Aria Ruso
The last thing I expected was for my door to slam open before the light of the day had even begun streaming through my windows. The hallway light had me slamming my eyes closed and pulling the comforter over my head. Early mornings had never been something I preferred. I’d worked midnights at the ICU for years, and in four years at college, I’d only ever signed up for one eight AM class out of obligation.
If the sun wasn’t up yet, I wasn’t either.
“Get up,” Cade shouted, turning on the light in my room. Somehow, the light seeped through my light-colored comforter.
I groaned. “Come back at normal business hours, and we can talk.”
He tugged on my comforter, but I held it tightly beneath me, refusing to budge.
“Stop being a child,” he demanded, his voice hard. “We’re training. It’s important.”
I shook my head, peeking out of the covers slightly to meet his eyes. Somehow, the man had already put on a pair of rough jeans and a button-up long-sleeve shirt. He was ready for the day, and I was envious of his ability to be so put together despite the hour.
“My training with Carter is at eleven, and I guarantee that he wouldn’t make me get up earlier to join him. He knows my thoughts on mornings.”
“Aria,” he scowled. “Get your ass out of bed.”
The back and forth between us was waking me, but I didn’t want to be awake. I wondered if I could close my eyes and hide beneath these covers long enough for him to go away…
“I want you out of bed for one morning, but if you give me a hard time, I’ll make this an every morning ritual. It won’t be any skin off my back to come and get you every morning when I get up.”
I groaned, knowing that he could match my stubbornness tenfold. I had no doubt that he’d use this against me and do exactly as he said, so I flung the warm covers down, exposing the top half of my body. I wore an oversize T-shirt, so no unmentionables were exposed, but it didn’t stop him from looking.
“Pervert,” I groaned. I considered what still remained under the blankets, and an idea popped into my mind-one that I knew I shouldn’t act on. I’d seen the way he’d reacted yesterday when I’d shamelessly flirted with him, and I knew that no matter how much he hated me, he still reacted to me in a way I couldn’t explain.
I knew that I had a hold on him, and I could use that to get precisely the reaction I wanted.
“Out. Of. Bed,” he repeated slowly.
“Fine,” I told him, allowing a smirk to cover my face as I flung off the rest of the covers and allowed the cool air of the room to chill my legs.
My bare legs.
I wore only a pair of lacey underwear beneath the long T-shirt, and as I stood, I knew he had an eyeful of that lace. I went as far as to lift my arms over my head in a deep stretch, and as I turned my body, I felt his gaze fixed on me. I walked slowly across the room, looking at the few pieces of clothing I had resting on my dresser. I had an outfit prepared for the day, but instead of using it, I shifted through the dresser drawers slowly, bending slightly as I picked up a pair of pants and a floral shirt.
I made sure to keep my legs straight as I bent, flinging my hair over a shoulder as I arched my back and slowly made my way up, smiling at him as I went.
Oh, he was reacting exactly how I’d expected. His fists were clenched hard enough that they turned white, and the veins in his arms stood starkly against his skin. I walked past him, going as far as brushing my hand against his arm, before closing the door to the bathroom. On the other side of the door, I heard his deep exhale and muttered curses.
I took my time dressing and brushing my teeth. If he was going to interrupt my beauty sleep, I wouldn’t make it easy on him. Where did he think he got the right to wake me up at five-thirty in the morning?
When I finally came out, he was in the same spot. He looked me up and down and strode from the room, expecting me to follow. I grabbed my shoes from beside the door and carried them at my side as I hustled to follow. “I don’t understand why you suddenly insist on spending time with me,” I said. “At five-thirty in the morning.”
“Shitty company is better than no company,” he reminded me, and I shot daggers toward the back of his head. Asshole. “And I learned yesterday that there’s more of a threat to your well-being than I had initially believed.
There’s a price on your head, and I want to make sure that you can take care of yourself if that’s possible.”
I stumbled over my own feet as I heard that. Matteo had sent me here to be an informant. I hadn’t told him much, but I intended to. I felt guilty about giving out information on these people when I’d spent time around them, and I had made sure to avoid using Carter’s name. “My brother wouldn’t-”
“It’s not from your brother.”
I had no idea who else I could have pissed off enough to get a hit on my head. “That can’t be right.”
“People are angry about this alliance, and they don’t want it to stand.
Taking you out will take out the alliance.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. If news of this alliance had gotten out, I could only imagine how the people in the other families would feel about it. My father had hated the Irish influence on the mafia that had been growing in recent years, and all the other families were on the same page. I thought Matteo would have explained his plans to the other families, but it wouldn’t have been a wise move, I realized. The more people who knew his plans, the more likely it was that Cade would learn of them.
Matteo had to risk our arrangement looking legitimate.
All these thoughts swirled in my mind as we reached the front door of the house and I put on my shoes. I followed him out and onto the grounds of his property. I had no idea where we were going, but I didn’t care.
“Your brother could have ended this with some bullshit excuse as to why you were here. He didn’t have to tell them about the alliance,” Cade said, his frustration showing.
“My brother isn’t my biggest fan for the same reason as you aren’t,” I told him. “Didn’t you wonder why he’d use me like this without an issue? He doesn’t care whether or not I live. He just wants to use me to get what he wants.”
Cade’s jaw clicked as he led me toward a wide building. I eyed the exterior, but I followed him inside, shocked by what I saw. It was a shooting range-a fancy one with all the electronic mechanisms a good range would need. I understood now why he wanted to train me. This was a different kind of training. Gun training.
He guided us toward the closest target and took out his gun, placing it on the table in front of us. He grabbed two sets of ear protection and rested them there, too. “It surprises me that he hates you,” he admitted. “He used
to love you. He would get into fights over you.”
I snorted. “No, he wouldn’t.”
But Cade looked serious. “When we’d go out and get ourselves into trouble, if he heard one person say your name, he was swinging. He’s always been extra protective over you. I was the only one allowed to fuck with you, and it was only because he knew I wouldn’t take it too far.”
But you did take it too far, I wanted to say. I knew it would be pointless, though. Instead, I took a deep breath and kept my mouth shut.
“That’s not who he is now,” I told Cade. “He genuinely hates me. He isn’t the same person you were friends with, and I don’t know if he’ll ever be that person again. I don’t know what changed him, but there was something. If you spent more than a few minutes in a room with him, you’d see it.”
I didn’t think I had ever admitted that he wouldn’t be that same person again, but hearing it had my chest aching with a realization I didn’t want to have.
Cade only nodded, putting on his ear protection before walking me through how to shoot a gun. He showed me all the parts of the gun, and I paid close attention to each of them. It felt odd that after all the years I’d been around guns, I knew nothing about them. I’d seen entire arsenals on the kitchen table for the better part of my life, but my father had never once asked if I wanted to learn how to use them.
I wondered at what age Matteo had learned to shoot.
As I walked through the steps of learning to shoot, I focused as well as possible. Unfortunately, I couldn’t shake the conversation about my brother.
I knew that I had to keep our dealings secret. I couldn’t tell Cade about Matteo’s future betrayal and the way I was supposed to be feeding him information.
But… a part of me felt guilty for what I was doing. Cade’s hatred for me made my decision feel easy at first, but something was changing. Guilt slowly began eating away at me as I realized that despite his brutality, Cade seemed to genuinely care about what happened to me. If he didn’t, he would have never brought me here and shown me how to shoot a gun.
He was a cruel, murderous mafia boss who married me out of a sense of obligation, but regardless of what he’d done, he had at least one decent bone in his body.
I hated him, and that wouldn’t change, but maybe I could understand him a little bit, too.