Chapter 22 Luca
LUCA
The world stops.
Not the way it stopped when I found Marco’s body. Not the gradual, horrifying realization that everything had changed forever. This is instant. Absolute. Like someone just ripped the oxygen from the room and replaced it with pure rage.
Salvatore Romano.
The name echoes in my skull, bouncing off the inside of my head with enough force to make my vision blur. Three years. Three fucking years I’ve been searching for Marco’s killer. Three years of following dead ends, tearing apart rival families looking for answers.
And she knew.
She fucking knew.
“You knew?” The words come out strangled, barely recognizable as my own voice.
Gigi’s chin lifts in that infuriating way she has—the same defiance that first intrigued me, that made me think she was different from her coward father. Now it just makes me want to—
“Salvatore Romano,” she repeats, her voice enunciating every syllable of his name. “He’s the one responsible for Marco’s death. He used my father as a pawn. And I’ve known since that first night at his gathering when I heard his voice.”
The room tilts sideways. I grip the edge of my desk hard enough that wood splinters under my fingernails.
“You—” I can’t finish the sentence. I can’t force words past the rage choking my throat.
Images flash through my mind in rapid succession.
Salvatore’s smug face at the gathering, his toast about stability and commitment, the casual way he discussed business while Marco’s real killer stood there pretending to be my ally.
And Gigi. Gigi sitting beside me through all of it, smiling that perfect smile while carrying this secret like a fucking bomb.
“How?” I nearly choke on the word. “How did you—”
“The recording.” She’s still standing there like she has any right to explanations, like she hasn’t just admitted to the most devastating betrayal I’ve ever experienced. “The one from three years ago. My father called Romano to report the ‘failure.’ I heard every bit of the conversation afterward.”
Everything I thought I knew shatters into pieces too small to reconstruct.
The recording. The proof I demanded, that she claimed only captured her father’s side of the conversation. The voice she said was “unfamiliar” and “distorted.”
She lied.
Right to my face, she looked at me with those brown eyes and lied.
“You told me—” My voice rises to something close to a roar. “You told me you didn’t know who was on the other end of that call!”
“I was terrified!” Fire flashes in her eyes now, matching my fury with her own.
“What did you expect me to do? Tell my captor—the man who was planning to murder me, by the way—that I had information about his biggest enemy? That would have made me either too valuable to live or too dangerous to keep!”
The rationalization makes sense in some distant, logical part of my brain that’s currently drowning in rage.
But logic doesn’t matter. Not now. Not when she’s just admitted to watching me suffer for over two months while protecting the man who destroyed my life.
“Danny!” My voice cracks like a whip. “Get her computer. Now.”
His eyes dart between Gigi and I. “Boss—”
“Now, Danny. I want every device she’s ever fucking touched brought to this office in the next five fucking minutes or I swear to god—”
“It’s in storage,” Danny says quickly. “I’ll have someone—”
“No. You get it. Personally. And bring it back here.”
As he leaves, I turn back to Gigi, who’s watching me with something that might be fear finally creeping into her expression. Good. She should be afraid.
“You’re going to play me that recording,” I say in a near snarl. “Every. Single. Word.”
I close the distance between us in three strides, bracketing her against the wall with my hands on either side of her head.
This close, I can feel the heat radiating from her skin and see her pulse hammering.
My body responds despite the rage—because of the rage—the thin line between fury and desire blurring until I can’t tell which is stronger.
“You’re going to play me that recording,” I say roughly. My gaze drops to her lips before I can stop it, and I hate that even now, even in the midst of this betrayal, I want to kiss her. I want to press her harder against this wall and remind her exactly who she belongs to. “Every. Single. Word.”
“Luca—” Her breath hitches, and I watch her pupils dilate slightly despite the fear in her eyes.
“Shut up.” The words come out so cold, so hate filled that even she flinches.
But I don’t move away from her, trapped by my own need to be this close even as fury tears through my chest. “You don’t get to speak.
You don’t get to explain. You had weeks—months—to tell me the truth, and you chose silence.
” My fingers curl against the wall, close enough to her face that I could touch her if I just—
No.
