Chapter 14 #2
Reflexively, I reached for the pendant my mother gave me on my eighteenth birthday.
The night I met Luca. Her eyes had sparkled like one of her signs as she clasped the chain around my neck, and the memory made me think out loud.
“Have you ever thought that maybe we’re meant to find a way out of here together? ”
The tip of his tongue ran along his bottom lip, his eyes dropping to my lap, and his fingers still tangled with mine.
His grip loosened, just enough for his hand to slide over my arm and up, past the wound Vigo aggravated earlier, to my throat.
His touch was molten lava and everything I had imagined.
He licked his lips again, and my heart stumbled on the next beat.
Then his thumb pressed against my riotous pulse, detonating a throb between my legs.
Yes.
I caught his wrist, holding his hand in place.
Never in my life had I been more centered, more aware of myself, my body, and how light played with darkness.
How the sun created shadows and how his warmed my skin.
Luca was my darkest temptation. Such explosive chemistry was dangerous, but no one would fault the devil’s daughter for staining her soul black while he was near.
I was marked at conception like a red check that said surrender was inevitable with this man.
So, I wasn’t afraid. I breathed in the sweet scent of sweat and the sun, shifting closer.
Close enough, I knew how shards of light split the dark blue of his irises and how his thick lashes curled at the ends.
The distance eased between us, and his grip tightened on my throat.
His mouth parted. A whimper escaped through mine.
“Do you like how my hands feel on your skin, uccellino?” Little bird. “Are they better than your own?”
Fire ignited my cheeks. Had everyone seen what I did to myself when the nights were long and unending?
Had he seen me writhe in my sheets, panting and moaning and wishing I had a man to do what a toy had to?
But I only ever thought about him while I worked myself into an orgasm.
As I did that night under the stars, with the wind and his voice in my ear.
“Sì.”
His eyes dropped to my lips. The slightest distance disappeared, and then he fell back onto his heels.
“Luca.” I scrambled on my knees, following him as he rose to his feet. “Don’t leave me,” I pleaded, fingers digging into the fine cotton of his slacks. “Per favore.”
A painful rumble shook through his chest as he stared down. Broad shoulders. Sleek lines. A heaving tower of dominance and mio bel salvatore. The wind whistled, circling around us, and I knew. I just knew he was God’s plan and my best chance to escape this prison.
“Please,” I begged again.
“Is this what you truly want, Vivienne?”
No. I squeezed my eyes shut. I wanted everything. I wanted him. All of him. But I would take whatever he offered like a beggar who owned nothing, not even pride.
I looked up at him and nodded.
His jaw clenched, but resignation burned brightly in his eyes.
“Don’t go inside until I come for you,” he commanded. “Do you understand, Vivienne? You’ll do as I tell you from this moment on.”
?
IT TOOK LUCA thirty minutes to negotiate my release from constant surveillance, and ten to remove the cameras.
I paced outside as he stripped them from my home.
Burning with embarrassment, I held myself back from rushing into my father’s office to demand answers—how dare he invade my privacy.
But it was late, and the never-ending day weighed heavily in my limbs.
When Luca gave a curt nod, I entered to thank him. His hard glare stopped me in my tracks. Without a word, he brushed past me to enter the security code on the wall panel. Then he disappeared down the hall. I was left in silence except for the soft latch of his door as it closed behind him.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. A long shower would’ve soothed my fragile nerves, but the cameras were too recent a memory to shake the thought of prying eyes.
In the dark, I changed into sweats and a tank, leaving Mama’s dress lying over a chair in my closet.
I’d take care of it tomorrow, along with her other things.
Rafi and Sam had called, but I was too exhausted to rehash details.
All I could do was send a quick text with a promise to connect in the morning.
As I did nightly, I prayed the rosary, adding a final petition on Luca’s behalf—for his soul, for mine, and how I thought they may be connected.
The final word left me antsy and unfulfilled, as if God had his own plan and it differed from what I most wanted.
I climbed into my bed. The silk sheets were as luxurious as this house, but sleep eluded me.
There was too much battering my brain: Mama, her funeral, revenge, and Luca.
I thought of him on the other side of the wall, naked and tangled in his own sheets.
After a restless hour, I shoved the covers to my feet and changed into my bathing suit.
The security code Luca entered was easily undone, and instead of heading to the pool on the other side of the house by Dante’s rooms, I trudged carefully through the rose garden.
The ocean was colder than the air, freezing and dark.
The reflection of the moon bouncing off the lapping waves reminded me of Luca’s eyes.
