Chapter 39 Luca
LUCA
The ropes bite deeper every time I pull.
My wrists are already raw, slick with blood and sweat where the rough fibers have sawed through skin, but I brace my feet and wrench again anyway. The chair scrapes an inch across the concrete before a kick slams into one of its legs and knocks it flat again.
“Careful,” Nikolai sneers. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
I lift my head enough to glare at the bastard through the blood dripping into my eye. “That concern sounds real heartfelt.”
Nikolai’s fist cracks against my cheekbone for what has to be the twentieth time, and I’m starting to think the left side of my face owes him money.
Same spot. Every time. The swelling has swelling now, layers of it puffing up until my eye is damn near useless. He follows it with the cane, a sharp crack against my ribs that punches the air straight out of my lungs, and before I can suck in a breath, the cane drops between my legs.
I bite down so hard my molars grind.
“Don’t go getting sleepy on me.” Nikolai fists my hair and yanks my head up.
I spit blood in his face. Mostly because fuck him, but also because it’s the only weapon I’ve got right now.
“Not sleepy. Just bored.” I force the grin even though my split lip screams. “You’d think with all this free time you’d develop a second move.”
The backhand comes fast. I let it roll through me, let my head snap to the side and wait for the pain to settle in with the rest of it. Face, ribs, dick. That’s Nikolai’s whole playbook. Over and over, the world’s worst DJ playing the same three tracks on repeat.
Anton Kozlov sits fifteen feet away in a metal folding chair like it’s a leather wingback in his study.
Dark suit. Black gloves. Pale eyes, flat and cold in the warehouse light. No tie, but the top button of his shirt is still fastened, like he’s here for a meeting instead of a torture session.
He hasn’t touched me once.
Hasn’t raised his voice.
He just watches his son work with the detached interest of a man observing a dog he’s training.
Nikolai crouches in front of me, bracing his forearms on his thighs. “I have to admit, you lasted longer than I expected. I thought you’d be begging by now.”
I spit blood onto the floor between us. “Sorry to disappoint.”
His smile flattens. “You know what your problem is, Andretti? You still think this ends with you being a hero.”
I say nothing. Mostly because my mouth tastes like metal and I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of hearing how wrecked I am. Also because hero was never really on the table for me. Men like me don’t get to play hero. We just pick who we’re willing to become monsters for.
And I already made my choice.
Natalia.
That name moves through me even now, even tied half-broken to a fucking chair in a warehouse that smells like motor oil and gasoline. It lands in my heart and sits there, stubborn and hot and alive. The only good thing in this whole goddamn room.
Nikolai reaches out and catches my chin, forcing my head up. “I’m talking to you.”
I yank away as much as I can. “And I’m ignoring you. We both have hobbies.”
That gets me another strike with the cane. Fast and hard, right to the ribs this time. Pain bursts white behind my eyes and the whole place blurs at the edges.
“Enough,” Anton says quietly, and Nikolai stops mid-swing. Just like that, the attack dog heels.
Anton stands and smooths the front of his jacket. Walks toward me with the unhurried gait of a man who has never once been afraid in a room he controls.
He crouches in front of my chair. His eyes are pale gray, almost colorless, and there’s nothing behind them. No rage, no satisfaction. Just the calm appraisal of a man deciding how something is going to go.
“I have to admit.” His voice is mild, unfeeling. “I’ve been wondering about you.”
I glare back at him through the blood in my eye. “Lucky me.”
He continues as if I haven’t spoken. “The son of Lorenzo Andretti, arrogant enough to believe he could climb into my daughter’s bed and put his hands on what belongs to me.”
“She’s not yours,” I snarl.
His eyes sharpen, pale and cold as winter glass.
“Wrong. I still decide her future.”
A vicious heat tears through me. I jerk against the ropes with no regard for the sting in my wrists.
“Your little rebellion changed nothing,” he says.
“At most, it forced me to accelerate a timetable that was already in motion. The Colombians are coming. They will take her exactly as planned.” He wrinkles his nose, faintly, like the words themselves stink.
“They will not know that she is no longer… untouched.”
The warehouse seems to narrow around his words.
“You’re not getting away with this,” I grit out.
“I will.” He stands with a sigh. “But first, I’m going to bring Natalia here.
” He says it the way someone would say I’m going to order lunch.
