Black Widow | 18+

6 | Turbulance

Raul and I stood talking to a hedge fund manager and I kept my sweetest smile plastered on my lips as my eyes pulled away to scan the room at intervals. We'd been going from guest to guest for an hour now, and I had to keep on introducing myself as Artemisia Pericelo, the poker player. 

It wasn't a lie. I was fucking phenomenal at poker. 

However, the usual comments of men being sexist and impressed at the same time started to make me bored, and I was counting down the moments until this Gianluca came into sight, or Anton and Leandro would be making an entrance. 

I got lucky however, because as we began to walk to the bar Raul spotted the man before I could, and a smirk came to his lips. 

"I want to introduce you to someone," he said as we walked through crowd of people to the bar that ran across the entire length of the room. 

"Who?" I asked innocently, my grip on his arm tightening a little as a false sign of comfort. 

"You know the men I said my boss and I are working against, he's one of their guys, and he's had enough of his own boss." Raul smirked as I looked up at him, I knew better than to say anything at all in a situation like this, so I allowed him to lead us to the man who stood at 5'10 in a navy blue suit with a smirk on his lips as he stared at me. 

"Raul," he greeted with a thick accent. "Who's this?"

"Artemisia," I smiled, avoiding my last name being announced in case of any link to my father being made. 

"Lovely to meet you Artemisia," he smiled, I couldn't recognise this man, and I had a feeling that he was far removed from the operation, perhaps being kept in Italy to run things there until the Torromandi operation spread further down the east coast. 

"You too," I smiled gently before turning to the bar and getting myself a whiskey. I stayed in-tune with the conversation happening behind me however, detecting Gianluca's hesitant tone as he began to speak. 

"You can trust her," Raul said lowly, "I've done the checks, no traces to anyone." 

I let out a sigh of relief as the bartender handed me my drink, and I spun around with the same graceful smile on my face as I turned back to the men. 

"Well, Leo didn't seem bothered about me coming. He said it would be good for me to see how things worked here." Gianluca said, and I kept quiet as I innocently gazed over at him. 

"Good, well we need to know as much as possible." Raul said, placing a hand on the small of my back. 

"He seems to be uninterested in a possible takeover, I mentioned it briefly today. He said he would be willing to talk about options with you guys. It kind of gave me the impression that he was open to a partnership." Gianluca said as he kept eye contact with Raul. 

I had a moment of sympathy. Leandro's clean up job had possibly affected attitude as a whole, more than just the immediate families, this guy could have lost his father and was probably never even given a reason as to why he was killed. 

But then I checked myself. Since when did I care about consequences? Especially consequences that impacted people who worked with the Torromandi's. 

"We won't have a partnership, we want a takeover, and we'll force them into it." Raul said, "Your safety, and the safety of the Russian will be first priority if we continue to have your cooperation. We want you in the plan."

I furrowed a brow, one that didn't raise suspicion, Raul had never explicitly told me what he did but it was easy to infer it from his words as the naïve woman he assumed me to be.