That was my last thought as I dove in, breaking a whitecap.
My strokes were long, as were my laps. A hundred yards one way, back the other.
I cut through the current until fatigue weighed down my limbs and I thought I couldn’t go on.
Then I pushed myself farther and faster.
I swam until I didn’t give a shit about anything.
Eventually the heavy weight loosened in my chest, and I could breathe.
I headed in, and just as my foot touched land, I ran into a wall. An angry wall. He grunted and hauled me from the ocean with an arm around my midsection. My ass fell to the shore, and I wiped my face in a frantic attempt to free myself from my tangled strands that had escaped my bun.
Ten feet from my perch, Luca scowled with one hand raking through his hair while the other held his gun by a wet thigh.
He was shirtless. I parted my lips to give him a piece of my mind but instead gaped at his nudity—at his powerful muscles bunching under bronzed skin, the indent at his waist that looked like a pair of parentheses for the dark trail disappearing beneath unbuttoned pants.
They were barely pulled over his hips, barely zipped, barely covering the large swell of his dick pressing against the fabric.
My eyes fell to his feet, which were equally bare, and I knew then what happened. He woke to find my empty bed.
I glanced at his face just in time to see him cataloging my body as I did his. His gaze stuck hungrily on my tits—nipples furled tight from the cold air and his hot gaze.
“How did you know I was gone?” Was he as awake as I was? Did he hold the heavy weight of his cock in his hand while thinking of me? Did he stroke himself and crave something more? I needed answers, and I got nothing but his sneer, so I asked again, “Why did you check on me, Luca?”
He remained stoic and silent. Frustration flickered through my chest, and before I could second-guess the decision, I was on my knees, crawling through the cool sand.
His eyes fell to my cleavage, gaping from my suit, which wasn’t sexy but could hardly hold the only womanly part of my frame.
God blessed me with straight lines, but he must have found a wide-width marker when he drew my breasts.
Luca’s hand fell to his side, the lowered gun in the other.
His stance and his jaw were so rigid that I feared for his molars.
With every inch that closed the distance, his forced furor slumped with the resignation in his shoulders.
I made my way to kneel before him. I always kneeled for Luca, praying or begging, and this was no exception.
“Did you wake up and know I was gone? Could you feel the distance?”
He cared. I knew he did, and I needed him to admit it. Luca demanded my trust, and I wanted his feelings.
“Answer me,” I insisted.
In some inexplicable way, his life and mine were tangled, and I needed to hear him say so.
“I looked in on you because you’re my job, Vivienne.”
His tone was as cold and unforgiving as the ocean. Instead of satisfaction, I was left with tears stinging the back of my lids. They never fell. He could punish me as Vigo did, but these men wouldn’t see my pain.
I stood and brushed the sand from my ass, taking the first step on the path to the house.
“You’re my ward. Do you understand what that means, uccellino? I thought you did, but it seems I need to spell this out.”
His harsh words stopped my progression, but I didn’t turn. I wouldn’t look. I listened as I’d done my whole life. But I ignored the intense reaction my mind and body had for this man. A renewed hatred spread through my veins, directed toward myself and my weakness.
“Without my permission, you don’t move. You go where I allow, on the property or not. Look at me, Vivienne.”
His command straightened my spine, but I stared straight ahead.
He said it again, this time while stepping close enough that he warmed my back. I shivered and hoped he didn’t notice. I didn’t want him to know how his body affected mine or how hard his rejection stung.
You’re my job.
The brutality of his apathy was chased away by bitter relief.
If I didn’t care, I couldn’t hurt. Days ago, the most important person in my world was murdered in my arms. Mama’s death was the harshest lesson I could learn, and I became an adept student.
I envisioned a castle of solitude—walls and moats, mortar and brick—erupting around my heart.
Still, pain squeezed through the seams holding me together, rendering me breathless.
I shook my head. He forced my chin around with his fingers, and I burned him with the vehemence shining in my eyes.
“I feel nothing for you because I can’t. That is what you must understand. I’m under Vigo Cabello’s employ, and you are my burden for however long he grants me the assignment. There can be nothing else. He won’t allow it. Neither will I.”
A chill rushed through my once hot veins, renewing the drive for revenge. “So, I’m a possession. Yours and his.”
An unnamed emotion bounced around his eyes, but it disappeared with his curt nod.
“Then I have gained nothing but a new abuser. Thank you for the clarification.”
I walked away with as much dignity as I could until my room door latched. The wood floor was cool under my knees as I slid down, praying for strength.
I was wrong to ask for help.
The road to freedom was one I would take alone.