Page 63 of The Bonventi War

"Just keep driving," I say firmly. "I don't care where."

But that's not entirely true. I want to go back. I want to grab her, shake her until she understands what she means to me. Until she sees that everything I've done, every move I've made, has been to keep her safe. To keep her mine.

"I'm just a job to you, remember?"

But she wasn't. She hasn't been "just a job" since—when? Since I saw her pleasuring herself, knowing I was watching? Since I felt her come apart around me? Since I woke to find her gone from my bed, and the loss was physical, like missing a limb?

No. It was before that. Maybe since I first saw her in that gallery, chin up, eyes defiant. Something in me recognized something in her. A fierceness. A loyalty. A vulnerability she tried like hell to hide.

The kind of woman who could stand beside a man like me. The kind who could bear my children, raise them with that same fire in their veins. The kind who wouldn't flinch from what I am, what I do—but who would make me want to be, not better, exactly, but worthy of her.

And what did I do? I forced my way into her life. I put cameras in her home. I killed men in front of her. I claimed her like she was property.

"Maybe I don't want to be another thing you own."

But she's mine and I'm her's.

She became mine the moment I decided she was, and nothing—not her denial, not her father's scheming, not even her hatred—will change that.

The part that's eating me alive, the part that makes me want to break something, is that maybe I am exactly the monster she thinks I am.

My phone buzzes. Ares. I almost ignore it, but for some reason, I answer, even when everything else is going to shit.

"What?" I bark into the phone.

"Bad timing?" Ares's voice comes through, a hint of amusement in it that makes me want to reach through the phone and strangle him.

"You could say that."

"The gallery girl giving you trouble?"

I clench my jaw so hard I'm surprised my teeth don't shatter. "She thinks I've been using her. That everything between uswas just a fucking scheme to find out why her brother was the shooter."

Ares is quiet for a beat. "Wasn't it, initially?"

"Fuck you." I hang up.

My phone immediately buzzes again. I answer it with a snarl.

"What part of 'fuck you' was unclear?"

"The part where you're acting like a lovesick teenager," Ares replies evenly. "Since when does Giovanni Bonventi let a woman get under his skin like this?"

Since her. Since Raven. The thought comes unbidden and unwelcome.

"She's making deals with her piece-of-shit father. The same father who was ready to sell her to the Russians like she was fucking merchandise." My free hand balls into a fist. "She's choosing him over me."

"Is that what's really bothering you?" Ares asks. "That she's choosing her father? Or that she doesn't believe you care about her?"

I stare out the window at the passing city, seeing nothing. "She called me a monster."

"You are a monster, Gio. Just like me, just like Enzo, Marco, shit, all of us. It's what we do. It's who we are."

"Not to her." The words escape before I can stop them. "I was never a monster to her."

Ares sighs heavily. "Where are you headed?"

"I have no fucking idea."