Devil’s Lily: A Dark Mafia Romance (Nightshades Book 1)

We spent hours on the shooting range, and I absolutely reveled in every single moment. Teasing Maximo was the cherry on top. I was surprised—no, thrilled—that seeing me shoot so expertly aroused him. And oh, did I milk that reaction.

Every perfectly placed shot came with a cheeky wink and a seductive sway of my hips as I strutted past him. I teased him mercilessly, pushed his patience to the limit, until he finally had enough, pounced on me, and carried me laughing and squealing to the bathroom where he screwed my brains out. By the time he was done, I was screaming his name to the rafters for his men to hear.

Now, walking beside him to the car, my body still hums with the aftermath.

“I’m starving,” I complain as I get in through the door he’s holding open for me. He turns to our driver and speaks to him in Italian before getting in with me. The driver follows suit and turns the ignition.

“We’ll stop for some food on our way,” Maximo tells me as we pull out of the parking lot, running a hand through his disheveled hair and making it look even more deliciously messy.

I chuckle, scooting closer to swat his hand away. “You’re hopeless. Let me fix it.”

He smiles at me indulgently as my fingers comb through those thick, silky strands, and suddenly I’m remembering how those same strands felt clutched in my fists as I came earlier.

“Interesting. What are you thinking about that’s making your cheeks go so red?” Maximo’s hand rubs over my hot cheek. “Are you thinking naughty thoughts?”

I roll my eyes to hide my embarrassment and push his head away playfully as I move back. He chuckles, and my gaze drops to his lips. We’ve been skating around actually kissing—stealing hungry glances at each other’s lips, lingering too long—but he doesn’t seem willing to make the first move.

Then a sudden realization hits me. He won’t kiss me unless I explicitly ask for it or take the lead myself, because I was the one who originally took it off the table. So no matter how much he might want to kiss me, he’s holding back in a bid to respect my wishes.

“Maximo, I–”

His phone ringing interrupts me, and he holds up a hand as he answers, “Yes? Deal with it, Dante, I’m busy right now.” He pauses to listen, then checks his watch. “We should be home in about an hour. Yes.” With that, he ends the call and shifts his attention back to me. “You were saying?”

My heart stutters, and just like that, I chicken out, shaking my head. “Nothing.” His eyes narrow. He knows it’s not nothing, but he chooses to let it go.

The car slows to a stop, and the driver announces, “We’re here.”

I glance out the window to see we’re parked in front of a fancy-looking restaurant. But suddenly my excitement fizzles out. My body feels heavy, the kind of tired that seeps into your bones. I lean back with a sigh, tilting my head towards Maximo. “Can we just get the food to go?”

Maximo doesn’t argue. He simply nods and asks me what I want. Armed with my order, our driver gets out to get the food and is back in record time.

After we get back on the road, I let my head loll against the window, staring at the passing scenery. The rhythmic hum of the tires against the pavement starts to lull me into a calmer state, but my thoughts betray me. My mind wanders, circling back to the one thing I keep trying to ignore—kissing. Or rather, the lack of it.

Why does it keep creeping into my head? I chew on my lip and tap my feet on the floor nervously as I try to focus on something else. But it’s like a magnet.

I’ll just blurt it out, I think. Or better yet, just do it. I risk a surreptitious glance at Maximo, only to find him already watching me. Crap.

He rolls up his sleeves, and my eyes fall to his bulging muscles and the tattoos on his arm. An idea takes root. “I want to make you a deal,” I blurt out before I can change my mind again.

His brows lift in an amused arch, and he gestures grandly, like a king entertaining a subject. “Go on.”

I blow out a nervous breath and continue. “Tell me about your tattoo. Why the flowers? Do they mean something? And what about you and the guys? What happened that made you so loyal to each other? You mentioned shared experiences and pain.”

His entire demeanor shifts. His teasing face hardens, and his eyes cloud over. A fortress of old wounds slams shut. “You said it was a deal, so what do I get out of it?”

Here goes nothing. “A kiss.”

That gets his attention. He watches me for a moment, searching my face. “A kiss. You think I want your kiss that badly to tell you something so personal?”

