The Don's Favorite Mistress Vanished novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Key in the Box
That night I put on the black dress because I thought they were going to ask me to marry him.
Corrado had told me to wait for him at the penthouse at nine.
There was a velvet box on the dining table, and I didn't dare touch it.
I'd been by his side for ten years, and he'd never given me anything that fit in a box like that.
He walked in at exactly nine, his coat wet with rain and his shirt collar open.
Corrado Sandri, Don of Chicago, was never late and never said hello.
He looked me up and down, and that cold gray of his eyes drilled into my knees.
"That dress," he said.
"I chose it for you."
"Take it off."
He didn't say it like an order, but not like a question either.
He took me against the window, the whole city lit up behind my back.
He hiked my skirt up to my waist and spread my legs open with his knee.
His hands knew my body better than I did, and that night they touched me with a urgency that wasn't his.
I arched against the cold glass as he kissed my neck.
"Say it," he murmured.
"I'm yours."
He entered me in one deep thrust, and it tore a moan from me that left me breathless.
He held me by the thighs and drove into me against the glass, hard, relentless, my name breaking in his throat.
I came with my nails digging into his shoulders, and he followed with a hoarse growl against my mouth.
We stayed like that, breathing, his forehead pressed to mine.
I thought this was the moment.
I thought he was going to stand me up and take the box.
Corrado buttoned his pants and poured himself a whiskey without looking at me.
"Saturday the fourteenth, I'm getting married," he said.
It took me a moment to realize he was serious.
"To who?"
"To Zinaida Orlova. Gleb's daughter."
Zinaida was the Bratva princess, the woman in white dresses who'd had dinner with us twice.
I'd even run her background check for him, page by page.
"It's peace for Chicago, Fiora," he added, turning the glass between his fingers.
"It's an arrangement. Nothing changes between us."
I smoothed my dress down with steady hands.
"Open the box," he said.
I opened it.
It was a bronze key with a tag that said Lake Shore Drive, floor 31.
"An apartment of mine," I said.
"Yours. In your name. So you're comfortable."
I closed the box with a soft click.
Ten years of forging his paintings, reading his enemies, sleeping with a gun under my pillow for him.
Ten years of thinking I was his woman.
And that key told me what I'd always been.
A body with a good memory and a better hand.
"Congratulations," I said.
Corrado frowned, like he'd expected screaming.
"Don't be dramatic."
"I'm not. And the dowry?"
"The painting arrives tonight at the port warehouse. Gleb wants it authenticated before the wedding."
The Magdalene, a seventeenth-century painting that hadn't existed until I painted it, over six months, in my studio.
"Only I can sign that certificate," I said.
"I know. That's why I'm asking you."
I put on my coat and clipped my earpiece behind my ear, like always.
He took my chin and kissed me, long, with a tenderness that almost broke me.
"You're the only thing I do right," he whispered against my lips.
I laughed, because if I didn't, I'd shatter right there.
At eleven I arrived at warehouse four, between containers and silent cranes.
Two of Corrado's men opened the door to the climate-controlled room for me and left me alone with the Magdalene.
The ceiling light fell on her sad eyes, the ones I'd painted with my own hands.
I was about to open my briefcase when I heard a click from the door behind me.
Then, through the earpiece, Corrado's voice, so low I barely recognized it.
There was a long silence.
"Lock her in," he said.
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