snuck was a goddamn word.”

“I snuck a handful of your mom’s ass last time I saw her,” Niko says.

“You fucking-”

“If you’re done,” I growl at the two of them.

Luke throws up a hand as if to say it doesn’t matter anyway, and Niko just keeps swiping through pictures on his phone with a faint grin. Idiots.

“The original plan was to blackmail your father. He drops his case against us and he gets you back. If he didn’t play ball, then my father was going to…” I clench my teeth when I think about him cutting off her fingers one by one and sending them to her dad until he caved. “He was going to make things messy.”

“And the new plan?” she asks, a hint of hope in her voice.

“The new plan is I’m going to get you out of this.”

“Couldn’t you just drop me off at home?” she asks quickly. “I won’t even press charges. I’ll just pretend none of this ever happened. You could—”

“No,” I say. “If my father were to find out I cut you loose, he’d just send someone else to get you. I’m going to keep you safe until I can find a way to get you out of this. Okay?”

Her expression falls. “It still sounds like I’ll be your hostage.”

“In some ways you will be,” I say. “I can’t let you contact your family, because word might trickle back to my father. I can’t let you out in public or people might start asking the wrong questions. But I’ll treat you like a queen. I promise. You’ll have everything you could want. Every comfort. And when I find out how, I’ll set you free.”

She still looks sullen.

I touch her chin with my finger, lifting her face to mine. “Neela,” I say. “Trust me. This is the only way. You can hate me if you want, but it’ll only make this harder.”

“For you?” she asks, eyes hard. “Or for me?”

I clench my teeth. “For both of us.”

She wrings her fingers in her lap, eyes downcast.

“Never thought I’d see the day,” Niko muses from the passenger seat. He’s half-turned toward us with a condescending grin on his face. “The Beast has been tamed, I suppose. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You don’t even carry your gun half the time anymore. Traded it for a pen and a briefcase a few years back, didn’t you?”

It doesn’t matter that I’m the son of Michael Luciani. It doesn’t matter that I’m the biggest and the strongest in the fucking car, or that I’ve proven my worth a dozen times over. Just like a wild pack of animals, the kind of men in my line of work are always watching for weakness. Show them a single sign that you’ve faltered, and they’ll rise up to challenge you.

Niko is doing exactly that, and the fact isn’t lost on Chase or Luke, who watch with frowns.

“Call me tame again if you want a fucking demonstration,” I growl. “Otherwise, you can keep playing with your goddamn phone.”

Niko locks eyes with me a few moments before sniffing dismissively and turning back around. Small victory. He’s watching now. Eager. I’ll have to remember to keep a very close eye on him until I can find a way to get him off my crew.

We park the car at the back of the club. Chase and the guys go in ahead of us, leaving me to escort Neela inside.

“The Beast?” she asks as we approach the building.

My body tenses at the mention of the nickname. “They started calling me that a long time ago,” I say, hoping she’ll drop it.

“Why?” she asks.

“It’s not important.”

She takes the hint and averts her eyes to the club. I’m relieved to see she’s relaxing at least a little bit. I take her hand and stop her before we walk inside, leading her instead to a bench by the water. “Listen,” I say once we’ve sat down. “I may not be a good man, and I’ve sure as hell done bad things, but I’m trying to do the right thing now. Okay? I meant what I said back there. You can trust me.”

“I want to believe that,” she says. “I just don’t understand any of this. I mean, who are you guys? Are you hitmen? Professional kidnappers? Just criminals?”

“Mafia,” I say. “But it’s not like what you see in the movies. Not in my family, at least.”

“But you still break the law,” she says, eyebrows drawn in confusion. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t need to blackmail my dad.”

“You’re right,” I admit. “But I’ve been moving us toward being a legitimate business over the past ten years. A lot of our money is in businesses, like this club, and real estate now.”

“But where’d the money come from?” she asks. “I mean, if you rob a bank and then invest the money in real estate, it doesn’t exactly make you a law-abiding citizen.”

I work my lips to the side and laugh a little. “Fair point. I’m not claiming to be a saint, Neela. I’m just saying I’m not a cold and ruthless killer.”

“You’re not?” she asks, surprising me with a little half-smile. “That’s really convincing coming from The Beast.”

I know she’s just fucking with me, which is a step in the right direction in itself, but I can’t hear the name without images of bullet holes in a crumbling, yellowed wall playing across my mind. I see his body slumped over, like he was just sitting down for a break and dozed off. I can even remember the smell of the gunpowder, acrid and hot in my nose.

“Sorry,” she says suddenly.

Her voice startles me, and I realize I must’ve been zoning out as the memories came back.

She looks over at me and I’m struck by how beautiful she looks. There’s a special edge to her that I can’t quite pinpoint. At times, it seems like innocence, but that doesn’t quite capture it. She doesn’t belong in my world, like a flower squeezing free between two slabs of concrete, she seems too delicate and good to exist here, but I have to drag her deeper all the same.

“I don’t really know what to think,” she says after a while. Her hands are nervous in her lap, fingers squirming together. “I want to be pissed at you, I think. That feels like the right way to feel. My family is going to freak out when they realize I’m missing, and it’s because of you. But then if I believe what you’re saying, then it almost sounds like I should be thanking you.”

“You shouldn’t thank me,” I say. “I don’t expect it, at least. It’s a shitty situation and you don’t deserve to be wrapped up in it. I’m going to do what I can to make sure it’s not too hard on you. Okay?”

She nods, favoring me with a quick smile.

