Ana walks toward the bed and then plops down on the edge. She fidgets with her hands in her lap, eyes downcast.

“You don’t need to apologize,” I say, reading how uncomfortable she is about what just happened in her body language. “There’s no harm in learning you don’t enjoy something.” I move to sit beside her so I can pull her into a tight hug. I keep my voice easy, but inside I feel a clenching in my chest because I know I fucked up.

Bringing her to a public show like that was idiotic and selfish. Maybe I thought the sexuality of it would shock and excite her, but if I had really thought about it, I’d have known she wouldn’t enjoy something that intense.

“What happens if I’m not able to be the submissive you want me to be?” she asks.

“Ana…” I gently push a thread of hair behind her ear, then turn her face up so she’s looking at me. “I put value in all of this for two reasons. The obvious is that it can be fun as hell if we’re both enjoying it. The other is that there’s no bond like the bond between a dom and a submissive. We can give this part of ourselves up in the safety of the club or in my playroom. We can test the edges of our comfort together. Safely. What happened back there? That was my mistake. I should’ve been a better judge of where you were, and I should’ve known that was too much.”

“How should you have known? I’ve been on what, three dates with you?” She laughs sadly and tears well in her eyes. “Your baby is growing in me and we barely know each other.”

“I know you’re strong. Your dad has spent your entire life teaching you to bow down to him without question. It never broke you. Fuck. Look where you are right now. Think about what he’d do if he knew.”

“At this point, he might kill us both. He has been trying to set me up with some guy for months now. I think his plan is to just pretend the baby belongs to whoever this guy is once it’s born and marry me off.”

“Not happening,” I growl.

Ana grins, but a little sadly. “I’ve never even met the guy. But that was always my dad’s plan. Marry me off and then he’d know he had someone to take over the business when he was too old to do it.”

I think about that for a few moments, my mind jumping to the child growing in Ana’s belly. “I’d never want our kid to be involved in this. Hell. I wouldn’t want them to know about it. I can’t imagine grooming your daughter to be some sort of…”

“Bait,” she finishes.

“Yeah. Bait.” I chuckle a little to myself when I realize something.

Ana looks at me, confused.

“Sorry,” I say. “I was just thinking about how easy it seemed for my brother, Enzo, to shrug off his duties and walk away from all this when he and Neela had Brenden. It was like a switch flipped for him. I was happy for him, but jealous. I wished something mattered that much to me.”

“Does being the big bad boss of the Luciani crime family really mean that much to you?”

I bristle a little at the way she asks the question, like she can’t possibly understand how someone could find pleasure in being what I am, in doing what I do. I have to remind myself how it would seem from an outside perspective before I talk to keep the edge of anger from my voice. “For better or worse,” I say slowly. “It’s who I am. The men who work for me are all like family. They’re brothers. And there’s pride in knowing what we’ve built and where we’ve come. I’m good at it, too. At least I was.”

“What do you mean? You’re not good at it anymore? What changed?”

“You.”

Her eyes widen slightly and then she looks down, fidgeting with her hands again.

“Before you,” I continue. “I had nothing to lose. I cared about my brothers and my friends, but I knew they’d be fine without me. I’d think about some of the things I did to prove myself early on in the business, some of the horrible shit, and I’d feel like self-destructing. I wanted to go out in flames or to do something great. I don’t think I really cared. It made me invincible. No one could scare me or intimidate me because I wasn’t afraid of anything.”

“And now?” she asks.

“Now I’ve got you. I’ve got our baby. I’ve got something to want to live for, and I’ve got the unfortunate ability to understand that other people do, too. It means I don’t just see people as obstacles or things to move around like pieces on a chessboard. I’m not sure I can be who I need to be anymore.”

“And… that’s bad?” she asks carefully.

I chuckle and lean back to scratch my head in thought. “I’m still trying to figure that out. Maybe it’s not, in the long run. Maybe—”

The door opens and three men with guns drawn step inside, followed shortly after by Rosiano Torretti, Ana’s father.

Ana freezes, but I immediately stand, putting myself between her and the men with guns instinctively. I doubt any of them would dare shoot her, but I don’t want to risk it.

“I fucking knew it,” says Rosiano, who strolls into the room with a deadly kind of calm surrounding him. The only part of him that gives away the burning anger he feels is the mad glint in his eyes, like he could lose his cool at a moment’s notice.

“How did you get in here?” I ask. My heart pounds, because I know at least three of my guys would die before they let a Torretti, let alone Rosiano, up this far in my club, and I can’t think of how he’d be here if they were still breathing. Wouldn’t I have heard something, though? Maybe not. With the distant thump of music from the many floors of the club and how far away the first floor is, even a gunshot might not be obvious.

“We asked nicely,” says Rosiano with a grin that gives me chills.

“Then I’ll ask you nicely to leave. I was kind of in the middle of something,” I say.

