You’ve hardly eaten, Anabella.” My father sits across from me with his hands templed in front of him. “You’re eating for two, remember?”

“No,” I say bitingly. “I had forgotten I was pregnant. Maybe because you won’t let me talk to the father.”

He flexes his jaw and presses his fingers together until his nails turn white. “The father was a mistake. I’ve gracefully chosen to look the other way and embrace this child as one of our own. You would be wise to stop reminding me about this mistake of yours, or I might change my mind.”

“God forbid my child doesn’t have the blessing of the great Rosiano Torretti. Maybe then my baby wouldn’t need to be caged if she’s a girl or dragged into your pointless wars if he’s a boy. How horrible.”

As always, Ronnie and Franco are sitting nearby, and I can see both of them tensing from the tone I’m taking with my father.

“Out,” he says to them.

They get up quickly, chairs screeching, and leave us alone in the dining room of my father’s house.

“I’ve given you some liberties because this is a difficult situation. But that is over. You will pay me the proper respect from here forward, or I’ll tighten the leash on you. Mark my words.”

I gently set my fork down. “How much tighter can it get, exactly? You’ve already forced me to drop out of my classes. To stay locked up in the house. To stop talking to my friends. What more is there, exactly?”

“That fucking—” my father’s nostrils flare and he relaxes the fist he was making beside his plate with a visible effort. “That Luciani piece of shit can’t see you pregnant. He’d do something stupid to get you back. I know he would. Once you’ve had the baby, we’ll just need to be sure you’re not seen in public with it for some reasonable amount of time, maybe until we can get you married and it would be conceivable that the baby was another man’s.”

“May I be excused?” I ask sweetly, even though the thoughts in my head are anything but sweet. The love I have for my father has been ebbing away like a great wall before a relentless storm. No matter how big or immovable it may have seemed even a few months ago, it can only withstand so much, and now I can feel how every step deeper into this threatens to bring the wall down, to erode away one of the foundational pieces that would bring the whole thing crumbling into a ruin.

He watches me a long time, as if he’s trying to decide if I’m still feeling insolent or if I’m sorry. He must misread my face, because he smiles slightly and nods. “You should get some rest. Yes. Remember, I need you dressed and ready first thing in the morning. We’re meeting with an important guest who has come a long way to visit me.”

I close the door to my room less than a minute later, pressing my back to the wood and sinking down with a sigh. I put my hands to my stomach, feeling the way the skin is already growing tighter as the baby grows. It’s a pleasant feeling. Comforting, even. It makes me feel less alone, even when I’m practically a prisoner in my own father’s home. He can force me to stay away from Angelo, but no matter what he does, the baby will be a part of Angelo he can’t take from me. No one can.

There’s a scraping sound from outside my window that has me on my feet. I inch closer, briefly thinking about yelling for help but deciding against it because some feeling deep down is telling me to wait.

A head appears in the window, even though I’m three floors up. I don’t comprehend at first. It’s too dark outside to make out the features, but there can’t be a person outside my window this high up, except…

I can see from the way he moves that he must be using a ladder.

I’m paralyzed. Even if I wanted to scream now, I couldn’t, like I’m deep in some nightmare where no matter how hard I try to scream the only sound is a suffocated, whispering hiss.

When the stranger manages to pull the window open, my fear evaporates as the soft light from my room falls on his face.

“Angelo?” I ask.

He presses a finger to his lips, eyes never leaving me as he eases himself through the window with surprising grace for a man his size. He walks to me, eyes so hard that I can feel his intention from across the room.

With a single look, he wipes away months of doubt and indecision. He still wants me. He still wants this. When his eyes fall to my stomach with a meaningful flicker, I realize he knows about the baby, too.

He stops just inches from me, hand rising to touch my cheek and brush my lips with his thumb. He studies my face like he hasn’t seen me in years. “Are we safe here?” he whispers.

“Yes. They don’t come into my room.”

“Good.”

“Angelo,” I say as firmly as I can. “They will kill you if they find you here.”

“I know.”

I want to push him back to the window and beg him to run, but I’m too weak. All I can do is wrap my arms around him and lean my head on his chest, where I can breathe in the spicy sweet smell of him. Fresh and masculine. “It’s yours,” I say.

