Beautiful Beast (Perfectly Imperfect: Mafia Legacy #1)

“Do the jobs often go wrong?”

“Sometimes.” His tone changes, voice drops and comes out sounding almost savage. “I lost an entire team once.”

“What happened?”

“One very important detail got missed.” He grabs the wineglass off the table and, with brisk steps, crosses the room, stepping out on the balcony. “I didn’t realize that the woman we were hired to assassinate was the girlfriend of a rival hitman. The bastard executed all four of my men before they even got the chance to reach their target. Fucking Mazur.”

He launches the glass at the balcony banister. The stemware shatters, the sound of the breakage echoing through the air.

“You killed the guy who slaughtered your men, I assume.”

“No.” Rafael leans back on the railing, crossing his arms over his chest.

Slight shivers run down my spine from the intensity of his darkened gaze.

He doesn’t say anything else, just watches me from a distance, as if waiting to see if I’ll ask for an explanation. I want to. The interest this man ignites within me is beyond compare. Every time I think that I get him, he does something to contradict my conclusions.

“Why not?” I ask, a bit cautiously. “Why not retaliate for the killing of your men?”

“There are rules in every trade. In mine, one does not accept a hit contract against a fellow hitman or his family, no matter what the offered price is.”

“I didn’t expect there’d be an established etiquette in a business that deals in death.”

“There is.” His jaw hardens. “I broke the rule. And my men paid with their lives for my mistake.”

A sudden urge to go to him and offer some kind of comfort overwhelms me. Even with the shadows that obscure most of his features, anger and self-blame are clearly written on his face. That doesn’t track with him seeing his men only as hired workforce. Doesn’t fit the picture of the shitty employer he hasn’t denied being. There’s more to Rafael De Santi than he wants to let on.

I glance at the sticky note I found stuck to the corner of the laptop screen. It’s a drawing of a scene from this morning—of me, while I was having breakfast on the terrace. Alone. I believed he had already gone to work at that point.

The proof of that erroneous thought is in my hand. I smile at his attempt to capture little details, especially by using nothing more than a simple ballpoint pen. No one but me would ever be able to tell that the half-smudged blobs on the ends of the “doodle-me’s” fingers are the marmalade stains from when I was stuffing a croissant into my mouth.

There are four more sketches just like this one, hidden in the drawer of my nightstand. Every time I stumble upon one, I need to fight not to give in to giggles like a schoolgirl. I wonder, what does he do with the doodles I leave for him? Probably throws my crude drawings in the trash.

Rafael’s phone rings.

“Pronto,” he barks.

I’m still staring at the sticky note when my desk chair is suddenly yanked back, the casters smoothly rolling over the floor. “What—”

“How the fuck did that happen?” Rafael leans over the laptop with the phone pressed to his ear.

With him this close, I can hear the muffled speech of a man on the other side of the line, but his English is heavily accented, which makes it hard to grasp what the guy is talking about. Rafael grabs the wireless mouse with his free hand and just nods to whatever the man is saying while minimizing the multitude of windows on the screen.

“Wait a second, Hans.” He lowers the phone to the desk and looks at me.

“You want the chair?” I ask.

“Yes.”

I nod and start untangling my legs from beneath my ass as I rise, but Rafael wraps his arm around my waist and lifts me.

“Chill, man!” I protest. “I was getting up.”

“I may need you. You’re staying.” He drops onto the chair and sets me on his lap.

I stare at Rafael’s profile as he rolls the chair closer to the desk and picks up the phone again while keeping his other arm tightly wrapped around my middle. He hits the video call option and leans the phone against the desktop pen holder. A video feed of a man wearing a black balaclava, so only his eyes are visible, fills the screen. His location appears to be a swanky room, with luxurious furniture and paintings in the background.

“Continue,” Rafael tells the guy as he once again reaches for the mouse.