My stomach knots. Shit, did I miscalculate? “I told you something personal earlier,” I remind him.

“Fair point. Alright.”

“Alright? As in, you’ll tell me?”

He shrugs, feigning nonchalance. “I would’ve had to eventually, so I take your deal. But I want more than one kiss. I want the right to kiss you whenever I want. Anytime.”

Yesss. That’s what I want too. Even if he hadn’t taken the deal, I would have found another way to bring up the topic. But I keep that part to myself as I smile at him. “Done. Now tell me.”

He chuckles. “It’s a long story.”

“Then it’s a good thing we still have about thirty minutes left before we get home.”

He gives me one last smile before his face becomes serious, his gaze shifting away from me as a faraway look settles on his face. “It’s such a long story, I don’t even know where to start.”

I scoot closer until I’m right by his side and rest my head on his shoulder. “Start anywhere.”

He sighs, a sound that feels heavy, as if he’s reaching into a dark corner of himself. “Rafael, Michael, Romero, and I… we all grew up in Little Italy. Rafael and I were pretty close from birth since my father was his father’s enforcer before he died. After that, his father didn’t mind me sticking around, especially because I helped with the things I could.”

“We became friends with Romero after his father joined the old Moretti syndicate when we were thirteen. A year later, we met Michael. His father was a corrupt senator who used Alfonso, Rafael’s dad, to take out his perceived enemies in exchange for looking the other way at the crimes Alfonso committed—and occasionally bailing him out.”

I nod against his shoulder. I already knew Rafael’s father was a don back in the day, and rumor has it Rafael killed his own father —which, to be honest, I don’t find all that hard to believe. The man is pretty scary.

Maximo stretches his arm out behind me and wraps it around my shoulder. “Anyways, the guys and I were tight. Then, in senior year, we got a new student—a clever sixteen-year-old girl who skipped grades because of her big brain.”

I hear the smile in his voice and glance up. A twinge of jealousy shoots through me at the obvious affection on his face for this new girl.

“The day she started at our high school, the guys and I were shit-talking about her, not knowing she was behind us, and she clapped back with some shit of her own. She was fearless. Rafael declared protection on her for reasons only he knew. Maybe because she was so small compared to the other students. Good thing he did, too, because she ended up being assigned as his tutor.”

“His tutor?” I ask, trying to keep up.

“You see, back then, we were all so busy running errands for Don Moretti—things no teenager should have been doing—that we didn’t have much time for school. So we were all falling behind, with the exception of Michael who was pretty smart back then. Still is, the fucker.”

He chuckles, and I smile as I think about the tattooed man. If he wasn’t the CEO of a top tech company, I might doubt that. At first glance, with his tattoos and piercings, I would’ve pegged Michael as just another rich, white man with a taste for criminal activities.

“Anyways, we all got a warning from the school, and Romero and I worked harder the following semester, but Rafael couldn’t be bothered. So the principal intervened by assigning him a tutor. The new girl. Emilia Rossi.”

Emilia. Even her name sounds pretty. I ignore the tightening in my throat and raise my hand to Maxim’s chest, reminding myself I’m married to him, not this other girl.

“Well, Emily joined our table for lunch after that, and we all just took to her. She was smart, witty, and couldn’t stand Rafael’s arrogance, which was funny to watch. A week later, her father was killed. Turned out he was a detective investigating Rafael’s father, and Alfonso had him murdered.”

I gasp at the dark turn in the story, my fingers stilling on Maximo’s chest as I glance up at him. His face tightens, brows furrowed, the lightness from earlier gone.

“It was all over the news, but like I said, Alfonso was well-connected. He not only had Michael’s dad in his pockets but also other top politicians, so no arrests were made. Emily closed herself off from us. I mean, we were still essentially strangers. She must have been going through hell, especially since she’d lost her mother years earlier and was now an orphan.”

My heart aches as I think about losing my atë. I can’t fathom how I’d be able to cope alone if I didn’t have Roan or Maximo. I blink back the tears stinging my eyes.

“Then she got the foolish notion of revenge and went to one of Alfonso’s well-known warehouses with her father’s gun. It didn’t end well.” He trails off, his fingers flexing on my shoulder.