I force myself to step back before I do something we’ll both regret. The loss of her warmth feels like a physical wound.
“So now you’re going to sit there and be quiet while I figure out what the fuck to do with you.”
Her lips tremble, but she stays silent. Smart girl. Too bad she wasn’t smart enough to trust me with the truth before I found out this way.
The silence that falls is suffocating. I can hear my own heartbeat, thundering in my ears loud enough to drown out rational thought. I can feel rage pulsing through my veins like poison, making my hands shake with the need to break something, destroy something, make someone pay for this betrayal.
Three years of Marco’s absence stretches behind me like an open wound that never healed.
Three years of grief and rage and the desperate need for justice that consumed everything else in my life.
Three years of searching for the mastermind behind the betrayal that killed my cousin, my best friend, my brother in every way that mattered.
And she knew.
She fucking knew.
I pace the length of my office like a caged animal, every muscle coiled tight with barely controlled violence. Gigi stays where she is, pressed against the wall, watching me with those chocolate brown eyes that once looked at me with something like love.
How much of it was real? How much was just her playing a role, keeping me pacified while she protected her father’s secrets and Romano’s identity?
The thought makes me want to vomit.
“Did you laugh?” The question escapes before I can stop it, raw and ugly in the quiet. “While I tortured myself trying to understand who betrayed Marco—did you laugh at how pathetic I was?”
“No.” Her voice is small, and I hate that even now, some part of me responds to the pain in it. “Luca, I never—”
“I said shut up!” I roar, and I’m suddenly across the room, one hand slamming against the wall beside her head.
She doesn’t flinch or cower. She just meets my gaze with her chin raised like she still has any right to dignity.
“You don’t get to talk,” I spit out. “You don’t get to defend yourself. Not after—”
My voice breaks. Fuck. Fuck.
I press my forehead against the wall, trying to breathe through the rage threatening to choke me. She’s too close. Her presence is assaulting me. Every sense memory of holding her, touching her, loving her crashes over me like a wave.
And underneath all of it is Romano’s smug face.
Weeks. Weeks in the presence of Marco’s killer, and I didn’t even know.
Because she didn’t tell me.
Footsteps in the hallway signal Danny’s return. I force myself to step back from Gigi, putting distance between us before I do something I can’t take back. When Danny enters carrying a laptop, I snatch it from his hands with enough force to make him stumble.
“Out,” I order.
His jaw drops. “Boss—”
“I said out, Danny. Close the door.”
He hesitates, his green eyes flicking between me and Gigi with obvious concern. But he knows better than to push me when I’m like this. The door clicks shut behind him, leaving us alone with the computer and the truth I should have had a little over two months ago.
“Play it.” I shove the laptop toward Gigi. “Now.”
Her hands are shaking as she opens it, fingers fumbling with the password. The tremor is barely visible, but I notice everything about her now—every tell, every micro-expression, cataloging them all for signs of further deception.
The laptop boots up, and she navigates to her cloud storage with the ease of someone who’s accessed this recording before. How many times has she listened to it? How many opportunities did she have to come to me with this information?
“There.” She clicks on a file labeled only with a date. The night Marco died. “It’s…it’s long. And there’s a lot of just me and my father. But Romano’s voice comes in at about the forty-minute mark.”
“Play it from the beginning.” I need to hear all of it. I need to understand the full scope of what she’s been hiding.
She swallows but presses play.
The audio quality is poor as it was recorded on a phone app not designed for surveillance, but it’s clear enough. I hear rustling, then Gigi’s voice. It sounds more uncertain than the woman standing before me now.
“Dad? Dad, are you here?”
Footsteps. A door opening. Then her sharp inhale of horror.
“Oh my god, Dad! What happened? Who did this to you?”
Antonio’s voice is thick with pain and terror, slurred like he’s been beaten badly enough to struggle with speech. The description she gives of his apartment—destroyed furniture, blood everywhere—makes my stomach roil.
This is new information. I knew Antonio had been coerced, but not the extent of the violence involved. I didn’t know that whoever used him had beaten him first, made him understand the consequences of refusal before offering him the deal.
Gigi’s voice on the recording is desperate, pleading for answers. Then her father starts talking.