Forbidden By Her Mafia Stepbrother novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Rules of the Wing
Massimo gives her three rules and wraps her wrist without touching her skin; her passport is gone.
The east wing had four rooms and no pictures on the walls.
Wynne had never been past the sitting room.
Massimo's bedroom door stood open, and she looked once at the large dark bed and looked away.
"You'll take the guest room," he said. "It has a lock. The key's on the inside."
"A lock on the inside, in your wing."
"Yes."
"Every door in this house locks from the outside," Wynne said. "I've noticed."
He took that without a word and put her duffel bag on the guest room bed.
Someone had packed it fast.
Her sweaters were rolled in with her toothbrush and one pair of sneakers.
"The driver brought it up," he said. "Anything you want from downstairs, you tell me and I get it."
"I want to go to work tomorrow."
"No."
"I frame pictures, Massimo. It's a shop with a bell on the door. Nobody gets shot in a framing shop."
"Fabrizio's cousins know where it is."
"Then I'll go anyway."
He leaned in the doorway.
Even tired from the flight, with the knife hand still swollen across the knuckles, he filled the frame.
"Say the rest," he said.
"What rest?"
"The list. You've been holding it for two years. Say it."
She had not known he knew.
Her face went hot.
"You told me I couldn't go out after ten," Wynne said. "You told me who drove me and what time I came home. You told me I couldn't go to my friend's wedding because it was in Camden."
"It was in Camden."
"It was a church!"
"Go on."
"You glared at every man who ever called the house. I haven't been on a date since I was twenty-two. You made me sit in my room and think I was some kind of problem."
Her voice cracked, and she hated it.
"And today I walked into that dining room and you were the only person who looked at my arm."
Massimo didn't answer for a while.
"I forbade you every one of those things," he said, "so you'd be safe in this house. I'm not going to say sorry for it. I'm going to say I understand why you hate me."
"I don't hate you."
"Good."
"I haven't decided what I feel," she said.
Something moved in his face and was gone.
"Sit," he said. "Rules."
She sat on the bed with her arms crossed.
"One. You stay in the wing until Friday. You go downstairs only with me." He held up a second finger. "Two. You tell me where you are, even if it's only the bathroom."
"I'm not telling you about the bathroom."
"Then you tell me you're going to the bathroom."
"Massimo."
"Three." He stopped.
His jaw tightened.
"I don't touch what's under my father's roof," he said. "So you don't have to wonder about that. In this wing, with the door open or shut, nobody touches you. Not Fabrizio. Not me."
It was an odd thing to say to someone you had just thrown a knife handle for.
Wynne looked at him.
"I didn't ask," she said.
"I know. I'm telling you anyway."
He went out and came back with a plastic bag of ice and a roll of gauze.
He set both on the bed beside her, at the exact distance of her knee.
"Put it on your wrist. Wrap it. Twenty minutes."
"You're not going to do it?"
"I just said I don't touch."
"You said you don't touch me."
"That's what I said."
She picked up the ice and held it to the bruise.
The cold made her gasp, and he turned and looked hard out the window.
She wrapped the gauze herself, badly, one-handed.
After a minute he took one end of the roll without touching her skin, and held it taut so she could finish.
Their fingers did not meet.
She felt it anyway, down the whole line of her arm.
"There," Massimo said, and let go.
"Thank you," Wynne said.
It came out softer than she had planned.
He stood in the door a moment longer and then he went down the hall, and she heard a study door close.
She sat with the ice melting down her wrist.
After a while she got up and unzipped her duffel to look for her phone.
It was not there.
She dug through the sweaters and the bottom pocket, where her passport lived inside a sock.
The passport was gone, too.
She stood up with the empty sock in her hand and went down the hall to ask him.
The study door was ajar.
Massimo was not at the desk.
A laptop sat open there, with a grid of small gray camera feeds on the screen, the front hall, the garden, the pantry, the dining room.
In the pantry square, a man in a cardigan stood very still beneath the camera and looked straight up into it.
It was Aurelio.
The volume on the laptop was low, and she leaned closer.
"Good," the Don's voice said, smiling. "He took her upstairs."
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