Chapter 12
Leo
I slam my fist on the table, making Mattia jump.
“It’s been seven months!” I yell at him. “That’s not enough time—”
“Will you fucking give it up?”
“Never!”
Mattia and I stare at each other across the desk in my study in my family’s home. I called him to share a new lead—another one—in Bianca’s disappearance. But he arrived with his shoulders slumped, dark circles and heavy bags under his eyes. I can’t help but feel my best friend has been humoring me these past months. Ever since we took care of Abrashi, it’s like the will to find his sister has slowly been leeching out of him.
Leeching out of him to fuel my drive to recover her. It seems to me no one is doing anything to find her.
“Leo, stop,” he says.
I tighten my fist and clench my jaw. “I won’t.”
“We can’t keep doing this.”
I throw a wad of papers at him. “It’s a lead.”
He sighs. “Seven months old. I can’t even believe they found traces after all this time.”
The sample a top-notch forensics team I hired found is severely degraded, I’ll admit it, but they found it. In the alley right after the ATM machine where Bianca was last spotted. I had them comb the whole stinking shithole with their finest equipment, and lo-and-behold, they found traces of her blood. It’s a spatter consistent with the slash of a knife that dripped droplets on the ground and showered a pattern on the wall, made by a left-handed person.
“Someone attacked her in that alley, Mattia,” I enunciate carefully, to drive the point home. “The traces, the blood drops, end at the mouth of the alley.”
Mattia’s nostrils flare. “An alley that opens onto a whole crossroad of alleyways there.”
Is he seriously not hearing what I’ve been saying all this time? “Ardian Abrashi was left-handed. The forensics state this splatter pattern came from someone left-handed.”
He sighs, closes his eyes, and pinches the bridge of his nose before looking at me again. “What’s this new lead of yours?”
I don’t want to cry victory yet, but at least he’s listening. “One block south of that spot. Cameras caught a car leaving off as if it had nitro turbo boost rigged to its engine.”
He takes the photo I extend and peruses it. “Right. A totally non-descript dark sedan with tinted windows speeding down empty streets in the middle of the night, the driver not visible, let alone the license plates.”
Is the fucker being sarcastic?
“We can use the cameras to track it down—”
“After seven months? Leo, this has to stop.”
“No, I won’t—”
“Please,” he mumbles, and the trembling in his tone makes me pause. “Every time you uncover a lead, it gives us hope, Leo. I…I can’t keep doing this.”
He doesn’t wait for my answer and turns on his heel and leaves the study, the door closing with a soft click behind him. However, the sound is deafening in my ears. It’s like he closed the lid on the entire endeavor it has been, and still is, to find Bianca.
I fall into a heap on my executive chair.
If her own family is stopping the search to find her, what hope do I have left of finding her and bringing her home safe? Of bringing her to my place, to my house, as my wife?
A sound chokes in my throat when I think of her. The sadness, I have to transform it into something, or it will eat me whole like corrosive acid on my every cell. So I think of her, but it’s a different fantasy, one where she’s okay, where she’s with me…
I close my eyes, and I can see her smiling face in front of me. She’s so pretty when she laughs. It’s like her features take on a mischievous expression, her eyes sparkling, that wide mouth grinning and radiating her joy.
I picture those plush, pillowy lips, and my cock goes hard inside my pants. I remember the scent of her skin just under her earlobe—flowers and candy and a more ethereal smell I can’t pinpoint that is essentially her. I inhale sharply, drunk on the memory of her, the aroma of her arousal that I drowned in during our time together.
I remember the feel of her, tight around my finger when I slipped it inside her in that loft in Tribeca, tighter around my cock when I took her in the bridal suite. How it felt to bury my face between her luscious breasts, the pebbled bud of her nipple between my teeth, the nub of her clit under my tongue as she gushed onto my tongue that was laving her slit, poking into her to lap all that cream…
One of my hands undoes my belt and button and zipper while the other slips under my briefs, closing hard around my erect cock. I sneak in a breath, imagining it’s Bianca’s hand palming my dick, her mouth which I never got to fuck closing on my member. I can feel the wetness of her tongue on the bulbous head, her playful streak wherein she’d lick the slit at the top and savor my pre-cum, the heat of her mouth as I push myself deeper inside, ramming and pulling back, my fist closing in her hair.
When I imagine the tip of my cock touching the back of her throat, I erupt in the hardest orgasm I’ve had so far in all my fantasies of Bianca Bonucci.
“Damn,” I mutter when I come back to earth again.
I have come all over my hands and on my pants. I get the box of tissues in the drawer and hastily wipe it all off before it has the chance to dry. I have no plans to explain to my dry cleaner why there are dried come splatters on my clothes.
The silence in the room settles onto me, and I’m left itching suddenly. It’s like the air is closing all over me, pressing, trying to force itself under my skin.
I jump out of my chair and head to the door. I almost smack into my father in the hallway. I no longer live here, but Pellegrini business is conducted from this house, hence my study in this building.
My father throws one look at me and lifts an eyebrow. I follow his gaze, cringing at the piece of tissue stuck to the front of my pants.
“It’s like catching you at fifteen again,” he says, lips twitching with a smile he’s repressing.
I groan, remembering that year. We’d been in our vacation house in The Hamptons. New occupants had moved in next door—Mr. and Mrs. Corrigan. He was never here, it seemed, and she was always out back near the pool, sunning herself on a chaise, topless, and perfectly visible from the small window in the upstairs bathroom.
I’d been watching her and her glorious breasts on display, furiously jacking off like only a fifteen-year-old teenage boy can. My dad caught me as I came out, a piece of tissue paper stuck to my T-shirt. His lips had twitched then, too.
