Chapter 3 - Dinner at the Dragon’s LairThe sun had set, plunging downtown Chicago into a sea of neon lights and driving rain. Most of the office towers around us were dark, but the forty-second floor of the Marino Building remained brilliantly illuminated.
We were sitting across from each other at the small conference table in Dante’s private office. In front of us sat two takeout boxes of spicy Szechuan noodles and containers of potstickers that I had ordered down from a little hole-in-the-wall place two blocks away—the kind of greasy, authentic food that mob bosses supposedly never ate, but which Dante devoured with surprising enthusiasm.
“So,” Dante said, using chopsticks with practiced ease, “let me get this straight. You spend your days balancing a multi-million-dollar criminal enterprise, managing my impossible schedule, and haggling with commercial carpet cleaners, and your nights...”
“My nights are spent sleeping for five hours, waking up in a cold sweat wondering if my insurance claim for Leo’s physical therapy got approved, and occasionally binge-watching bad reality television,” I finished, popping a potsticker into my mouth.
“You never go out?” Dante asked, his dark eyes softening just a fraction. “No boyfriend? No social life?”
I gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Mr. Marino, dating in Chicago when your primary romantic benchmark is a man who keeps a suppressed pistol in his desk drawer tends to narrow the applicant pool significantly.”
Dante paused, his chopsticks hovering over his food. He looked at me across the table, the overhead LED lighting casting sharp shadows across his chiseled jawline.
“I wasn't always like this,” he said softly, his voice dropping into a register meant only for me.
“I know,” I replied gently. “People say Clara was an extraordinary woman.”
The mention of his late wife’s name usually caused every person in the building to instantly scatter for cover. It was the ultimate taboo—the invisible bomb shelter buried deep beneath the Marino empire. But I said it plainly, without pity or fear.
Dante slowly set his chopsticks down. He stared into the grain of the wooden table for a long moment.
“She loved flowers,” he whispered, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. “Every Friday, I’d buy her a bouquet of white peonies from the market on State Street. The day she died... she was holding a bunch of them. The bomb went off right as she opened the passenger door of the Lincoln. There was nothing left... except white petals scattered across the asphalt.”
He looked up, and for a fleeting second, the terrifying Mafia boss vanished, leaving behind only a broken, haunted man who had spent nine years punishing himself for surviving.
“You think about her every single day,” I said, not as a question, but as an absolute truth.
“Every second,” Dante admitted. “Every breath I take feels like stolen time. For nine years, I built walls of steel and blood around myself so I wouldn't have to feel the pain. I thought laughter was dead. I thought human connection was a weakness.”
He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table, locking his gaze onto mine.
“And then my exhausted, overworked secretary walked into an execution, threatened me over a carpet-cleaning bill, and made me laugh for the first time in a decade.”
My heart skipped a beat, doing a bizarre, unauthorized acrobatic flip against my ribs. I swallowed hard, desperately trying to find my professional armor.
“Well,” I cleared my throat, picking up my water glass. “I’m glad my budgetary concerns could serve as a therapeutic breakthrough. But right now, Mr. Marino, we have a more pressing therapeutic emergency: Marcus Vance is currently hosting a charity gala at the Drake Hotel, and if we don't crash it tonight, he’s going to liquidate his accounts and flee to Zurich by morning.”
Dante blinked, the sentimental fog instantly burning away, replaced once more by the razor-sharp predator who ruled the Chicago underworld.
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He smiled—a wide, brilliant, terrifyingly handsome smile that I had never seen before in my life.
“Get your coat, Emily,” Dante said, standing up from the table. “We’re going to a party.”
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