Page 13 of Mafia Princess

Jesus—I was clenching my thighs. I was clenching my fucking thighs, and he wasn’t even anywhere near me.

With sweaty palms, I started typing.

Karina: You don’t have a choice. Have a nice day, Detective.

I didn’t hear from him again after that.

The drive home was quiet, and I was wondering how I was going to get through the next few weeks. I arrived home two days ago, and I already felt like I was suffocating just by having the Valenti last name. No matter how long I stayed away, how long I waited before I came back home, the people here never forgot. They always recognized me, especially when I was out with my two brothers hovering over me like guard dogs.

Italian men and the women in their lives.You could always count on an Italian man to be extremely overprotective.

My brother Dante, who was turning twenty-four tomorrow, was too busy chasing after tits and ass. Not that he needed to chase it; it somehow followed him wherever he went. It was like he was a magnet for everything that had an abundance of estrogen. The problem was, his dick didn’t know how to say no.

But Antonio, my oldest brother, was most like my dad. He was all business and no play. When it came to the family and running the business smoothly, he was a perfectionist. He was what they called the underboss, the son who would take over my father’s empire and run it exactly the way he was taught. Antonio was darker, harder than Dante, more focused.

I worried about Antonio sometimes. He was twenty-eight, and I knew for a fact he hadn’t been out there enjoying life as much as he should. He had to grow up much sooner than the rest of us, and I was afraid he was going to wake up one day and realize he’d been living someone else’s life, not his own.

Actually, that was the reality of all three of us Valenti children. We’d always live in the shadow of our father—the Wolf.

I looked down at my phone with Lorik’s face still on the screen. Why did I have the feeling that not only did I have the Wolf to worry about, but also that damn detective?

Chapter 5

LORIK

My apartment was a dump. It was the motherfucker of all dumps. If you took into consideration what my apartment looked like, you’d say I was one disgusting individual. My mom would die a slow and painful death if she had to see this place.

There were empty beer bottles scattered throughout the living room, along with dirty glasses containing the sticky residue of last week’s rum. The microwavable plastic instant meal containers were stacked up in a tower next to the kitchen sink, and the empty cans of the soda I used to quench my morning-after thirst were lined up on the counter.

The way I saw it, I was a detective, not a domesticated pansy. I had much better things to do with my time than clean, cook, and do laundry.

Talk about laundry…I’d probably need to do that soon-ish since I pulled my last clean shirt from the closet this morning.

I glanced at the heap of dirty clothes bunched up in the corner of the living room. The living room, for Christ’s sake. Okay, this could not continue.

Since I was apparently off for the rest of the day—and the rest of the month—I decided I might as well try to make my mama proud by getting rid of at least eighty percent of the germs I was currently sharing my living space with.

Luckily, it didn’t take me long to clean up most of the mess. I was a minimalist. If I didn’t have a use for shit, said shit didn’t get into my apartment. There were the basics every human being needed. Microwave, coffee machine, fridge—and it was a fucking state of the art fridge with an ice maker. Because there was nothing more annoying than when you wanted to pour that first drink of the day and realized you were out of motherfucking ice. Happened to me once, and I maxed my credit card the very next day buying that damn expensive fridge. I’d been a happy man ever since.

There was a La-Z-Boy in the living room because every man needed a La-Z-Boy. I was pretty sure it was written in the Bible somewhere. And then, of course, there was my fifty-two-inch Smart LED television set to complement my Xbox One perfectly, and the state-of-the-art surround sound for those nights I decided to piss off the neighbors.

Naturally, there was also a black leather couch where I just happened to fall asleep five nights of the week. The other two nights were usually spent in either my bed or a bed completely unfamiliar to me, next to a woman I’d familiarized myself with from the inside out—or rather, my cock did. Bottom line, my bed was used for something completely different than sleeping, which was probably why I always seemed to find pieces of condom wrappers lying around in there. Amazing how those foil packets managed to creep into the tiniest of places and remain hidden for fuck knew how long.

Then, of course, there wasthecabinet—the cabinet where I kept all my investigation tidbits. The very first thing I did when I moved in was build the huge cabinet, which I bolted against the wall. Carpentry was one of my many hidden talents.

Behind those cabinet doors was all the information I’d managed to gather on the Valenti family. That cabinet was like my own personal Holy Grail.

I tossed all my laundry into a black bag and headed to the front door. Then I almost squealed like a fucking girl when I opened the door and looked straight into Anderson’s ugly-ass face.

“What the fuck, Anderson?”

He walked right by me and into my apartment. “Heard you got suspended.”

“Why don’t you come right on in?” I flung the door shut and set down the black bag.

“I told you to drop it. And you just couldn’t listen, could you?”

I turned and swung my car keys around my finger. “I guess doing what I’m told isn’t something I’ve mastered over the years.”

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