“I know.” His deep voice vibrates through his chest against my cheek, warm and comforting.

“What are we going to do?”

“Try,” he says simply, as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world.

I pull back to look at him incredulously. “It’s not that easy.”

“Usually, that’s how you know it’s worth trying.”

I want to groan in frustration. “This is serious, Angelo. My father wants you dead. Do you know what he’d do if he knew you were here?”

“He can only want me so dead. If he finds me in here, is he going to want me more dead than he did before tonight?”

I glare at him.

He gives me a small grin in contrition. “I realize it’s serious, Ana. But you have to realize you’re carrying my baby. He’d need to threaten me with a lot more than death to stop me from being with you. The mother of my child.”

His words seep into me like warm water on a cold day, wrapping my bones in his comforting embrace and making me feel totally weightless and safe, even if it’s just for a moment. Because they’re only words after all, no matter how good or strong his intentions are. “There’s no way everybody can win here. If you and I are together, it means you found a way to get my father out of the picture. He and I have our differences, but he’s still my father. I can’t just happily sit by while I wait for you to hurt him, or worse. And if—”

“Ana. I’m not going to hurt your father. He’s your family. That makes him mine. There’s another way. I just haven’t found it yet.”

I push my cheek to his chest again, wanting to believe and trust him to fix everything for me, but knowing deep down that it can’t be that easy. I can’t just close my eyes and hope everything will magically resolve itself.

“Come with me,” he says.

“What?” I ask.

“You said they don’t come in your room. You can come with me tonight and I’ll have you back before morning.”

“Come with you where?”

He shrugs. “Wherever you want to go. The club. My place. Enzo’s place. Just somewhere I can have you to myself.”

I work my lips to the side, wishing he didn’t make it so easy to be stupid. “You’ll have me back before morning?”

“Scout’s honor,” he says.

I laugh a little. “Somehow I doubt you were a boy scout, so that doesn’t count for anything.”

He shrugs. “Swearing on my honor as a mafia boss didn’t seem as compelling.”

“It’s not,” I agree.

“Then I swear I don’t want to do something reckless that will make it even harder to sneak you out of here next time. How about that?”

“That’ll do.”

The waves lap at the shore, making a sound like thousands of leaves rustling in a breeze. The moon’s reflection is broken into countless tiny fragments across the waves, constantly reforming into a whole only to be broken up again.

Angelo’s beach house is one of the only along the coast with the lights on. We’re sitting on his extended patio, which surrounds a huge pool that overlooks the beach and is furnished with hammocks, lounge chairs, and a full bar with an outdoor grill and refrigerator. It feels like having a five star hotel’s amenities to ourselves.

“I kind of expected you to take me to your club,” I say as we lounge beside each other in two of the chairs beside the pool.

“I wanted you all to myself tonight.”

I turn, arching an eyebrow at him. “What does that mean, exactly?”

He studies the waves. “Whatever you want it to, I guess.”

I think that over. I still can’t completely decide if I’m really more to Angelo than some kind of passing fixation, a temporary toy that he’ll get bored of and toss aside in the end, baby or not. The cynical side of me thinks he means he wants to sleep with me again. The optimistic side thinks it means he wants to get to know me more.

“Maybe we should talk about how this is going to work,” I suggest.

He shakes his head. “There will be time for that later. I just want to enjoy you tonight.”

I grin. “Is that just your smooth way of saying you don’t know how this is going to work?”

“It’s my smooth way of saying I can’t stop thinking about you and I’m hoping to add another enjoyable memory to the too-short list I have with you.”

“I see. And would this enjoyable memory involve us in a horizontal or a vertical position?”

“Does it always have to come back to sex with you, sweet, innocent Anabella,” he says, adding the last in a cheesy Italian accent to imitate my father.

“Play it off all you want, but it’s hard to think of much else around you. I want to believe I can trust you, but my instincts keep telling me you’re just a wolf in sheep’s clothing, waiting for me to let my guard down.”

He laughs. “Harsh. But with my baby growing in your belly, I think I’ve earned a kind of right to take you whenever I want, don’t you?”

