Chapter 4

• The sleek black sedan glided through city traffic with a predatory purr, its tinted windows shielding the occupants from prying eyes. In the rear passenger compartment, Michael reclined with leonine indolence, his powerful frame exuding an aura of smoldering menace even at repose.
• "You want to explain to me what the hell that was back there?"
• The gruff demand sliced through the weighted silence, drawing Michael's hooded gaze towards the man occupying the front passenger seat. Despite the deferential phrasing, there was no masking the bewildered edge to Luca Rizzi's graveled tone.
• A muscle ticked in Michael's taut jaw as he leveled his icy consigliere with a quelling look. "Mind your place, Luca."
• The rebuke was soft, almost negligent in its delivery, yet carried an unmistakable threat that brought the other man up short. Rizzi's unkempt salt-and-pepper brows hiked towards his hairline as he absorbed the full weight behind those deceptively mild words.
• "Yeah, yeah, I know," he groused, sinking back against the buttery leather seat. "I'm just the help, right? But you gotta admit, pledging damn vows with that skittish little thing was a hell of a surprise maneuver, even for you."
• Michael's mouth curved in a lingering smirk but remained otherwise impassive. Luca often mistook Michael's sporadic bouts of impetuosity for the vice of spontaneity. Truthfully, every decision he made, no matter how hasty it appeared on the surface, was the product of razor-sharp calculations and meticulous strategizing.
• Michael settled back, permitting himself a moment of retrospective sinfulness. Those tumbled chestnut waves, porcelain features smudged with the remnants of anguish and shattered illusions. The swell of plump lips parting with shock as tenuous composure continually slipped through her delicate grasp. And those eyes...
• Michael could still feel their soulful, whisky-warm depths pulling him into oblivion during their brief kiss. The unexpected allure of that fragile strength cloaked in fragility. The wounded doe begging to be tamed beneath the prowling wolf's skillful touch.
• By the time he regained his prestigious gentleman's club, where deals and fortunes shifted like the tides...yes, sweet Valerie would be unraveled and remade utterly in his image.
• But first, he required a firmer understanding of the threads comprising his malleable new wife's fraying tapestry. Once he unraveled her secrets and innermost weaknesses, she would eventually cease being a loose end and become another impeccably woven contribution to the ingenious game he'd already expertly set into motion.
• Luca was still shaking his grizzled head in a blend of amazement and disbelief, bringing Michael's ruminations full circle.
• "I can't believe you just married her like that. In a damn courthouse, of all places!"
• Michael allowed the slightest twitch of his lips as practiced mask firmly resealed over his wandering thoughts. "Problem, Luca?"
• The stocky consigliere immediately stiffened beneath the implied reprimand in Michael's softly uttered query. "Nah, nah no problem here. Just wasn't expecting you to, y'know...put a ring on it with the next pretty face that caught your eye."
• A muscle feathered along Michael's jaw, the only warning before that implacable stare swung back towards his second-in-command with the weight of sharpened steel. "Underestimate me again, and even my wife won't stop me from putting you down once and for all."
• The threat wasn't shouted or snarled, it didn't need to be. Rizzi practically vibrated with tension, squaring those burly shoulders as his expression washed blank of all but reflexive wariness. Whatever complaints or objections he might have harbored shriveled on his tongue, wisely retreating before Michael's stony promise of retaliation.
• Even the driver hunched infinitesimally lower over the steering wheel, no doubt thrilled to escape his boss's notice. A strained hush swallowed the sedan for several excruciating heartbeats.
• Then, Michael exhaled a soundless breath and in an instant the charged atmosphere dissipated, leaving only the sleek predator's purr of engine and a lingering unspoken vow on the air.
• As the luxury sedan sliced through the city's arteries, Michael settled deeper into the plush leather seats, wrestling with the truths he'd kept entombed for far too long. Even from those closest to his orbit, like the gruff Luca currently dissecting his impulsive nuptials step-by-step.
• If only his consigliere realized just how premeditated this joining truly was. Not some rash fancy indulged on a whim, but the exquisitely choreographed culmination of over a decade's worth of longing and meticulous planning.
• A dim, forlorn part of Michael still marveled at the depravity ignited that fateful night ten years ago, when a mere glimpse of a waifish, tear-stained beauty in the shadowed bowels of his territory sparked an unholy obsession. He'd only been eighteen at the time, already well on his way to cementing his merciless stranglehold over the city's underbelly.
• Yet as he towered over that frail, huddled twelve-year-old wraith in the filthy alleyway, Michael felt something ancient and bestial roused to snarling, ravenous life for the first time.
• At first, he scarcely recognized the unnamed compulsion ravaging his senses each time their gazes clashed, hers imbued with a wisdom and sorrow far beyond her tender years. Why his eyes kept straying back to drink in the swell of her cupid's bow mouth, the gossamer tendrils of her wind-tossed chestnut tresses.
• Then, as the months and years lurched onward in an agonizing crawl, that possessive yearning for the mysterious ragamuffin progressed beyond mere lust or avarice, surpassing even his wildest flight of blasphemous fancy. Michael found himself spellbound, hopelessly, irretrievably _enraptured_.
• By the time his exhaustive search finally identified her as the lost Ashford heiress, it was too late. The indelible branding of her haunted, soulful whisky-warm eyes had already incinerated the last remnants of his conscience and rationale. Michael knew with cold, inalterable certainty that he would burn the world asunder before relinquishing even a fragmented piece of her to another.
• What followed were years of meticulous strategizing, of lining up sacrificial pawns and weaving each infinitesimal thread to snare her precisely where fate ordained they reunite. Each step, every nuanced breath between them was orchestrated in aching slowness, dragging out Michael's torment until that singular, earth-shattering moment when she crossed his path again...now unmistakably a woman in full bloom.
• He could still taste the dizzying relief thrumming through his veins, the visceral rush of pure triumph, as their charged gazes locked and held outside that very courthouse. In that suspended breath, the cosmos realigned itself in tune with the cosmic cravings raging through him for far too long.
• Now she was _his_ . Sworn to him, bound in sanctity before their Creator's eyes as Michael's destiny had forever decreed. There would be no relinquishing her from his side this time, no wrenching separations save oblivion itself.
• Sweet Valerie wore his brand now, a living talisman shielding him from the anguished loneliness that made even the most ruthless and bloodstained butcher cower at its memory. She was the answer to the howling, scouring void within - his salvation, his damnation, his eternally coveted _everything._
• Even if she never knew nor understood the true, rapacious depth of her new husband's devotion. After dreaming of taming her exquisitely shattered spirit for so many aching nights, reality would inevitably surpass even Michael's most fervent expectations.
• With a subtle shift of muscle, he splayed his fingers, savoring the lingering ghost of her delicate digits interlaced through his. Soon, so very soon, he would know every velvet plane and silk-lined secret of his new wife's flesh as intimately as his own.
• Then and only then would the true consolidation of their fates finally, irrevocably, begin.