“Really?” she asked, arching a brow as I shimmied into the sheer negligee. In any other situation, it would have been cute, and I would have loved wearing it. But now… I felt dirty just being in it.
“You really don’t know who he is?”
I shook my head. I had never heard of him before. Was he a new don or a son of one? I doubted it, considering how the woman on stage had addressed him.
“Can’t hurt,” the woman said after a moment. “You are better off not asking questions and accepting your fate.” She took in my frantic expression. “He likes them quiet.”
Before I could ask anything else, she was herding me out of the room and down the hall, away from the stage to a smaller room instead. There was a bed draped with sheer curtains and silk sheets, and nothing else. “What is this?” I asked.
“The sampling room,” the woman replied. “Get on the bed.”
“Wait, what?”
She looked around before leaning in. “Your buyer will come to examine his purchase. If you are a virgin, he has to leave you that way if he wants his money back. But everything else is fair game.”
This was all too crazy. I wasn’t really here. This was a bad dream because I had eaten some bad delivery or something. At any moment I was going to wake in my own bed in my penthouse and this nightmare will be just that: a nightmare.
This couldn’t be my life. “Please, I don’t belong here,” I pleaded as she moved to the door. “This is all a mistake.”
The woman looked back at me, and I saw what I hoped were pity in her eyes. “Blame your father for this one, Miss D’Agostino. He brought this down on your head when he fucked over those men in that room. You are the compensation.”
She was gone before I could respond, the telltale sound of a lock letting me know that I wasn’t getting out of this room.
My shoulders sagged, my skin prickling from the cool interior of the room and the lack of clothing on my body. I had fully expected to put up a fight against my future husband today, not be sold to the very devil himself! I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t know Valentino, but given my brief instances with him, coupled with the warnings of the old woman, I knew I wasn’t about to have a savior on my side.
Chapter 5
Leda
You’re the compensation.
He paid twenty million for me.
He wasn’t about to drink wine and laugh over this nonsense.
He was going to hurt me.
I wrapped my arms around my waist, ignoring the inviting bed in the corner. It was clear that this wasn’t the first time that something like this auction had taken place, and I wondered how many times Valentino had attended these events. The staff knew his preferences well, which didn’t bode well for me at all.
Was he one of those men that preyed on helpless women? Did he beat them?
Well, he wasn’t going to get one over on me. I wasn’t going down without a fight.
My father was going to blow his lid when he found out about this.
Even though it was my life that was being taken, I couldn’t help but smile at the thought. All his carefully laid plans were going to go to shit, and if I died today, it would so be worth it to know that he wasn’t in control of this.
A hysterical laugh escaped me.Iwould pay twenty million just to see the look on his face, knowing that he hadn’t won. I hated him with every fiber of my being for what he had done to our family, what power he thought he had over both me and Nico.
The bastard still thought he was in control of my life and of his Mafia, but it was clear, given the words that had been said, that he wasn’t. My father was going to get what was coming to him, and I hated that I wasn’t going to be around to see it.
My smile died, and I felt a wave of despair well up in my chest. I didn’t know what was going to happen tonight, but it wasn’t going to be good. For twenty million, I was likely to be tortured before I was killed. Valentino was going to violate my body in ways that I couldn’t even imagine, all because of my last name.
I would be shouldering the sins of my father, the very one that I hated.
Well, they weren’t going to find a weak woman when it happened. I was going to claw and fight to my very last breath. They would know the name of Leda D’Agostino for far longer than my father’s.
Realizing I had been wasting time, I hurried about the room, looking for anything that I could defend myself with. There was nothing save the sheets on the bed. I swallowed as I thought about them being wrapped around my neck, but quickly shook that thought out of my head.