A Taste of Poison, A Touch of Grace: Falling for the Mafia King Who Bleed for Her

The dining room of Bellavista hung in a suffocating silence. The click of polished dress shoes against Italian marble sounded like a countdown. Four men flanked the table, their hands tucked with deliberate carelessness beneath the tailored cuts of their charcoal jackets. At their head stood Marco Vance, Matteo’s chief security officer and right-hand operator for nearly a decade. Marco’s sharp jaw was set in stone, his eyes scanning the terrified patrons before settling on Sophia.

“Boss,” Marco said, his voice flat and deferential. “The perimeter is secure. You’re exposed here. Our vehicles are idling at the curb.”

Sophia didn’t flinch, though the cold air radiating off these men made the small hairs on her arms stand up. She kept her chin lifted, refusing to step backward into the server station. She had lived around wolves her entire life in this neighborhood; she knew that the moment you showed your throat, they tore it out.

Matteo didn’t look at Marco. His dark eyes remained fixed on Sophia, burning with an intensity that seemed entirely disconnected from the danger surrounding them. “You heard the man, Sophia,” Matteo murmured, his deep baritone carrying an edge of dry humor. “They think I’m walking into an ambush. But I think the real danger is leaving you here with the mess I created.”

“I’m not a mess to be managed, Mr. DeLuca,” Sophia replied evenly, smoothing her black server apron. “You got your answer. Now take your army and walk out before you ruin my tips for the night.”

A flicker of a genuine smile crossed Matteo’s chiseled face. It transformed his features—stripping away the cold, unyielding mask of a cartel sovereign and revealing the magnetic, lethal man beneath. “Feisty,” he murmured. “My mother would have loved you.”

He stood up, towering over the table. Standing at six-foot-three, broad-shouldered and commanding, Matteo DeLuca looked like an emperor who had traded his armor for an immaculate Tom Ford suit. He casually tapped the Manila folder on the linen cloth—the files detailing her father’s old investigations. “Keep them safe, Sophia. Those papers are the reason your father died, and they’re the reason someone tried to slip cyanide into my sea bass tonight.”

Before Sophia could formulate an answer, the front plate-glass window of Bellavista exploded.

The sound was a deafening crack that shattered the restaurant’s fragile quiet into a million jagged pieces. Glass sprayed across the dining room like shrapnel. Screams erupted from patrons as tables overturned, wine glasses shattered, and the sharp, rhythmic staccato of automatic gunfire ripped through the humid evening air.

Marco drew a Glock from his holster in a heartbeat, shouting tactical commands into an earpiece. Matteo didn’t hesitate. In one blindingly fast movement, he reached across the table, grabbed Sophia by the forearm, and hauled her bodily over the bench seat just as a volley of high-caliber rounds tore through the leather upholstery where she had been standing seconds prior.

“Down!” Matteo ordered, his body completely covering hers against the cold tile behind the bar.

Sophia’s heart hammered violently against her ribs. The smell of cordite, expensive vintage wine, and crushed plaster choked her throat. Matteo was heavy, warm, and entirely solid—a shield of pure muscle and Kevlar pressed against her spine. One of his large hands cradled the back of her neck, tucking her head firmly beneath his chin.

“Matteo!” Marco yelled over the deafening cacophony of gunfire outside. “Drive-by shooters! Two black SUVs on the curb! We need to pull back to the kitchen exit now!”

Matteo looked down into Sophia’s wide hazel eyes. Her cheeks were smudged with dust, but there was no hysteria in her expression—only the sharp, adrenalized focus of a survivor. “Can you run?” he whispered, his mouth inches from her ear.

“I run ten miles every morning carrying flour sacks,” she snapped under her breath, adrenaline masking the tremor in her hands. “Move.”

Matteo gave a dark chuckle. Rising into a crouch, he pulled his own pistol from an inside holster, firing three controlled, precise shots through the broken front facade to force the attackers back. “Move to the kitchen! Marco, suppressive fire on the street!”

Sophia led the charge through the swinging double doors into the industrial kitchen where she had spent the last five years of her life. The cooks and dishwashers were already cowering beneath the heavy stainless-steel prep tables. At the far end, the heavy metal fire door stood shut.

Matteo shoved Sophia ahead of him through the kitchen. “Where does this exit lead?”

“An alley behind Fourth Street,” Sophia panted, throwing her weight against the emergency push-bar. The heavy door groaned, then burst open into the cool, rain-slicked city night. “There’s a blind turn behind the dumpsters that connects to the subway entrance!”

“Good girl,” Matteo muttered, his hand finding the small of her back to propel her forward.

They spilled into the alleyway. The rain had begun to fall, a steady mist that slicked the asphalt. But as Matteo’s lead guard sprinted toward the alley mouth to clear the lane, he suddenly dropped, his chest erupting in dark red. A high-powered rifle bullet had drilled through him from an elevated position across the street.

“Sniper on the fire escape opposite!” Marco roared, diving behind a metal trash bin.

Matteo yanked Sophia hard into the recessed shadow of the brick loading dock, his body shielding hers against the brick wall. They were pinned. The alley behind them was a dead-end blocked by a locked security gate; the mouth of the alley was zeroed in by an assassin.

Sophia looked up at Matteo. His jaw was clenched, blood trickling from a shallow cut on his cheek where flying glass had grazed his skin. Despite the hail of death waiting twenty yards away, he reached out with his thumb and wiped a streak of white plaster from her cheekbone. The gesture was shockingly tender.

“You shouldn’t have warned me at that table, Sophia,” he murmured softly, his eyes searching hers. “If you hadn't, you'd still be an anonymous waitress with a dream of opening a bakery.”

“And you’d be lying on an autopsy slab with poison in your stomach,” she shot back, her chest heaving. “I don’t regret it.”

Matteo’s lips parted, an electric current passing between them through the gun smoke and rain. His hand shifted to cup the side of her neck, his thumb resting over her racing pulse. “Then remember this: from this second on, you belong under my protection. Whether you like it or not.”

Before Sophia could protest, the roar of a heavy diesel engine echoed from the far end of the alley. A massive armored black SUV smashed through the alley’s security gate, tires smoking, turning broadside to block the sniper’s line of fire.

The passenger door flew open. “Get in!” Marco screamed.

Matteo grabbed Sophia’s waist and practically lifted her off her feet, throwing her onto the leather rear bench before tumbling in after her. Marco dived into the front seat as bullet impacts rattled like hailstones against the reinforced ballistic glass. The SUV surged forward, tires screeching against the wet pavement as it peeled into the midnight city streets.

Sophia collapsed back into the leather seats, staring out the window at the smoking ruins of the restaurant where her life had made sense only an hour ago. Beside her, Matteo was reloading his magazine with mechanical, cold precision.

His phone buzzed on the console. Matteo answered it, placing it on speaker.

“DeLuca,” Matteo said.

A distorted, synthesized voice crackled through the vehicle’s high-end sound system, echoing with chilling clarity inside the sealed cabin.

“You’re hard to kill, Matteo,” the voice rasped. “The poison was supposed to be clean. Now it gets messy. Hand over Bennett’s daughter and the files, or we will slaughter every living soul in your high-rise before dawn.”

Matteo’s grip on the phone tightened until his knuckles went stark white. He leaned close to the microphone, his voice dropping into an icy register that terrified even Sophia.

“If you even breathe in her direction,” Matteo whispered, “I won’t just kill you. I will erase your entire bloodline from the face of the earth.”

Matteo disconnected the call. He looked across the seat at Sophia, his eyes dark with a promise of blood and iron. “We’re not going to my penthouse,” he told Marco quietly.