Toxic Love: A Dark Enemies To Lovers Mafia Romance

“So, you get a goomar. Easy.”

I groan, shaking my head as Vito chuckles. Lying in the pool lounger next to mine, he grins around his cigar as he deftly lights a wooden match and brings it to the finely cut tip. The cherry catches and glows orange before he drops the match into the ashtray perched on the side table next to him, beside his glass of Fernet Branca. Then he leans back in his lounger to gaze out over the pool and at my back garden.

Vito, aka Don Vito Barone, head of the Barone mafia organization, was always like a second father to me. Well, more like a fun uncle in the beginning, I suppose. But when my real father and mother died when I was barely fifteen, Claudia sixteen, and Bianca only two, that fun uncle very much did become a father to all three of us.

Vito took us in and raised us right alongside his two blood sons, Carmine and Nico. He gave us all a good life and used his influence—and his wealth—to get Claudia and I into Knightsblood University, and Bianca into the School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center when it was clear that she was a very talented dancer.

I grew up fucking around with Carmy and Nico whenever my dad dragged me along to the Barone house when he was doing work as Vito’s personal tailor. Given Don Barone’s sense of style and love of fashion, my father was over a lot. So it never felt odd after my father’s death when Carmy and Nico went from being my friends to me and my sisters’ unofficial brothers.

When it…happened…they mourned Claudia and wanted vengeance for her death as if she were their own flesh and blood. I know they’d give their lives to protect Bianca just the same. So would Vito, without flinching.

“Seriously, a goomar. That’s your solution to this bullshit.”

Vito grins as he puffs on the Cuban. I glance over at him and resist the urge to chuckle at the sixty-five-year-old man in the tiny black speedo sprawled next to me.

The older Barone is a tanning junkie, even if Carmine, Nico, Bianca, and I have all tried to impress upon him the concept of skin cancer. Whenever we do, though, Vito just starts waxing eloquent about the glory of Rome and superior Italian genes.

For years, Vito was quite happy sunning himself on the oversized patio of his luxury midtown penthouse—with or without a comically small speedo like the one he’s currently wearing. That is, until New York continued to grow around him, and his newer neighbors started to complain about the naked Italian guy sipping Montepulciano and bronzing his ballsack for them all to see.

Apparently, even highly connected and lethally dangerous mafia dons bow to the pressures of multi-million-dollar co-op boards. Who knew.

Anyway, Vito’s go-to spot for sunning himself these days is my pool.

…I’ve made the speedo mandatory.

It being barely spring and not, in my opinion, nearly warm enough to be sunbathing, I’m dressed in white linen pants, Italian loafers, and a pressed black polo shirt.

This is about as casual as I get.

Jeans are for riding a motorcycle. Sneakers and t-shirts are for the gym. I absolutely do not own a fucking hoodie.

My predilection for style and fine fashion certainly stemmed from growing up as master tailor Bruno Sartorre’s son. But it was honed under Vito’s fashionable eye and taste for luxury. I mean, you only get so many turns around the sun. Dress for the occasion.

“Well, okay, not a solution. But getting a side piece might certainly make your life a little happier.” He smirks. “Not to mention your dick.”

I’m always slightly amused at the differences between my birth father and my adoptive one. Bruno prided himself on good manners and didn’t approve of crude language and swearing. Meanwhile, I can’t imagine Vito not talking like a sailor about fucking, genitals, and other similar topics that would have given my father a stroke.

“Well,” I lift a brow. “I’ll consider it.”

“Do. It saved my marriage, Dante.”

I roll my eyes, suppressing a grin. I already have a pretty good understanding of the…I suppose you could say gray areas…of Vito and Giada’s marriage.

While Giada was still alive, my adoptive parents were famously at each other’s throats half of the time and locking themselves in their bedroom to hate-fuck each other’s brains out the other half of the time. I don’t know—and can’t imagine a world where I’d need to know—the details of whatever their “arrangement” was. But I do know Vito had plenty of goomars in and out of the house—and I would suspect Giada did as well, she was just a hell of a lot more discreet about it.

“And your dearly departed wife? What did she think of a side piece ‘saving your marriage’?”

Vito puffs on his cigar and shrugs. “I doubt she thought about it very much at all. She was too busy fucking the gardener for the last ten years of our marriage.”

I snort a laugh.

“Dick like a fuckin’ donkey, or so I’m told,” Vito continues, holding his hands easily a foot apart from each other. “I’m amazed she could walk at all after we hired him.”

I grin. “Well, maybe I’ll need to hire a gardener, too.”

