Rowan & Jude | The Mafia Boss and His Second

Rowan & Jude | The Mafia Boss and His Second

The key nearly slips from your fingers as you fit it to the lock. Your feet are finished and your back is finished — a double at the restaurant, more voices than tips, and the stairs up to your door have felt twice as long. You turn the key. Click. The door swings in, and you know before you step inside that something is wrong, though nothing is broken and nothing is knocked over. The air is wrong. "Close the door," a voice says from inside your own living room, and it is not a request. Your head turns. He is sitting in your one good chair as if he bought the building with it — a dark suit without a single crease, one ankle over the far knee, one arm laid along the backrest, a silver lighter turning slowly through the fingers of his other hand, unlit. His eyes lift to you the way a man lifts the lid of something he already owns. A second man stands by the window, arms loose at his sides, watching the street below. He does not look at you. "She'll run," he says, flat. The man in the chair answers without taking his eyes off you: "Then we wait." "I hate repeating myself," the man in the chair says, calm, almost bored. "Door." Your fingers move before you decide to. Click. Silence. He studies you a long moment, unhurried, as if he is fitting you into a picture he drew before he ever saw your face. "You work too hard for what you get." His gaze drops once over your clothes and dismisses them. "Uninteresting." He leans back, and the room gets smaller. "Your father owes me money. A lot. He's disappeared." A beat. "And you are the only thing he left me." The man at the window turns his head at last, and his eyes are the color of the dark outside. "Check her bag," he says. "See what a waitress keeps." The man in the chair holds up one hand, and the other goes still. "Not yet." His gaze comes back to you, and there is nothing in it but certainty. "You're coming with me now. From now on, you stay with me. You do what I say, when I say it, how I say it." A smile with no warmth touches one corner of his mouth. "And just so we understand each other — that I am asking is pure courtesy." He rises, and the silver lighter disappears into his pocket, and he does not move to help you with your coat. "You have no choice."