“She got brutalized by the men, and they were going to—they wanted to defile her. But thankfully, the guys and I had an errand that day. So we were coming to the warehouse to submit our report and saw what was happening. Rafael went berserk.”

He describes how Rafael pulled out his gun and shot the man trying to take off Emilia’s clothes, and how he and the other guys also drew their guns to defend their friend. It was messy, but luckily the men weren’t expecting resistance and were so caught off guard that the guys managed to kill them easily.

They helped Emilia to the hospital and dumped the bodies of the dead men in the river in an attempt to clean up. But they didn’t realize there was a camera in the warehouse. Alfonso inevitably watched the feed and was pissed at them. Shit.

My stomach churns because I know something worse is coming.

“He said we should have let the men do whatever they wanted to her. She was just sixteen.” His voice sounds stricken.

I shift on the leather chair, crawling into his lap until I’m straddling him. My face presses against his neck, and my fingers run down his arm, offering what little comfort I can.

“He was so mad at us. He tied us up and carved into my arm—as well as Romero’s and Michael’s—with his knife, making sure to cut through the arteries. He wanted us to bleed out and for Rafael to watch it happen so he’d learn a lesson about how to conduct himself in the future.”

I swallow my gasp, closing my eyes as if that will stop the nausea assaulting me at the horrifying situation he’s painting.

“He had one of his men bring Emily from the hospital where we’d taken her. His plan was to make her and Rafael watch Michael, Romero, and me die slowly. Then he’d do what his men couldn’t do to Emily before killing her. All this to harden Rafael, who he couldn’t kill because he considered him his legacy. His heir. The way he took so much pleasure talking about his sick plan…”

“He was a very sick man.” I can’t resist adding. I can’t even fathom what Rafael must have gone through growing up with that psychopath. Maybe that’s what shaped the man into the iceberg he is today.

“The one mistake Alfonso made was not tying Rafael up. He had beaten him to a pulp and thought he was too weak to do anything. But Rafael slowly got up, got his hand on a gun, and ended his father’s life. That one singular action saved our lives.”

Now I understand why all these strong men are so loyal to Rafael. Hell, he has my loyalty too now. Without him, I’d never have met Maximo because he wouldn’t have survived.

I shudder at the thought of never meeting my husband. Never feeling what I feel for him now.

“After that, we ran away from the town, barely alive. Emily did a rough job patching up our arms since we were too scared to go to the hospital. Scared Alfonso’s men would catch up to us. We found a tiny studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and lived there for a while, stealing and doing other small crimes to survive.”

“Exactly a year later, the guys and I decided to get tattoos to cover up the scarred flesh and celebrate escaping death. We wanted something similar as a way to declare our commitment and loyalty to one another.”

Pulling away from his chest, I meet his eyes, then cup his face. “I’m so glad you made it out alive.” I let go and bend down towards his arm.

Then I nuzzle the scarred flesh, feeling all the pain, all the history there, before slowly kissing every single mark and bump. “Why flowers?” I murmur against his arm.

“That was Emily’s idea. Something beautiful to cover up something that was meant to be dark and ugly. Michael drew the line at roses and said if we were going with flowers, it should be deadly nightshades. But there were only so many nightshade flowers.

“So we each did our own research to find something that represented us. I chose Lily of the Valley because the drooping bell buds reminded me of pain, loss, and resilience in the face of adversity. It felt like a reflection of myself and my brothers. The others carefully chose their own too, which is why there are four different flowers.”

I frown as I stare at the pretty ink that now seems alive with meaning. “Shouldn’t there be five flowers? Emily didn’t choose one for herself?”

“She chickened out when we got to the tattoo shop, the weakling.” He chuckles, and I smile up at him.

“Now.” His tone changes to something darker as he drops a hand to my face and lifts me from his arm. “Your turn to uphold your end of the bargain.”

My heart stutters, then takes off like a racehorse, pounding wildly as I remember what started all this. His palm slides to the nape of my neck, his fingers pressing lightly, possessively, while his thumb grazes the sensitive skin there. A shiver ripples through me, goosebumps erupting in its wake, and when he leans closer, his warm breath fans my face, sending a teasing heat straight to my core..

