The Cursed Mafia King's Obsession

Dante's Pov

I didn't feel her hit me so much as I felt everything after it.

One second the alley was empty, rain started to needle down through the streetlight overhead, and the next a woman had slammed into my chest hard enough to knock the air out of both of us. My hand caught her arm on instinct, nothing more...the same instinct that had kept me alive through twelve years of this city trying to put me in the ground. That was all it was supposed to be.

Then something inside me that had been silent for eleven years opened its eyes and roared.

Ours.

It wasn't a word so much as a fact, arriving fully formed, too loud to argue with. My wolf hadn't made a sound in over a decade...it hadn't stirred, hadn't wanted, hadn't so much as lifted its head at anyone who'd ever stood close enough to touch me. Now it was slamming itself against the inside of my chest like something let out of a cage it had stopped believing existed, and every part of me that had spent eleven years convinced this would never happen went very, very still trying to catch up.

Mine, it said again, quieter this time, almost reverent. She's ours.

I was nineteen the last time anything in me reacted like this. Nineteen, and then it simply stopped....every wire in me that was supposed to carry want, desire, attraction, whatever men and wolves alike were supposed to feel when someone stood close enough to matter, went dark all at once and never came back on. I spent years testing it before I accepted it. Clubs where women did everything they knew how to do to get a reaction out of me and got nothing. Men, eventually, because I'd started to wonder if the wiring had simply crossed somewhere instead of dying, and I owed myself an honest answer before I gave up completely. Nothing worked. Nothing so much as flickered. My wolf stayed silent through all of it, curled up somewhere behind my ribs like it had already decided nothing in this world was worth waking up for.

So I stopped looking for it. I built something that didn't need it instead. An empire doesn't require a heart to run....it, it only requires nerve, and patience, and a willingness to make decisions other men couldn't, and I had all three in abundance once I stopped wasting time waiting to feel something that clearly wasn't coming back. I told my mother it was a choice, that I'd simply decided love was inefficient, a weakness other men could afford and I couldn't. She never believed me. I'm not sure I ever fully believed myself. Either way, eleven years passed like that...eleven years of being told, by every part of myself, that whatever this was supposed to be, it wasn't for me.

And now a stranger runs into me in the rain, and my wolf is trying to claw its way out of my chest to get closer to her.

Careful, I told it, the way I'd once told it to sit through every long, silent year it had refused to answer me at all. It didn't listen. It never had, and now that it finally had a reason to speak, it clearly wasn't interested in taking orders from me again.

Mate, it said, and this time the word landed somewhere lower than my chest, somewhere I didn't have language for. Let's claim her.

The rain became thickened while I was still trying to make sense of it, coming down harder now, cold enough that I felt it soak through my shoulders before I thought to care. She hadn't pulled away. I hadn't let her. We stood there like that for a second too long...her hand fisted in my jacket without either of us deciding it should be there, my grip still locked around her arm...and I told myself it was a shock. Hers, from whatever she was running from. Mine, from a decade of silence breaking open at once. Neither explanation felt complete, and my wolf wasn't offering me a better one. It only wanted one thing, and it wanted it with a single-mindedness that frightened me more than the men I could already hear approaching somewhere behind her.

Protect her, it said. Whatever comes down that street - she doesn't get hurt.

"Help me," she said, and her voice came out so quiet that I almost lost it under the rain. "Please. They want to kill me."

I looked down at her face and couldn't see it clearly...not really, even with the streetlight behind her and the rain running down between us...but I could see enough. Tears, or rain, or both, tracking down skin gone pale with fear. Her whole body was shaking, and it wasn't from the cold. My wolf noticed that before I did, and something in my chest went sharp and cold in a way that had nothing to do with the storm.

"Who wants to kill you," I said. Low. Steady, because one of us needed to be, and it clearly wasn't going to be the animal currently trying to take over every decision I made.

"I don't have time to explain." She looked back over her shoulder, and I followed her gaze down the alley toward the mouth of the street, where headlights had just swung around the corner, cutting through the rain like something deliberately hunting. "Please. I know I don't know you. I don't care. I need you to help me."

I should have asked more questions. Eleven years of running an empire had taught me that much - never move on a stranger's word, never take a threat at face value before you understand what it costs you to believe it. My wolf didn't care what eleven years had taught me. It had waited eleven years for this exact moment and had no intention of spending it being cautious.

Ours, it said again, and this time I stopped arguing with it.

"Stay behind me," I said.

The headlights kept coming. Two cars now, not one...I could hear the second engine catching up behind the first, both of them moving with the kind of confidence that told me everything about who was driving them. Men who already believed they'd win. Men who weren't expecting resistance, because whoever they were chasing had never had anyone standing between her and them before tonight.

She pressed closer against my back without me telling her to, one hand still twisted into the fabric of my jacket, and I felt her breathing hard enough that I could feel it even through two soaked layers of cloth. My wolf pressed forward with her, wanting to be closer still, wanting there to be nothing left between her and whatever was coming but me. The alley behind us dead-ended thirty feet back. I'd clocked it the second she ran into me, the same old habit that had kept me breathing more times than I could count. Thirty feet of nowhere to go, and two cars closing in from the only direction that led anywhere else.

The first car slowed at the mouth of the alley, tires hissing against wet pavement, and its headlights swept across both of us before the driver had even fully stopped. Doors opened on both sides. I counted four men before the second car had even finished pulling in behind the first, boxing the alley shut, and every one of them was already reaching for something under his jacket like this wasn't the first time tonight he'd expected to need it.

I felt her go rigid against my back.

"They found me," she whispered, and something inside my chest...man and wolf both, for the first time in eleven years agreeing on exactly one thing...decided, before a single shot had been fired, that none of those four men were leaving this alley with her.

I ran the numbers the way I always did, because doing nothing had never once solved anything, not even with an animal in my chest currently insisting numbers didn't matter. Two of them hung back near the cars, hands still inside their jackets, waiting on a signal from whoever was in charge. The other two advanced first, slow, confident, the kind of confidence that came from men who'd never once had to work for what they wanted. I'd left the house without so much as a knife on me, certainly the only thing I'd be dealing with tonight was a late meeting and an early morning. My wolf didn't care about that either. It had waited eleven years to feel something, and it clearly intended to spend every last piece of that patience on keeping her breathing.

Whatever you do, it said, low and certain, don't let go of her.

I had no intention of it either.

The four of them fanned out across the mouth of the alley, closing the only gap left between us and anywhere else, and I understood, with a clarity that should have frightened me far more than it did, that whatever I'd just felt for the first time in eleven years, I was about to find out exactly what it was worth.