I motion for her to follow me and lead her into the club, which, for all intents and purposes, is going to be her prison for the foreseeable future. Ask my father, and it’s his club, but ask anybody around here and they’ll tell you the real truth. It’s mine. Half of the Luciani family assets are mine. Without my work, we’d still be squabbling over street corners and laundromats. If I was feeling generous, I could probably give my little brothers some of the credit, too.

Dig beneath the surface, and everything in the city is owned by the Toretti or us. Thanks to my influence, the Luciani family is on the cutting edge of organized crime. No more shaking down small businesses for protection money and the old-timer shit. Now, we are investors without the burdens of legal conscience, as I liked to put it.

Just like inventors need investment capital to get their products off the ground, enterprising criminals need weapons, vehicles, and crews. We provide that, for a cut of the profit. Left to his own devices, my father would’ve kept the family in the dark ages, right along with the Toretti, and it was only when he started handing me some of the control that I used our money to branch out. I poured money into clubs, restaurants, and even some of the local wholesale stores. My father and his crews started handling most of the new-age work backing criminals with money, and I started looking for ways to get us to a place where we’d have something legit to pass on to my kids, if I ever slowed down long enough to have some. My father didn’t understand my angle at first. He kept trying to see what the scam was in real estate.

The beauty of it was that it isn’t a scam. It’s almost legit, once you get past the minor issue Neela pointed out. I’m just making good investments with our dirty money and putting it into businesses and properties that’d help us bring in cash. It isn’t perfectly legal, but I’m taking the cronies and fuckups who owed us favors and turning them into businessmen and managers. Over the last ten years, I’ve dwarfed our prior earnings and put us on a short path to becoming legit. We just need a little more time. A few loose ends cut, a few old habits curbed, and we’d be a bunch of criminals who found their way to the straight and narrow path, so long as our past never caught up with us.

My work has earned me a reputation. My father is the boss, the ultimate authority and the one no one dares to cross. In principle, at least. He stays mostly secluded to his tower downtown, where he still clings to the threads of the old ways with his old crews. Even working as backers for aspiring criminals isn’t worth the risk anymore, not with the strides I’ve made recently.

The younger generation gets that. Most of the old-timers, though? They still keep their loyalty to my father, which means the Luciani crime family is split between something resembling a booming corporation and an old school mafia family.

I take Neela inside the club, which is already pulsing with activity, even though midnight hasn’t rolled around yet. The decor sets the place up to look like the interior of a lavish bachelor pad. White marble floors, plush, circular chairs and sofas dotting the space, and several staircases lit by bright blue neon light. The ceiling is spotted with patchworks of decorative wood beams, and the bar spans nearly an entire wall. Most of the second and third floor are visible from where we stand at the entrance, thanks to the partially open ceiling, but the fourth floor—where the real intense shit goes down, is completely concealed from here. The fourth floor is a club in and of itself, entirely catering to guests with a taste for BDSM.

Music thrums through the air, which is laced with a thin layer of smoke that catches the neon and bathes everything in an electric blue glow.

I fucking love this place.

It’s my kingdom. My sanctuary. My retreat.

I lead Neela through the main floor as people look up and nod me their respect before carrying on with their business. No one stops to harass me or ask me for favors. They know better. I spot my younger brothers lounging in the far corner with a group of women and a few bottles of liquor. Angelo notices me and gives me a subtle tip of his glass, dark eyes intense. As always, the scar across the bridge of his nose makes my skin crawl with the memory of that dark night. Gino, my youngest brother, sits on the opposite side of the table and gives me a slightly sarcastic salute. Gino has always managed to maintain a hint of sarcasm and amusement, despite the horrors we've lived through.

I give my brothers a quick nod and take Neela deeper with my crew following a few steps behind.

We eventually reach the third floor, where I have my private rooms. The door is unassuming; it’s tucked near the back and could be mistaken for a fire exit if it weren’t for the burly guard who leans against the wall beside the door.

“Mr. Luciani,” he says formally, giving a more shallow nod to the rest of the guys as he lets us in.

The door shuts behind us, muffling the music from the club to a comforting and dull pulse, like a distant heartbeat. “This is where you’ll be staying,” I say to Neela.

“You mean my cage?” she asks.

“I don’t think she likes you,” Luke notes. He helps himself to a glass from the bar by the kitchen and pours himself a drink.

My private room here isn't too extravagant. It has great views, expensive furnishings, and a sleek, modern vibe, but I didn't want to crowd my club by eating up too much of the square footage for a personal refuge, so it favors creative uses of space and smaller rooms oversize.

“You can call it whatever you want,” I say. “But you’ll be taken care of. You’ll be fed well, and no one will hurt you.”

“Unless your dad doesn’t cooperate,” Luke says with a sinister look for Neela.

I step to Luke until I loom over him, fingers itching for his throat. I may not have spelled it out for the guys yet, but they should have enough brain cells to rub together to figure it out on their own. If I’m not taking Neela to my father, then she’s not getting hurt. End of story. “I’ll make this clear one time.” I look to Chase and Niko, making sure they understand I’m talking to them too. “Neela is mine. My hostage,” I add a little too slowly. “Any of you fuckers try to scare her or intimidate her and you’re going to have a problem. I don’t care how much history we have. My father isn’t going to hurt her, and if anyone has an issue with that, they can fuck off.”

“Loud and clear,” Chase says with a solemn nod.

Niko nods.

Luke waits long enough to make sure I know he’s defiant, but not long enough for me to call him on it, then nods his head. “Got it, boss.”