Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 95046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
EMMALEEN
Six weeks of dungeon submission.
Two men who complete me.
And then this Irish jerk shows up and stuffs me in a trunk!
I should scream.
Or kick.
Or punch him in the face.
But I don’t do any of that.
Because I'm a hot mess who gets off from taking orders and I can’t tell if this is a kidnapping or a really aggressive meet-cute.
GIOVANNI
Romance is a game I was never going to win.
I built her a dungeon.
He built her a chapel.
I gave her a collar.
He gave her books.
Little Miss Take needs to come home.
To me.
To my rules.
To my monster who never needed to be a saint.
I don't have to be better than him. I just need to be the one willing to die first.
My sin, my sacrifice... until confession became the only way to keep her forever
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
The autumn air bites through my suit jacket as I step onto Mama Bavga's front terrace, the heavy oak door closing behind me on the controlled chaos of Sunday dinner cleanup.
Congratulations, October. You're basically the mob boss of seasons—showing up uninvited, making everyone uncomfortable, leaving a trail of dead things in your wake. Very on-brand.
I stop mid-step—halfway down the stone stairs leading to the driveway.
What the fuck was that?
I replay the thought, dissecting it like evidence at a crime scene. The rhythm. The absurd comparison. The self-aware humor wrapped in cynicism.
I just… created an Emmaleen-ism.
All by myself.
A laugh erupts from me as I continue descending the terrace stairs and start walking towards the Aventador.
Somewhere in the past weeks—between the contracts, and the positions, and the poems she writes in perfect terza rima while I fuck her senseless—Emmaleen Rourke has infected my internal monologue.
Her chaos has leaked into my carefully ordered mind like water.
The corner of my mouth twitches. An expression I don't recognize on my own face. Something dangerously close to amusement.
Oh, she would love this. October as a mob boss. She'd spiral it into a fifteen-minute monologue about seasonal intimidation tactics and pumpkin spice as a protection racket.
The thought of her voice—breathless, rambling, somehow both anxious and confident—settles somewhere behind my ribs.
A place located suspiciously close to my heart.
The front door opens on the terrace above me, leaking sounds from inside, then Jino is skipping down the stairs. He passes me, clicking his key fob to make his car chirp. "Gotta swing by my place," he calls over his shoulder. "Need to grab clothes, some gear for tomorrow's session."
"All right. How long?"
"Twenty minutes, probably. I'll meet ya at home."
Home. He's looking at me when this word comes out. The word lands between us like a loaded weapon.
Jino shrugs up one shoulder—a gesture that splits the difference between acknowledgment and dismissal. Half apology for the slip, half defiance that he doesn't particularly regret it.
The movement is casual enough to dismiss, deliberate enough to notice.
I don't correct him. Don't point out that my mansion isn't "home" in any traditional sense of the word. It's just the current operational base, temporary like everything else in this business.
But I also don't miss the implication threaded through his choice of words.
That Emmaleen has become his gravitational center.
That her space—and by extension, my space—has expanded to include him in its orbit.
We bump knuckles—brief, efficient contact that says everything required without wasting words. Then he slides into his black Challenger.
I turn toward the Aventador.
The matte black body gleams under the estate's exterior lights. The scissor door lifts and when I lower myself into the driver's seat, the cockpit wraps around me like a second skin.
When I press the start button, the engine doesn't roar. It detonates—a sound engineered to remind everyone within earshot that power isn't always subtle.
I Follow Jino down the driveway, then we diverge, turning in opposite directions and Sewickley Heights stretches out before me like a carefully curated museum of old money.
The streets are silent, lined with estates hidden behind stone walls and ancient trees. No pedestrians. No traffic. Just empty pavement and the occasional glow of security lights marking properties owned by families who've been here long enough to forget when they first arrived.
The neighborhood fades behind me as I accelerate toward the highway—four lanes of dark asphalt cutting through the Pennsylvania hills towards Riverview.
My estate isn't Sewickley Heights. It never will be. I don't have Mellon money, but my Victorian-era Gothic monolith of dark brick stone sits on five acres of small-town wooded privacy, restored to a level of craftsmanship most of these inherited fortunes wouldn't appreciate.
The estate in Riverview started as a bribe from my father.
A carefully calculated gesture designed to soften the blow of exile. Being sent to Riverview felt like banishment at the time, assigned to manage sleepy operations in a dying coal town while my brothers remained in Pittsburgh, close to the real power and real decisions that shaped the family's future.
Salvatore has always been generous with gifts, but his gifts have never been about affection. They are guilt wrapped in expensive paper, apologies he'll never actually speak aloud, and compensation for the emotional distance he maintains with surgical precision.
But now that Emmaleen is there—and Jino, I have to admit, whose presence has proven more valuable than I initially anticipated—the place doesn't feel like a bribe anymore.
Especially now that Dom and Ricky have stopped treating my dungeon like their personal sex club and moved into their own places. No more stumbling over their weekly rotation of Pittsburgh girls. No more finding discarded lingerie in my kitchen or hearing headboards slamming against walls at three in the morning.
So… Jino's characterization was right.
It's home.
As the highway stretches ahead, dark and mostly deserted this time of night, my mind lands where it's been landing for weeks.