The second I say it, a strange sensation ripples over my skin: a feeling somewhere between anger and revulsion that I’m not quite able to pin down before it slithers away.

“Maybe.” Vito turns to me and lowers his sunglasses, his brow furrowed. “Listen. I obviously don’t know her that well, but even I can tell it takes a special sort of man to handle a woman like Tempest Black, my friend.”

“I don’t need to handle anything,” I grunt. “She and I understand what this is.”

“Of course, of course,” Vito sighs, waving his cigar. “But only a very foolish man would walk into this thinking he’d never have to handle his wife. And you, Dante, are not foolish.”

My brows draw together as I lean back in my lounger. “She can do whatever the fuck she wants, for all I care. There’ll be no handling of any kind.”

“Ha! Spoken like a man who’s never been lived with a woman,” Vito grins.

I sigh. “Amused by all of this, Vito?”

“Hugely,” he chuckles, stretching as he leans back in his chair. “Oh, did she ever acknowledge your gift, by the way?”

I roll my eyes. “My gift” wasn’t from me at all. It was all Vito’s idea, and when I nixed it, he had one of his people send the fucking package over to Tempest anyway on my behalf. This was a week ago, right after Tempest signed that goddamn blood marker.

When I don’t respond, Vito turns to me and lowers his shades again.

“You’re still sore about that?”

I turn to glare at him. “I just don’t like people putting words in my mouth or speaking for me,” I mutter.

This time he’s the one who rolls his eyes, shoving his cigar back between his lips as he waves me off.

“Listen to signore Drama Queen over here. No one was putting words in your mouth, Dante. It’s simply customary to gift a ring at a time like this, regardless of whether it’s ‘real’ or not. You might not like Ms. Black⁠—”

“She’s a fucking witch with a mouth like a sailor who dresses like she’s fronting a grunge band,” I grunt. “Not liking her is an understatement.”

Yes, Vito sent a goddamn engagement ring to Tempest. From me. Which she promptly sent back, to my house, in a much larger box.

…because it came back to me together with a claw hammer and a bottle of lube.

Point taken.

“She’s a pretty girl, no?”

“No, she’s not.”

Vito snorts. “What, you prefer the sort of woman who frequents your club?”

“I prefer the sort of woman who doesn’t trick me into fucking marrying them,” I grunt. “And besides, you know damn well I don’t play at Venom.”

It’s one of my firm rules: I don’t shit where I eat. Club Venom is my business and my empire, not my playground.

“The man sits on a mountain of cake and complains about being hungry,” Vito says to the air, shaking his head.

I glare at him. “I’m not complaining.”

“That’s all you’ve done since I arrived.”

“Well you are welcome to go sun your wrinkly nuts back at your penthouse and risk the wrath of the 5th Avenue co-op boards,” I mutter.

Vito laughs loudly and takes a sip of his Fernet Branca before turning to eye me. “It could be much worse than Tempest Black, my friend.” His brow darkens. “Like one of those goddamn Greeks.”

I bite back a smirk. Vito hates the Drakos family, which is fair. Their youngest son, Deimos—a fucking psychopath with…interesting kinks—scared the ever-living fuck out of Vito’s niece Francesca one night at Club Venom. Granted, she only got in because the men working the door that night knew her uncle and were scared of the name. Later, I made them far more scared of me if they ever considered letting her in again. I also booted that little psycho Deimos from Venom and revoked his membership permanently.

“You know, when I mentioned hiring a stripper for your bachelor party, I wasn’t picturing my own father.”

Carmy steps out of the house and onto the back patio. He makes a face as he nods his chin at Vito.

“For fuck’s sake, Pop, put on some goddamn pants.”

Vito snorts, patting his belly contentedly. He’s still got the imposing physique he had as a younger man. But, I mean, the guy is sixty-five, and he does love his wine and pasta.

“Does the peak male form intimidate you, son of mine?” Vito grins, tossing back his Fernet and then cupping his package through the speedo.

Carmy rolls his eyes. “No, but your peak male form in that fuckin’ banana hammock is going to put me in therapy.”

“Which would probably be a good thing for everyone in your life that has to interact with you on the regular.”

Carmy flips me off before he frowns and tilts his head, noticing the Sinatra playing softly over the outdoor speakers. His eyes roll.

“Jesus, Dante. He’s even got you listening to this old timey shit on these little playdates of yours? I’m gonna walk out here one of these days and find you in a cute little G-string too, aren’t I?”

“Aww, you fantasizing about me, Carmy?”

Vito laughs heartily before he wags a finger at his son. “This old timey shit is solid gold Sinatra. You should get some musical taste, like Dante. Anyway, I’m gonna go hit the head.”

