Chapter 1

1

Arya

Eleven years later

We were just about to cut the cake when the shooting started.

As much as I’d begged and pleaded for my eighteenth birthday party to have a puppy theme, my mother insisted we go with something more grown up.

To reflect that I’m a woman now.

I don’t feel like a woman.

It has been six months since I left the five-story palace in the sky I call home—and only for a doctor’s appointment. Before that, it had been a year. The only people I come into contact with are my tutors, seamstresses and personal trainer. How can I call myself a woman if I’ve experienced so little of the world? In many ways, I’m still a coddled child.

So I should be excited about the rooftop pool party, even if most of the attendees are friends of my parents. Right?

Don’t be ungrateful. So much work went into this.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my parents who did the work, though. My father is never here and my mother just returned from a three-month trip to the Mediterranean. This is the first time I’ve been in the same space as both of them since…well, I can’t even remember. But they did remind me via text to be extra polite and dutiful with so many of their friends here tonight.

Forcing a smile onto my face, I adjust the strap of my pale blue bikini and watch our chef, Huxley, bury the knife in the center of the three-tiered cake. Everyone is crowded around, talking excitedly over the tropical music that started blaring from the speakers as soon as they’d sung Happy Birthday. The sun is beginning to set between the buildings that make up the Manhattan skyline and tiki torches are lit up all around the edge of the pool, supporting mother’s luau theme.

I scan the faces of the people huddling together, drinks in hand. I notice a couple of my father’s business associates watching me under the hoods of their eyelids, their gazes drifting down and over my bikini bottoms. One of them even leans to the side, seeming to assess my backside. My father is on his fifth or sixth drink and doesn’t appear to notice. Or care. Feeling trapped, my heart starts to pound—

A gunshot splits the night air, traveling straight through the cake and frosting flies everywhere. Huxley drops to his knees with a hole in his neck and my mother screams.

The guests scatter, most of them running for the exit, others diving for cover.

I’m rendered immobile, my eyes fixed on the sniper just above the doorway, crouched down behind a brick piling. The muzzle of his gun is aimed directly at me.

Time slows down, my pulse pumping methodically in my ears, and I’m reminded there are valid reasons I’m never allowed out of the house.

My father is the Manhattan District Attorney.

His enemies are countless, especially since he’s made organized crime his target.

The threats to my life started happening in my early teens. Kidnapping attempts, threatening letters, shots fired at me in the park. For some reason, they come after me, not my father. They must believe it will hurt him more.

So they locked me away.

Unnecessarily.

See, I have a guardian angel. My parents think I’m ridiculous for believing so, but I know it’s true. Every attempt that has ever been made on my life, he’s been there. A righteous blaze through the shadows, hood drawn up to hide his face, smelling of oranges.

Something is always triggered in my memory, but I can’t place why he’s familiar.

I only know that he saves me, every single time. And tonight will be no exception.

Goosebumps travel up the flesh of my arms and I close my eyes, heat percolating the lowest, most feminine points of my body. He’ll be here. It has been so long. Too long. I’ve started getting urges, confusing ones, and apparently they connect to him because little pulses tick in my wrists, between my legs, just knowing he’s near.

I can already smell the oranges.

The red light from the gun’s scope travels across my belly and I quell a frisson of fear.

A split second later my faith is rewarded when a muscular forearm wraps around my waist, my feet leave the rooftop and I’m suddenly traveling through the air, narrowly missed by the bullet. I land in a strong set of arms, enveloped in citrus, and I look up, finding a pair of intense green eyes glittering down at me from inside a black hood.

“Just can’t stay out of harm’s way, can you?”

I blink up at my guardian angel. That voice. He’s never spoken before. There’s something about it that calls to the furthest recesses of my mind, but I can’t place it. Surely if I’d heard this rasping baritone before, I would remember exactly where.

“Happy birthday, Arya. This is going to be one you never forget,” my guardian angel mutters, gathering me close to his body and striding across the roof. “Over the doorway. Take him out,” he shouts to someone I can’t see. “There are more waiting in the stairwell. Put a bullet in every last goddamn one of them. Come find me when it’s done.”

Just like that, we’re locked in the dark cabana located at the roof’s edge. A place for guests to change or leave their possessions. There are a couple of lit candles flickering—Hawaiian scent—casting shadows on the wall. The atmosphere would almost be romantic, if it wasn’t for the pings of bullets passing through silencers out on the roof, although I can barely hear any of it over the frantic pounding of my heart.

“You’re here,” I murmur, burying my face in his neck. “You came.”

A shudder wracks his wiry frame, the sinew of his arms flexing beneath me. Lethal is the word I would use to describe him. Strong, tall, angular. His body is a finely tuned instrument.

A weapon.

In contrast, he sets me on my feet gently, his palms skating down my arms, over my hips. “She’s not hit,” he breathes, as if reassuring himself. “She’s not hit.”

“You wouldn’t let me be hit,” I whisper, wrapping the front of his jacket in my fists, pulling him close, closer, until his lips settle against my forehead. “I knew you would come. Please don’t disappear again this time. Please.”

