Chapter Thirty-Six
Matteo
I don’t think I could forget about Valentina if I tried. Not if I spent ten years trying, not if I spent a thousand.
Months ago, the second I realized there was no alternative to marrying Marina Marchesani if I wanted to become and stay Don, I tried forgetting about the girl in the peacock dress.
I went to Firenze more often, drank with Enzo, tried to flirt with pretty girls to forget about her.
Instead, fate chose to serve her up to me on a platter, presenting me with a priceless jewel sparkling brightly against the backdrop of a dark, dirty alley.
And now I’m supposed to give her up?
Ye—
NO. No .
No.
Italian marriages are supposed to be sacred, with fidelity between spouses being the cardinal rule, but that’s the one thing I can thank my father for. His repeated and unabashed affairs could have paved the way for me to potentially have a more modern approach to marriage, if it wasn’t for the fact that Valentina would shoot me before I was even done speaking if I ever suggested keeping her as my mistress while marrying Marina in name only. Emiliano Marchesani would also kill me for humiliating his daughter.
That, and also, I couldn’t actually fathom living that way.
I want a lot more from Valentina than just her body. I won’t have her in half-measures. Not without the parts she chooses to keep from me and not without the parts that are out of reach because she can never be my wife.
After I came down Valentina’s throat, I took her home where I fucked her four more times in my bed. I was hoping it would be enough to permanently imprint her ass, but it wasn’t.
I’m excited to keep working at it tonight once I’m back from the Tellier gala I have to attend. If this were any other event, I wouldn’t even have considered leaving Valentina’s side the night after our biggest argument, but this was a necessary trip.
It would take a college class fifty semesters of chaos theory to adequately study my path to becoming interim Don . Nothing has gone the way I expected and the reasons why can all be pinpointed back to the seismic earthquake that was Valentina’s reappearance in my life.
It might not have happened the way I planned it, but it’s happened nonetheless. Until my father is found, I am the Don . The last week in power has been exactly as I envisaged it would be. There’s only so much I can do until my position is confirmed, but I can feel that the crown fits just right.
That’s why I have to make sure my father never reappears. We followed dozens of tracks, all of them leading to inevitable dead ends, except the last one. One of our lower level assets reported rumblings that he had been kidnapped by none other than Thiago da Silva.
Da Silva is the head of the Colombian cartel. No Underworld man’s reputation is good, but his eclipses almost all others for how notoriously vicious he is. Where I like to observe and lie in wait, striking clinically only when necessary, he takes more of a ‘ chop it to pieces with a machete, then torch it with a flamethrower’ approach.
The shock and awe is a nice touch, but it’s also totally lacking in subtlety. A little tasteless if you ask me.
No finesse whatsoever.
On the surface, one boss coming for another isn’t necessarily shocking. It’s a power player, a fucking bold one, but one that seems to match the flamboyance he favors.
But it doesn’t make sense. He’s besting us on all fronts, slowly encroaching on our business and taking over our long held shipment lines. Provoking a war with the Famiglia doesn’t help him, not when he’s already winning without the bloodshed that will come from this if it’s true.
No, this is personal.
And I need to find out why.
We’ve never met, and one doesn’t simply saunter into a Colombian jefe ’s office and introduce themselves, not unless they have a very serious death wish.
Thankfully, we do have one ally in common, one family that ties us together, no matter how strenuous the link.
And that family likes to flaunt its wealth and power, throwing lavish parties to make sure people never forget, parties I know Thiago da Silva will go to to kiss the ring.
Which is why my attendance at the Tellier gala was nonnegotiable, no matter my preference for staying in bed with Valentina wrapped around me.
This is my opportunity to meet him and understand what possible reason he has for kidnapping my cunt of a father.
“Focus, Matteo,” Enzo whispers under his breath to me. He tips his chin discreetly to the right. “Incoming.”
I turn to find two women I know well heading my way. They’re both older than me, the roughly fifteen year age difference having done nothing to dull either of their beauty.
“Matteo,” the redhead says with a hint of fondness. I smile at her then look swiftly away. Before her marriage, she was universally regarded as being the most beautiful woman in Europe. Since said happy union, her husband has had the bad habit of bombing anyone’s house who dares look upon her for long enough to try and form an opinion on the matter. “Your star has certainly risen since the last time we saw each other.”
“Adéla?de,” I bow over her hand, kissing the air above it. “Lovely to see you.”
“Word of advice, Matteo,” her blonde companion offers with an equally enchanting smile. “Or caution, rather. Refrain from mentioning any emotions being elicited by the sight of Adéla?de while her husband is in the same country. You know how he gets.”
I do in fact know exactly how he gets.
“Oh, hush,” Adéla?de admonishes, blushing prettily. “You exaggerate.”
“Aren’t they still cleaning up the damage from my brother’s last jealous outburst?” Chiara questions innocently.
“Well…,” her sister-in-law begins. “Only because the government took a really long time to organize a coordinated response team.”
