Her Dog Escaped Into The Mafia Boss’s Penthouse — She Had to Join His Family Lunch to Get Him Back
Chapter 4
“No,” she said, her voice steadier than she expected. “Thank you for the meal. But I really have to go.” She met his gaze directly. “Please. I need to go home.”
He studied her for a long, silent moment, the entire table seeming to hold its breath around them, waiting for his cue. He was searching her face for something — weakness, defiance, fear — and she was fairly certain he found all three at once. Finally, he gave a small, sharp nod.
“Gio. Get the lady’s dog.”
It was over. The relief was so sudden and so potent it made her dizzy. Gio gently scooped up the sleeping Otis and handed him across. Lena clutched him to her chest hard enough that he let out a small, offended whimper.
“Thank you,” she mumbled, already pushing her chair back.
“I’ll walk you out,” Matteo said, standing instantly. The entire table rose with him.
She didn’t wait. She turned and walked quickly back through the marble foyer, aware of him behind her, his long, unhurried strides somehow keeping perfect pace with her rushed ones. He smelled of wine and something cold and metallic beneath the expensive cologne. She reached the massive front door, her hand on the handle, when his own hand landed on the wood just above her head, blocking her exit.
“You’re shaking,” he observed. His voice had changed — the performance for his family gone, replaced by something quieter, more intimate, and a thousand times more unsettling.
“I’m sorry I interrupted,” she said, cheek pressed to Otis’s fur, not looking at him.
“You’re not sorry,” he said. “But you are frightened. You should be.” He leaned in fractionally, and she could feel the warmth radiating off him. “Let me go. You don’t belong in this building,” he continued, as though she hadn’t spoken. “Your apartment is a clerical error. You’re a stray. Same as him.” He nodded down at Otis.
Tears of pure humiliation and fear stung her eyes. “Please.”
“You’re interesting,” he said, ignoring the plea entirely. His fingers — the ones that had held the wine glass, that had fed her dog scraps of bread — brushed her wrist, right over the pulse hammering beneath the skin. It wasn’t a caress. It wasn’t a grab. It was something closer to a brand, one light, deliberate graze exactly where her fear was loudest. “Have a good evening, Lena.”
He knew her name. She hadn’t given it. She didn’t ask how. She wrenched the door open, crossed the twenty feet back to her own apartment on legs that barely held her, and fumbled the key into the lock three times before it finally caught. She slammed the door, threw the deadbolt, and slid down against it until she was sitting on her own cheap welcome mat with her head in her hands, Otis wriggling free to trot happily toward his water bowl, entirely unbothered by the afternoon he’d just caused.
She didn’t sleep that night. Her apartment, which had always been her sanctuary, now felt flimsy — the deadbolt suddenly paper-thin, the brick wall outside her window suddenly a cage rather than merely a dull view. She lay awake replaying the meal, the coded words, the ice behind Isabelle’s smile, the effortless, absolute power of the man who commanded that entire room without raising his voice once. And she replayed, too, the low terrible intimacy in his voice at the door, the brush of his fingers against her skin.
She should have been repulsed. She was repulsed. She was also, as the first gray light of dawn crept into her small room, forced to admit a small and deeply unwelcome truth: beneath the terror, something she hadn’t felt in years had quietly sparked to life. It wasn’t only fear. It was the specific, terrible thrill of having been, for one single hour, entirely and unmistakably seen.