I Wore Red to Make Him Jealous. I Didn’t Expect to Find My Name in His Mafia Security File.

He did not wait for my answer.

Luca Castellani did not ask for permission, and he certainly did not care that I had a seating card waiting for me at table seven in the grand ballroom. His hand slid from my upper arm down to my wrist, his long fingers wrapping around my pulse point like a man taking ownership of a heartbeat.

If anyone had been standing in that lobby with a camera, if they had captured that exact, breathless fraction of a second and saved it , they would have immortalized a masterpiece of impending ruin. They would have seen the vibrant, dangerous splash of my red satin dress contrasting with the sharp, ruthless black of his tuxedo. They would have seen the way his arm banded across my waist to catch me, his hand resting intimately against my ribs, dangerously close to the plunging neckline of the silk. And they would have seen my face—eyes wide, lips parted, caught in the exact moment I realized the safe, predictable walls of my life had just violently collapsed.

"Walk," Luca commanded softly, his voice barely carrying over the ambient noise of the wedding reception happening down the hall.

I walked.

I had no choice. The gravity of the man was absolute.

As he pulled me toward the private, gold-plated elevators reserved exclusively for the hotel's VIP residents, the few people in the lobby simply parted. A security guard in a dark suit stepped forward as if to ask for Luca's keycard, but one look at Luca's eyes made the man step back and stare at his own shoes.

The elevator doors slid open. Luca pulled me inside and hit the button for the penthouse level.

The doors closed, sealing us in a polished mahogany box. The sudden silence was deafening, broken only by the faint hum of the machinery and the ragged, shallow sound of my own breathing.

Luca released my wrist. He stepped back, putting exactly two feet of space between us, but the distance felt like a physical weight. He reached up, unbuttoning his tuxedo jacket with slow, deliberate precision. The movement was predatory, casual, and utterly terrifying.

"Mr. Castellani," I started, trying to find the professional voice that I used every morning when I handed him his black coffee and recited his schedule. It failed me. My voice trembled, betraying the wild fluttering of my heart. "Rachel is expecting me. I am a bridesmaid. I cannot just disappear into the penthouse."

Luca didn't look at me. He kept his eyes fixed on the illuminated numbers ticking upward above the door.

"Rachel will survive," he said, his voice entirely devoid of warmth. "And you are not going back down to that ballroom, Mera."

"You can't just dictate where I go," I argued, crossing my arms over my chest, a defensive gesture that only served to push the red satin higher. "I am off the clock. It is Friday night. My personal life is not subject to Castellani Industries' approval."

At that, Luca finally turned his head. His dark eyes dragged over my face, down the column of my throat, tracing the delicate gold chain resting against my collarbone, before finally settling on the curve of my waist. The look was so heavy, so possessive, it felt like a physical touch.

"Your personal life," Luca said, his voice dropping into a register that made my toes curl inside my heels, "has always been my business. You just didn't know it."