Chapter 1
“Take Nothing of Mine,” The Mafia Boss Ordered—Unaware She Was Carrying His Child
CHAPTER 1
The rain had been falling on Chicago for three days, and by the fourth it had stopped smelling like weather and started smelling like exhaust and wet asphalt and everything the city had failed to wash away.
Natasha sat on the edge of the bed in the penthouse, listening to it hit the glass.
The windows ran floor to ceiling across the whole eastern wall. Twenty-two floors up, the city lay under her like something she had been permitted to look at rather than something she lived in. The glass was bulletproof. Leo had mentioned it on her second night here, three years ago, the way other men mention the square footage of a garage—casually, as a fact about the building, while he poured two fingers of scotch and did not look at her when he said it.
She had found it reassuring then. She found it suffocating now.
Leo Tomlin was not a man who yelled. She had learned that in the first month. He did not throw glasses or flip tables or put his fist through drywall when a thing was finished. He detached. He became polite. He became a man performing the administrative functions of a relationship while all the warmth drained out of the room like water leaving a tub.
He was standing by the entryway now, his back to her, adjusting his watch.
It was a platinum Patek Philippe. She had bought it for his thirty-second birthday with money from the monthly allowance he gave her, which meant, technically, that he had bought it for himself. She had known that when she bought it. She had wrapped it anyway and watched him open it and watched the small, rare, unguarded thing that crossed his face—and that had been worth the arithmetic.
He had not worn it much since the funeral.
“The car is waiting downstairs,” he said.
His voice was a low rumble. It had no heat in it. For three years that voice had been the thing that pulled her out of sleep and the thing she measured a room by, and now it was just noise shaped like words.
“Donigan will drive you to the airport. The account in your name has two hundred thousand in it. Enough to start over.”
A pause.
“Don’t come back to the city.”