🐺 The Forbidden Bed That Made Her the Mafia Boss’s Fiancée

Chapter 10 - The Man Who Would Not Bow

Fear changes sound.

The theater became both too loud and too quiet. Rain hammered the roof. Men moved in the dark. Kate sobbed somewhere near the stage. A gun pressed into my side with intimate certainty.

Adrian stood ten feet away with his weapon lowered just enough to keep Matteo from killing me.

His eyes were not on the gun.

They were on my face.

“Elena,” he said quietly.

I understood then that he was not speaking to the room. He was speaking to the part of me trying not to disappear into panic.

I breathed in.

Held.

Breathed out.

Matteo laughed softly against my hair.

“Touching. Salvatore’s son finally learns to beg.”

Adrian’s gaze moved to him.

“I do not beg.”

“No. You trade. The ledger.”

Vittoria stood near the aisle, pistol raised with both hands. She looked smaller under the broken light, but no less dangerous.

“Matteo,” she said. “Take me.”

He barked a laugh.

“I wanted you twenty years ago. You were more interesting then.”

“You wanted Salvatore to choose you.”

That landed.

I felt Matteo’s grip tighten.

Vittoria continued, voice steady.

“He saw what you were. That is why he trusted Michael Brooks instead of his own brother.”

Matteo’s breathing changed.

Adrian noticed. So did I.

“You think he chose a mechanic over me?” Matteo said.

“I know he did.”

The gun dug harder into my ribs.

“Enough.”

I looked down.

My heel stood on a piece of broken stage glass. My father had once taught me that when trapped, you do not look at the door you want. You look at what is close enough to use.

I shifted my weight.

Adrian’s eyes flicked to my foot.

So brief no one else would have caught it.

He understood.

“Matteo,” Adrian said.

His uncle looked at him.

I brought my heel down hard on his instep and drove my elbow backward with everything terror gave me.

The gun went off.

Pain burned across my upper arm, hot and immediate, but I was already falling forward.

Adrian moved like violence given human shape.

He reached us before Matteo could recover. One hand seized Matteo’s wrist. The gun clattered away. The other drove him back against a row of seats with a crack that echoed through the theater.

Paul’s men flooded the aisles.

Vittoria cut Kate free.

I pressed a hand to my arm and stared at the blood slipping between my fingers.

“Elena.”

Adrian was beside me again, Matteo subdued behind him, his uncle’s face bloodied and furious.

“I’m fine,” I said automatically.

“You are bleeding.”

“I said fine, not elegant.”

His breath left him in something that might have been a laugh if we were different people in a gentler story.

Then Matteo started laughing.

Everyone turned.

“You still don’t know,” he said from the floor.