Page 6 of Snowed in with the Mafia

Again, I’m astonished by the enormity of the cabin. No one needs this much space or art, which looks priceless to my unworldly eyes. I hate to think how much they pay for heating. The temperature is perfect all around, in every room, and the contrast with the snowstorm outside creates a cocoon of luxury.

Eileen leads me into what seems to be another wing of the cabin, except it’s just one gigantic bedroom. The ambiance here is different, subtle but insidious, and the entire room is lit by flames from a hearth that resembles a falcon in flight, its mouth opened as if it’s consuming the fire below. On the other side of the fireplace, is a structure of sorts covered in a white sheet.

Instinctively, I know everything in this room is old, ancient, with not a single thing changed, moved, or replaced.

The furniture is thick, heavy, opulent, and fit for kings, each piece bearing some variation of a trio of falcons. The bed is so big that ten people could easily fit in it.

And then I see them.

I don’t know what I expected, but they were not it—at all.

From everything I know about the world of the mafia, the men in charge are usually middle-aged, and while well-dressed and groomed, they often bear the signs of their nefarious lifestyle: bags under their eyes, wide paunches, thinning hair, and heavy shoulders. Those were the kinds of men I expected.

The men before me—Nico Santoro, Luca Armano, and Vincenzo Rosso—are anything but middle-aged.

The sheer vastness of the room diminishes as my eyes fall on them, filling my entire vision to the point where nothing seems to exist outside of them. For a moment, I’m sure I’ve been taken to the wrong cabin and shown the wrong masters of the Falcon Mafia.

Their dark gazes slide over me, creating a vortex of tremors inside me as they peruse me from the top of my head to the tips of my well-worn boots, then back up again.

Dear God, I used to read about this in those romance books Gianna is addicted to, but now I’m experiencing it in real life. Their attention on me makes me feel… naked, as if they’ve stripped off my less-than-fashionable clothes, leaving me in my once-white bra and panty set, which is now off-white due to diligent washing. But soon, even those meager items of clothing are gone, and I’m naked before them.

My breath falters, forcing me to play catch-up in a losing battle. What is going on? A strange, brutal heat rushes through me, and now I can barely inhale enough air to function properly. An uncanny ache develops in my nipples, and their hardness pokes at the flimsy material of my bra under my sweater.

The tingling feeling is not coming from my thighs, which I press together to stall the sensation, but rather from between them. I’m not sure, but I think my panties are wet, and I struggle with the need not to check them right then and there. How insane is this?

Am I okay?

Yes, I’m fine.

The only reason they’re looking at me so intensely is because they expected me to arrive in that white see-through gown with the print of the gold falcons on it. They were expecting a docile woman whose virginity they were going to pay for once she bled for them. Not me. Not this farm girl with questionable fashion tastes and a mission on her mind.

Chapter Six

Nico

The fiery glow from the hearth dances around the room. Snow falls heavily against the floor-to-ceiling windows outside the cabin, bound to worsen overnight. The woman we’re going to breed, the virgin Alessia, stands right before us.

Her presence momentarily blindsides me, infusing the air with the subtle scent that comes off her—something vanilla, sweet, and frustratingly addictive.

She’s hidden the body that belongs to us beneath layers of clothes. She’s not wearing the jewelry we gifted her either. Clearly, she has other ideas in mind, and I’m more curious about them than I have been about anything else in my life before.

My gaze slides over her, and my fucking breath catches.

I don’t acknowledge the shift that happens inside me. Yes, I have to clench my fists to stop myself from reaching out to her immediately, but she does something else to me. She makes breathing a little harder.

My fate is my bloodline. When it comes to anything else, I don’t believe in it, but she seemed to have entered the stone-cold hardness in me and soaked it in fucking sunlight and this all from one single photo of her shown to us by the Vergine Selettore, where her spectacular ember eyes radiant with defiance and pride, stared back at me.

Yet there isn’t anything sweet about her invasion into the deepest parts of me. She did so violently, suffocating me, spilling into me like an obsession I will never be able to get enough of.

My body tenses up more, as if I’m facing my greatest foe yet, and if I take my eyes off her, I’ll lose, and she’ll decimate me. Yet looking at her weakens me.

For that reason, I immediately render her an enemy, and as with all our enemies, we keep them close so we can control the narrative and easily strike them down when needed. She can’t be allowed to dwell freely in the world, not when she has this much of a poisonous, devastating effect on our minds and bodies.

Fuck.

I dismiss those unnecessary thoughts from my mind and glance at the men standing on either side of me: Luca Armano and Vincenzo Rosso. Men I’ve known all my life, grew up with, went to school with, and trained to be silent killers. Now, we run one of the most prestigious, oldest, and most dangerous mafia units in the world. Respected and feared at the top. Revered and ruthless at the bottom.

When it comes down to it, I trust no one but these men. Our bond is stronger than if we shared blood. But in a way, we do. When we took our oaths to be the masters of the Falco Family, we sealed our fates in a ceremony with our blood.

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