“I don’t see it that way,” I say, feeling a little coy. The truth is, I’d let him take me right here and now. I know I couldn’t stop him, not if he made it clear that he wanted to. My body isn’t worried about consequences or the future—no matter how my brain may be hung up on those minor details. Around him, it’s only possible to think about the immediate moment and how good it would feel to have his rough hands enveloping me.

Still, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I may be carrying his baby, but that can’t mean anything. Nothing real, at least. Maybe if I was someone else with another life, maybe then it would be enough. For a prisoner like me, it’s only one more reason I should stay away from him and stop letting myself fall into his arms again and again, because every time is only going to make it that much harder when we have to go our separate ways—and we will eventually, my father will make sure of that.

“Then I suppose I’d better start earning my right to another taste,” he says, rolling to one side and resting on his elbow as he shifts his gaze from the ocean to me.

Heat rolls through me, like his attention is a spark that lights the dry kindling inside me in the space of an instant.

“You could start by telling me how a nice guy ended up at the head of a organized crime family.”

He smiles, but the corners of his mouth turn down after a few seconds, making him look deeply sad.

“What?” I ask.

“Nice guy,” he chuckles. “I’d have an easy time finding some people to disagree with you on that one.”

I frown. “I’m not talking about what you’ve done, Angelo. I’m talking about who you are.”

He flicks his eyebrows up, dismissing the concept. “There’s no difference. You are what you do and what you do is who you are.”

“Then everybody who has ever messed up should just throw in the towel? Accept their label and live with it?” I ask the question with more heat than I intend to, but some small part of myself takes offense to the idea, maybe because I’m not proud of how I’ve let my father rule me for so long, especially at how I let him come between Angelo and I.

He shakes his head, laughing. When he looks back up at me, there’s affection in his eyes. “You don’t think we’re defined by our pasts?”

“I don’t,” I say. It’s true, too. It’s how I found a way to keep loving my father, even after hearing rumors of the things he’s had done—the people he had hurt. He had done bad things. He still did bad things. But he wasn’t a bad man. I had to believe that. I had to. Loving him has become more impossible lately, and as much as I might try, I can only feel a bitter anger when I think of my father now.

“There are some things that you don’t come back from, Ana. Some sins have a price too high to ever pay off.”

I want to ask him what he’s talking about, to argue with him or try to convince him he’s wrong, but something in his eyes warns me off. I study the dark, inky black waves instead. “I had an uncle who was a gambler,” I say after a while. “He’d show up to these illegal card games my dad would host—the kind where you could bet as much as you wanted. He was always betting more than he could afford, and my father would help him out of the holes he’d dig. But eventually my father cut him off. No more money. No more bailouts. Well, my uncle kept on gambling anyway. He ended up owing money to the wrong people.”

I pull at my fingertips, shaking my head a little sadly at the memory. “I remember when my dad told me all of this. He was trying to teach me some kind of lesson, I think. All I remember is feeling like I didn’t know my uncle after all. I was so disappointed. But a few years later, I learned my uncle had stopped gambling and started working for the guys he owed money to. He wasn’t ever going to make enough to pay them back, but when I realized he was trying to do what was right anyway, it just…” I laugh, feeling silly. “I still wish he had never gotten himself into the situation, but I could respect how he tried to make it better, even if he never could.”

Angelo grins. “Subtle.”

I look up at him. “What?”

“I get it. You’re saying I should devote my life to making amends or some shit, even if there’s no chance of paying back the debt.” He stands up suddenly, anger clouding his face. “I never said I regretted the things I’ve done. I did what had to be done. I always have.”

“Hey,” I say, reaching to touch his arm. He lets me. “Angelo,” I say quietly but firmly, waiting until he looks me in the eyes. “I don’t care what you’ve done. Call me jaded, but I grew up with a mafia boss for a father. I’ve heard stories of what goes on. I care about you. I care that you’re the man who put this baby inside me. I care that you’re going to be there for our son or daughter. That’s all.”

His eyes widen and then narrow, searching my face. “I’ve tortured men,” he says, not looking away from me. Not an ounce of apology in those cold blue eyes.

I wince a little at the thought of it, but I force myself to stare back. “Okay,” I say.

