Kiss Me in the Dark Anthology - Monica James Page 0,108
was the one pledging to kill a man.
My own father.
It was disgusting, but my words were true.
If I survived, if I saw him again, I’d string him up from a tree with bells tied to his ankles so he sang in the wind, just as Rocco had promised to do to the rest of my family.
“Cosima,” Seamus started to say, stepping forward with his hands outstretched in benediction.
“Remember the promise you made to me. Now, get out.”
Stupidly, my father looked at my owner who only crossed his arms over his chest and dipped his chin so he could glare at my father from a better angle.
Tears spilled over as Seamus looked back at me, but he nodded slowly, his shoulders sunken as he followed the butler out the door.
I didn’t turn to watch him go.
Instead, I swivelled to fully face my new owner with my hands on my hips. “Now, you can tell me what the fuck you think you’re doing. I saved your goddamn life!”
He only blinked at me in a way that was much more elegant than a shrug.
“So, this is how you repay me?” I snapped.
“I told you that day to take care where you stick your pretty little neck out. A hunter like me might find you too pretty a thing not to take a bite out of, or at least to use as bait.”
Despite myself, his cruel expression scared me. Goose bumps ripped like torn Velcro across my flesh. “I didn’t take you for a man who would resort to buying a woman like livestock.”
A shift came over his face unlike anything I had ever seen before. His placid expression melted away to reveal the cold as stone heart of him.
I opened my mouth to say something but stopped when he took a massive step forward into my space. His fingers found my chin and held it in a firm grip so that I couldn’t look away from his liquid black eyes.
Without thought, my lips curled into a snarl at his proximity.
“Irish and Italian,” he scolded with a soft click of his tongue against his teeth. “I doubt you’ll prove the stereotypes incorrect and prove to be an obedient, docile little slave.”
“Hai ragione,” I said, agreeing with him.
He surprised me by smiling sharply into my face, pressing a thumb over the middle of my closed lips so that I couldn’t speak. “No problem, my beauty. I look forward to breaking you.”
Then, before I could bite his thumb off the way I planned, a sharp, small pain erupted at the side of my neck, and I passed out.
Four months earlier.
Outside, Milan was sweltering and bright. A baby cried somewhere in the street while another couple argued furiously in Italian dialect. The yellow light of a mid-spring dawn saturated the waiting room and made the multitudes of beautiful women lining the white plastic chairs blink sleepily. It was five am and no one had the right to be attractive at such an early hour but for these women, visible fatigue was not an option.
I sat in the corner in the small, stuffy room clutching my portfolio with both damp palms. It was abysmal really, next to the stacks of photos weighing heavily in the other models’ laps but I couldn’t afford to be pessimistic. There were sixty-seven girls vying for the same multimillion-dollar campaign, and each was more beautiful than the last. A gorgeous African woman with skin like polished bronze and a caramel kissed Afro sat next to me chatting with one of those rare Asian women who are both tall and curvy. Across from me, sat Cara Delavigne and the girls beside me were speaking quietly about Kate Upton’s chances of being chosen. This kind of gig was a model’s golden ticket and everyone in town wanted it.
The only edge I had against them was this; I needed it.
The money from a job like this could go beyond just paying Giselle’s art school tuition and using the meager remains to keep the rest of the family in Naples afloat. It could set up Elena in university, get Sebastian out of his dead-end factory job and put Mama in a house with working heat and plumbing. It would get the black-eyed mafia men circling our dying economy like carrion away from us for good.
I shifted the weight of the world on my shoulders so it settled more comfortably and reminded myself that if Atlas could hold up the world, I could withstand holding up my own.