Chapter Five
Matteo
“W hat the fuck was that, Matteo?” Enzo asks, stomping after me. “Who is she?”
“Nobody,” I grit out through clenched teeth. “Where are we meeting Emiliano?”
He throws me an irked look. “The rooftop. Which I’ve already told you.” He throws the door at the end of the hallway open. “Don’t tell me she’s nobody, cousin. I haven’t seen you look at a woman in years and that ,” he growls. “That was more than looking.”
“She’s just a stripper, Enzo. Guido was busy and couldn’t take the audition. I was walking by when I heard Amadeo tell her he needed to reschedule, so I offered to help.”
My fists clench in anger thinking about Guido overseeing her audition instead of me. Enzo doesn’t miss it.
“Doesn’t sound like Guido,” Enzo grunts, flicking his searching gaze my way. “Or you.”
Enzo is my cousin, my second-in-command, and my closest friend. Only he can get away with openly challenging me like this, but he’s approaching the limit of what I’ll put up with.
I snarl at him and he puts his hands up as we continue through the maze of Firenze’s many hallways and rooms.
“ Scusa ,” he mutters. “I just want you focused on this meeting given what’s at stake.”
His face is guarded as he stares back at me. “You don’t have to remind me of what’s at stake, Enzo. I’ve been working towards this moment my entire life. I know exactly what this meeting could mean for me. For us.”
He nods, accepting the truth of my words without question. Enzo is the most loyal bastard in the entire fucking world. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for me. He’s questioning my focus because there’s no room for mistakes.
“I’ll text Amadeo to take her to the back and introduce her to the other dancers,” Enzo tells me and I grunt, not giving him any other reaction.
Far from Melody’s presence, I can think clearly for the first time in an hour.
She’s being dishonest about her reasons for wanting employment at Firenze . I’m usually excellent at reading people, but she’s an enigma.
The reason for her lies could be as simple as her running away from an abusive boyfriend. From what I’ve heard, we’ve had that happen quite a few times with other strippers. She was clear about wanting money and didn’t seem interested in anything else, so the theory holds up.
But she could also be a plant, a spy, an assassin, or any number of other things, each with the end objective of destroying the Famiglia .
I know this and yet all I can focus on is my desperation to not have her on stage shaking her delectable ass for others.
Enzo is right to be concerned. I’m fully compromised. She was even more intoxicating than I imagined, and fuck knows I’ve imagined it a lot. All that skin wrapped in a lethal costume. Miles of long legs on display. A face that’s haunted my dreams, with plump, pouty lips that I’ve stroked my cock to, imagining watching them part around my thick length.
And her hair .
There’s an obstruction in my throat just thinking about the mass of thick brown locks tumbling loosely down her back. Wrapping it around my fist fulfilled half of a fantasy that had been thumping inside me since the moment I saw her.
She’s even more beautiful than I remember.
“You ready?” Enzo asks. I nod and he pushes the door open.
Emiliano Marchesani is standing at the rooftop’s edge, his hands in his pockets and his back turned to me as he stares out at the view of the city. The sun is setting, offering a beautiful glimpse of London against a sky of pinks and oranges. It’s my favorite time of day.
“Emiliano,” I call and he turns. He nods at the security he’s brought with him and they disperse, moving further away but keeping a watchful eye on him.
“Matteo. You’re late.”
“Apologies. I had business to attend to.”
His gaze moves over my shoulder to Enzo who follows closely behind me. “Let’s speak alone.”
“No,” I say, reaching him. I extend a hand out between us. “Enzo stays.”
He glances down at my hand, then back at me.
“You made me come alone.”
I grin easily, flashing him my most disarming smile. “That’s because I don’t trust any of your men. Enzo, I trust with my life and yours.”
The older man stares at me for a moment longer, disrespectfully stretching the amount of time I stay with my hand extended. It’s a show of power, one I’m only too happy to indulge if that’s what it’ll take. Finally, he nods and slips his hand in mine, shaking it forcefully.
“What’s with all of the cloak and dagger of this meeting?” he asks, shrewd eyes picking apart my face. “I assume your father wouldn’t be thrilled if he found out about this. Nor would your brother.”
My jaw sets at the mention of those two.
“They would not.” My lip curls. “And you haven’t told them, which means that you’re at the very least intrigued by what I have to offer.”
Emiliano’s eyebrow twitches, the first slip in his mask. He’s a brutal, emotionless man, one I’d be a fool to cross.
“I’m listening.”
Growing up, life was always about survival. My father was an abusive asshole, and my brother learned how to be a sociopathic sadist from him. He learned by watching and he trained. On me.
For years, I was his training dummy. He used me, used my body, to develop and hone his favorite torture methods. I kept hoping, expecting, praying , for help. To be rescued. For an adult to intervene and save me.
But the help never came.
Encouraged by the seemingly carte blanche he was given, Rocco grew more vicious and barbaric. He had everything you could want. Power. Influence. The ability to wield fear like a weapon. He was the heir and I was the spare. I should have gone unnoticed to him growing up, forgotten like I often was by our parents, but he was obsessed with what I had. He wanted it all for himself, no matter what it was.
As we grew up, his tactics changed. By the time I was seventeen, I was bigger and stronger than he was, making physical assaults impossible. So he resorted to more imaginative ways to torture me.
When I was eighteen, I had a girlfriend, Susanna. We’d been together less than a week when I came home on the last day of school and found her dead in my bed, her throat slit and blood everywhere. The memory of Rocco fucking her dead body, his white hips furiously slapping against her flesh is forever seared into my brain.
He’d turned towards me with a crazed expression on his face, licking his lips as he announced, “She screamed for you the entire time I killed her.”
Rocco had stared at me as he continued desecrating her, not wanting to miss a single expression on my face. It’s what motivated him, what has always motivated him, to needle and stab until he found the weak spot he was searching for.
Because no matter how much he’d hurt me, no matter the blows and burns and scars, I’d never given him what he wanted. I’d never screamed. Never lost my cool.
Never broken.
And I didn’t that day either. I simply turned on my heels and walked out.
The next day, I left. I went to Italy for college and stayed there long after I’d graduated, brewing on the same thought that I’d had since the first time he hurt me — revenge.
Life stopped being about survival. I became consumed by my need for vengeance. Even back then, I knew that one day, I’d take what he so arrogantly assumed would be his from between his fingers and that he’d never see it coming.
I was going to see the moment he realized he lost in his gaze before he ever saw anything in mine.
That was going to be my ultimate revenge.
“I’ll be blunt with you, Emiliano. I didn’t come back to London just to be a second son in a failing organization. I intend to overthrow my father and take my brother’s place as the new Don of the Famiglia ,” I announce matter-of-factly. “And I’d like your help in doing so.”