His lip curls at that, and the men behind him shift a little, guns still pointed straight at my face. “Ana. Come. Now.”

She reaches for my hand and grips it tight. “What do I do?” she whispers.

There seems to only be one answer that is safe. I don’t even have my gun with me. Even if I did, I couldn’t risk some kind of bloody final stand with Ana in the room. At the same time, if Rosiano leaves here with Ana, he isn’t likely to make the mistake of keeping her somewhere I can easily find her again. What if I can’t find her?

I clench my fists, jaw tight as my eyes move between the four men in front of me and my brain hums with the effort of thinking, coming up with some kind of plan, but I’m met with only emptiness.

“Stay,” I say, eyes not moving from her father. It’s not what I meant to say. Not what I should say, but telling her to do anything else feels physically impossible. I can’t tell her to go when I know there’s even a vague chance that I might never find her after he hides her away.

Rosiano makes a show of looking around the room, eyebrows raised. “Do you know something I don’t know about this room? Are there cameras, maybe? A group of your men on their way to gun us down before we take her from here, whether you like it or not?”

I have nothing. No cameras. No weapon. No more men to back me up. All I have is the burning, acid sickness in my stomach telling me that I can’t let this happen, no matter what.

“Name your price,” I grunt to Rosiano.

“Angelo,” whispers Ana, who stands to hold herself against my arm. “Let me—”

“You don’t talk to him,” snaps Rosiano. “You don’t say another fucking word to him or you’ll be wearing his blood before you can blink. Do you fucking understand me? I’ve put up with your disobedience. All I’ve ever done is try to make the perfect life for you. Protected you. Loved you. Provided anything you could ever want. And you thank me by—” his face contorts when his eyes shift to me, mouth twitching and eyes bulging. “You thank me by fucking some Luciani piece of trash?”

No amount of reason can stop me then. The way he’s talking to my Ana. The way he’s disrespecting her and me. I forget the guns and all that’s at stake in a moment of pure, blind rage when I lunge for Rosiano, who has made the mistake of standing too close to me. I’m on him before his men can react, tangling with him and reaching for his throat. There’s a scrabbling of feet all around me as his men holster their guns to wrestle me free of Rosiano, not wanting to risk shooting and hitting him.

I manage to land a solid punch to Rosiano’s nose and feel the pure satisfaction of his nose crunching from the blow before I’m yanked free of him by three sets of hands.

I’m breathing hard as the man hold me back now, but one of them had to move to hold Ana back from pulling them off me.

Rosiano stands slowly, rubs his nose tenderly with his hand and inspects the blood there as if he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. He raises his eyes up to regard me for a long moment before he opens his mouth to chuckle, but there’s no humor in the sound. “You have balls. I’ll give you that. I can respect a man who doesn’t take shit. I can.”

Rosiano paces in front of me, sniffs up a bloody noseful, and then an evil smile creeps across his lips. “Tell you what. As a show of respect, I’ll let you decide where we put the bullet. You want it here?” he asks, jabbing a finger between my eyes. Or maybe here?” he asks, poking me in the heart. Or,” he asks, lowering his voice and leaning closer. “Do you want to give me a reason to drag this out? To take you apart piece by piece. To find out how long it takes before you beg me to end it. How long you think that’d be, Angelo? I think two days. Maybe three, depending how long it takes the infections to set in. We’d use dirty knives, of course, but sometimes the immune system is stubborn and it takes time.”

I spit in his face then.

He jerks back, expression full of rage before he pulls a pistol from his belt and whips it across my mouth. The men holding me don’t let me slump to the ground even as my legs try to give out from the blinding pain and the taste of blood in my mouth.

“Angelo!” cries Ana. “Dad, stop. Stop it.”

“Shut the fuck up!” He shouts, wheeling toward her and pointing his finger. “You caused all of this. Does that make you happy? Whatever happens to him, you can thank yourself for. Just think about that.”

“If anything happens to him, I’ll kill myself,” she says.

“Ana,” I say through the blood filling my mouth. “Stop. You won’t. You’ll have our baby and you’ll raise it right. Fuck this old bastard. He doesn’t own you. No matter what he does to me. He can’t own you or the baby.”

“I’m serious,” she says, ignoring me and staring straight at her dad as she struggles against the man holding her arms behind her back. “Is he worth that to you? All the love you would have wasted on me if I die?”

Rosiano presses his tongue against the inside of his cheek, considering her threat. He looks back to me again, then leans close and cups my chin in his hand as he glares into my eyes. “I can get to you whenever I want, Luciani. Ana is going to be dead to you from now on, and you to her. You’ll never find her. Never hear about her. And she’ll never hear about you, even if you wind up dead. I’m going to let her little threat save your worthless life. For now. But it’s only buying you time.”

He nods his head to one of the men behind me and the next thing I know is something like a hammer hitting the back of my head. I lose consciousness before my head hits the floor.