Page 63 of Made to Sin

I regretted not running.

“If another man dares to touch even a strand of your hair, sweetheart, he’ll find himself decapitated the following morning.”

With the warning slicing through our budding tension, he got out and slammed the door behind him, leaving me breathlessly trying to regain my sanity in the car.

What he said wasn’t a passing statement, it was a promise. But it wasn’t the vow I was afraid of, it was how it made me feel. In contrast to the repulsiveness I should have felt by his possessiveness, I was burning up inside. Call it mommy issues, but I craved the attention.

My core throbbed at the thought of him killing a man for touching me. Something was unquestionably loose in my mind, but I couldn’t help myself, I wanted more.

I wantedhim.

If this infatuation was what got me killed, I guess I couldn’t say I didn’t see it coming because I didn’t know how to stop.

Luciano was a bad man, a murderer, a cold-blooded killer, yet I wanted him more than I had ever wanted anything in my life.

ICOULDN’TSLEEP. MYMINDwas filled with dirty thoughts of a certain mafioso boss.

The conversation in the car replayed in an endless loop inside my head. Was it wrong of me to want to test the theory? To let another man touch me just to see if he would wind up dead tomorrow morning?

God, I was sick.

The clock furiously blinked as the numbers changed from one fifty-nine a.m. to two a.m. I’d been tossing and turning for the past three hours. This was ridiculous.

Kicking off my sheets, I decided a drink would help ease my mind. Like my lesson with drugs, alcohol was never the answer to tough times, but it was worth a try. I was grumpy when I didn’t get enough sleep, and that wouldn’t be a good day for anyone.

I padded barefoot into the kitchen as quietly as I could, taking extra caution not to bump into anything, and rummaged through Luciano’s alcohol collection. Though I wanted something light, he only had pure liquor for grabs.

I never liked the taste of whiskey, but there had to be a reason why he had bottles of it. Pouring a finger of the brown liquid into a nearby tumbler, I gave it a chance. The consequences wereimmediate, the bitterness scraped my throat and churned my stomach. With a grimace on my face, I remembered why I avoided the drink.

“Do I need to worry about having an alcoholic in my house?”

Luciano’s deep voice startled me, causing me to drop the tumbler with a yelp. No wonder Mamma told me to not mention anything about the devil. Think of him, and he shall appear.

The shattering of the glass made me wince for the second time tonight. It hadn’t been a full day, and I already created a big mess.

“I’m sorry,” I quietly said.

Turning toward the couch, where he was standing in the moonlight, my eyes grew wide. This was the first time I saw him out of his normal suit and tie. For some reason, while I knew he didn’t wear suits everywhere, I never really imagined him out of it.

My mouth immediately went dry at a glance. I thought he couldn’t have looked better than when he was in a full tuxedo, but boy was I wrong. His casual appearance in sweatpants and a t-shirt was a sight for sore eyes.

Despite gray sweatpants being a weakness of mine, I couldn’t tear my eyes from his upper body. The man had a full sleeve from the looks of the ink starting at his wrist running up and under his shirt. I didn’t know where to look first as his right arm was full of intricate drawings and symbols.

My eyes ran from the bottom, where a shaded rose made out of money started the ink trail, to the top, where a cross ran under the sleeve. I had the sudden urge to go over and lift the sleeve to see what else was a part of the collection.

“What did we say about the staring, Katarina?”

I had been too fascinated to care about being incognito, but being called out on it made me bashfully red. I stood rooted in my spot as he moved to come around the kitchen island until he was in front of me.

With how underdressed he was, a swarm of timidity invadedmy body. Now, I looked everywhere but him. This whole interaction knocked me off my axis, and I didn’t know how to respond other than another pathetic “I’m sorry.”

His hand reached out and tilted my chin, forcing my gaze straight to his face. “So you’ve been saying. Is there something I should be concerned about?”

“That I dropped your tumbler?”

He let out a low, amused chuckle at my answer. The sight of each laugh pouring out of his plump lips made me redder.

“I see. That was an expensive glass you dropped, sweetheart.”

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