His Rival’s Bodyguard

A Dark MM Mafia Romance
by Rafe Calder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Kings of Harbor City, Book 1
Tropes: Mafia Heir × Enemy Bodyguard, Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Only One Bed, Touch Him and Die, Stoic Protector × Defiant Prince, Size Difference, Praise and Command, Written Terms, Second-Chance Spark, He Falls First, Morally Grey Heroes

My father died with his name on his lips. Now he’s the only man keeping me alive.

My father died with a bullet in his chest and Roman Varga’s name on his lips.

The Warden. The Varga family’s security chief. The man standing over me while the blood was still warm on the marble.

He says his people didn’t order the hit. He says someone wants Harbor City at war.

I told him to go to hell. Then my own family’s car blew up with my name on the manifest.

Now I’m locked in a safe house with one bed, a perimeter I can’t cross, and a man who watches me like I’m the only thing in the city worth guarding. He has rules. I’ve never met one I didn’t break.

Roman Varga doesn’t protect anything halfway.

And if I let him keep me, I’ll have to become the kind of king who burns two empires to keep him back.

His Rival’s Bodyguard is a dark, high-heat MM mafia romance with a rival heir and the enemy’s most lethal man, forced proximity, only one bed, a contract written on safe-house notepaper, a bodyguard who unloads his gun before he lays a hand on his prince, on-page violence, a lot of on-page spice, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA. Dual first-person POV. Book 1 of Kings of Harbor City.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A mafia heir everyone took for decorative, and the accountant’s memory that proves them wrong
✅ A stoic six-foot-four bodyguard who takes his gloves off for exactly one man
✅ One safe house, one bed, and a rule about never closing a door
✅ Terms written like a deal memo: “Out there you do what I say. In here I do what you ask.”
✅ Touch-him-and-die protectiveness, praise, command, and a necktie that keeps changing owners
✅ A cloakroom kiss he walked out on three years ago, finished in the same cloakroom
✅ Blood on white marble, a ledger behind an altarpiece, and a traitor inside the family
✅ He falls first, no cheating, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including praise and command, consensual power exchange, and light bondage with a necktie), graphic on-page violence and killing (shootings, a car bomb, knife violence), the on-page murder of a parent, a body staged as a suicide by hanging, grief, a past kidnapping and injury of a seventeen-year-old (recounted, non-sexual), organized crime, surveillance of a love interest, betrayal by a family member, and strong language. No sexual violence, no dub-con, no cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Luca

I knew the gala had turned dangerous the moment Roman Varga walked into my father’s ballroom.

Not because he was armed. Everyone in Harbor City was armed. There were more guns under the gold-leaf ceiling of the old Customs House that night than in the Fourth Precinct’s evidence room, every one of them tucked beneath a tuxedo and a charity smile, and I’d stopped seeing the lines they made in good tailoring around the time I learned to tie my own bow tie.

Roman was dangerous because he never had to reach for his.

He came through the bronze doors two steps behind Dante Varga and half a step to the left, where he always stood, and the room bent around him the way water bends around a hull. Six-four. Shoulders that must have made his tailor laugh out loud. Dark-blond hair clipped close to the skull, a pale scar riding the edge of his jaw, and black leather gloves he kept on when the attendant reached for a coat he wasn’t wearing. A coat slows the draw.

The quartet lost half a bar. Along the walls, eight of my father’s men found reasons to unbutton their jackets.

The Warden. Head of security for the Varga organization. Eleven bodies, according to my father’s files, and my father’s files rounded down.

I’d read that file more times than a well-adjusted man would. Pulled out of a county group home at fifteen by Dante’s father. Four languages. No address on record, no vices on record, no one he went home to. I’d checked that last part twice.

He found me in four seconds. I counted. Gray-green eyes crossed three hundred guests, two bars, a string quartet, and an ice sculpture of a container ship, and stopped on me like I was the only fixed point on his chart.

I lifted my champagne.

Roman did not smile.

He never had. Not even three years ago, with his tongue in my mouth.

New Year’s Eve at the Aurelian. Mara Sanz’s neutral ground, every family in the city pretending to like each other until midnight. I’d spent the evening needling him across a ballroom because he was the only man in it who wouldn’t flinch, and around eleven I went to the cloakroom for my coat and a clean exit. He followed me in.

“Your driver’s had four whiskeys,” he’d said. “One of mine will take you.”

“I’d sooner walk home naked.”

