Page 60 of Precious Hazard (Perfectly Imperfect #11)

For the light of warm, green eyes.

My eyes snap open.

“Your snores are as loud as a freight train, DeVille,” Tara mumbles beside me. Her hair has spilled across the pillow, strands tickling my nose.

I sigh. That was one weird as fuck dream. I lay my hand on the small of my wife’s back and glide my palm upward along her spine. “I guess you should get used to it.”

“Can I request a bonus?” She flips over, turning to face me. “A hundred grand for suffering due to hazardous sleep conditions that were not disclosed during our negotiations?”

I grit my teeth. She had to bring it up again. “Saving you from gun-wielding thugs wasn’t in the contract either, yet I did it anyway.”

“Please. Those idiots had more gusto than brains and had absolutely no training. We probably would have managed just fine without you.”

“Yeah, sure.” I gently sweep the hair off her forehead to have a better look at the cut she received.

“Were you really worried? At the club. You said you were scared for me.”

A chill races down my spine. Saying that I was scared is putting it mildly. I was fucking terrified.

“Of course I was. Can you imagine the depth of the shit the Family would be in if something happened to you on my watch? Drago would have gone ballistic.”

“I was at my brother’s club when the attack happened. If anyone was going to be blamed, it would have been him.”

Damn right, he’d be to blame! And is, actually. Something I won’t forget anytime soon. But I can’t admit that to her.

“You’re my wife, and therefore, my responsibility. Having said that, from this point on, you won’t leave our property unless your entire security detail and I am with you.”

Anger flashes in her eyes. “You can’t just lock me up!”

I can. And I will. I refuse to ever go through the kind of horrid shit I went through last night again. “You should put something on that cut.”

“Don’t change the fricking subject again!”

“It’s not up for discussion, Tara. I’m willing to overlook the fact that you violated the terms of our agreement by working at your brother’s club if you assure me that it won’t happen again.”

“Both you and your agreement can go to hell,” she sneers and leaps out of bed.

My eyes track her as she rushes toward the door connecting our bedrooms, picking up her clothes from the floor along the way. She stops at the threshold and glares at me over her shoulder.

“By the way, what I agreed to is that I wouldn’t work at the club.

” An impish smile breaks across her face.

“Work implies payment for services rendered. Since I was simply helping out without the expectation of monetary compensation, there was no violation of the terms on my part. And there’s nothing in that document that forbids me from doing it again.

You really need to be more cognizant of the shit you sign, DeVille. ”

The door slides closed in my awestruck face.

I’m fuming the entire time I’m in the shower and while I get dressed for work.

It’s absolutely unthinkable that she’d risk her safety just to spite me!

She’s so damn stubborn! The fear that gripped me when I had no idea whether she was alive, hurt, or dead is still playing havoc with my head.

The worst-case scenarios of my wife’s body peppered with bullets or her being snatched away to God-only-knows-where are flashing through my mind, and there’s nothing I can do to stop the crushing horror show.

My guts twist, and the remnants of my last meal threaten to make a reappearance, sending me to double over at the thought of what could have happened if I’d been too late.

“Greta!” I holler as I hurry down the stairs while shrugging into my jacket.

“Yes, Mr. DeVille?” she calls back from the kitchen.

“I won’t be back until late tonight, so consider your ban on cooking for my wife lifted. Could you please fix her something for lunch?”

She peeks around the corner. “Of course. Anything in particular?”

“Just see what she wants. But maybe forgo another soup. I’m sure she’s sick and tired of those after a full week of eating them. By the way, thank you for going out of your way and cooking them for me. They were… quite nourishing.”

“Oh no, that wasn’t me. Did you like how the cream of potato turned out? Mrs. DeVille had a bit of trouble with it.”

I jerk to a halt halfway to the front door. “You didn’t make the soups while I was sick?”

“No, that was your wife. She was worried about you being contagious, so she gave me a week off and didn’t let anyone else inside the house.

” She resumes wiping the countertop and then exhales a heavy sigh.

“Poor thing. She was so nervous. Called me each time she thought the stove made a strange noise. Or whenever the smell of gas lingered in the kitchen longer than she expected it would. You might want to consider replacing it with an electric range, Mr. DeVille. This one must be a very painful reminder of what happened to her dear sister.”

“Her sister died in a bomb blast.”

