My Fiancé Sold Me to Loan Sharks to Save Himself — So the City’s Most Feared Man Made Me His Wife

Part 1

The rain hadn’t stopped in three days, and neither had the men who wanted me dead.

I smelled them before I saw them.

Cheap cigarettes and wet leather, waiting in the alley behind the bakery where I worked the closing shift.

“Going somewhere, Nora?”

The voice slid out of the dark like something with teeth.

I froze with my keys still biting into my palm.

Two of them stepped under the broken streetlight.

One was built like a loading dock.

The other was thin, with a scar that tugged his mouth into a permanent sneer.

“I don’t have it,” I said.

My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.

“I told you, Kyle took everything before he ran.”

The thin one laughed.

“Your fiancé’s a ghost, sweetheart, but your name’s on the paper.”

“A quarter million doesn’t care who signs the check.”

He looked me up and down, slow, the way men like him always did.

“Shame, too.”

“You’re too big to work it off the easy way.”

The heat climbing my neck wasn’t shame anymore.

It was something harder.

I had spent twenty-eight years apologizing for the room I took up.

For my body, for my softness, for daring to want an ordinary life.

And the one man who swore he loved me had handed me to wolves to save his own skin.

The big one moved first.

His hand closed around my arm hard enough to leave a print.

Something snapped loose in my chest.

I swung my canvas bag with everything I had, the steel thermos inside catching him square across the jaw.

He dropped his grip with a curse, and I ran.

I don’t remember choosing a direction.

I only remember the fire in my lungs and the slap of cold rain on my face.

I remember the certainty that I was going to die in an alley over a debt that had never been mine.

Then I saw the light.

Warm amber spilled from a set of frosted glass doors at the end of a narrow uptown street.

I threw my whole weight against them and fell inside.

I didn’t stop for the man at the podium.

I ran down a hallway lined with velvet, hunting for a back door, a closet, anywhere.

Instead I shoved through a pair of heavy doors and stumbled into a silence so complete it stopped my heart.

The room smelled of bourbon and old money.

Four men stood in the corners, and every one of them reached for something under his jacket.

At the head of a long leather booth sat a man who seemed to pull the air out of the room.

Dark suit, darker eyes, silver just beginning at his temples.

He looked at me the way a glacier looks at a ship.

“Please,” I gasped, clutching my coat to my chest.

“They’re going to kill me.”

The doors crashed open behind me.

Both collectors barged in, soaked and shaking with rage.

“Listen here, you fat —”

The thin man’s words died in his throat.

He looked at the man in the booth, and the color drained out of his face.

“Mr. Russo,” he whispered.

“We didn’t know.”

“She’s just a stray.”

The man in the booth never looked at him.

He looked at me, at the bruise blooming on my arm, at my ruined coat and my trembling hands.

“A stray,” he repeated, and the word was soft and lethal all at once.

I had been taught my whole life to shrink, to make myself easy to overlook.

But raw fear strips all of that away.

So I looked the most dangerous man I had ever seen dead in the eye, and I begged.

“Help me.”

“I’ll do anything.”

“I have nothing left, but I swear I’ll do anything.”

He set down his glass without a sound.

He stood, slow and deliberate, and crossed the room until I could smell bergamot and smoke on him.

Then he lifted his jacket from his shoulders and draped it over mine.

The warmth of it nearly buckled my knees.

He turned to the collectors without raising his voice.

“Tell your boss the debt is cleared.”

“He’ll have his money by midnight.”

The thin man gaped at him.

“Sir — why would you —”

“Because she’s untouchable now.”

His eyes never once left my face.

“She is going to be my wife.”