Carmy grins at me as his father gets to his feet. “Yeah, I’ll work on that, Pop.”

Carmine and I repress our laughter as we watch his father amble inside, ass hanging out of his speedo.

“I mean, to be fair, you gotta have balls to wear one of those things,” Carmine sighs, sitting in his dad’s vacated lounger.

“Yeah, well those balls have just been all over that chair, Carm.”

He makes a face as he scoots to the far end of the lounger. “So, anything?”

I shake my head sadly. Carmy swears under his breath.

When I was going to be marrying Maeve Black, Carmine, Nico and I had a fuckton of ideas lined up for ways to basically take Charles Black for everything we could. Yes, I need to get married to hold on to Venom and my empire. But his empire is crumbling around him, and I’m the only one offering cement and rebar. He needed that match more than I did.

However, given that I’m now marrying the queen of the damned herself, the plans we had set up with Charles are no longer viable. I’ve been looking at angles for putting the squeeze on him anyway—I mean, I’m just marrying his granddaughter instead of his daughter. But I’m hitting a roadblock.

The nice version is: Tempest hates Charles. The not so nice version of that uses much more colorful language. So the odds of using my marriage to Tempest to gain any sort of leverage over Charles is looking bleak as fuck.

Before, it was me doing Maeve—Charles, really— a favor by marrying her. Now that it’s Tempest’s name on that blood marker, though?

She’s doing me the favor. She has the leverage and the power.

Not, of course, that she needs to know that. At all.

He exhales heavily. “Well, shit. This sucks—” Carmine winces as his eyes snap to mine. “I mean, you know, relatively speaking. Not sucks like⁠—”

“Like having to marry Tempest fucking Black?”

He shrugs. “Hey, she’s…”

“Batshit crazy?”

“Headstrong,” he grins. “Tempestuous, if you will.”

“She’s a brat with authority issues and a terrible sense of style.”

Carmine sighs. “Dude, by your standards, even I have bad style.”

I arch a quizzical brow at his black suit, no tie, fitted, with the top two buttons of his dress shirt undone. I clear my throat. “I mean…”

“Dude, it’s Armani. Even you can’t say shit about Arma⁠—”

“That jacket cut is at least eight years old, the inseam on the trousers should be tightened up a half inch, and there is absolutely no reason you should be wearing French cuffs without a tie. I don’t care what Tom Ford is doing.”

Carmine is silent as he slowly he shakes his head at me.

“You’re a fuckin’ snob, bro.”

“Hey, you asked.”

“I…didn’t, actually?” He rolls his eyes. “You know, I was all set to commiserate with you about having to tie the knot with Tempest. But shit, I think I feel worse for her now.”

“Yes, that’s the support in these trying times I was looking for. Thanks, Carmy.”

He sighs heavily. “You used to be fun, you know? And I don’t know why you’re so bent out of shape about Tempest. I mean, yeah, she’s…rough around the edges. But, bonus! She doesn’t come with all the baggage and psycho family drama of a mafia princess.”

“No, just the psycho family drama of her brothers being Alistair and Gabriel fucking Black. Who would happily stab me in the neck if they thought they could argue their way into⁠—.”

“Again, one conversation would⁠—”

“Carmine.”

He holds his hands up. “All right, all right, I’m done.” He clears his throat. “Hey, at least she’s hot.”

I scowl. “Excuse me?”

“Your fiancée. Great legs. Cute face. Fantastic ass.”

“Well then, you marry her.”

“And what exactly would that accomplish?”

“Me not having to marry her?” I grunt.

Carmine grins widely. “Well, maybe after you two are officially hitched and you tell her she can do whatever she wants because it’s all for show, I could be her side piece, you know?”

My jaw grits, and a feeling not all that different from the one I felt at the idea of me “hiring a gardener” creeps over my skin, turning my nerves raw and my blood hot.

“I mean she’s got crazy written all over her, and man, crazy chicks?” Carmy whistles wolfishly. “Those bitches will fuck your dick raw—Dante?”

I blink and snap out of my daze, realizing I’ve been glaring a laser hole right through Carmine. He frowns, cocking one brow.

“You, uh, you good, man?”

“Yeah,” I shake my head. “Yeah, fine. Just a lot on my mind.”

He smirks at me. “Well, I do have a cure for that. It starts with a B…then an A…”

“If it’s bachelor party, my answer is no.”

“It is bachelor party!” he crows. “And your answer is hell yes.” He reaches over, clapping me on the shoulder. “I mean,” he winks. “Throw as many hissy fits about as you want. But you’re getting married, Dante.”