2. Luca
LUCA
Dear Diary,
Today I learned nothing ruins family bonding faster than a Mafia don at the dinner table.
Watching my younger sister dance around the kitchen with a wide smile and laughter on her lips never got old.
Her long dark hair curled down her back in messy waves, and there wasn’t even a swipe of makeup on her cheeks.
Every freckle on her nose stood out, making her look about five, at least to me, even though she was actually more than a decade older.
She was a different girl than the one I’d stolen away in the night twelve months earlier.
Mrs. Wilson waved me over, and I dropped my dirt-smudged tool belt at the door to her modest three-bedroom home, deep in suburban middle-of-nowhere. She smiled at me kindly, as she spun Isabella beneath her arm and then handed her off to me.
“I need to finish making dinner. Dance with your sister.”
An old Elvis song, one of Mrs. Wilson’s favorites, played through the speakers, and I grinned down at Izzy’s upturned face. “You’re in a good mood for someone who was at school all day.”
She smiled and took my hand, twirling under my arm more easily than Mrs. Wilson’s, since I was at least a foot taller than the elderly woman we rented two bedrooms from.
“I know! We had a math test today and everything. It should have been the worst day ever. Elsie and the others spent all of lunch moaning over how bad their lives sucked.” She raised a shoulder in a shrug.
“They don’t know what they’re talking about.
I’ll do math tests all day, every day, if that’s the worst thing I have to do. ”
The smile fell off my face. I knew she was thinking about the months she’d spent as a child bride. Trapped in a house. Maybe even thinking about the fact she’d tried to kill herself, believing that was the only way out.
A shiver ran down my spine just thinking about how close I’d come to losing her. How I’d sat at her wedding and watched her cry as she’d said her vows. How I’d let my father’s underboss take her home as his property, even though she’d only been fifteen years old.
It had gone on far too long, and for that, I would never forgive myself. It made me sick every time I thought of it. Which was often.
She poked me between the eyebrows. “Stop it. We’re here now. Safe. I’m good. None of it was your fault, and you’re going to need Botox if you keep frowning like that. We can’t afford it anymore.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Turning over a new leaf, working a legitimate nine-to-five job, and supporting a teenager didn’t exactly leave much money left over for forehead fillers.
Or anything else, really. I was lucky to have found us a roof over our heads, considering we’d walked away from my father and all of the Guerra business holdings without a cent to our names.
I’d be forever grateful to Mrs. Wilson, who had only wanted to rent one of her spare rooms to a nice elderly lady who could be some company for her.
But I’d seen her ad on a local noticeboard, and even though Isabella and I didn’t fit the description on her ‘Roommate Wanted’ flyer, we’d turned up on her doorstep anyway.
If it had just been me, I was pretty sure I would have been straight back out on the street.
But Mrs. Wilson had taken one glimpse of Isabella’s tortured eyes and the bandages on her wrists, and I’d seen the mom in her come to life.
For the last twelve months, she’d been exactly what Isabella needed. A mother, grandmother, friend, and confidante all in one.
I often wondered if Mrs. Wilson’s grown-up kids, who didn’t call or visit often, actually realized how good they’d had it growing up in this house.
How lucky some people were to never know anything other than dancing to old Elvis songs in the kitchen, while hot food, lovingly prepared, bubbled away in the oven.
Before she died, our mother had never been particularly warm.
We had a housekeeper, Virginia, who had tried her best, and I loved her for it.
She’d make our favorite foods and shoot us proud smiles when we’d come home with good grades our parents didn’t care about because straight A’s were just an expectation and didn’t deserve celebration.
But she’d always been under the watchful eye of our father, who had never let her get too close. She’d be scolded for making us soft if she tried showing us any affection.
Maybe it was too late for me now, in my thirties, to be mothered.
But it wasn’t too late for Izzy. And I was damn determined she was going to have the childhood she deserved.
Even if it meant living in this one-stoplight town.
Even if it meant breaking my back on worksites, earning shit money, and paying taxes like the people I’d once thought of as schmucks.
I no longer thought that. I hated the past version of me who had.
