Kidnapping the Assassin: The Mafia Don’s Fatal Mistake

The Graveyard in His Eyes

Chapter 18

**[Elara]**

A ghost was pressing me into the floorboards. 

My brain violently rejected the visual data my eyes were feeding it. It was impossible. I had watched the black harbor water swallow him. I had spent a fortune dredging the riverbed for three months, pulling up nothing but rusted metal and false hope. 

Yet the crushing weight bearing down on my chest was undeniably human. 

The heat radiating from his skin burned through my soaked clothes. I memorized every inch of this man’s face in the dark of a basement a year ago. The sharp, arrogant slope of his nose. The thick, dark lashes framing eyes that used to look at me with a terrifying, consuming devotion. 

But as I stared up at him now, my lungs seizing in my chest, I realized something was horrifyingly wrong. 

The devotion was gone. The recognition was entirely absent. Looking into Cassian Rossi’s obsidian eyes right now was like staring into an empty room. The lights were off. The man I loved wasn't home. 

"I asked you a question," he growled. 

His voice was a rusted, gravelly rasp. It didn't hold the smooth, commanding baritone of a Mafia Don. He sounded like a street dog that had spent a year fighting for scraps. 

He shifted his weight, digging his knee painfully into my thigh. With his free hand, he drew a jagged, matte-black combat knife from his tactical vest and pressed the cold steel directly against my carotid artery. 

"The Corsicans pay me to kill people, not talk to them," the stranger holding my husband’s face muttered. "But you looked at me like you saw a dead man. Why?"

I couldn't breathe. My throat tightened, threatening to close entirely. 

He didn't know me. He didn't know the ring on my left hand belonged to his family. He didn't know he had burned his entire empire to the ground just to keep my lungs inflating. 

"Cassian," I choked out, a desperate, wet sound escaping my lips. I reached up with my free hand, my trembling fingers brushing the rain-soaked hair sticking to his forehead. "Cassian, please. It's me."

He flinched at my touch. His eyes narrowed, a flash of pure irritation crossing his features. 

"Wrong name," he spat. He pressed the blade a fraction of an inch deeper. A thin bead of warm blood welled up against the steel. "They call me the Hound. And you’re the Rossi Donna. You’ve been causing my employers a lot of expensive problems."

The physical pain of the knife was nothing compared to the violent rupture happening inside my chest. 

*The Hound.* 

He was a mercenary. A gun for hire taking orders from the very people he had sworn to destroy. The trauma from the river, the oxygen deprivation it had wiped his slate entirely clean. My husband was gone, replaced by a programmable weapon in the hands of my enemies. 

He leaned in closer. He smelled wrong. There was no expensive bergamot or Italian leather. He smelled like cheap ozone, stale rain, and drying blood. 

"Any last words, Donna?" he whispered, his muscles tensing for the lethal strike. 

The Viper finally woke up. 

Grief was a luxury I couldn't afford right now. If I kept crying, he would slit my throat. If I fought him physically, one of us would end up dead, and I would rather put a bullet in my own brain than kill him. 

I had to outsmart him. 

I stopped struggling. I let every muscle in my body go completely, terrifyingly slack. My head fell back against the floor, and I closed my eyes, exposing the vulnerable column of my neck to his blade. 

He hesitated. 

Assassins expect their prey to thrash, to beg, to fight until the bitter end. Total surrender confuses the predator. It creates a microscopic window of hesitation. 

"What are you doing?" he demanded, his grip on my wrist loosening by a fraction of a millimeter. 

"Accepting the inevitable," I whispered softly. 

My right hand, pinned near my waist, subtly angled downward. Inside the lining of my trench coat sleeve was a spring-loaded injector. A localized, weaponized dose of liquid fentanyl. Enough to put a charging rhinoceros to sleep in three seconds. 

I flicked my wrist. The injector slid smoothly into my palm. 

I opened my eyes, staring directly into the graveyard behind his gaze. 

"I love you," I said. 

His brow furrowed in utter bewilderment. "What"

I drove the injector directly into the thick muscle of his thigh. 

The mechanism hissed. He let out a sharp, feral grunt, instantly yanking the knife away from my throat to swat at his leg. But the chemical agent was already rushing through his bloodstream. 

He grabbed my throat with his massive hands, intending to crush my windpipe before he went down. His grip tightened with terrifying force. I gagged, clawing at his wrists. 

"You" he slurred, his eyes rolling back. The vicious strength drained out of him with astonishing speed. 

His massive frame collapsed forward, crushing the air out of me as he went entirely dead weight. His head rested against the crook of my neck, his hot, shallow breaths ghosting across the fresh cut he had just made on my skin. 

I lay there on the ruined marble floor, pinned beneath him for the second time in my life, violently gasping for air. 

Slowly, my hands crept up his back. My fingers tangled in his damp, dark hair. I held him tightly, closing my eyes as the thunder rattled the penthouse windows. He was real. He was breathing. 

I shoved his heavy body off me and dragged myself to my feet. I stepped over the bodies of my guards and retrieved my radio from the coffee table. 

I pressed the transmission button. 

"Vincenzo’s cleanup crew, report to the penthouse," I ordered, my voice hardening into a sheet of impenetrable ice. "Bring heavy restraints and a medical transport."

"Is the target neutralized, Donna Rossi?" the captain asked over the static. 

I looked down at the unconscious man bleeding on my rug. I looked at the hands that had once saved my life, now hired to end it. 

"No," I replied smoothly, wiping the blood from my neck. "The target is coming home with us. Prepare the soundproof holding cell at the estate."

He had chained me in the dark to break me. 

Now, it was my turn.