Only To Be Without, Book 1

Chapter 1

(December 2019 Gravesend, Brooklyn, NY, USA)

The silence stretched uncomfortably between them, filled only with the slight creaking of the buzzing metal lamp suspended from the ceiling over the faded formica table. Nia could hear the rumble as the train passed by the building above them, a puff of dust fell from the bare boards overhead and the lights dimmed momentarily as the plates rattled against the tabletop.

These dates were always notoriously awkward but she didn't usually care given only one of them would be leaving at the end of the night. She didn't usually care but...

His face was a revelation, the curve of it perfect as though chiseled out of stone.

How foolish, she was waxing poetic about dinner, though the livestock seemed a bit underfed tonight. What was his name again? Yes, Peter Chielinni... what an odd coincidence. What an interesting mystery.

The pink of his lips, though, tucked back in a ghastly smile, the stark demarcation of pale skin and shadow at his jaw made her want to close her human teeth along his mandible until the skin gave way beneath her incisors. Her stomach lurched in hunger and her throat tightened as her mouth watered.

He was gorgeous somehow, and she found it a wonder. She smelled the gel in his hair, more feathered with gray than the picture he had on his profile, not silver but as though the black had drained dully like ink from the strands. She smelled the dying breath of the limp carnation near his lapel, the cigarette smoke in his black velvet jacket, and the cheap cologne he had spritzed along his throat.

She could see that the stubble gathering at the corner of his jaw (he must have shaved early this morning, she thought) was black like the roots of that ill-controlled brown mop on his head, and the rest of his facial hair followed the same strange rule: his eyebrows were brown and laced with grey but the long lashes in his shadowed, hollowed eyes were coal black and she didn't smell any mascara.

The slightly oversized black silk bowtie at his collar, he had tied it himself and quite smartly, she imagined the creases it would leave in his wrists after he had run when he saw her for what she was, or perhaps dimpling the corners of his mouth to muffle the sounds of horror escaping, and the sweat that would bead along the perfect cupid's bow of his upper lip as she looked down on his lean, prone form. It was always very satisfying to put someone so much taller than her on his back.

They always underestimated the tiny woman and then they regretted it.

She couldn't reach five feet without wearing a two inch heel, but dynamite came in small packages, as Rocco was fond of saying. The dear fellow had a certain proclivity for both explosives and bad jokes, and she could blame Mino for that latter part.

Little Jimmy Chiellini might be known as Don Chiellini now, but he still cracked jokes like he was a twenty-six year old nothing with a fondness for cocaine and alcohol, as he had been when she'd first met him.

He had been known only as the punk nephew of Don Enzo's, in the Brooklyn Camorra, and Don Gio's, in the Napolitano Camorra for they had met that night in Napoli, but two days later she had been on a plane to Newark International Airport, and it had been the first time she had ever flown while not in her true form.

It was difficult to go flying when the Neapolitan population began noticing the purple and black scaled and winged monstrosity that blotted out the night sky. She loved flying, but the trip back to her new home had been horrifyingly turbulent within that winged metal tube, they'd somehow flown into a tropical storm that had not previously existed. She still believed her Maker had forced the Council into raising the storm as retribution for her escape from his control.