Chapter 17
Luca
VIVIENNE’S VOICE WAS muffled as I moved down the hall, sleep blurring my eyes.
Even a man walking a morally gray line understood that eavesdropping was wrong.
But that was my job. A career choice I despised when she mentioned Jake, the ginger felon who was shot during the raid that killed Simone.
Jealousy bled through my veins. She asked Sam for his address to send a get-well basket and balloons. Fucking no good pansy.
He looked at Vivi the way I wanted to. The way I did when no one was watching, heat searing through my eyes while exploring each inch of ivory skin and her silver hair.
None of that mattered. Vigo would ensure Jake never had a chance with her.
Neither would I; another foregone conclusion.
Vivienne could voice her feelings every minute of every day, and her father would still bind her to another man with his signature on a three-page contract.
That thought twisted my features into a scowl as I stalked into her kitchen.
She glanced at me, her gaze dropping to my worn Navy T-shirt and gray joggers.
Her knuckles blanched, her fingers squeezing around the phone still pressed to her ear.
The heavy weight of her stare stayed with me as I poured a cup of coffee and downed a gulp.
“Son of a bitch,” I hissed as the roof of my mouth blistered.
Vivi stepped forward, took the mug, and blew on the steaming contents while Sam’s voice squawked in her ear like a cartoon.
Using my palms, I braced myself on the edge of the counter.
For years, I’d ignored this girl. I would leave the room if she entered.
I turned corners, walking in the opposite direction, sometimes out of spite alone.
Her response? To cool my coffee because it was too hot.
Such a simple gesture—one of many, actually.
A gentleness no one had shown me my entire life.
Everyone had a melting point.
Mine was an instinctive, base-level kindness.
She wasn’t flirting, nor was there a hidden agenda in her frosty eyes as they peered over the rim of the mug that crumbled my defenses.
This was just Vivienne. Pure, innocent, good Vivi.
“What’s that, Sam?” she finally asked, setting down the cup. “Friday is perfect. I need to see Rafi too, and that should work with his schedule. Yeah, okay. I’ll call if I need anything.”
After saying goodbye, she set the cell next to my mug.
“I’m sorry.”
I tensed, waiting for her fingers to slide along my arm or press into my back. Women had a tendency to use their bodies to pacify me. It had the opposite effect, probably because of my upbringing and Anna’s belt.
I wasn’t born of love. I didn’t live in peace. I was a tool shaped by hate and sharpened by violence.
I was a monster.
And still, Vivienne wanted me and said so with wide eyes and a hand on my heart. A heart that thrummed beneath her palm like I was the goddamn pansy. Confirmation of what I’d forced myself to forget since that moment with the wind on my back and Dami’s condemnation in my ear.
Vivi was the brightest star in my sky. She was both fire and ice, and that made my blood flow with bitter resentment. Because I’d go to my grave unfulfilled with that raw ache bleeding out of my veins. Some people called it karma. I called it my rotten life.
I cleared the hostility from my throat. “Why are you sorry?”
“I should have warned you.”
“That you’d ruin me?” I clarified.
“What?” She laughed, but humor evaporated with the air in the room, and my lungs constricted. Her frosty eyes welled with emotion, her bottom lip squeezing beneath her teeth.
My spine snapped straight, and I faced her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I, ah…” She swallowed. “I was thinking of my mother this morning and how she liked steaming black coffee. I made the pot for her.” The last word cracked with emotion, and her chin trembled. “I made it for Mama.”
“Hey,” I said, tugging her into my chest out of reflex alone.
My chin landed in her hair as I gulped in a lungful of vanilla and sin.
Comforting did not come naturally to me.
There was no good place for my hands, and I fumbled over her shoulders and down to her waist. Vivi didn’t seem to mind.
Her arms rounded my back, and she melted into me—a perfect fit.
Every point of contact was torture. The rise and fall of her chest. Her warm breath and her fingers twisting into my T-shirt.
Heat raced through my veins, settling in my dick that hardened against her stomach.
I inched away so she wouldn’t notice. But Vivi, Christ almighty, just squeezed in tighter, making some soft sound that did the opposite of easing my hard-on.
“What else should I know about Simone?” I croaked, rolling my eyes to the ceiling. Any visual was better than Vivi naked. Vivi on her knees, begging. Fuck.
“There’s so much.”
“Just tell me one thing I wouldn’t know.” Anything, for God’s sake. Anything to divert my mind and distract my imagination.
