Chapter 9
Leo
“Bianca is missing, and I had to hear it from my father’s enforcer?” I shout, barging into Mattia’s house as soon as he opens the door for me.
“Go on,” he says. “Shout it from all the rooftops while you’re at it.”
“It’s already being spoken about in all the relevant circles,” I throw back. “What the fuck, Mattia? Why didn’t you tell me anything?”
He sighs. “Let’s go inside.”
I frown as I watch his trudging step, how his feet are dragging on the marble flooring as he leads me to the kitchen. I came here ready to rip him a new one, but this is giving me pause. When Bruno, my father’s enforcer, summoned me to a meeting at the family home today, I’d been expecting a briefing about the current situation we’re facing on one of our trade routes. Some little fuckers were undercutting our stock in the ports of Turin.
But the news was more dire. There are rumors—Bianca Bonucci has not been seen for over a week, and no one knows where she is. Not even her father, who was supposed to be keeping tabs on her.
Without her, the deal with the Abrashi family collapses. We’d all be back at Square One facing those greedy, blood-thirsty Albanians.
I am worried for our family, our organization. A war is the last thing we need. This news, though? It hit me differently. Like a freight train going right through my chest.
A world without Bianca in it… It’s something I can’t fathom. It kills me to know she’ll soon belong to another, that some other man will get to put his hands on her, take her, put his seed inside her and someday put a baby there, too. All this makes me burn with rage, with jealousy.
Still, at least in all these scenarios, she’s alive. Breathing. Relatively safe—our world is inherently dangerous, true, but we protect our own. At least on this, the Albanians adhere to the same code.
Having her leave me in that loft in Tribeca almost killed me, though I knew I had to let her go. If she’s dead, though, it will annihilate me. Or worse, call out the monster in me. My father often tells me he’s worried about me, about the way I’ll run his operation with my punch-happy fists and cold, calculating mind in business. There is something as too cold and ruthless, it seems, and I fit that definition, according to him and to his enforcer, who’ll be mine if he’s still alive when I become the Don of our family.
Hearing Bianca was missing? I could feel the monster stirring awake. Right now, he’s battering me all over, demanding to be let out, let loose. He’s in my blood, having replaced the soothing Bianca managed to bring to me with her touch, with her presence.
I rushed out of my father’s home and came straight here, my foot on the gas pedal of my Levante. The Aventador would’ve gotten me here faster, but the streets of New York are not the place for a sports car. All the way, my heart hammered away, worried about Bianca, about what might have happened to her. How could she have just disappeared? Wasn’t her father keeping an eye on her? And what about Mattia?
This hurt, too, that Mattia didn’t tell me anything. Our relationship has been strained since the day I walked out of his house after breaking a Scotch glass in my hand and giving no explanation for my silent outburst. Can’t have him knowing I have the hots for his very-forbidden sister, that I burn for her with a yearning that’s not of this world, that would make the devil himself seem like a tame angel.
So we’ve been somewhat estranged, my best friend and I, and here we are today.
I follow him into the kitchen. Hana’s at the island, and she gets up to come hug me in welcome. Her face is pale, drawn, her small body tense.
I rub a hand gently on her back as she hugs me. “How are you holding up?”
She sighs, shakes her head when I release her.
“What?” I ask.
Something feels off. There’s an air of coiled tension in the room. I glance at Mattia. It looks like the weight of the world is pressing down on his shoulders, and his golden skin has a grey cast to it. Bags underline his eyes; he looks like he hasn’t slept in days.
I feel a strength that comes up from Lord knows where rise up my spine, sharpening my gaze, my insight. My father always says a good boss or Don trusts his gut.
Mine’s telling me something’s afoot.
The monster is also whispering his vitriol concurrently.
I narrow my eyes onto Mattia. “Talk.”
“Here,” Hana replies, pushing a folder my way on the island.
I glance at them both, noting the tenseness of their jaws, then open the folder.
My mouth curls in a snarl of disgust as I peruse the images, screenshots of bondage porn that keep getting worse with every frame. When I get to one where a woman’s spread thighs are being slashed by a broken bottle shoved deep inside her, I close the folder with a snap.
“What the fuck!” I curse, looking up at Mattia. “ Dio Santo , what did I just see? I’m gonna need to bleach my eyes now.”
“You and me both,” Mattia says. “And Hana, too.”
I glare at him. “You let your wife see this?”
“Bianca saw it first,” Hana says softly behind me.
I whirl around to face her. “What?”
She swallows, hard, pinches her lips together.
“I can’t do this. You tell him,” she throws at her husband before running out of the room.
I turn to him. “Talk. Now.”
How can Bianca have seen such disgusting shit? Why?
Does it have anything to do with her disappearance?
Mattia gulps and chin-nods at the island. “Got a P.I. to go through Abrashi’s browser history. He came up with that.”
I shrug. “Yeah, we all know The Butcher ’s a sick fucker.”
