Chapter 9
Luca
DAYS SPED BY in a haze of guns, blow, and Vivienne.
Weapons were an extension of myself. Drug trafficking an inevitable part of the business.
The king’s daughter? A ruthless distraction, prancing around with an attitude and in some teeny-tiny bathing suit.
That girl swam for miles, and someone had to watch her.
After too much of that nonsense, I volunteered for every job off the compound.
Damian didn’t hesitate to vocalize his displeasure.
“Some of us like to sleep,” he complained while we “managed” a delivery. Only the boss knew what was inside the crates transitioning from truck to barge. I guessed cocaine, and the objective was to move them without police interference to a waiting crew. Done.
“So sleep. I don’t need a babysitter.” I swung into the Rover, slamming the door behind me.
He scoffed, slipping behind the wheel. “Bullshit,” was his response, because, truth be told, he’d watched my back for so long that he was almost another extension of myself.
Almost. Damian wasn’t dark. His ma and pop lived in Jersey, along with a slew of brothers, and I caught him on the phone asking about a new nephew.
Between the two of us, he was the good guy.
In his mind, he’d probably worked it out that we were still do-gooders for the nation.
Besides, if I rested, I thought about winter frost and pouty lips. The exact opposite of a healthy lifestyle. So I kept busy, even when the job saw the moon collapse against the horizon and the start of another day begin.
Five miles from the docks, my cell vibrated against the dash. I swiped open the call, leaving it on speaker.
“Mancini.”
“2732 Belmont.”
“The Bronx?”
“Yeah.”
Eddy’s confirmation lit a fire in my chest. “That’s the mission.”
“Correct again. Simone’s got a delivery arriving, and the boss ordered some guys to help.”
“Find someone else.”
Damian shot me a look, but I fixed my gaze on gray concrete and boredom.
“You’re the closest to the site, and I ain’t telling him you refused an order.” The line clicked dead.
“Goddamn it.” I scrubbed my face. It was Wednesday, and if I’d learned anything over my time at the compound, it was Vivienne’s schedule.
Not that I was paying attention or anything.
Knowing the whereabouts of the family was a hazard of the trade.
Or so I told myself. I also told myself it didn’t matter that the capo’s daughter would be at our destination, yet the sudden tick in my jaw said something altogether different.
Damian chuckled.
I glowered. “What’s so funny about unloading a semi at the ass-crack of dawn?”
“Of all the women.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure, I don’t.” He had the audacity to grin. “I don’t know anything about wanting the impossible. Wanting something you can’t have but craving it like it’s a drug when you’re an addict. I haven’t the slightest idea what that feels like.”
“Fuck.” I rolled the irritation off my shoulders. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said, the smile lingering. “So what—I’m in love with my brother’s wife? I’ve grown familiar with the forbidden, you’ll get there too. I just have one question.”
“What?”
“Why Vivienne?”
“Why Vivienne, what?” The tick returned full force.
“Out of all the women in the world, why does she make you crazy?”
If he wasn’t family, I’d throw my fist at his temple for seeing right through me. The calm exterior, the facade of normalcy, never fooled Damian. There was no use in denying the truth.
“It’s nothing I can’t manage.”
“Yeah? I mean, you shot a man—
“Tomasso è un idiota. (Tomasso is an idiot.)”
“The nightly stalking and increased agitation—more so than your normal charming self—and it seems like she might be the reason we’re never at the mansion now. But the thing I don’t get—she’s not even your type.”
My fingers dug into my thighs. “Just because I can’t punch you, doesn’t mean I don’t want to.”
“I’m not talking about her looks.” He glanced at me, then back to the road. “She’s the king’s daughter. His pure, wholesome daughter.”
And I preferred dirty. Dark and apathetic. The kind of woman who was already broken, so I couldn’t add to her pieces. Vivienne was made of innocence and light, and a heart of glass I would shatter.
“I’m not going to do anything.” I couldn’t, for more than one very good reason.
The first was obvious. Breaking the recruit’s fingers at the initiation ceremony was tame.
Tommy’s hand—easy. I’d never let her see the man created by the devil and molded by Anna and the job.
A mixture as volatile as the Molotov cocktail I’d once thrown on Giovanni Mauro’s front porch, after he forgot the definition of the word “no”.
His girl was nice to me. The night I found her crying by the river was the last time he used real teeth to chew his food.
But my fists weren’t enough. Most of the time, I took things a step too far.
