Page 35 of Her Dark Mafia Protector

“He just might be,” she says with all seriousness in her tone. “Trust me when I say that I am not atallembellishing what I’m about to tell you.”

Elle goes on to paint an absolutely horrifying picture of Dante and of the new reality that Zara has gotten herself into. The money that she stole using her tech skills was straight out of Dante’s personal accounts, but for some reason, she didn’t place his name with hisnickname,and she had no idea who she was getting involved with.

“He’s the most decadent Don in all of Vegas,” Elle says. “His penthouse is quite literally referred to as a palace in the sky.”

“How do you know that in less than an hour’s worth of researching behind your keyboard?”

“I have contacts with some of the housekeeping staff in most of the prominent buildings in the city. I know a woman whose sister is a maid in Dante’s building. She’s been inside his place before. She said she’s seen all kinds of wealth and luxury and obnoxious abundance, but that she’s never seen anything like Dante’s penthouse before.”

“Okay, so he’s really fucking rich,” I say. “That probably works in Zara’s favor. Maybe he won’t even miss the money she took.”

“Doubtful,” Elle frowns. “This guy prides himself on being incompletecontrol. From the bank account to the bedroom to the boardroom, everyone who has ever had contact with him says that he doesn’t toleratedisobedienceand that he holds a grudge until he feels he’s beenobeyedand rightly compensated for.”

Zara is out of her depth. She thought she could steal from the most decadent don in the city and walk away unscathed. From the picture that Elle is painting, it sure doesn’t seem like that’s likely.

“Nico,” she says as she turns her laptop to face me and pulls up a social media post to show me. “This woman was an ex-girlfriend of Dante’s several years ago. I found her social media profile when I was digging around online and following various rabbit holes to their bottoms to see what I could find. She went from being a beautiful, wealthy, mafia princess to being a homeless drug addict on the street.”

“What happened to her?” I ask as I stare at the photograph of a once-lovely woman with hollow-looking eyes. The post is old, and nothing has been added to her social media account for years.

“The official statement is that she overdosed and died. But if you read the comments, you’ll find a different story being floated.”

I take a minute to read through the comments on the woman’s latest post. The comments are all much more recent than the date of the post. And just like Elle said, they are all remarking on the woman’s overdose and raising questions about whether she really did kill herself or if there was foul play at hand. One comment even blatantly calls out the idea that she was murdered by her ex and that the whole thing was covered up.

“Why would Dante have murdered her?” I ask as I look through some of the other notes that Elle scribbled down. “Was she cheating on him or something? Obviously, that doesn’t make it right, but what motive would he have had?”

“That’s the really bad part,” she says, as if all of this wasn’t bad enough. “Look.”

Elle clicks on another open tab, and a video snippet plays. It’s Dante making a public statement about pressing charges against the same woman from the social media account.

“Apparently,” Elle says as we watch the video together, and I take note of the way Dante’s eyes stare down the camera. “After their relationship ended, shestole money from him. It wasn’t even a lot; a few thousand dollars is what I think the charges indicated. It was less than a week after that when she was found dead on the street, surrounded by a halo of drug paraphernalia. All the woman’s friends said that their relationship burned hot for a while, but then Dante grew bored with her, and things went sideways.”

I watch him speak for a few more seconds on the video clip and then press pause. The frozen frame shows a devilishly handsome man with evil intent behind his eyes. I’ve seen men like him before, men who won’t let up simply because they don’t have to and feel as if they areowedsomething from others. Zara couldn’t have possibly known that this was the kind of man she was stealing from. Now she’s trapped, and she doesn’t even know it, a pawn in Dante’s twisted games, only useful until he grows bored with her. He’s a spider, and she’s caught in his web.

I clench my fists against the table. Zara might have put Elle in danger without thinking and without knowing how important she was to me. But I won’t leave her to the mercy of a man whose hunger is never satisfied.

“Elle, I know we said that we were going to walk away from all of this and ride off into the sunset together without looking back, but Zara’s my friend. She’s played with fire, and now she’s goingto burn. The only way to save her is to plunge directly into Dante Marchesi’s darkness—and hope we don’t lose ourselves along the way.”

“I’m with you,” she says as she reaches her hand out to place in mine. “And I don’t think we’ll get lost this time. We’ve already crawled through all the shadows and come out the other side into the light. Let’s go help your friend find her way out of the darkness before a man like Dante drags her down into the underworld with him.”

THE END