“In January.”

“I’d still be warmer than I am standing next to you.”

“You never stop talking.”

“Make me.”

I still don’t know who moved first. I know he pulled one glove off with his teeth. I know his bare hand closed around my throat, not squeezing, only holding, his thumb under my jaw to tip my face where he wanted it, and that I went from furious to hard so fast it should have embarrassed me. He kissed the way he did everything. Thoroughly. No wasted motion. His thigh pushed between mine and I rode it like I’d been waiting all night for somewhere to sit.

He let me. That was what I couldn’t get past, afterward. He stood there like a load-bearing wall and let me grind myself stupid on him, somebody’s sable crushed against my back, and when I got a hand between us and found his cock through his trousers, thick as my wrist and hard enough to strain the wool, he made a sound against my teeth that I have never managed to forget. I squeezed. His hips drove forward once and trapped my hand there. The Warden, with all that famous discipline, fucking into my palm through his clothes in a coat closet.

So I pushed. I always push. I told him, into his open mouth, exactly what the Vargas’ guard dog could do with me if he had the nerve: turn me around, get my trousers to my knees, and find out how quiet a Moretti could be with a ballroom on the other side of the door.

He stopped.

He looked at me. One breath, maybe two, his hand still on my neck and my pulse slamming into his palm.

Then he let go, picked his glove up off the carpet, and walked out.

Not a word. I stood there among other people’s furs with my tie hanging open and my cock aching against my zipper, and four floors up the whole hotel counted down to midnight and cheered.

I hadn’t forgiven him. I’d made a small religion out of not forgiving him.

“Luca, darling. Is that who I think it is?”

The councilman’s wife had her hand on my sleeve and forty thousand dollars of my father’s sapphires at her throat, a thank-you for her husband’s vote on the Pier Nine dredging contract. I knew the figure because I’d buried it in the foundation’s hospitality line myself.

“That depends who you think it is.”

“The Vargas. Here.” She said it the way people say rats. “At a Moretti gala. Your father must be beside himself.”

“My father invited them.” Which had been news to me as of twenty minutes ago, when the guest list on my phone quietly grew a page. “It’s a charity. We take anyone’s money.”

She laughed, because I’d used the voice that tells people when to. I kissed the air beside her cheek and moved on.

That was my function. Vittorio Moretti ran the half of the family business that never appeared on paper, and I ran the half that did: Moretti Maritime, four terminals, eleven hundred employees, a foundation that put longshoremen’s kids through college and was currently regilding the altarpiece at Stella Maris down on the docks. There was a watercolor of the finished altar on an easel by the east bar. Thirty years old, a vice president’s title, and a reputation as the decorative Moretti, the one who’d been sent to Wharton so he’d stay out of the way.

I encouraged the reputation. People say remarkable things in front of the furniture.

Tonight’s pledges would close at two-point-three million. Perhaps a third of it would be real. I could have told you which third.

I worked the floor. White marble veined with gray, laid in 1911 and restored with my father’s money. Gold-leaf stars across a ceiling the color of deep water. Over the grand staircase, a chandelier the size of a tugboat’s wheelhouse, two tons of Bohemian crystal that had cost more to rewire than most of our guests paid their staff. I shook the hand of a judge we owned and a bishop we were renting. I let a hedge-fund widow tell me I should model.

And the whole time I could feel him. A pressure between my shoulder blades, steady as a palm.

I gave it ninety seconds before I looked.

Dante Varga stood at the center of the room, forty-one and handsome in the way of an expensive knife, with my uncle Tomás, who had crossed the marble to meet him with both hands out as though twenty years of funerals had been a clerical error. Tomás was thirty-nine, my father’s brother by a second marriage and the family’s designated charm. He remembered your children’s names, your wife’s birthday, and the exact amount you owed. Roman was at Dante’s shoulder and wasn’t watching either of them. He was reading the walls. Our men stood at intervals along the pilasters in rented tuxedos, and I watched the Warden’s attention touch each one, a tick mark, a tick mark, a tick mark, and then lift to the mezzanine and stay there.

A crease appeared between his brows. Small. On that face it was practically a scream.

Then his eyes came back down and landed on me again, and he caught me staring, and neither of us looked away.

It’s a strange thing, being wanted by someone who is also working out how to get you out of a room alive. I didn’t have the words for it then. I only knew that my collar was too tight, and that underneath a midnight-blue dinner jacket cut within a millimeter of my life I was half hard at my own father’s charity gala because a hired killer wouldn’t blink first.

