Chapter 4 Four
Matteo’s POV
L’Ombra was mine, of course. Not on paper but in the way that mattered. The owner’s debts were held by a shell company I controlled. The security feeds terminated in a private server in my office. The deepest booth, the one reserved for the most powerful man in any room, sat empty unless I chose to occupy it. Tonight, I was not in the booth. I was above it.
A private balcony, concealed behind one-way smoked glass, overlooked the main floor. I was not here for pleasure. I was here to observe a meeting between a city councilor and a construction magnate. Their words, transmitted through a discreet audio feed, were a predictable murmur of veiled promises and political prices. Their body language told the truer story: the councilor’s nervous sweat, the magnate’s proprietary lean. It was a dull, transactional dance. I watched it with a profound and familiar emptiness. The scene below was a sea of socialites, a dull murmur of ambition and lust. I was bored. Again.
And then I saw her.
A stroke of emerald in a room of black and gold. A woman ordering a drink alone at the bar. The posture was all wrong for this place. She wasn’t leaning in to share a secret, wasn’t tilting her head in flirtatious laughter, wasn’t trying to melt into the current. She stood perfectly straight, her shoulders set with a defiance, as if bracing for a physical blow. The line of her neck was elegant and vulnerable, her profile clean and severe in its beauty, utterly focused on the room before her.
My breath caught in my throat. I knew that profile. I had studied it under a desk lamp. The photograph had failed her. It had captured the facts but none of the essence.
Elena Moretti.
The spark I’d felt looking at her photograph exploded into a roaring, visceral fire. She was here. In my club. Dressed not as a victim, not in some timid, bridal color, but in the color of deep forests and stolen jewels. A declaration of war.
I abandoned my post at the glass, the audio feed from the meeting fading into nothingness. The councilor and the magnate ceased to exist. My entire world narrowed to the woman in green.
I watched her scan the room. It wasn’t the lazy, hopeful glance of someone waiting to be noticed. It was the methodical, sweeping assessment of a strategist. A hunter. Her eyes moved, paused, evaluated, and dismissed. There was no desire in that look, only a grim, analytical determination. She was searching for something. Or someone. This wasn’t a woman hoping to be chosen. This was a woman making a choice. A desperate, calculated choice. She was on a mission.
My earlier intrigue hardened into something far more acute. She hadn’t run and hidden, as I’d expected a terrified animal would. She hadn’t come to beg or negotiate. She’d walked directly into the heart of the city’s most exclusive darkness and she’d done it like lioness. She had infiltrated my territory to enact her rebellion.
A slow, incredulous smile spread across my face. Did she come here looking for the monster? To see the face of the man who’d bought her? The sheer, breathtaking audacity of it stole the air from my lungs. Little did she know, the monster wasn’t lurking in the shadows.
He was watching her from above. And he was enthralled.
She was a vision of life in a room of expensive and polished dead things. I tracked her gaze as it landed, held, and focused. She was looking at Alberto Fiori, sitting in his usual secluded booth. A respectable, discreet, and famously principled shipping heir. A patron of the arts. A kind man. A safe harbor. A truly, profoundly boring man.
She placed her untouched drink on the bar with a decisive finality and started cutting through the crowd to move toward him.
A jolt of pure, possessive fury electrified me. No. That was an unacceptable conclusion. She did not get to choose her own savior. She did not get to direct the terms of her defiance with someone else. Her courage was mine to witness. Her fire was mine to test. Her first, desperate act of freedom belonged to me, and me alone. Alberto Fiori would be a forgettable footnote. I would be the chapter she could never close.
I turned from the window, abandoning my observation post without a second thought. The political meeting no longer held the slightest shred of interest. Nothing in the world mattered except intercepting that streak of defiant silk.
I moved to the concealed door, my blood singing with a sharp, clean purpose it hadn’t felt in a decade. This was an unforeseen gift, a thrilling opportunity that had fallen into my lap. She thought she was playing a game of her own clever invention. She had no idea she had just stepped, barefoot and brave, onto my board, and that I had been moving pieces around her for weeks.
I would not meet her as Don Silvio Valtieri, her faceless fiancé. That would end the game too quickly. I would meet her as a stranger. A more dangerous predator in this jungle. I would see the woman behind the photograph, up close, without the filter of her fear of me. I would taste her rebellion before I ever had to crush it.
I descended the private, soundproofed staircase that emptied out near the service entrance to the bar, my eyes never leaving her. She was a vision of focused intent, moving through the humid crowd with a grace that was entirely unconscious. She didn’t see me. Her world had narrowed to boring, safe, honourable Alberto Fiori, a man who would probably offer her tea and a sympathetic ear before gently refusing to get involved.
Not for long.
I paused at the bottom of the stairs, in the deeper shadows, and adjusted a cufflink. A profound, hunter’s calm settled over me, quieting the thrilling roar in my veins. This was the moment before the strike. The most perfect moment.
She believed she was claiming her freedom. She believed she was making a sacrifice to rob me of a prize. She thought she was being bold.
I was about to show her the difference between a bold move and a master stroke. Between choosing a man and being chosen by a force of nature.
I stepped out of the shadows and into the periphery of the club’s ambient light. I began moving, not directly at her, but on a diagonal path that would intersect hers just before she reached Fiori’s booth. My gaze was locked on the determined set of her jaw, the fierce, unyielding light in her eyes that she believed was hidden from the world.
Let’s play a game, Elena, I thought, the smile on my face now a genuine, predatory thing of sharp edges and dark promise. You think you are sacrificing your treasure to keep it from me. You think tonight is your secret. I am about to make it ours. I will take your brave, desperate rebellion, and I will make it the first thing I truly possess about you.