Chapter 1 - THE KISS IN THE DARK
Mafia Boss Accidentally Kissed a Poor Nurse at an Auction—Now He’s Desperate to Find Her
The room smelled of cold wax and money.
Cora Whitaker stood at the edge of it with a tray of glasses she had been told to keep full, and she counted the exits the way she counted them in a hospital ward: the service door behind her, the corridor to the left of the platform, the window that had been painted shut. Three. She had been in worse rooms. Not many.
She was twenty-seven years old, in a black dress that belonged to Priya, with her hair pinned up and her feet already aching. Felix had told her it was a private party and she would serve drinks for four hours and her father's debt would disappear. Felix had a good face for that kind of sentence—smooth, apologetic, the face of a man who had never once been afraid in his life.
She had swallowed her pride and said yes, because desperate people do not get to ask what kind of party it is.
By eleven o'clock she understood what kind. The men at the long table were not drinking. On the platform, a painting was being bid on by telephone, and the man with the phone kept saying numbers that did not sound like money. In the corner, two men discussed a shipment of something that was not art in the tone other men use for weather.
And at the head of it all sat a man in a black suit with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, and everyone in that room looked at him the way people look at a fire.
She did not know his name was Julian Voss. She did not know they called him the Undertaker. She only knew that when his eyes crossed the room and found her, they did not stop, and they did not soften, and there was nothing in them at all.
Then the lights went out.
Somebody shouted. Somebody fired. The sound came apart against the stone walls and came back doubled, and Cora dropped the tray and the crystal went everywhere and a woman screamed somewhere near the platform. She was already moving—she had spent nine years moving toward the sound of an emergency—and then a hand closed on her wrist and pulled her off her feet.
The wall hit her back. A body covered hers.
She did not see him in the dark. She smelled him—wool and cold air and something faintly metallic. His hand was flat against the wall beside her head. Then he leaned in, and his mouth found hers, hard and precise, and held there.
Her first thought, absurd and clear: this is not how you hide from a gunman.
Her second: that's exactly why he's doing it.
Because in the doorway, in the flash of a dying lamp, a man with a pistol was looking at them, and what he saw was a man in a black suit pressed against a woman in a black dress, and he made a decision, and he turned and went the other way.
The kiss lasted four seconds.
Then the lights came back on, and Julian Voss straightened, and looked down at her without one flicker of anything—no apology, no apology-shaped courtesy, nothing—and said, "You were the closest."
He was gone before she could find her voice.
Tomas found her instead.
He was short and slender and moved like a man who had learned a long time ago not to be seen, and he took her arm at the elbow in a grip that was not rough and was not removable. "Come."
"I have to—there was a man shot, I'm a nurse—"
"You're a server carrying drinks." He walked her through the service door and down a stone corridor. "You saw nothing."
"You need to let go of my—"
The car was already at the curb. He put her in the back seat and got in front and pulled away without headlights, and for three blocks nobody said anything.
Then he threw it over his shoulder, in a voice that was clipped and flat and had fear underneath it.
"Don't tell anyone what you saw. Don't try to understand what just happened. And most importantly, don't ever mention that name."
"What name?"
He did not answer. He stopped on a corner in Brooklyn she had never stood on before and leaned over and opened her door.
"Go home," he said, "and pray they forget you."
She stood on the cold sidewalk for a long time after he drove off.
Then she lifted one hand to her mouth and stood there, in her borrowed dress, with her cheap shoes soaking through, and found that no matter how hard she tried she could not wash off the coldness of a man she had never met—a man with eyes as black as two bottomless wells, eyes that held not the smallest trace of human warmth.
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I’ve updated the post with the FULL STORY in comment. If you’re unable to see it [the blue text], try this: go to the comment section, choose "Most relevant" and change it to ALL COMMENTS — then find 𝐚 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐛𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭—𝐭𝐚𝐩 𝐢𝐭, and it will lead you to the full story. Enjoy reading.