“She’ll watch you die. Slowly. And then she’ll understand, once and for all, what happens when she forgets who she belongs to.
” He smooths a hand over his jacket. “After that, she’ll go where I send her, and your father can bury what’s left. ”
The image hits all at once. Natalia in this room, seeing me tied to a chair, bloodied and half-conscious, horror all over her face while he makes her watch.
Anton watches my face as the realization crashes through me. He sees it. The dread. The rage. The helplessness. And for the first time all night, he smiles.
I lunge so hard the chair jerks across the concrete. “You sick bastard!”
He glances down at his phone, frowning faintly, then lifts his eyes back to me.
“This is becoming tedious,” he says, blandly.
He steps back and gives the smallest nod.
Nikolai smiles like he’s been handed a gift.
“Gladly.”
He comes at me fast, no more talk now, just fists and the blunt enthusiasm of a man who enjoys hurting what can’t hit back. The first punch snaps my head sideways.
The next punch lands, but my mind is already slipping somewhere he can’t reach. To Natalia. Her face. Her voice. The way she looks at me like there might still be something in me worth saving. If this is it, I’m taking that with me.
I taste blood.
I force myself upright anyway.
That only seems to encourage him.
Pain smears the edges of the room. By the time it settles, Anton is looking at his phone again.
Dimly I notice that this time, his mouth is tighter.
Then the warehouse door groans open, the sound scraping through the concrete space, and every head in the room turns.
Natalia.
For one disbelieving heartbeat, I think I imagined her. That my brain finally cracked open under too many punches and too much blood loss and decided to give me one last beautiful hallucination before the end.
But no.
It’s her.
She’s breathing hard, like she ran. But she is standing there on her own two feet, chin lifted, shoulders back, looking into a room full of armed men like she has every right to walk straight through the middle of them.
Anton goes still.
Not just surprised. Still in that dangerous way men get when the math in their heads stops adding up.
“Where’s Boris?” he asks.
Natalia’s gaze never leaves his face. “Dead.”
The room goes so quiet I can hear water dripping somewhere in the walls.
“I killed him.” Natalia’s voice is steady, and there’s a new thread of steel winding through it that’s new.
Anton’s composure holds, but barely. The mask is still there, the boardroom calm, but the edges are wrong now. Tight.
“But before he died,” she continues, “he told me the truth about my mother.”
Anton’s voice comes out sharp. “Natalia.”
The authority in his voice would have flattened her once. I know it would have. I’ve seen what men like him build into their children. Fear trained so deep it becomes reflex.
It doesn’t work now.
She looks back at him, and for the first time since she walked in, I see something hotter than steadiness under her calm. Rage. Old and young at once. Years of swallowed terror brought up hard against fresh grief.
“I know she wanted to leave you. I know Boris killed her on your orders. I know you told me she died in childbirth and let me believe it was my fault for twenty-three years.” Her voice cracks on the last part, and then it steadies again.
“I carried that. Every single day. Thinking I killed my own mother by being born.”
Anton’s eyes flick briefly toward the men around him, apparently irritated now that private family rot is being aired in public. “You don’t understand the circumstances.”
Natalia laughs, and the sound of it does something vicious and satisfying to me because there’s not one ounce of obedience in it.
“I understand perfectly. I found the proof in your office. I heard Boris admit it. I know exactly what kind of man you are.”
Anton’s nostrils flare. “Be careful.”
“Or what?” she asks softly. “You’ll kill me too?”
No one moves.
No one breathes.
“Your mother was weak. She made her choice, and I made mine.” Kozlov’s eyes dart to me as a look of disgust crosses his face. “And now here you are, making the same mistake. You really are her daughter.”
That does it.
Whatever last illusion might have been hanging on inside her dies right there in front of all of us. I can see it happen. Not dramatic. Not loud. Just gone.
She squares her shoulders. “You don’t own me.”
Anton steps toward her. “I own every breath you take.”
Gunfire explodes from the dark.
The first shot takes out the warehouse light over Anton’s head. Glass bursts down in glittering shards. Men shout. Someone near the far wall drops with a cry, blood spraying across a crate. The whole place detonates into chaos in less than a second.
Dario comes through one side entrance with two soldiers at his back, already firing. Matteo breaches from the opposite wall like a fucking freight train, taking down one guy with a shot to the throat before pivoting and putting a second bullet into another. More of our men pour in behind them.