Cazzo.

A hand closed on my shoulder. Heavy, warm, a signet ring pressing through the wool.

“Walk with me,” my father said.

The collector’s office sat behind a paneled door off the ballroom, a small oak room where customs men had once weighed other people’s cargo and decided what it was worth. My father shut us in. The quartet dropped to a murmur.

Vittorio Moretti at fifty-eight was built like the stevedore his father had been and dressed like the banker he’d paid to make people forget it. Silver hair. A boxer’s nose. Hands that could still close a deal or a windpipe. He went to the window, checked the street, and turned around with an expression I’d never seen on him and couldn’t name.

That wasn’t quite true. I’d seen it once, the summer I was seventeen, through a morphine haze in a private clinic, while he sat beside my bed for two days with a rosary he didn’t believe in wound around his fist. I hadn’t been able to name it then either.

“You put Dante Varga on my guest list,” I said.

“My guest list. You keep the spreadsheet.”

“Twenty years of telling me that family would cut my throat in my sleep, and tonight they’re drinking the ’08 Krug.”

“Throats have been cut over worse champagne.” He almost smiled. It didn’t reach the rest of him.

“Are we selling them something?”

“We’re ending something.”

“Ending what?”

“Ask me tomorrow.”

“Does Tomás know what we’re ending?”

“Your uncle knows what I’ve told him.”

“That isn’t a yes.”

“No. It isn’t.” He studied me the way he studied a manifest that didn’t add up. “Did you listen to my message?”

“I was in a budget review until six. Your foundation doesn’t balance itself.”

“Listen to it.”

“Now? I’ve got a bishop out there who thinks I’m fetching him a canapé.”

“Tonight. When you’re alone.” He said it gently, and that was what put the first cold thread down my spine. My father didn’t do gently. My father did correct and again.

“Papà. What is this?”

Instead of answering he turned back his left sleeve and began working the link out of his cuff.

I knew those cufflinks. Everyone did. Heavy ovals of old gold, the Moretti crest raised on each one, a lion with an anchor in its paw, the detail worn soft by three generations of thumbs. My great-grandfather had them made the year he bought his first crane. My father wore them to weddings, indictments, and the opera. I’d never once seen them leave his wrists.

He took my hand, turned it palm up, and pressed one into it. The gold was hot from his skin. He folded my fingers closed and kept his hand wrapped around my fist.

“If anything happens,” he said, “trust the numbers. Not the blood.”

I waited for the rest. There wasn’t any.

“If anything happens.” I heard my own voice go dry and light, the way it does when the floor tilts. “Is this the dying speech? Because you’ve given it twice, and both times it turned out to be the clams.”

“Luca.”

“What numbers? Which blood? You understand that’s not an instruction, it’s a fortune cookie.”

“You’ll know them when you see them. You always do.” He let go of my fist and, before I could step back, laid his palm against my cheek. “You were the one who could read a ledger. The rest of them read faces and think it’s the same skill.”

I held very still.

In my family you earned a hand on your face. I could have given you the date and the deal for every time I’d had one. Rotterdam. The union pension restructure. The night I was twenty-two and found nine million dollars my uncle’s people had misplaced. Affection was a wire transfer, and it cleared when the work did.

This one wasn’t attached to anything. I checked. I’d done nothing all week but argue with him about dredging.

It frightened me more than the cufflink.

“I know about the other accounts,” he said.

Everything in me went quiet. “Which accounts.”

“The ones you think you hid. The crane crews I cut loose in March, who all turned up with severance I never signed. The widow on Pier Six.” His mouth bent. “I meant to be furious. Then I ran your totals. You did it without costing me a cent.”

“So you’re not furious.”

“I’m telling you I noticed. Let that be enough.” His eyes went to the door and came back. “They think you’re soft. Every captain out there.”

“I’ve put real effort into it.”

“I know. I let them think it.” His thumb moved once along my cheekbone, rough as rope. “It kept you alive. It won’t much longer.”

“You’re being theatrical.”

“Probably.” He patted my cheek, twice, too hard, the way he had when I was a boy and it was the only kind of touch he owned. “Indulge an old man. Keep the link on you. Not in a safe, not in a drawer. On you.”

“And the other one?”

