Chapter 16 - The King and the Cook
Roman stood framed in the doorway, his overcoat gone, his white shirt torn open at the chest, revealing a makeshift field dressing wrapped tightly around his ribs. His knuckles were raw, split to the bone, and his face was coated in powder burns and soot.
He looked at Vincent, breathing steadily on the prep table under Marco’s rhythmic bagging.
He looked at Bruno, sleeping quietly on the butcher’s block.
Then, his gaze rose to me.
I was standing in the center of the room, drenched in human blood from my collar to my shoes, holding a pair of bloody surgical forceps in one hand and my carbon-steel kitchen ladle in the other.
Roman walked forward. The men in the room parted like the Red Sea, lowering their heads as their boss passed.
He didn't look at the gore. He didn't look at the weapons. He stopped six inches from me, his dark eyes burning with an emotion so raw, so terrifyingly powerful, that my breath hitched in my throat.
Without a single word, Roman Duca fell to one knee on the bloody tile floor.
The room gasped.
Dante froze. Marco’s hand stopped on the ventilator bag for half a second before he remembered to squeeze. Roman Duca—the man who controlled the docks, the politicians, the police, and the underworld of three states—did not kneel to anyone. Not to foreign dons, not to federal judges, not to God himself.
And now he was kneeling in the dirt and blood before a thirty-four-year-old homeless woman holding a kitchen ladle.
“Roman…” I whispered, my voice trembling. “Get up. What are you doing? Get up.”
He looked up at me, his hands reaching out to take both of my blood-stained, trembling hands into his own.
“You saved my family, Maggie,” Roman said, his voice echoing with absolute, unbreakable devotion. “Not with guns. Not with fear. With your hands. With your heart. Everything I own—every dock, every warehouse, every dollar, every life in this organization—belongs to you. From this moment on, you do not just run this kitchen. You run Ravenwood.”
He lifted my bloody knuckles to his lips, kissing them with the reverence of a pilgrim before an altar.
“Stand up, Roman,” I said softly, tears cutting clean lines through the soot and dried blood on my cheeks. “Please. A king doesn't kneel on a dirty floor. Especially not in my kitchen.”
Roman rose slowly, his eyes never leaving mine.
He reached up with his scarred hand, cupping the side of my neck, his thumb brushing against my jawline. For a moment, the entire world narrowed to the space between our faces. The smell of blood and gunpowder faded, replaced by the warmth of his skin and the steady, thunderous rhythm of his pulse beneath my palm.
“The war isn't over, Maggie,” he murmured, his face inches from mine. “Ruslan escaped. He will gather what’s left of the Moretti soldiers and hit us with everything he has left before the feds intervene.”
I pulled my hand back, wiped the forceps clean with a sterile cloth, and looked toward the grand windows where the grey winter dawn was breaking over the snow-covered pine trees.
May you like
“Let him come,” I said, my voice hardening into pure, unyielding steel. “The kitchen is fully stocked, Roman. And nobody takes what belongs to Ma.”
***