Turning Point||Book 2

Salvatore

Then, there was her. The instant she walked into my world—no, I had walked into hers—fear clawed its way into my mind, refusing to be ignored. Don't grasp it, and you risked losing it altogether. I didn't want to lose it. Grasping it was more than a mere challenge; I didn't compete. When I desired something, I obtained it, regardless of where it was or what could happen of I did.

Salvie's fear of losing it consumed him. This was a truth I couldn't hide from myself. No one could know though, especially not about this monstrous fear gripping me—this obsession with obtaining that one elusive thing. And letting anyone in on your fears?—big mistake I'd not start to make now.

Every time I entertained the thought of letting that contest go, my body tensed, my heart skipped beats, and the urge to slam my fists into portrayed surfaces usually took divine intervention to quell.

I craved her. There was no denying it.

Red.

Her every move, every flutter of those red wings to him, I had it all mapped out. Knew her alias, that damned slutty nickname. Butterfly, wasn't it? Funny, how something so delicate could hold so much power over me.

Another funny thing is, in my line of work, information was as easy to come by as breathing. Nothing about her I couldn't know if I wanted to.

When he worked his way around her body, I knew what he called her. I knew every intimate detail of her life, every fucking secret she shared with him. I had my damn ways, and if you knew them, you'd call me more than just Salvatore Bianchi. You'd call me the Black fucking Hand.

Butterfly...

Red.

My obsession wasn't just about conquest; it was about pure, unadulterated lust. That much was undeniable.

But what was it about this woman that drove me to such depths of desperation? What made her different from the others?

I had women lining up at my door, a collection of every type imaginable. Dark to fair; short to tall; lean to thick; innocent to wild. All colors of hair possible. If I wanted every type for the night, all I had to do was snap my fingers and they'd all queue at my bed. They didn't have to consent; I simply took what I wanted, and they knew better than to refuse me touching them.

With a harem at my disposal, why had I fixated on just one woman, as if she embodied every desire I craved? Why had I tailed her every move, why had I made Caleb write those pathetic threat notes to her? What was it about her that made me willing to pay a hefty sum just to have her?

The answers were like wiseguys playing hide and seek, buried deep under layers of desire and obsession. But I'll tell you one thing: tonight, she would belong to me, bending to my will without question.

I had just got off the horn with Angelo De Rossi. He was bringing her to me. Puttana!

I paced around my lair before swinging open the door to go downstairs. This joint might have been registered under my name, built to my taste, but everyone knew it as the Black Palace, for obvious reasons. Everything tied to me had a touch of darkness. Didn't even need to push it, they naturally slapped a fitting name on everything I laid claim to, and if "Black" wasn't in it, it wasn't fitting.

In this building, I had so many staff that I'd lost track of most of their names. Simple tongue clicks and finger snaps got me the attention I needed, so why bother memorizing alphabets? The only things worth committing to memory were locations, the code of deals, important contacts. And... a name. Xenia.

Couldn't shake it off, could I? Branded in my goddamn head, it was.

One of my staff bowed as I passed, trailing me to the lounge downstairs, asking if I needed more than just setting up the butterfly's bedroom. She was my oldest employee by far—Cecelia, unmatched in loyalty. She managed the tasks of the other females in the house, while Luca handled the males. As if my plate wasn't already overflowing like a shitty buffet line, HR work was the last thing I was going to tackle. Let's file that under "things that would never happen."