“Stays with me.” He tugged his jacket sleeve down over the open cuff. It didn’t hide much. My father, who had never in thirty years let me see him with a button undone, was going to walk back into a room full of his enemies with his shirt gaping at the wrist. “One more thing. Keep Varga’s man in sight tonight.”

That, at least, sounded like him.

“I’ve never had trouble with that,” I said, which was true in ways I had no plans to explain.

His eyes rested on me a moment longer than the line deserved. Then he nodded, squared his shoulders into the shape the city knew, and opened the door. The music came back up. He walked out into the gold light with one cuff loose and didn’t look behind him.

I stood there with my fist closed.

When I opened it, the lion had printed itself into my palm. I turned the link over. Plain back, a jeweler’s mark, the ordinary toggle. Nothing. A piece of an old man’s vanity, handed over with a line he’d probably rehearsed in the car. He’d been reading too many of his own obituaries, the drafts the Courier kept on file for men like him.

I slid it into my waistcoat pocket, against my ribs, on the left. Over the scar. I didn’t think about why.

My phone showed one voicemail. Papà, 4:12 p.m., one minute forty-seven seconds. My father had never left me a message longer than call me. He regarded voicemail the way he regarded signed confessions: as something that happened to careless men.

My thumb hovered.

When you’re alone.

I wasn’t alone. I was the host’s son at a two-million-dollar party with a bishop waiting, a Varga delegation on my marble, and a man in black gloves somewhere out there looking at me like a problem he intended to solve with his hands. I put the phone away and went to find some air.

The only air in the Customs House was at the top of the grand staircase.

Forty marble steps climbed to a gallery balcony that jutted over the ballroom like the prow of a ship, and from the balustrade you could see everything: the bars, the quartet, the ice ship weeping onto its tray, the brass-railed mezzanine that ringed the upper level across the void. The chandelier hung directly overhead, close enough that I could hear the crystals ticking against each other in the draft.

I set my glass on the rail and breathed.

Below, my father had rejoined the room. Tomás was laughing at something Dante had said. And the space at Dante Varga’s left shoulder was empty, which meant—

“You shouldn’t stand under that.”

He’d come up forty steps of stone without a sound. Of course he had.

I didn’t turn around. “You’re in the wrong half of the building, Warden. The help eats downstairs.”

“Then you should head down, prince. They’re about to serve.”

It landed. I let it, picked up my glass, and took my time with a swallow. “Three years, and that’s what you’ve been saving?”

“I didn’t know we were keeping a calendar.”

“I’m an accountant. I keep everything.”

He came to the rail. Not beside me. A guard’s distance, an arm and a half, angled so that he had the room and me in the same glance. Up close he smelled of cold air and gun oil and something darker under it, cedar or smoke. The scar on his jaw was finer than I remembered. The gloves were not for show; the leather had gone soft and pale across the knuckles.

“Your books are off,” he said. “It’s been nine years.”

That stopped me. “I beg your pardon?”

“Saint Brendan’s. The Ferrante funeral. You were twenty-one, home from Philadelphia for the weekend, and you walked across a churchyard to tell me my jacket was cut wrong for a shoulder rig.”

“It was.”

“I had it recut.”

I stared at him. He was looking at the mezzanine.

“Backlit. Elevated. One way down,” he said. “If I wanted you, this is where I’d want you standing.”

“Is that a threat or a fantasy?”

“An assessment.”

“You do know how to make a man feel special.”

“You’re not a man up here. You’re a silhouette with a net worth.”

“I’ve been called worse by better.” I turned my glass by the stem. “My father tells me he invited you. Did he give a reason, or do the Vargas simply appear wherever the bar is open?”

His attention flicked up across the void and returned. “Dante goes where he’s asked. I go where Dante goes.”

“Leashed or unleashed?”

“Depends who’s asking.”

“Nobody’s asking. I asked once. You’ll remember how that went.” I smiled at him with all my teeth. “Actually, you won’t. You left before the end.”

Something tightened along that scar. “I remember how it went.”

“Do you.”

“You had your hand on my cock and your tongue in my mouth, and you told me to turn you around and find out how quiet a Moretti could be.” Not a flicker. He might have been reading me a parking ticket. “I remember.”

Heat climbed my throat so fast I tasted it. For three years I’d half believed he’d wiped that night the way you wipe a blade. He had it word for word.

“Then you remember walking out.”

“Yes.”

“That’s all? Yes?”

“You want an apology at the top of a staircase, in front of three hundred people who’d sell tickets.”

