Page 11 of Cage of Thorns and Blood

The waitress takes the payment, and I add a thirty percent tip on top. The service here is always excellent. It's discreet, but also on the ball. The staff work hard, and I know how difficult working in the restaurant sector can be. Among some of the legitimate businesses that my family own, and wash money through, there is a chain of mid-end restaurants. When I was a teenager, my father decided that it would be good for me to work in one of them.

He rotated me around the business from the bottom to the top so I could get a holistic view of how one entire contained business worked. I'd started in the kitchen as a pot washer. It was hot, hard, dirty work. I still enjoyed it more, though, than my short stint on the food side of things. How anyone can want to be a chef and get through the training is beyond me. Father had to move me on quickly, because despite only being a teenager, I would have literally murdered the chef if he’d screamed at me one more time.

My time spent fetching and carrying wine for the patrons was much better than being in the hot kitchen, until the day I accidentally spilled some wine all over a woman's white dress. She'd made such a scene, and my face had been burning hot from the embarrassment as everyone watched me.

The other staff all treated me with a cool deference, but I could tell most of them disliked me simply due to the fact of me being the owner's son. After that, I moved into the office and saw how the profits were added up at the end of the night, receipts stored, along with cash, and the banking transactions all accounted for. It was a good grounding in just how many people it took to run one restaurant.

After my few months there, Father took me to one side in his study and gave me a long talk. He pointed out to me that we ran a multi-million-pound empire. He asked me how I imagined we could run such a huge amount of business with so few people. When I told him, truthfully, that I didn't know, he replied with a slick smile, “Fear, son. It’s fear.”

No one within our organization dared to step out of line. No one dared to skim from the top, or do anything remotely harmful toward the organization because anyone who did would meet a terrible end. Furthermore, depending on exactly what their transgressions were, their friends, family, and other people within their lives could be in danger too. There is a code within our world that the ruling families do not go after one another on a personal level. That doesn't mean that lowly street people can't find their entire kin wiped out if they try to fuck us over.

Of course, the Mancini and Andretti clans never really got the script when it came to not involving family members within feuds. I'm sure that if I talk to Renata about it, which is not going to happen, she would say that my family is to blame and her stories would probably be the inverse of mine. She’d believe it was us who struck first, and my family who did the most damage. Her family blames ours. My family blames hers. It's always the way. Who knows what is actual history and what is nothing but familiar lore?

Me personally, I don't care who did what to who in the far past. I only care that in recent years, the Andrettis have been a thorn in our side, and ever since they stopped my father and uncle from buying their shares up on the board, and threatened Bianca, they have been on my shit list. Renata has been on that list since we were teenagers. No one has ever done to me what she did. She didn't even give me a chance to explain. I realize my hands are balled into fists on the table, and I make a conscious effort to relax myself, shaking my shoulders out.

Renata is digging around in her handbag, then she takes some money out and offers it to me. I glare at her.

“You're going to offend me if you're trying to pay for that meal,” I say.

“I'm only paying my share.”

“I don't let women pay when they're out with me.”

“Let?” She raises one perfect brow, arched beautifully in disdain, like a movie star in a black and white film.

“Yes, let. You have a problem with that?”

“Seems a little arrogant and controlling, but if you would like to pay for the meal, then I shall kindly accept and say thank you.” She gives a small smile. “I was raised to be a good, polite Italian girl, you see.”

There’s so much sarcasm loaded into her words it makes me smile. I'd really like to unpack some of the simmering resentment she seems to have for her life and the world around her. I don't understand why someone who has been given everything she could ever want seems to be so angry.

Renata is spoiled rotten by her family. Or, at least, it seems that way to me looking in from the outside. She got married, and when she decided that she didn't want to stay married, they let her divorce. There aren’t many families in our life who would do such a thing.

Most women have to stay in their marriages whether they're happy or not. Renata walked away a very wealthy woman, or so my investigator believes. It seems her family doesn’t know about all of that as it was kept quite secret. If the rumors are to be true, she took herself a few lovers along the way until I put a stop to that by scaring them all off. I know for a fact that she causes hassle with Nico's men by flirting with them because she's banned from going into some of their clubs. According to my guy spying on her, she taunts his enforcers with her sexuality.

When I finally take her into my bed, there will be none of that anymore. If she thinks I’ll tolerate her even looking flirtatiously at another man, she has a surprise coming her way.

“Shall we?” I stand and walk smoothly around to her side of the table, ready to pull her chair out as she gets up. She gathers her clutch and jacket from the back of the chair and shrugs it on. Once she's standing by me, I grab my jacket and fold it over my arm, while my other arm I hold bent at the elbow for her to take. She glances at it for a moment, and I think she may reject the offer, but then she slips her arm through the crook of my elbow, and we walk out of the restaurant together.

Heads turn our way, and I catch the eye of a few of the guys trying to take a look at Renata’s ass. I glare at them, and they drop their gaze. The words of an old song about how hard it is to be in love with a beautiful woman pop into my head. It’s not hard if you’re man enough to face down any fucker who thinks he has a right to what is yours.

My car has been brought around to the front by the valet, and I turn to her. “Did you drive here?” I ask, even though I know she didn’t.

“No, I took a cab,” she says.

I nod as if this is news to me. It pisses me off the way she runs around all alone. Doesn't her family worry about her safety? There is no way that we’d let the Mancini women run around town in cabs. It isn't safe. Any one of us in our world can become a target, and letting high value females wander around without security seems crazy to me.

“Where's your security detail?” I ask her, unable to keep quiet on the topic.

She laughs at that and shakes her head. “I don't have one, Matteo. I don't need one, apparently. To be fair, I'm not involved in the family business in any way. I'm not married to anyone involved in the business. My previous husband was a legitimate businessman and had some royal connections; even then, no one ever threatened me in any way, shape, or form.”

He was minor, extremely minor, European royalty from what I read.

She glances at the car, back to me, then licks her lips and waits … expectantly. I think she's waiting for the invite to come back to mine. That's not going to happen. I know full well that if I invite her back to my place, she'll either say no, or she'll come and then reject me once we are getting hot and heavy.

She believes that I think tonight is a coincidence. She thinks she’s the puppeteer, but I’m the one holding the strings. There will be nothing for her to reject because I'm not going to make a move on her tonight. She's going to be the one who's laid in bed later, wondering why nothing further happened, not me. I know her game, and I know what she's about. She thinks that she can play hard to get and that will make me want her more.

What Renata doesn't understand is that nothing could make me want her more because I already crave her more than any other woman. I don't think anything could make me want her less either.

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