That I enjoyed the mayhem—that’s why I was a monster.
“I’m serious. I won’t touch her again.”
“There’s not a chance in hell that ends well for either of you.”
“I heard you, alright?” I barked.
“Good. Remember who you are, and everything will be just fine.”
How could I forget? “Understood. Now, tell me about that new kid. What’s his name?”
Damian allowed me to transition topics until we pulled into the mission. The truck waited. We unloaded the first boxes, dropping them where Simone directed. On my third trip, I found Vivienne in a makeshift pantry by the kitchen. And she wasn’t alone.
Heat stabbed into my skin, tiny laser beams of animosity for the ginger who looked at her like she hung the moon. She did, but it was my moon. The fuck? I growled my anger, dropping the goddamn crate at their feet. Vivi startled, twisting toward me.
Silver hair.
Big eyes.
Frost.
“Luca?”
I ignored her, retreating outside for another box. Late summer humidity clogged the air, but that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t breathe.
“Hey, Damian.” I just imagined her wave and the bright smile that came with the greeting, because I couldn’t look at her again. Mostly because I wanted to shake her and then pin her against the wall, where I’d press myself between her thighs. I picked up the heaviest crate I could find instead.
“Thanks for coming so early.” Vivienne followed me, undeterred by my silence, while her mother pointed down a hallway.
After turning a corner, I found myself in a room full of bunks.
“What do you think?” She twirled around, stumbled, and then righted herself with the grin I missed earlier.
A volcano in my chest boiled and spit lava.
“We’re just setting up—that’s what all of the stuff is for. The grand opening is next week.”
She rambled for minutes about how they rehabbed this old warehouse into a shelter for those in need, and her passion fueled something inside me. Some kind of primitive attraction punched through my stomach. The memory of the only time I’d held her bombarded my mind.
Her fingers on my skin.
My lips on her neck.
Her panting breath.
My beating heart.
She was the last woman who touched me. The only woman who made me feel more human than monster, and she easily became my favorite visual while I fisted my dick alone at night in the barracks. Yet minutes ago, she was flirting with the grungy ginger.
“Who’s the long lost Weasley brother?” I demanded when she paused.
She blinked, her vision sliding down my body in a stream of fire and ice, until she got stuck at my belt. “Who?”
“Vivienne.”
Her eyes blinked to mine. “Oh, are you talking about Jake? He started last week.”
“I don’t like him.”
She shook her head, as if I were speaking a foreign language.
I made sure to enunciate my words. “He looks at you.”
A beat passed, enough time for her cheeks to burn into a pretty pink. Then she turned to the crate, trying to pry it open with her tiny arms. Her voice was just as weak. “You look at me.”
I stepped in, my hands landing on either side of hers, a sliver separating her skin from mine. Heat, spitting lava, and a fucking ginger prick pissed me off, and I freed a corner but held it shut until she found my eyes again. She did, and the volcano erupted, stealing my breath.
Goddamn, I said I wouldn’t touch her, and I clenched my fingers to be sure I kept that promise. But being close to her drove me mad; she smelled like vanilla and sin. Like someone I could savor and defile all at once.
Bad idea.
I pushed the fantasy aside, focusing on the topic and not the pulse hammering in her throat. “What do you know about him?”
She shrugged, shoving my hands out of the way to retrieve linens. “He seems nice.”
“That didn’t answer my question.”
“Maybe I’m not planning to.”
“Viviieennne.”
Her silence was as frustrating as the back she turned on me to fit a sheet over a mattress.
I waited for her to finish. Then my dick took over all the thinking while she bent over, head down, ass in the air, fussing over wrinkles that would never relax.
Neither would I. Not when I imagined her naked, fisting those same damn sheets and begging for harder and faster.
Clearly, I had a problem.
And her name was Vivienne. She was the only forbidden Cabello, but that wasn’t why I couldn’t stay away.
I didn’t understand the deep, instinctive need—I couldn’t explain it and didn’t want to.
I just wanted to be near her, like a hunger bleeding into my veins and changing my DNA until nothing in the world made sense but Vivienne.
I clenched my teeth and asked again. “What do you know of him?”
She looked at me over her shoulder, then stood, arms crossing, hip jutting out. There was something beneath the attitude. A light sparking in the frost. A twist to her lip. “Not much.”
“Not much means something.” I moved toward her.
She held her ground. “It means none of your business.”
“Everything you do is my business.”