"No."
"I am aware that it's reckless, but I've run out of options, Mark."
The b-stard sipped from his glass like my words were static on a radio—background noise that only irritated him.
His indifference was more pungent than the aged whiskey he swirled with idle fingers, his expression carefully blank, polished to perfection like the marble countertops gleaming beneath us.
The sudden shift in his demeanor felt like a slap made of silk—smooth but unmistakably violent.
Only last month he had spoken to me like an equal. Now I was reduced to a nuisance. A buzzing fly circling a too-expensive dinner table in a too-expensive kitchen, my presence too loud, too desperate, too real.
Men.
They always wear their disdain so comfortably, like cufflinks.
"All I need is one meeting."
"Lucrezia, be rational. Why would Emiliano Sanchez meet me?" He sighed, his voice brittle, unbothered. "We barely exchanged two words at the auction."