He was an asshole.
I missed things from our old life. I couldn’t deny that. I looked a hell of a lot better in an Armani suit than I did in a bright-orange work shirt with “Johnson’s Earth Movers” printed on the back.
But my sister safe, going to school, and happy was worth more to me than my preference for Italian leather shoes.
I still heard a car backfire and ducked, assuming it was gunfire.
I was too old and had seen too much to ever stop that.
But Isabella could learn to have a normal life, I was sure of it.
All I had to do was keep my father and his men away from her.
“Luca?” Mrs. Wilson called over the crackly crooning filling the air as thick as the scent of her stew. “Did you happen to check the mailbox on your way in? I was expecting a package from my sister. She wants me to knit her granddaughter a new beanie and is sending me the wool.”
I twirled Izzy to the kitchen table where her homework was spread out and turned back to Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll go check now.”
She smiled at me. “Take a flashlight. It’s dark out.”
I nodded and took one from the second drawer where she kept all her kitchen junk.
The house was on a pretty large property, and the trip to the mailbox did take a minute or two on foot.
I hoofed it along a well-worn dirt path, flashlight trained on the potholes I made a mental note to fill in so Mrs. Wilson didn’t trip and break something.
The package waited for me in the mailbox, and I took it out, not bothering to check the return address because the squishiness gave away that it was wool inside.
There were no streetlights out here, in the middle of rural nowhere, you had to go closer into town before you got that luxury.
But my flashlight caught on something metallic.
Something out of place.
Something wrong.
With a sick sense of rising dread, I aimed it at the road.
Or more accurately, at the black SUV parked in front of the property.
It hadn’t been there when I’d gotten home from work.
I would have noticed, not only because there was no reason for any car to be parked in front of Mrs. Wilson’s house, unless they had business with us.
But also, because nobody drove sleek black city cars out here.
It was all rusted trucks and four-wheel drives. Practical vehicles for rural life.
This car was much more suited to the life we’d left behind.
And that had fear gripping me by the throat.
Once upon a time, I would have gone to the car, pulling a gun from the waistband of my pants, and unloaded bullets into whoever sat in the driver’s seat. Shoot first. Ask questions later.
Now all I did was stumble back toward the house.
Where I’d left Mrs. Wilson and my sister completely unprotected.
The flashlight clattered to the dirt at my feet. The package of wool falling a second later.
I ran for the porch. Sprinted like my life depended on it.
I couldn’t fucking breathe, but it wasn’t because of the exercise.
The door cracked back against the wall so hard it set my teeth on edge, but that was instantly forgotten by the scene laid out in front of me.
A man I knew all too well sat at the small wooden table covered in my sister’s homework, while Mrs. Wilson poured him a glass of sweet tea.
She hummed the Elvis song that had been playing when I’d left. “Oh, Luca! You didn’t tell me your father was coming to visit! I would have tidied the place up a bit.” She smiled at him warmly. “It’s so lovely to meet some of Izzy and Luca’s relatives.”
Izzy’s face was white. The healthy, happy glow she’d had just minutes earlier had been completely replaced with a sheen of sweat. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, and her chest rose and fell too fast, her breaths sharp and painful-looking.
I was sure mine were the same.
“I wasn’t aware he was coming to visit.” My voice was cold as ice as I stared down at the man whose eyes were nearly identical to mine. I’d seen him every day when I stared into the mirror. So much so I’d stopped looking at my reflection at all, because all I’d seen was how similar I was to him.
Carlos Guerra took the offered glass from Mrs. Wilson’s bony fingers and swallowed a mouthful, careful not to spill a drop on his expensive suit that was wholly out of place in the run-down farmhouse we’d called home for the past twelve months.
We’d stayed too long.
I wanted to kick myself. The plan had always been to move around. To never stay still.
Being dead in the water was a sure way to get…well…dead.
But I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tear Izzy away from a life that had healed the broken parts of her. She’d made friends here, and leaving Mrs. Wilson after they’d developed such a tight bond would have destroyed both of them.
So we’d stayed.
Stupid.