“She liked silly Christmas movies. Rom-coms.”
“Yeah? Are they good?”
She laughed, then rubbed her nose on my chest. I held in a groan.
“Not really,” she finally said with a hint of a smile. “But they always end with a happily ever after.”
I fisted her hair. The long strands cascaded over my hand and covered my forearm in a thick blanket of silver. “Is that what she wanted?”
“I suppose it was.”
I don’t know why. I shouldn’t have, but I tugged, so Vivi’s head fell back, and she had to look at me with those wide, frosty eyes. “Is that what you want?”
She blinked. “Doesn’t everyone?”
Silence ticked away like seconds on a time bomb, with the two of us immersed in what felt like sheer terror before an explosion.
I fisted her hair harder. She twisted her hand deeper into my shirt.
Electricity surged between us—the catalyst for detonation.
There was no question I wouldn’t survive this woman, but every molecule in my body understood that I was placed on this earth to ensure she survived me.
I could endure the pain, but I didn’t have the strength to watch her wither under the painful truth of my life.
I loosened my hold.
“Luca,” she breathed, tightening her grip. “Don’t go.”
“We both know I should,” I said, my hands falling to my sides.
I stepped back, dropped my eyes to the floor, and turned to leave.
“I think about you,” she called after me.
My palm met the wall, my body an inch from escaping down the hall, where a cold shower waited.
“I think about you when the lights are off,” she said.
“When I’m all alone in the dark, I think about that night and what you said.
All the words you whispered in my ear play back as if we’re together again, and I pretend my fingers are yours and that it’s you who’s touching me.
Then I pretend it’s your mouth, and I spread my legs wider. ”
Holy shit. A pulse pounded in my dick so hard it hurt.
But it hurt worse not looking at her, or acknowledging what she said, or admitting that I had jacked off to the same memory so many times it was engraved behind my eyelids.
But I was mute. I couldn’t move or breathe.
This was so dangerous and wrong, yet she’d worn down my defenses, and I turned to face her anyway.
When I did, she was pouring herself a mug of coffee.
Then her cell rang, and my response was lost in her greeting.
Sofia Cabello saved me, or maybe she saved Vivi from me.
On my way to the shower, I pulled my T-shirt over my head and threw it in the wash. I scrubbed my skin and rinsed away the tension, but as the water ran cold, I didn’t think about Vivienne on her knees. I thought about her arms wrapped around my back and how her body molded perfectly to my own.
A feeling shook through my chest.
Something soft and fragile.
Something that felt too much like hope.
?
MY FIST BANGED on the door for the hundredth time. “Jesus Christ, Dante. Open up.”
“Gesù Cristo, Luca,” he mocked from the other side. Then he tugged it open and sneered, “I was fuckin’ sleeping. No one but the birds are up this goddamn early.”
“Exactly. A little bird with no sense,” I mumbled, pushing into his suite.
A bra was thrown over the back of his couch, with a second left on the oversized chair. Neither were a distraction from my heart, somersaulting from sheer panic. “I lost your sister.”
He stopped scratching his chest. Then he burst out laughing.
“This isn’t a goddamn joke,” I warned.
“No, you are. Hotshot hit man. Can find anyone in the world except Vivienne. What the fuck, Mancini? What were you doing?”
“Showering. Okay?” I scrubbed my face, regretting the extra two minutes it took to shave.
But I did it for Vivi. Fuck that, I did it for myself so I could feel her fingers on my jaw, tracing down my neck.
Good Christ. Chernobyl melted down inside my chest. I stalked over to the window, peering out at the bay.
I half expected to see Vivi tunneling through the waves, as though I’d missed her the twenty times I’d walked around the house.
“I left her alone for ten minutes. She was on the phone talking to Sofia.”
“Check the pool.”
I dropped the shade and turned on him with enough sarcasm to freeze the Atlantic.
“Thanks for the clue, Sherlock. She isn’t there.
All the cars are accounted for. There’s no visual of her on the perimeter cameras, but she’s not inside the house either.
I’ve studied the film from every angle—in the catacombs and all the hallways in the mansion. Nothing. She disappeared.”
Anxiety exploded through my veins. A fear I couldn’t verbalize until facing her brother, his own panic draining the humor from his features.
A muscle in his jaw bulged. “Give me five minutes.”
“Three,” I called after him, and thank God, he was back in two, still zipping his pants.