“Actually, no. Mrs. DeVille said it was in the house fire that followed after the gas to their stove blew up. Honestly, if I were her, I’d probably never be able to go near another gas appliance or any kind of flame. But that girl—”

I don’t hear what else Greta says. Instead, I take off sprinting up the stairs. Ignoring the ringing phone in my pocket. Not caring that it’s probably the don on the line. What the fuck? Why didn’t she tell me? I’m in front of her door in no time.

“Tara.”

Knock. Knock.

“I’m sleeping!” An agitated, terse reply. “Go away.”

I sigh, leaning my forehead against the white door. “Why did you lie? Why did you let me believe that it was Greta who was preparing my meals? And why… why the fuck didn’t you just tell me about your issue with the stove?”

Her footsteps echo as she approaches the door and then opens it a crack. “I didn’t lie, DeVille. You simply assumed. Just as you assumed many other things about me.”

“I’m sorry, gattina . I… I thought you hated my guts.”

“Save your apologies. Especially since, as you so eloquently implied, the food sucked a big one. I hope that, at least, the notes I left for you on that contract didn’t disappoint you as much.”

“Those were… amazing. But I figured it was Ginger who made them, not you.”

“Hmm. Well… Perhaps, next time, she could nurse you while you run an insane fever, force-feed you meds, and drag your heavy ass into a cold shower to bring it down.”

The door slams shut in my face for the second time today.

I stare at the slab of the door, at a loss for words, while a myriad of emotions rage inside me.

Suffocating me. It wasn’t a hallucination.

All those flashes that I thought were a product of my fever were real.

She was there the whole time. Jesus fuck, she could have gotten seriously sick because of me, all while I’ve been spewing shit at her like a stupid asshole.

And the gas stove… Fuck! I never even bothered to figure out the reason behind her reticence to cook.

I simply assumed it was one of her bratty impulses.

I never thought… Shit. She’s been making me food for days.

Dear God, my little hazard must have been scared out of her mind, and yet…

she pushed past it. For me. For the ungrateful fucknut that I am.

Closing my eyes, I lean my forehead on the wooden surface. My palms, too, like I can shove the stupid thing away. Remove the damn barrier between us. But it’s not the door that’s separating us. It’s my idiotic behavior. From the very beginning of… us.

“Tara,” I rasp.

“Leave me alone!” The words, muffled and a little broken, flow through the solid wood standing in my way. “And answer that bloody phone! It’s annoying.”

***

“Are you listening to me, Arturo?”

I drag my gaze up from my hands and look at Nino.

We’ve spent the last hour in Ajello’s office, briefing the don on our next steps for dealing with the Greek Syndicate.

When Ajello’s phone rang, and he got up and headed to the far corner to speak with his wife, my mind again drifted to the scene between me and Tara earlier.

That’s the only thing I seem to be capable of thinking of since leaving home.

“Not really.” I shrug. My skin is crawling with the need to get home. To my Tara. I’m not sure I give a fuck about stategizing or generally doing my job right the fuck now.

“I said, it sucks that we can’t simply kill the old Katrakis,” Nino grumbles from the other side of the conference desk. “Politics, even Mafia politics, are such a pain in the ass.”

I grunt. The two dead security guys at our Brooklyn construction site were Regular Joes, temps from a locally hired private security firm.

A firm we’ve been looking at recruiting into our ranks.

The deal isn’t done yet, so we can’t claim that it was our men who were killed.

There’s also ambiguity in terms of Katrakis’s motive.

Without any solid proof that it was a direct attack on our Family, we can’t assert justifiable retaliation against the Greeks.

Navigating the criminal underbelly of the world is a tricky business.

With so many players jam-packed into close quarters, one wrong move could seriously impact whether you live long enough to enjoy that elbow room you managed to carve out for yourself.

Every action needs to be weighed against every possible outcome to ensure it won’t endanger the Family’s prosperity.

I know that, too. And I’ve never had a problem with it. Until today.

“I’m going to crush that motherfucker’s spine,” I growl.

The fear of what could have happened to Tara is still sitting like a boulder in my stomach.

Just thinking about how close I came to losing her is driving me insane.

“I’ll be sure to do it one vertebra at a time.

And then I’ll hunt down the remnants of the Vipers gang and do the same to each man for going along with the attack on Naos. ”