My father smiled at Mrs. Wilson. “Do forgive me for dropping in unannounced. I know it’s terribly rude, and at dinner time too.”
Mrs. Wilson waved her hand dismissively. “Shush. I always make too much anyway. There’s plenty to eat. You’ll stay, won’t you?”
“No,” I said sharply.
Mrs. Wilson glanced at me in surprise and then with a frown of disapproval that made me feel about two inches tall.
But her disappointment in my lack of manners was the least of my concern when there was a serpent sitting at her table.
I cleared my throat. “Our father is a very busy man. I’m sure he has places he needs to be.”
He put his glass down and nodded. “I’m sorry, but Luca is right. I am quite short on time. I only came to invite my children to a wedding.”
Mrs. Winters clapped her hands. “Oh, how lovely! A chance for all the family to be together.”
But Izzy shoved back from the table so abruptly the feet on her chair scraped along the tiled floor with an ear-piercing screech.
She ran from the room and up the stairs without a word.
Mrs. Wilson frowned at her, but unlike my father’s scowls of disapproval, Mrs. Wilson’s was only filled with concern. She put the tea jug down on the counter and wiped her hands on a towel. “Perhaps she’s not feeling well. I’ll go check on her, shall I?”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
Mrs. Wilson darted a worried look between me and my father, finally picking up on the tension I’d felt like a blinking neon sign since the moment I’d walked back in the door. I waited until she disappeared up the stairs, and the soft snick of Izzy’s bedroom door closing, before I faced my father.
“So, you’re getting married again, huh? What is this? Wife number four? Five? Forgive me for losing count, there’s been so many. What happened to the last one? Dead or just disappeared?”
My father sat back in his chair like he didn’t have a care in the world. “Dead.”
I nodded. “What she do?”
“Plotted to have me killed so she could take over my empire.”
I snorted on my amusement. “Ballsy of her.”
“Indeed.” He crossed his arms over his chest and studied me. “You look…”
“Well?” I supplied for him. “Happy? Honest? Well adjusted? Take your pick.”
My father just stared me up and down, his nose wrinkling in disgust. “Dirty.”
I sat in the seat Izzy had vacated and leaned in, resting my elbows on the tabletop. “Funny, despite your pristine suit, I could say the same about you.”
If the insult registered, my father didn’t show it. “I need you back with me.”
My response was instant and automatic. “No.”
Dad let out a long-suffering sigh. “Luca, we can go through the whole thing, where I threaten your sister and that sweet old lady, or you can just do as I ask and come home. This charade has gone on long enough, don’t you think? I gave you twelve months. That was more than generous of me.”
I tightened my fingers around the tabletop so hard I was surprised I didn’t get splinters.
“Generous of you? Generous of you would have been letting Isabella choose a husband of her own one day when she was actually old enough to do so. Generous would have been you leaving me the hell alone to run my businesses without you adding a slice of money laundering or human trafficking on the side.”
He sighed. “So we’re doing this the dramatic way, are we?
” He leaned in, narrowing his eyes, so there were only inches between us.
“Come home, and I’ll tell Lorenzo Isabella is dead.
He’ll call off his search for her, and she can live here in this dinky town for the rest of her life if she wants to.
I won’t say a word about it. I’ll even pay for it.
” He wrinkled his nose at the handmade curtains on the kitchen windows. “Can’t imagine that would cost much.”
Forever a snob.
“And if I refuse?”
He rolled his dark eyes. “I stop paying Lorenzo’s guy to not find you. Lorenzo comes to get his wife. We torch this house with its owner locked inside. And you come home anyway.”
He said it so casually that to anyone else, it might have sounded like a joke.
Only to me, it sounded like the threat I knew it was.
He had me, and we both knew it. There was nothing I could do against my father, other than run. And clearly I’d proven we couldn’t do that well enough to stay off his radar.
He tapped the table twice as he stood. “I’ll expect you home in forty-eight hours, Luca. There’s going to be a wedding.”
“I can’t wait to meet my new mommy,” I said sarcastically.
My father just grinned. “Forty-eight hours, Luca.”