“I’m done leaving you, sweetheart.” His tone is made of iron. “You go where I go now.”

“Really?” Warmth, happiness and relief crest over me. “I want that.”

“You’ll be getting anything and everything you want.”

I bounce a little on the balls of my feet and he groans, pressing me against the wall of the cabana, his hands bracing over my head. “Can I see your face now?”

Pain laces his low chuckle. “You’ll agree to come with me, even before knowing what I look like?”

“I don’t care what you look like, I just want to see you when…”

A beat passes. “When?”

“When I kiss you for the first time,” I say in a rush, my cheeks heating drastically. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since I was fourteen and you stopped that man from pulling me into his car outside of the church on Park Avenue.”

He bristles against me, as if physically offended by the memory. “No one is ever going to touch you again, Arya. No one but me.”

I slide my hands beneath his jacket and run them up his hard packed stomach, his chest. “And then again when I was fifteen and that man tried to drown me in the health club pool—”

“Sweetheart, stop,” he chokes out, his mouth laying hard, fast kisses down the side of my neck, across my shoulder. “I don’t want to think about those times. They almost killed me.”

“I’ll stop talking about them when you kiss me—”

He throws back his hood and I’m only given a too-brief glimpse at my wildly handsome, if rough around the edges, guardian angel, before his mouth lands on mine. It’s wetter and more adamant, demanding, aggressive than I could ever have imagined—and I love it. My senses wake up from a slumber and cheer. He kisses me like he’s been craving me since birth, his hands wrestling with my hair, his tongue raking over mine, rubbing sensuously, the stubble of his chin scuffing mine. Low, tortured sounds rumble from his throat and his hips…

Oh, his hips.

This is another part of kissing I didn’t anticipate. How much our bodies would be involved. There is something hard inside of his jeans and he drives it up between my thighs, lifting me off the ground, slamming me against the wall repeatedly, growling brokenly. My butt cheeks slap against the wall and oh God, oh God, the rigid fly of his jeans is creating friction in a place I didn’t realize I needed it. But I do. I need it so bad. So I open my thighs and get more, encouraging him to thrust harder, so hard I’m worried the cabana is going to collapse. “Wanted to take you so many fucking times, Arya.” His words are almost indiscernible, muffled and slurred into my neck. “But had to wait until you were old enough. I wouldn’t have made it five seconds with you under my roof. And I’m not that kind of criminal.”

I don’t understand his meaning, but I trust him. I trust this man with my life.

He doesn’t have to explain himself to me.

“Wait,” I whimper when he gives me a particularly hard pump, his teeth burying in the side of my neck. “W-what is your name? I need to know what to call you.”

His tongue laps at the sting of his bite. “Damian, sweetheart. That’s the name you cry out for now. You’re going to cry it all kinds of ways. In happiness, in lust, in frustration when I’m banging you blind for the eighth time that day. Damian. The last name you’ll need to know.”

A light goes off in my head.

That Bronx accent, the green eyes, the shape of his face…

He’s the boy from the subway steps.

The boy I never stopped wondering about. Worrying for.

I go still with shock and he lifts his chin, that masculine jaw tight enough to crack, letting me study him closely. “Damian. I-I went back and looked for you when I was old enough,” I whisper, heat pressing against the backs of my eyes.

“I know,” he says gruffly. “I’ve known every step you’ve taken.”

My fingertips run down the side of his face, eager to memorize. “I wish I’d known you were out there. I’ve needed a friend so badly.”

“A friend?” He levers me up with his hips, grinding that hard ridge against my sex, and his eyes turn molten. “I’d have been no friend to you, sweetheart. I still won’t be one.”

My guardian angel being unkind is so unexpected, I flinch. “But…”

“I’m going to be a lot more than your friend, Arya,” he explains, searching my face with growing concern. “Do you understand what that means? Or have your ridiculously inept parents not explained what happens when two people love each other.”

Confused, I shake my head.

He drops his forehead to my shoulder, unwinding my legs from around his waist with unsteady hands. “Jesus Christ,” he rasps. “I must be scaring the shit out of you.”

“You could never scare me,” I protest, trying to pull him back. Closer.

There’s a knock on the door of the cabana. “All clear, boss.”

“We’ll be out in a minute,” he shouts back, refocusing all that intense, restless energy on me. “We’re going to have a little farewell meeting with your parents, sweetheart. Then I’m taking you home.”

“Wait. Permanently?”

When he said you go where I go I’d been in kind of a stupor. Elated to see him again after so long.

But the possessive way Damian wraps me in his jacket and scoops me up into his arms makes me wonder if this is the last time I’ll ever see my home. It also makes me wonder why I’m not even the slightest bit sad about it.

Still… “I-I don’t think they’ll just let you take me, Damian.”

Laughing, he kicks open the door of the cabana. A dozen men wait for us outside by the pool, some of them splattered in blood. “Sweetheart, I might not be the kind of criminal who kidnaps a minor, but I am a criminal. A goddamn good one. And I don’t have problems getting what I want. Especially when it’s what I want most in this world.”