With a wink, he’d said, “Make sure you’re at least legal before you start chasing after her tits.”
After catching glimpses of Mrs. Corrigan that summer, every girl my age paled in comparison. As luck would have it, she was there the next year, and the next, as well. At seventeen, finally legal as my dad had requested, I tried my luck even more by applying to be her pool boy that season. I became that and so much more to Mrs. Corrigan—Eva—those two months we spent there. It was her pleasure to take care of my sexual education in practical terms.
I blink out of the memory to find my father still watching me. Thirty-one years separate us, but after that day in The Hamptons, it’s like the line separating us as father and son faded—though it didn’t disappear; he’s still my father and also still my Don—and we became firm friends. He gave me my first taste of whiskey when I turned eighteen, and he wouldn’t hesitate to drop a comment like “She’s got a pair on her, that one!” when we were out together. However, he also taught me to treat women right, that consent is paramount if we are to consider ourselves honorable men. He might make comments about waitresses and such, but he always kept his hands to himself, addressed them with proper manners befitting a gentleman.
“You look like you need a drink,” he says.
I know it’s a suggestion just shy of an order, so I follow him into his own study adjoining mine and sit down on a leather sofa while he goes to the decanters. He returns with two tumblers of whiskey, hands me one.
I grab it and take a sip. He sprung for the good stuff. I fear an interrogation coming.
Or, in the case of my father, he’ll simply sit, look at me with his intense dark eyes, and wait until I cave.
One way or another, I will cave, so I resign myself and concede already.
“Mattia’s going to call off the search for Bianca.”
He takes a sip of whiskey. “Of course, it’s about a woman.”
I bristle. “Not any woman. I…” I haven’t told him about my plans for when I find her. Maybe it’s time I did. “I want to marry her.”
He stares at me for long seconds. “You know she’s promised to another.”
“Another who’s dead.”
“There’s still another Abrashi brother.”
I curse softly. “No one in their right mind will marry their daughter to The Butcher .”
“That’s true. The family’s angling on Don Salvatore to give up his daughter now that the Bonucci girl is missing.”
I swallow, hard. “So it doesn’t even matter what girl it is. It didn’t even have to be Bianca.”
“That’s how alliances word, figlio .”
I peer up at him, the question that’s been eating at me all these months since I met Bianca again at Mattia’s wedding no longer accepting to remain buried.
“Why didn’t you make an alliance with Roberto Bonucci? Power’s all he wants.”
He narrows his gaze slightly. “Who would I have offered in exchange? Myself?”
He’s a widower. Never mind that my mother left him when I was barely eight, my twin brothers Sergio and Emilio just three, Tristan hardly a year old—she subsequently died of an overdose in Mallorca two years later. That’s all that matters to us and the syndicate. It wouldn’t be seen as weird were he to take a new wife, even one younger than his own children.
“Me,” I state. “You could’ve offered me up.”
He sighs. “Leo, at Christmas, what did you tell your nonna ?”
My jaw tightens when I recall my conversation with my grandmother. She’d been asking for great-grandkids. “That I’m twenty-eight, and there’s still another two years until I have to hit the marriage mart.”
He nods. “Two years you planned to enjoy to the fullest.”
Fuck. I’d shot myself in the foot without even knowing it at the time.
“And you never showed any interest in Mattia’s sister,” he adds.
Mattia and I met as little kids. At five, I punched someone for the first time—it was the bully picking on scrawny Mattia. I then slung my arm around Mattia’s shoulders and brought him home with me, telling my parents this is the brother I wanted and would never give up on—the twins had been a month old at the time; I had no use for wailing babies as siblings, fully thinking back then they’d never grow up.
So my father is very closely acquainted with Mattia’s and has thus known Bianca all her life.
I decide to be honest, even though I rarely, if ever, hide anything from my father. He doesn’t know I slept with her on Mattia’s wedding day, when she was clearly promised to another. Nor does he know I’m the one responsible for Ardian Abrashi’s tragic ‘fall.’ Some things, he needs to have plausible deniability about as a Don.
“I hadn’t yet seen the woman she’d become,” I told him.
“Hmm.” He takes a sip of Scotch. “And that’s not just your dick talking, is it?”
“No.”
Though it’s actually my dick that told me she’s The One . I have no qualms about having fucked my way around in the past decade. My cock has been inside numerous pussies, many mouths, a few asses, too. It knows the feeling of sinking into a woman’s wet warmth and being welcomed there.
The day it plunged into Bianca’s body, it heard the welcome as well as the clarion call of coming home, of finding that elusive final destination it never wants to leave again. Her smile had already won my heart by this point. And seeing her with Abrashi at the bottom of the stairs, knowing she’d belong to him one day, my blood had lit up with the fire of jealousy, the one that clearly screamed at me she was mine, and mine alone.
“You really do love her,” my father says.
What’s the point in denying it?
“I do.”
“Then there’s no chance you’ll entertain the idea of marriage, I suppose.”
“To anyone but Bianca? No way in Hell.”
He swirls his glass. “I thought as much. I suggest you leave right this instant, then. Don Salvatore’s on his way over, wants to discuss an alliance between our two families.”
I frown, then put two and two together. If his daughter Paloma gets engaged asap, there’s no way she can be promised to an Albanian. Don Salvatore will want a Crown Prince for his only daughter.
I’m not going to be the sacrificial lamb in this deal.
I jump to my feet, already on my way out when my father adds,
“Oh, and Leo? You should get changed.”
Damn tissue’s still stuck to my front.