Page 18 of Engaged to the Don

“What do you mean?” I ask, almost not wanting to hear the answer.

“Didn’t you hear?” he sneers. “Your knight in shining armor doesn’t need your help after all. Christian Greco practically obliterated the Hell’s Devils, wiping out Roman’s biker gang almost to the point of extinction.”

I feel the color rush from my face.I didn’t need to be here. Christian doesn’t need my immediate intervention after all. From the sounds of it, he’s already garnered the upper hand in the matter. But now, I’ve walked right into the hornets’ nest. The door is blocked, the look on my father’s face tells me that he has no intention of letting me go again, and I’ve just played straight into his hand. This is a disaster.

“Come on, Lara,” my father says as his eyes narrow at me. “You might’ve always been a thorn in my side, but I do give you credit for at least being halfway intelligent. Surely you’ve figured out by now that my alliance with Roman and the Hell’s Devils is only a stepping stone to a much bigger foothold for control in the city. Look at it from the outside. I can practically see the wheels turning in your head.”

I don’t want to give my father the satisfaction of showing any reaction, especially as I start realizing he’s right. But it’s impossible not to see the pieces falling into place now.

“By attacking the biker gang directly, Christian gave me exactly what I wanted,” he continues. “And I didn’t even need to get my hands dirty doing it. Roman came running right back to me, begging for my help. Have you ever seen a desperate biker? It’s quite a spectacle.” He laughs as if watching another man’s defeat gives him great pleasure, even when that man was supposed to be an ally.

“Well, then I guess you have no use for me,” I say as I inch toward the door, knowing that my attempt to get out of here is just going to fail miserably. The man blocking the door doesn’t move. “Let me go,” I say as I turn to my father and try a stronger approach. But all he does is laugh some more. Nothing I do ever works to back him down.

“Now why would I do that? You came tome, little canary. It’s not my fault you walked into your own cage.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to keep me here,” I say. “Let me go. You no longer have any need for me. You’ve already married me off.”

“To Christian? The two of you aren’t married yet. And I’ve changed my mind about that arrangement, anyway. It no longer benefits me, so I see no point in keeping it. No, I think I have a better match for you in mind. You will now marry one of the most gloriously corrupt police chiefs in the Upper East Side instead. It’s a move that will seal protection money and ensure that the cops don’t mess with my business. Drug trafficking is a whole hell of a lot easier when the cops are on your payroll. I’m sure Christian is familiar with that as well.”

“Christian is nothing like you,” I hiss at him, jumping to Christian’s defense before I realize I’m doing it. My father loves making me squirm, and he’s currently succeeding at it.

“I think you might be mistaken about that, but regardless, it doesn’t matter, because you will be doing exactlywhat I say.”

I’m horrified at my current situation, but it’s not like I haven’t been here before. So, instead of panicking, I focus on the mission I agreed to do. I promised Malacoda Giotti that I’d take down my father from inside. The problem is that I have no idea how to do it.

“Take her to her room,” my father directs his minion.

The man at the door reaches to take my arm but I pull it away. “I can walk by myself,” I glare at him.

After he’s escorted me back to my bedroom, I wait a few minutes before cracking my door to peek out into the hallway. My father is overly confident now, and that equates to carelessness. He’s always been too ambitious for his own good, and it makes him sloppy. He has men stationed at the doors of the apartment and outside the building, with one standing just below my window. But he doesn’t have men guarding all the interior doors to the rooms. I guess he figures his only goal is to keep me trapped inside the house. Like I said—sloppy.

I go through the rooms of the apartment one by one, silently looking for any information I could take to Malacoda like I agreed to, something the Giotticapocould take to the Riccicapoto bring my father down. It's difficult to find something when you don’t know what exactly it is you’re looking for. He told me that I would “know it when I see it” but so far, I don’t see anything other than a drug kingpin who masquerades as a shitty father. But then, just like Malacoda predicted, I see it. Except it’s not a thing, it’s a person. Romansteps out from one of the rooms. The two of us stand there staring at each other, as if neither of us expected to see the other there.

I have no idea what he’s doing here, but he looks in rough shape. It looks as if he has burns on the side of his face and his hand is wrapped up in bandages which looks like it might even be missing a few digits. Part of me wants to take advantage of this moment to cause him even greater suffering and hit him when he’s down. But then I realize that this is an opportunity.

“An eye for an eye,” he says as he glares at me. “I should kill you with a shot to the head just like Christian did to my girlfriend. Maybe even strip you down naked first so you can get the full effect.”

I cringe when I think of what he must be implying, and I try not to think about the things Christian has done to protect me and hisborgata. “Or you could get even with Christian in a way you might enjoy more,” I say, making my voice sound as sultry as I can muster as I step closer to him.

“What are you talking about, you sphinx?” Roman says. “I don’t trust you. You’re with Christian.”

“Not anymore,” I say as I open my shirt enough to show him the place where my bullet wound decorates my shoulder. “Not since he failed repeatedly to protect me. That’s why I came back here, to make amends with my father and find a man who would keep me safe in the midst of all this chaos.”

Roman raises a brow at me and cocks his head to the side, as if he’s trying to decide whether to believe me or not. I take another step closer, leaving my shirt still open over my shoulder and knowing he can probably spot some cleavage as he looks down it. He may have just lost his girlfriend, but it’s obvious she was nothing special to him if he’s already so easily seduced by another woman so quickly following her death.

“If you were to offer me protection, then maybe I could be with you instead,” I suggest. It’s a longshot for him to believe I’d switch sides so quickly and wander into the arms of the enemy. But then again, he isn’t exceptionally intelligent.

He reaches out his good hand and runs his fingers right down the center of my shirt as he licks his lips. This guy is a pig, but I just need him to squeal something useful. “I guess that would depend on how well you can ride my cock.”

Disgusting.I combat the feeling that I’m going to be sick and press myself closer up against him. “Maybe I can show you. Is there a place we can go where we won’t get interrupted?” I bat my long lashes at him. This is all child’s play, and Roman is a fool to fall for it.

“Come on,” he says as he pulls me along.

I have no intention of touching him at all, but just as I expected him to do, Roman takes me to one of the rooms my father has secured with a lock and key. He produces a key from his pocket and opens the door. It turns out to be my father’s den, containing a desk scattered with documents and even a small notebook laying on its surface. Roman hoists me up onto the desk and opens my thighs to stand between them. Then, he works to undo his pants.

I need to think of a way out of this fast. As soon as he has the button undone, I reach over and grab the stapler off the desk and slam it down against his emerging erect cock. Roman wails in pain and drops to the ground for long enough that I can turn around and see what’s sprawled across my father’s desk. Almost instantly, I hear my father coming down the hall in response to Roman’s shouts, and I grab what looks to be an interesting small notebook from the desk and shove it down the back of my pants, hoping that whatever’s inside it is something useful, because it’s all I have a chance to get before my father appears in the doorway and Roman finally rises back to his feet.

“What happened?” my father yells at Roman. “What’s she doing in here?” It takes him no time at all to see Roman’s pants undone and understand what was about to happen. “You fool,” he scolds Roman who’s still reeling from the hit I gave his erect member. “You let her in here and she almost killed you. What kind of idiot are you that you’d trade a fuck for your life?”

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