Penelope Levine has been "promised" to notorious mafia boss, Brock Rumlow, in order to pay a family debt.
The night before her wedding, she meets James Barnes, the owner of Underworld, one of the most infamous nightclubs in New York. Their spark is...
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CW:Kidnapping, obsessive behavior, violence, removal of body parts, and violence against women.
I was born in a big gray cloud Screaming out a love song All the broken chords and unnamed cries What a place to come from - Florence + The Machine, "Leave My Body"
The car ride is tense. The blonde man who drove them to Rumlow's estate is driving her again, and she and Scott are surrounded by gangsters holding guns. Nobody speaks. Penelope stares down at her hands that are folded in her lap.
She meets the eye of one of the gangsters and he tilts his head once he sees her bag.
"What's in there?" He growls.
She wouldn't dare show him her phone. She might still need it.
"A book," she replies as she pulls it out of her bag. She made sure to take a black purse so that nothing would be visible other than what she took out. Penelope prides herself on her ability to think on her feet. Her father always said that her cleverness was the best thing about her.
"Give it to me," he growls.
"Come on, man. Let her have something," Scott chimes in.
"Shut the fuck up," the gangster spits.
He has awful tattoos on his throat, wrapping all the way around his neck, and even worse ones on his hands. Some of them look like they got infected and healed strange. They don't look anything like James's.
Penelope thrusts out the book. It's a copy of Hamlet that's well-loved and dog eared. It was one of the very first plays she was ever in in theatre school. She played Ophelia and worked for weeks to get the dialogue right and to really understand and feel it. It's not easy, but Penelope thinks she did a pretty damn good job for being relatively inexperienced.
The man flips through it with a disgusted expression on his face. The extent of his literary knowledge probably doesn't go beyond Playboy, and that's only if he can get the pages unstuck.
He hands it back to her.
"Can't understand a word. Is this supposed to be English or some shit?"
She smiles at him, knowing she can't get hurt right now.
"No, it's for people who can read."
"Bitch," he whispers.
The rest of the ride is silent while Penelope fantasizes about grabbing the gun in his hand, pressing the barrel to his forehead, and pulling the trigger. The image in her mind is so vivid that she almost feels herself reaching for it during certain moments, but she holds herself back.
They arrive at Crossbones Estates and Rumlow's driver and staff are immediately on Penelope, yanking her out of the car. She feels large hands wrap around her arms as Rumlow's driver hauls her out and pulls her into the building. There's no kindness, no warmth. She's being treated like an object, and she knows deep down that if she doesn't kill him, Rumlow will end up killing her first.