“It’s not Jasir’s computer.”
Time stops for a moment, then it all pulls in with a dull roar in my ears. “Ardian?”
Mattia falls into a heap on a couch. “Bianca told me about it. I didn’t believe her.”
I don’t know when my legs start moving. In a flash, I’m by his side, pulling him up from the collar of his polo shirt, and my fist has slammed into his jaw.
“You cazzo !” I yell. “You were going to marry your sister to a porco that could do this to her?”
Mattia winces. “I deserve that.”
“Like fuck you do, yeah! What the fuck were you thinking?”
We kill bastards like this if they pull this kind of stunt on the girls in our clubs.
I throw him back onto the couch, looking around for Hana. She hasn’t come, even after my outburst, even after hearing me punch her husband.
She knows what went down. Is this her way of showing me whose side she’s on? Bianca’s, and not Mattia’s?
“Does your father know about this?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
I hear the unspoken words. Even if he did, the bastard wouldn’t intervene. He’s too power-hungry and wants to make it up the echelons of the syndicate by any means.
I force a deep breath in. “Bianca came to you with this information?”
“I thought she just wanted out of the wedding, man. I swear. She told us Abrashi has a girlfriend—”
“Fuck!”
“It was an arranged alliance. Why would we care if the man had a side piece?”
My nostrils are flaring with the rage burning in me. “Except that girlfriend wouldn’t be his side piece. She’d be the one he cherishes. And his wife, the commodity he acquired because we’re so worried about the Albanians we’re ready to get fucked up the ass, she’ll be fair game for anything. For his sick, perverted games.”
“I fucked up, Leo.”
“Damn right you did! And now, Bianca’s gone.” I freeze, something registering. “You say she found out?” How’s not the question right now. “You think he knows?”
Mattia looks up at me with weary eyes. “You think he took her?”
I’m worried he did. So his sins won’t come out. So he can keep being with the woman he loves.
If he has her, she’s in danger. They could already be married, and this would mean he can do whatever he wants with her. Rape her. Fuck her up. Kill her. No one would intervene because it’s a husband’s prerogative to do with his wife as he pleases.
We have to get Bianca out of this mess. Come what may. And for this, I’ll need Mattia’s help. I’m not her blood, so I can’t make a strike in the name of her and her family’s honor.
His jaw’s starting to bruise. I go to the freezer and come back with a bag of peas I hand over to him. He thanks me with a nod and tends to his face.
“I assume you know where we can find the girlfriend?” I ask.
He nods at the island. “Address is in the folder.”
My mouth curls in a grimace at the thought of having to touch that filth again. I turn the file over, so the pictures will be face-down, and open it. Thankfully, the information about Abrashi’s woman are at the back. The address is in Brooklyn.
“Come on,” I tell Mattia. “We’re going out.”
The SUV takes us to a street in Williamsburg. I park, and we don’t have long to wait. The woman from the picture is coming home. I frown, watching her slow, waddling steps.
“She’s pregnant,” Mattia gasps.
I nod. Heavily so, too. No wonder Abrashi is tying up loose ends. The fucker.
“We can’t go there,” I tell Mattia.
“No. Change of plans.”
No matter the situation, we never hurt children, and much less a pregnant woman.
“Where can we find him tonight, do you think?”
Mattia sighs. “Turns out he also has a gambling addiction.”
I curse, itching to slam my fist into his face again. That’s the fucker they were ready to shackle Bianca to?
Bianca… A snapshot assails me, of her dark eyes peering up at me when I’m taking her, her lips parted, glistening because she just ran her tongue over them, me needing to take those lips, to plunge my tongue into them just like my cock was plunging into her core.
I reached completion in her arms, in her body, but it was more than just an orgasm. I hadn’t wanted to look at it at the moment—it had felt so momentous—but I’d found a piece of home there. A place I’d sought my whole life without realizing it, so when it fell into my lap as if sent by God above Himself, I didn’t recognize it.
Then God showed what a twisted sense of humor He had by making her stand right there on the edge of my life but just out of my reach, all while I consumed myself inside out with need, with desire, and dare I say it, love for her.
Breaking down in her arms at the loft in Tribeca, that’s what I started to fathom. This yearning, it didn’t come just from my loins.
She’d already left when it all crystalized in my being.
I love her.
And now, she’s missing. Probably taken by that motherfucking little piece of shit who saw her as his ticket to a free life where he gets to indulge in all his sick perversions while the woman he actually cares for gives him an heir.
Over my dead body!
“We haven’t heard of him frequenting any of our dens,” Mattia says.
News like this would’ve reached our ears, possibly giving us a way to nail his balls and not need an alliance to get him and his people in line.
“So he’s going where they’ll let any piece of turd in.”
We exchange a glance.
“Little Odessa?”
I nod. The Bratva are really not picky with their clientele. As long as the money’s good, they’re good.
That son of a bitch isn’t escaping from us tonight.