“I’ve killed men.”

I swallow hard. “Okay.”

“This is all okay to you?” he asks.

I take in a long breath, pausing until I can find the right words. “No. It’s not. It’s something I’m going to have to live with, to figure out. And if you want to be part of your child’s life then I guess you’re going to have to figure it out, too.”

For several long seconds, he doesn’t so much as blink. He just stares back at me, eyes icy and jaw flexed. He takes a step closer until he towers over where I sit, hand still rested on his arm.

“You know,” he says. “You’re sexy as hell when you’re trying to be tough.”

I bristle at his condescension. “Angelo… I’m not trying to be or do anything. This is serious. This is—”

He kisses me. His mouth is rough against mine at first, like a command. Stop and give me what I want, it seems to say. Enough talking.

He grips my hair in a tight fist, pulling my head back and forcing me to stay in place.

“Angelo,” I gasp between kisses. “We should—”

He doesn’t let me finish. He lifts me up from the chair, carrying me easily from the poolside chair toward the beach house.

“What are you doing?”

“You said you were okay with what I’ve done for my job. Now I need to know if you’re okay with what I do for pleasure.”

“I think I already have a pretty good idea what you—”

“I’ve barely given you a taste,” he growls, kicking open the door to his house without bothering to close it behind us as he carries me up the sweeping staircase toward the second floor. He carries me down a hall lined almost entirely with glass, giving an unbroken view of the beach and stars outside. A thousand questions and objections rise up and die before they reach my tongue, silenced by the pounding momentum of him, by the heat and purpose in everything he does.

He’s not a man to be stopped, to be questioned, or to be opposed. In a dark, dirty corner of my mind, I find myself embellishing the fantasy that he’s taking me without consent, that I haven’t technically agreed to anything tonight. He stole those kisses just like he’s stealing me away to some bedroom where he’s no doubt planning to steal the rest of me, too. I could tell him I want it, because I do, but it’d strip away that part of the thrill that tastes so wrong and so sweet.

I don’t feel like we resolved any of the issues I raised when we talked. If anything, they feel more unsolved than before we talked, but somehow it feels right to let him do this, to take me away and let our bodies do the talking for a while.

It’s almost impossible to feel like any problem is worth thinking about around him. Maybe that’s what makes him so addictive. When I’m beside him, I know he’ll take care of me. He’ll impose his will on the world—the universe. He’ll make sure everything works out.

Maybe that’s why I keep trying to run from him. He and I together puts him on an inevitable collision course with my father, a collision that I don’t think my father would survive. But I believed Angelo when he said he wouldn’t hurt my father. So what would happen?

He walks me past what looks like a master bedroom and takes me through a door at the end of a small staircase. The room must be at the highest point of the house and is totally encased in glass. But the views outside aren’t what catch my eyes first.

“Wow,” I say.

I expect an easy grin or a chuckle form him, but his expression might as well be steel. He takes me toward a leather… thing at the center of the room. It’s in the shape of an “X” and covered in straps, harnesses, hinges, and looks like some sort of torture device.

“Saint Andrew’s Cross,” he explains. “Now take off your clothes.”

I raise my eyebrows and let out a nervous chuckle. “You want me to—right here?”

“Off,” he says.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “We were just talking and now—”

He takes off his shirt, flicking his fingers skillfully across the buttons in a few smooth motions before he strips it and drops it to the ground.

“Okay, you’re starting to make a pretty good argument, but—”

He silences me with a raised finger and hard eyes. “I tried to be patient. I tried to do the nice thing. I didn’t take you straight to the playroom or to the club. But we can talk for hours and we’ll come to the same conclusion. I’m not a good man, and you deserve better. But if you’re going to be with me, you need to see what kind of appetites I have. What I expect of you.”

“Angelo, I—”

“No,” he says. “You deserve better, but that’s my baby in your belly, and unless you tell me to leave you alone, I’m not going anywhere. That means it’s time you learn what I expect. What I demand.”

He waits long enough that I realize he wants some kind of response. All I can manage is to nod my head. My eyes wander over the dozens of devices scattered throughout the room, all clearly designed for some kind of sexual fantasy fulfillment.

