Chapter One
“Idon’t think I’ve ever seen you here before. Are you sure you’re in the right group?”
Her voice was even more delectable than he thought possible. Ruinstudied his target, Callie Lawson, and had to wonder what she had done to piss off Dante Morelli.
It wasn’t down to rejection. Dante preferred younger women. More docile. The kind that didn’t know they were getting screwed left, right, and center by one of the most feared capos in the Giordano mafia.
Killing her would be so easy.
He’d been watching her for the past month, and so far he’d come to realize that Callie had no one waiting for her at home. At work, people ignored her. From what Dante told him, he’d let this woman go without any real explanation as to why. All his sources had told him she was a hard worker. She never ventured too deep into any kind of avenue. She lived her life on the edge. Even now, she sat in a knitting group but on a bench as far away from anyone else as possible. The only way anyone could tell she was part of the knitting group was down to the fact that she was actually knitting, the needles moving fluidly as she worked her ball of yarn.
Ruin stared down at the mess in his hands. He’d learned to cast on but wanted to make contact today, again something he had never done before in his life.
Killing people didn’t require becomingattached, and yet here he was, breaking all his rules. He didn’t give a fuck what people had done when he got the kill order. All he cared about was getting the job done properly and efficiently.
Callie was different, and he didn’t know why.Maybe it was the thick, black hair and innocent blue eyes. Or her sexy-as-fuck body. She had an abundance of curves, and Ruin had always loved a woman with a bit of meat on her body. In the circles he visited, they were always throwing skinny women at him. There was nothing wrong with them, but he liked a woman to grab onto. To be able to hold as he fucked her hard, making her take all of his cock, and hearing her beg and whimper as she took him.
Callie wasn’t a woman he could fuck. She was a target—a woman he needed to get rid of. There was a lot of money riding on this. What he didn’t know was why Dante had called him.
He was known as the Bogeyman. The man to get the job done.People feared him and he reveled in the knowledge. Killing didn’t bother him. There was no guilt or shame. Just … nothing. A void. Absolutely nothing.
Making contact with Callie broke his rules. She was going to die. He was going to be the one to killher. End of story. Why the fuck was he sitting on a park bench, near her, pretending to learn to knit? She was the enemy. Dante had warned him that she was manipulative.
It wasn’t like the capo to get soworked up. Was that why he wanted to know who Callie was? He didn’t like Dante, never had. The bastard was cruel for fun. There was killing, but then there was torture.
Most of the men around him feared him.Ruin didn’t fear anyone. Unlike Dante, he wasn’t owned. No one held a claim to him, even though the Giordano wanted to take him as if he belonged to their mafia. After years of killing and lurking in the shadows, no one would take his freedom away from him. He’d been killing for nearly thirty years.
“I’ve heard it’s good for the fingers,” Ruin said, finally breaking his rule and making contact with the woman he had to kill.
She smiled. “Ah, you’re getting the aches and pains in your fingers?”
He nodded.
Callie slid across the bench, placed her own knitting down, and then helped him. She put her hands on top of his and started to describe the process of knitting. She explained a knit, showing him repeatedly with his thirty cast-on stitches. That was row one. She then explained the purl stitch, and of course he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. He’d not done his research other than to the extent of casting on. For several rows, she explained, holding his hands and guiding him.
“Would you like to try?” she asked.
Ruin was a fast learner, which is why he was so feared. There was nothing in this world that took him long to master. He struggled through the knit stitch, but Callie gave a warning gasp, and he remembered how she moved her fingers.
“Very good.You’re a natural.” She patted his arm then slid away from him and picked up her own knitting.
Ruin watched her, curious. She was kind to him, even though she didn’t know him. That was stupid and dangerous, and he couldn’t figure out why she would do that.
“What are you making?” he asked. More rules broken. It wasn’t like he would care abouther.
Killing her was the end result, but he wanted more details on Dante.
Callie smiled and reached into her bag, pulled out a couple of prepared arms, and some other weird-looking shapes. “It’s a baby’s cardigan.”
“You have a child?” he asked.
It wasn’t possible. None of his sources had ever confirmed she was a mother. Everything indicated she was a single woman, living alone in the city, working at a boring analytical office. She sat in front of a computer all day, staring at numbers.
“Oh, no, I don’thave a child. I love knitting, and seeing as I have no one to knit for, what I do is make a whole bunch of clothes and then go and donate them to the local hospital. I’ve also done the same with dog clothes, and I donate them to several shelters.”
“Isn’tthat a waste?” Ruin asked.
“Why would it be a waste?”