“I don’t want an apology. I want to know what kind of man gets me that hard, has my throat in his hand, and then goes to check on the fucking car.”

It was the first time all night I’d made him look at me properly. Not the scan, not the tick mark. All of it, gray-green and level, and so steady I felt it in my knees.

“The kind who knew whose son you were,” Roman said.

“I’m still his son.”

“And I’m still working.”

I flicked two fingers at his hands. “Do those ever come off?”

“When I’m off the clock.”

“It’s a party.”

“Not for me.” A pause, short and exact. “Not in any room you’re in.”

I had no idea what to do with that. So I did what I always do with a thing I can’t price. I got cruel.

“Coward.”

“Careful.”

“Vigliacco.” I said it pleasantly, in the dialect my grandmother kept for butchers who thumbed the scale. “Bel cane da guardia. Senza palle.”

Nothing moved in his face. I told myself he hadn’t understood a word.

So I closed the distance and straightened his tie.

It didn’t need it. Black silk, a knot you could have cut glass on. I ran it between two fingers anyway, slowly, down to the button of his jacket, and felt his chest stop moving under my knuckles.

“You’ve quit breathing,” I said. “Is that tactical?”

“It’s patience.”

“For what?”

“For you to finish making your point.”

“I haven’t got one. I only like knowing I can still do that.” I let the silk go and went back to my side of the rail. My fingers weren’t entirely steady, and I wrapped them around my glass before he could notice.

He noticed.

And then his eyes left me again. Up, over my shoulder, across the open air to the mezzanine. It was the third time since he’d reached the rail.

“Am I boring you?”

“Your people left a door open up there.”

I looked. At the north end of the mezzanine, where the old clerks’ gallery ended, there was a service door that led to the roof stairs. It stood ajar on a slot of pure dark. Nobody beside it. There should have been two men on that door; I’d signed the overtime myself.

“Someone went for a cigarette.”

“Both of them.”

“Worried about me, Warden?”

He stepped in.

Not a guard’s distance. Nothing like it. His chest came within an inch of my shoulder, his gloved hand flattened on the balustrade beside my hip, and all six feet four inches of him settled between my body and that black doorway like he’d been poured there. Heat came off him through two layers of wool. Under his arm, where the jacket pulled, I could see the strap of the holster. I could have counted his eyelashes. They were darker than his hair.

If I’d leaned back an inch I’d have had the whole hard front of him along my spine, thighs to shoulders, and my body ran that calculation without consulting me. I knew precisely how he’d feel. I’d had three years to refine the estimate, most of them with my own hand.

My cock, the traitor, remembered him immediately.

“Come away from the rail,” he said. Low. For me only.

“Is that an order?”

“It’s a request.”

“How would I tell the difference?”

“You’d know.”

“Would I.” It came out rougher than I’d planned. Three years of rehearsed contempt, and my voice folded the second he got close enough to bite. “What does an order from you feel like?”

His gaze dropped to my mouth. Half a second. I felt it like a thumb dragged across my lower lip.

“Ask me somewhere with walls.”

Every clever thing I owned deserted me at once. I stood there with my pulse beating in my throat, in exactly the place his hand had been, and he knew. I watched him know it. His nostrils flared, his jaw set, and for one moment the Warden looked like a man holding a door shut with his whole weight.

Then the hand on the rail curled into a fist, and he was looking past me again.

“Who’s the shift lead on your mezzanine?”

“I haven’t the faintest—”

“Luca.”

He had never used my name. Not once, in nine years of standing on opposite sides of rooms. It went through me like cold water.

Down below, my father had started up the stairs. He climbed slowly, one hand on the banister, that undone cuff flashing white with every step. He tipped his head back, found the two of us pressed together at the rail, the heir and the enemy’s dog, and did something I had never in my life seen him do at the sight of a Varga.

He nodded.

Roman’s hand closed around my arm above the elbow. Leather, and under the leather a grip like a vise being politely introduced. The first time he’d touched me in three years.

“Now,” he said. “That one’s an order.”

I opened my mouth to tell him exactly where he could file it.

Above us, two tons of Bohemian crystal blew apart.

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The Glove — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

New Year’s Eve, three years ago. Roman Varga walks out of a cloakroom with one glove in his fist, goes down four flights to a parking garage, and finds out exactly how long his famous discipline lasts. Then another New Year’s Eve, the same truck in the same bay, and a husband who says show me. Nobody has to be quiet this time.

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