Chapter 3
Luciano.
When I arrived at Ava’s mother’s house, the door was unlocked. I stepped inside, the stale scent of dust and neglect made my nose it. I moved through the house quickly, checking room after room, a growing sense of urgency gnawing at me, causing my heart rate to spike until it was beating like a bass drum in my chest. It didn’t ease until I found her in the backyard, sitting on the damp earth at her mother’s resting place. Her back was straight, her shoulders tense. I felt a strange pull in my chest.
“Make sure no one comes back here. If she runs, no one but me touches her,” I instructed Carlos and the two guards behind me. “No one lays a hand on her,” I repeated.
For a moment, I stood back and watched her.
My father was a ruthless man—cold, calculated, and lethal. But when he spoke about killing Ava’s mother, it was the only time I ever saw something close to regret in his eyes. She had humiliated him, he’d said. Not just by laying with the son of his enemy—though that alone was an insult—but by running afterward, as if she hadn’t vowed to belong to him in front of God.
My father didn’t tolerate defiance. Not from his men, not from his enemies, and certainly not from the woman he claimed.
She broke a sacred rule—a covenant our world enforced with blood. This wasn’t just about her. To the families, to his men, it was a test. If he let her go, if he allowed her to live, they’d see it as weakness. They’d think they could cross him and walk away untouched.
So he did what was necessary. Not because he wanted to. Because he had to.
Ava knew my father had killed her mother, yet she stayed in that house with him for two years. Condemned to misery, and yet she never screamed. It captivated me. I wasn’t sure if it was fortitude or delusion on her part—but whatever it was, it drew me in. There was something resolute—almost pathological—about the way she endured. Survived.
And she was mine. I had known long before I ever laid eyes on her that Ava was mine.
Her mother married my father to buy vengeance for her dead husband and protection for herself and Ava. He waged a war against the Colombians in her name—then she betrayed him.
When she cheated, then ran, she sealed Ava’s fate. And when she died, Ava was left to settle the debt—because in our world, obligations don’t die with the debtor. They’re inherited. They must be paid in full.
But she wasn’t just a payment. Not to me.
I wanted her.
I understood the inconvenience of my own selfishness to her, but it wasn’t enough to make me change my mind. I wasn’t interested in fairness. I didn’t believe in it anymore. The day my mother was murdered, something in me died. A switch flipped. When her screams stopped, everything became clear—crystal, sharp, and cold.
There was no mercy. No justice. Only power and who held it. Only violence and those who wielded it. Only possession and those who took. Fairness was an illusion. A lie for people who still believed the world owed them something.
Everything I knew now boiled down to two rules. Kill before you’re killed. Take what you want.
I took a step forward, closing the distance between us. Leaves crunched beneath my feet. She turned at the sound, her eyes lifting to meet mine. She caught her plush lip between her teeth.
She was beautiful—not in the way the world defined it, but in a way that made something inside me twist and claw and want. She was natural, earthy. Warm beneath the broken shell. She was warmth. And I was so cold.
I reached for her.
“Come,” was all I could manage after all that practice—one word, heavy with everything I couldn’t say.