“And what do you expect?” I ask quietly.

“Submission. Surrender.”

“What if you try to convince me that pie is better than cake? Am I just supposed to agree with you?”

He grins, but there’s something heavy in his expression that keeps it from calming my pounding heart. “You’ll learn when I expect total submission and when you can relax. But you’ll always be accountable. I may choose to punish you for your behavior at breakfast when I get you into the bedroom.”

“And why would I want to agree to this? Why blindly agree to be punished for disobeying you?”

“Because you’ll learn to crave my punishment. You’ll learn to beg me for it.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Call me crazy, but I find myself doubting that.”

“Then my only choice is to give you a demonstration.”

I try my hardest not to let my eyes fall down his bare chest and abs, but fail miserably. Once they slip from his eyes and travel down his full lips, perfect jawline, and neck, I’m lost. He’s built from smooth skin, defined edges, and hard muscle. I want to explore every inch of him with the tip of my tongue, to feel the taste of his tongue inside my mouth again. At the same time, I want to run away as fast as I can. I want to go back to the cage my father built for me and raise this child by myself, pretending I never knew Angelo or who the father could be. That would be the safe thing. The smart thing. It’d keep anyone from being hurt. The biggest victim would be my child, who would never know the comfort of having Angelo’s hard eyes soften, even for an instant, on his or her face.

He moves to the corner of the room and opens a cabinet mounted on the wall. I watch with confusion as he pulls out a long candle, a lighter, and an ice cube from a little bucket within the cabinet. He pops the ice cube in his mouth, walking toward me and lighting the candle.

I want to ask questions, but it feels like all I can do is wait and watch, too curious and strangely aroused to do anything else.

He pulls me away from the strange cross-shaped device and lays me on a leather table covered with just as many restraints and belts as the cross. He stands the candle up on a table beside the bench just long enough to tie my wrists and ankles to the bench, pulling until the restraints are so tight that I’m sure I couldn’t escape, even if I wanted to.

He picks the candle back up and then lifts my dress until my panties are just barely covered.

“What are you—”

He quiets me with a glare, holding the candle over my inner thighs close enough that I can faintly feel the heat of the flame. A drop of wax drips down and makes me jump with surprise and pain. Before the heat has had time to calm, he bends and kisses the spot with his mouth, which is wonderfully cold from the ice inside his mouth. He uses his fingers to slide the cooled wax away from my skin and presumably keep it from his mouth, and even manages to make the movement of his fingers a chill-inducing experience.

He wordlessly repeats the process for agonizingly wonderful minutes, working his way from my toes to my neck, which is my favorite. Eventually, he crunches the remains of the ice between his teeth, and swallows what’s left before leaning down to kiss me with cold lips and an already warming tongue.

“That’s not fair,” I say after he’s done, laughing a little. “Hot wax and ice are hardly a punishment. You’re just trying to lure me in with the easy stuff.”

He shrugs, still not giving me the relief of a smile, as if he knows he has me in some kind of spell as long as he remains serious and stern. This version of him is the Angelo I know, but it’s all the hard parts without the funny and relaxing side of him. I would’ve thought that would feel off-putting, but it’s thrilling in all the right ways. It’s Angelo, but not quite Angelo, as if when he’s acting as my Dom he’s a being built for sex and smoldering glares.

“Okay,” is all he says before blowing out the candle and moving back to the cabinet.

I expect him to grab some new tool—something more intense like a whip or a paddle, but all he does is put the candle and lighter back. When he comes back, he starts untying my restraints. Regret floods through me. Is it done? Did I say something wrong?

On one hand, I’m trying to push him away and do what’s right, but whenever I start to feel like it might actually happen, I break into a near-panic at the idea of losing him. I feel insane. Crazy.

Once he has me untied, he flips me over and pulls my dress up, helping to lift my head as he pulls the dress off me completely. I don’t even try to fight him or argue it. His moves with the candle and ice have overcome all the wiser parts of my mind, and I’m ready to experience whatever he’s planning, even if my stupid mouth can’t stop digging a deeper hole for myself.”

Whatever is going to happen, I’ve already gone this far tonight. I can worry about the consequences tomorrow.