I didn't exactly choose to be stolen at four years old.
But the French underworld isn't big on consent.
One minute I was Donatella Acardi, Mafia royalty. The next? Just another stolen kid bleeding in someone else's basement.
That's where I met Ami...
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Donatella POV:
When he left the room, towel still slung low on his hips like the smug menace he is, I was fine. Totally, completely fine. I mean, come on.
Good girl.
It was just a phrase. Two words. A throwaway comment. A casual thing.
People say that all the time! Dogs get called that every day. Parents say it to toddlers. Coaches yell it across soccer fields. Mafia men say it to assassins-turned-houseguests who've been kidnapped, traumatized, emotionally stunted, and are currently hiding their entire illegal résumé in their sock drawer.
Normal.
Totally. Normal.
Right?
...
Except I wasn’t moving. I just lay there, arm flung over my face, staring up at the ceiling like it had the answer to my internal crisis written in Morse code in the cracks.
Good girl.
God. Damn him.
What the hell was that? Why’d he have to say it like that? So casual. So easy. Like he didn't just throw a tiny emotional grenade and strut out like we weren’t standing in the ruins.
I wasn't gonna mention it. Absolutely not. I was too emotionally advanced, too emotionally stable to care. I'm like a black-ops-trained, emotionally detached raccoon in combat boots—I don’t feel things. I feel facts. And caffeine withdrawals. And the urge to commit casual felony.
But then my brain—my traitorous, hormonal, war-crime of a brain—replayed it.
Good girl.
With the tone. The voice drop. The stupid lip twitch he probably didn’t even mean to do. The little glint in his eyes like he knew exactly what he was doing and wanted to leave me mentally combusting on this IKEA bed.
I rolled over, muffled a sound into my pillow.
“Nope. Nope. Nuh-uh. Not today, Satan. Not on this Tuesday.”
I smacked the bed twice. Paced. Sighed. Pointed at the ceiling.
“You think you’re slick, don’t you?” I hissed at the air like it was his soul. “You think you can just toss that little line out there and walk away like I’m not gonna analyze it to death while pretending I don’t care?”
I stopped.
Wait.
Maybe he knew I’d hear it. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe it was psychological warfare. Maybe Amir was playing long con brain chess and I was just over here playing mental Candy Land.
“Oh my God,” I muttered. “He knows.”
I whipped my phone out. Thumb hovered over the text box. I was this close to texting something like:
> “So anyway what did you mean by that whole good girl thing huh? Huh?!”
But then I threw the phone across the bed like it burned me. Absolutely not. I would not give him the satisfaction. No. This was war now. If he wanted to play games, I’d flip the entire board.
I flopped back onto the bed like a Victorian widow in emotional distress.
“You know what?” I muttered, burying my face into the pillow. “Fine. Fine, Amir. Play your little ‘cool and casual’ game. Say your little ‘good girl’ and walk away like you’re not a whole damn novella of emotional confusion.”
But the truth?
It stuck.
It lingered.
It looped in my head like a cursed YouTube ad.
And no matter how many war crimes I’d committed, or how many black site prisons I’d broken into with nothing but a hairpin and spite, that two-word phrase had me twisted like a teenage girl watching a rom-com at 3 a.m.
I was not gonna mention it.
But if he said it again?
I might actually melt.
And then kill him.
But like... romantically.
Wait-I didn't... I didn't mean that-
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