Page 78 of The Killer Cupcake (Poison Cherry #3)
"Do you realize," she said slowly, "that for the first time since we were teenagers, we're just two people in love? Not Henry Freeman’s girl and Cosimo Ricci’s boy. Not the scandal. Just... us. No one cares, here. No one.”
He approached. "People always care when it comes to us. That’s been the problem from the start.”
"Not here. Not in this moment. Not until that medallion arrives in Italy with us and the Ricci brothers inherit the earth. Not until you start negotiating for everyone’s lives.”
“Touché. Now get dressed. I want him to meet you face to face. Give him something worth caring about." His hands slid up her silk robe, settling at her waist. "Let him see what twenty years of fighting for the perfect woman looks like."
"You want to parade your aging trophy around to a kid who is playing at Mafia games behind his father’s back?” she laughed.
The words had barely left her mouth before he spun her, pressing her back against the wall. His hands captured her face, forcing her to meet his eyes—dark, intense, absolutely certain.
"You're not a trophy. You're bigger than the fucking prize I’ve ever fought for in the boxing ring.” His thumb traced her lower lip. "You're the reason I became more than my father's name. You're why there's still a Ricci empire to inherit. You’re my soul.”
"I thought the Wolf worked alone," she teased.
"The Wolf found his mate." He lifted her easily, her legs wrapping around him. "And she taught him that some victories are worth sharing."
Their mouths met in a clash of greed. Both were unable to stop sharing in the love that felt so honest and pure between them now.
She tasted possession in his kiss, but also partnership.
When he carried her to bed, when her hands found his skin, when he pressed her down into goose-feather softness—it was both claiming and surrender.
They moved together with the synchronicity of lovers who'd memorized each other's rhythms through years of separation and reunion.
And there, in their temporary Eden, they wrote their victory in each other's skin, until the approaching storm of Giovanni Ricci became nothing more than a distant thunderclap in their perfect sky.
The knock came sooner than expected. Carmelo had to take a call from Stefano before he hopped back in the shower to prepare for his meeting. That left her to meander through the villa.
She turned and looked over at Marco. He nodded in respect and approached the door.
"Wait." The command in her voice surprised them both. "Let me answer it. I'd like to greet this Giovanni Battaglia first."
Kathy walked with her spine straight and chin up toward the door .
Lethal grace she'd perfected over decades—a walk that had stopped conversations in New Orleans speakeasies and Harlem back-door meetings alike.
The Elliot blood ran thick in her veins, her father's ruthless cunning matched only by her mother's legendary skill with both seasoning and poison.
Her turquoise summer dress flowed like the Mediterranean itself, the front split revealing her slender legs that ended in pointed heels sharp enough to draw blood.
At forty-eight, she'd traded youth's raw beauty for something far more dangerous: the striking elegance of a woman who'd survived every game the underworld could play.
The silver threading through her dark hair caught the light like moonlight on obsidian, framing features that had launched a thousand vendettas by her Don.
She opened the door and felt the world shift.
The man standing there could have stepped from Michelangelo's fever dreams—all sharp Mediterranean angles carved by gods who understood both beauty and cruelty.
He was taller than most Sicilians she'd known, easily, with the build of a gladiator wrapped in modern elegance.
Dark hair and lashes ringed cunningly deceptive eyes; he couldn't be more than twenty-three or four, the same age as her daughter.
His white linen shirt, rolled to the elbows, revealed forearms corded with the kind of strength that came from more than just gymnasium visits.
"Ciao," she said, letting the word roll off her tongue like aged bourbon.
"Ciao, bel—" His voice, velvet poured over broken glass, caught mid-word. Then he paused, letting his gaze sweep over her. She could read the calculations spinning behind that beautiful face: Black. American. Here. Wife?
The confusion lasted barely a heartbeat before his training kicked in, but Kathy had been reading men since before this boy had taken his first breath.
She'd seen that look before—in Manhattan boardrooms, in Little Italy restaurants, in a hundred places where her presence upset careful equations about power and place.
"Is this the Ricci place?” He recovered smoothly, but she heard the slight adjustment in his tone, the recalibration of a young man raised on stories of Sicilian and Italian purity encountering something outside his world.
"It is for now." She leaned against the doorframe with deliberate ease, studying him with the same intensity he'd shown her. Let him look. Let him wonder how Henry Freeman's daughter had become Carmelo Ricci's queen. "And you must be Giovanni Battaglia?”
The visitor smirked at her coy manner.
“Please, come in."
Something dangerous flickered across his face—pride wounded, perhaps. "Grazie, for the warm greeting, but I am not Giovanni."
Marco's hand moved subtly toward the weapon under his arm. Kathy's pulse quickened with the thrill of the unexpected, though her face remained a mask of polite interest. She stopped her step and turned to face him. ”Oh? Then who are you?"
His gaze swept over the accommodations they had acquired in the village with approval, then landed on her again.
She saw him make a decision—to play this game on equal footing, tradition be damned.
The hunger in his eyes sharpened into something more calculating.
Here was a boy raised to inherit an empire, finding something he'd never factored into his equations for power.
"Lorenzo Battaglia." He paused, letting the name settle between them like a declaration of war. "I'm his other half. The better half. And you must be…?”
“Donna Katherine Freeman Ricci." She used her full name deliberately, adding the label of Donna to her Don. Something Ernesto coached her on before the visit. She watched him again process the information he had presumed. "I'm Don Ricci's better half."
His perfectly sculpted features arranged themselves into an expression of intrigued recognition.
This young wolf had done his homework, but clearly, the briefings hadn't included her.
"Ah? I've heard of you." The lie came smooth as silk, but she heard the curiosity bleeding through.
A Black American woman who'd claimed a Don.
In his uncle's rigid world, she was an impossibility made flesh.
"Now I'm confused. Who invited you, Lorenzo? This party is for Giovanni only.”
The bark of laughter that escaped him was genuine—dark chocolate laced with arsenic.
He walked deeper into the villa, passing her, with the confidence of a young god who'd never met a rule he couldn't break, but she noticed how his eyes kept returning to her, trying to solve the puzzle she represented.
"I'm the man he needs to speak to." Each word dripped with the arrogance of youth convinced of its own immortality. "Trust me. I run things."
"Do you?" She let amusement color her voice. This boy, trying to steal his cousin's thunder, had no idea he'd just walked into a game where the rules had been written by survivors, not inheritors.
"We shall see," she purred, moving past him with deliberate grace, letting him catch a whisper of her perfume—jasmine and lavendere, her mother's formula.
"Come with me," Kathy said, leading him toward the veranda where breakfast waited like a beautifully laid trap. He followed, and she could feel his eyes on her, trying to reconcile everything he'd been taught about the old ways with the reality of her American existence.
Marco followed them both, his attention sharp as a blade.
He knew, as she did, that Lorenzo Battaglia had just complicated everything.
This wasn't just Giovanni's ambitious cousin—this was a young man who'd walked in expecting to find the usual players and discovered instead that the game itself had changed.
As they stepped onto the sun-drenched, white limestone veranda, Kathy allowed herself a small, private smile.
Carmelo had prepared for Giovanni—steady, traditional Giovanni who played by the rules.
But Lorenzo? Lorenzo was hunger made flesh, ambition without wisdom, beauty without restraint.
A wild card. Possibly the only card in the deck they needed.