Page 219 of The Devil's Thorn

We moved slowly through the crowd, and I caught the way their eyes lingered on Rafael with deference, some with veiled resentment. Men with lined faces and designer suits leanedin toward him with half-smirks, murmuring things I couldn’t hear, their gazes flicking to me with careful calculation. Some approving. Some wary.

“Rafael Romanov,” one of them said—a tall man with gray streaking his temples and a heavy ring on his pinky. He clasped Rafael’s hand firmly, then turned to me. “And this must be the woman we’ve heard whispers about.”

Rafael’s jaw twitched slightly. “This is Isabella.”

The man took my hand, his grip gentle. He didn’t kiss it—just nodded. “You have fire in your eyes, ragazza. I’m curious to see if it’s all show.”

I met his gaze. Calm. Controlled. “You’ll have to keep watching to find out.”

He chuckled, then melted back into the crowd.

We moved further into the villa until Rafael leaned down, his breath brushing the shell of my ear. “This way.”

We stepped past velvet ropes guarded by two men in black suits and entered a smaller, elevated room where an opulent table waited, surrounded by twelve chairs.

I recognized a few faces already seated there—men Rafael had prepared me for. Leaders. Power brokers. The kind of men who didn’t just control cities… they decided how the shadows fell across them.

Rafael pulled out a chair for me, and I slid into it with practiced ease. He took the one beside mine, his fingers brushing the curve of my thigh beneath the table as if reminding me, I was still tethered to him.

Nikolai sat on his other side. Yuri was across from us, leaning back casually, a glass of whiskey already in hand like this wasn’t a den of wolves dressed in silk and smoke.

I kept my expression neutral, my gaze gliding from one face to the next, silently cataloguing the ones I recognized. Some gaveme polite nods. Others ignored me completely, already speaking to each other in low, clipped voices.

“Word is,” one of them said, swirling his glass lazily, “that Viktor’s absence tonight is intentional.”

“Or convenient,” another added, voice flat.

Rafael didn’t say anything. His silence carried weight.

To my right, a younger man leaned slightly toward me, speaking just loud enough for the table. “They say Viktor’s been working on something big in the dark. And when he resurfaces, he’ll have leverage we can’t afford to ignore.”

“Until then,” someone else muttered, “we move carefully.”

I stayed still, listening. This wasn’t a dinner. It was a test. A performance. A stage carved out for power and scrutiny. And I had just been handed a lead role.

Wine was poured, and the conversation shifted to trade, shipment routes, alliances no one would name aloud. The names passed around sounded more like code than people. I didn’t speak. I didn’t need to. I observed. Measured. Calculated.

But even through it all, one seat at the table remained empty. The one at the far end. I glanced toward it, something cold threading through my spine.

Rafael’s fingers flexed against my thigh. Subtle. Intentional. “He’ll come,” he murmured, low enough for only me. “Lorenzo always makes an entrance.”

I said nothing. But my chest tightened all the same. I didn’t know why. Not yet.

The low hum of conversations wove through the air like smoke—thick, slow, impossible to ignore. I sat still, my back straight, the cool press of the chair grounding me as I traced the rim of my untouched glass with one finger. The men at the table spoke in fragments—about arms shipments, routes, movements in the south. There were names dropped that meant nothing tothe outside world but carried weight here, spoken like warnings more than information.

A man two seats down leaned forward, his suit too tight around the shoulders, his cologne sharp. “You lost anything else in the Black Sea route, Romanov?”

Rafael didn’t flinch. “If I did, I’d let you know by now. And we both know you’d charge me to hear it.”

Laughter rippled around the table—tight, short, loaded.

I glanced across at Yuri, who rolled his eyes and whispered something under his breath before tipping back his whiskey. He hadn’t stopped smirking since we sat down.

My gaze drifted, taking in the nuances. The quiet flick of someone’s wrist to summon a server. The way two men exchanged a glance and then said nothing, letting silence speak for them. Power wasn’t in how loud they spoke—it was in how little they had to.

And all through it, Rafael stayed silent more than he spoke. Watching. Measuring. His hand rested lightly on my thigh beneath the table again, his thumb brushing once, a signal that I wasn’t just here to observe—I was part of the calculation.

A man on Rafael’s left was discussing a lost shipment like he was commenting on the weather. “You can’t trust anything moving through the Adriatic right now. Word is someone in Palermo’s been bought out.”