My body reacts instinctively—my lips part, my eyes flutter shut, every nerve on high alert now. But he doesn’t kiss me. No, the bastard brushes the corner of my lips, once, twice, then pulls away. My breath catches, and before I can recover, he moves to the other corner, repeating the maddening game.

Heat and frustration swirl in my veins, and a needly little sound slips out as I turn my head to chase his retreating lips. “Maximo.”

He chuckles darkly. “You’ve led me on a merry-go-round of want these past few weeks. If I want to torture you for a few seconds, you’ll take it quietly like the good girl I know you are.”

Good girl? Oh, hell no.

I whimper again, tightening my thighs around his hips and pressing my ass down on his now-hard cock in a silent rebellion against his taunts. But all he does is smirk, the cocky bastard, and as he finally leans down, a harsh knock on the window makes me jolt.

Whipping my head towards the sound, I spot Dante outside, waving his phone at Maximo impatiently. Wait. I glance around and realize the car is already parked in the underground garage of our apartment. When did we even get here?

“Fucking hell,” my husband curses and releases me.

“No. Maximo.” I grab his hand desperately; he can’t just leave me like this—hot, needy, and spiraling towards frustration.

His intense gaze softens as he caresses my cheek, his thumb brushing my skin in that maddeningly tender way of his. “Hey, it’s okay. We’ll continue this later.”

I groan as I reluctantly slide off his lap, my legs shaky with lingering tension. Maximo opens the car door and gets out, then helps me out.

“What is it?” he asks Dante.

Dante frowns at me briefly before turning back to Maximo. “We just got a call from the airport. The kumicho’s jet just arrived. It’s a day earlier than expected, so the landing permit he has will expire in less than five hours.”

Maximo mutters a low string of curses, then turns to me. “Go on in, dolcezza.”

A slew of curse words flies around in my own head, but I swallow them down and rise onto my toes to press a quick kiss to his cheek. “Be careful,” I tell him as I step away, then head towards the elevator, Marco close behind me. Heck, it feels like I spend more time with my bodyguard than my husband. Or maybe it’s just my sexual frustration talking.

In the elevator, I slump against the railing, breathing in and out as I try to calm myself, though the sticky mess between my thighs isn’t helping. Marco’s presence beside me only makes it worse. There’s something humiliating about standing next to a stone-face bodyguard while your body is buzzing from a makeout session that went nowhere.

By the time we reach the penthouse, my arousal has fizzled into a low simmer of irritation. I nod at the men in the hallway as I get out of the elevator and make a beeline straight to our bedroom. A cold shower is my only salvation at this point.

The icy water does its job, snuffing out the last remnants of heat and leaving me shivering but clear-headed. Afterwards, I pull my hair up into a tight ponytail and slip into my comfiest oversized shirt and pants.

Maybe it’s for the best that Maximo had to leave so suddenly. Going from one extreme—the telling of his violent history—to another—the intensely charged kiss and arousal—would only soften my heart even more towards him, giving him the pass to wedge himself deeper than he already is. As if he isn’t deep enough already. He’s in my heart, my brain. When he’s not with me, I’m thinking about him and wondering what he’s doing.

Yes, this short reprieve is good. It will give me time to put things into perspective and compartmentalize. I nod to myself as I walk out of the bedroom and down the hallway, pausing to admire the artwork on the wall. Now that I know their meaning, I see them differently, appreciating the layers of thought and emotion behind them. But the hunger gnawing at my stomach leads me towards the stairs.

I was so distracted earlier, I forgot my takeout in the car with Maximo, so now I need to make something for myself.

Perhaps, I’ll make some Italian cuisine and set up the dining area for dinner for two—a little mood-setting ahead of time. I could nibble on some of the leftover pastries I baked yesterday so Maximo and I can eat together. My lips twitch into a smile. Dinner for two. A warm meal, soft lighting… and then we’ll see where the evening takes us.

My heart pounds in anticipation and my steps lighten as I practically float into the kitchen.