“That’s because they’d never seen bombs like the ones he used before.” Chiara looks back at me. “Callum test dropped his entire new range of guided missiles on a small village in Surrey. Their crime, you ask? Having as their esteemed resident one Steven Armstead, twenty-eight, waiter at The Darling restaurant, forgettable in every way except for his ill-advised decision to smile at Adéla?de for longer than two seconds.”
I cross my arms over my chest and grin. “Callum killed the population of an entire village?”
Callum Tellier is a kingmaker. He’s himself one of the most powerful men in the world, if not arguably the most powerful. He owns Blackdown, a multi-billion dollar weapons company, as well as majority stakes in most of the companies that appear on the Fortune 500 . If he wants to destroy an entire village because one guy looked at his wife, that local government simply looks the other way and redirects part of its budget to a line item called “CT Clean Up”.
“No, we’ve agreed he’s no longer allowed to do that,” Adéla?de interjects. “He only bombed Steven’s studio. And maybe all the local farmland.”
Chiara laughs, adding with no small amount of sarcasm, “That’s going to be fun for the village economy.”
Adéla?de looks furtively around. She then leans forward, motioning for Chiara to do the same, and whispers just loud enough for me to hear, “I wired a million pounds to each of the residents to make up for it. Don’t tell your brother, he’ll be furious.”
“Including Steven?” I ask.
“Except for him.” Her nose scrunches in disgust. “He didn’t just smile, he leered .”
“Good riddance.” Chiara straightens and looks at me. “So you see, be careful what you say or do. Her husband doesn’t have a sense of humor where she’s concerned.”
Hands wrap around Chiara’s waist and she jolts, not having felt the man approach. Tall and wide, he pulls her backwards into him by her hips, until his chest is glued to her bare back. His face comes down, his lips brushing over her ear. “Why aren’t you telling the Leone boy your husband feels similarly murderous about you, sweetheart?"
“Call me a boy again, see how I like it,” I say with a shitty smile. Only my years of friendship with her husband keep me from pulling my gun out and shooting him.
I’m about to add something else when I see him.
Thiago da Silva, at the bar, a whiskey lifting towards his mouth as he scrutinizes the crowd around him shrewdly.
He’s known to avoid cameras so photos of him are rare. So rare in fact that I’ve never seen his face before this moment. I know it’s him only because of the infamous descriptions of him.
Tattoos cover every exposed inch of his body, save parts of his face, although even it is partially inked. A teardrop lives beneath his eye, a rose on the other side of his face, and massive gothic letters are stamped across his skull.
“ Diablo ”
His nickname.
I’m not likely to ever meet another man who fits the description, so this has got to be him.
Chiara relaxes into her husband’s chest with a contented smile. “Hello, darling,” she says, ignoring me completely.
Her husband does too.
“Let the record show that I wouldn’t have had to bomb the village because I would have killed the waiter before he ever left the restaurant,” he continues. “Make sure any men who try to talk to you when I’m not around know that.”
My companions’ conversation filters to the background as I keep my gaze focused on da Silva. He’s every inch the threat they described. It exudes off him, packing as hard a punch as ninety-proof alcohol.
He makes for an interesting enemy, and from what I’ve been told, an even more capable adversary.
It’ll be fun to play the game with him. I’m sure when I approach he’ll assume I’m there to kill him. He doesn’t know that if he hasn’t murdered my father yet, I may pay him to do so using funds from my personal bank account.
“As if you haven’t already made that loud and clear,” Adéla?de says with a sweet smile. “Remember the time you…”
I don’t hear the rest of her sentence. Not one syllable of it.
An insistent tugging appears in my chest. It turns my head to the side and aims my gaze at a woman gliding through the crowd.
A woman in an elegant gold dress.
The kind of dress that has a simple enough cut but screams its extravagance by how glamorously the silk shines in the light, how perfect it fits her body. My gaze follows the curves of her body up the arch of her tight ass, past the length of her waist, and over the swell of her breasts to her face.
I don’t need to see it to know it’s her, I’m sure of it the second I lay eyes on her ass. I’d know it anywhere.
Revealing her face is still jarring enough to knock the breath from my lungs. The air stutters past my lips as my heart squeezes violently. Mine , it roars, claiming her with every quickening beat.
Valentina.
My Valentina, who told me she was staying home, making popcorn, and watching a romcom.
She’s as beautiful as ever, but with a regalness to her posture that I haven’t seen before. She’s not an intruder mingling amongst the Underworld’s finest.
She belongs .
And based on the way I notice a few people nodding deferentially at her as she moves through the crowd, she’s someone .
I don’t know of any women leading any of the specific Underworld factions in attendance tonight, which means—
Which means.
I watch my Valentina cross the ballroom and come to a stop behind Thiago da Silva. A sick combination of fear and panic have my heart slamming into my ribcage, nearly shattering it on impact.
I’ve taken only one step, determined to throw myself between the two of them to protect her from him, my planned introduction be damned, when he turns around.
But he doesn’t lash out.
No, he does something far worse.
He smiles at her. The warmth of it illuminates his brutal features until his lips melt into an affectionate smirk that stretches from ear to ear.
Valentina throws herself at my enemy, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck, holding him like she holds me. Then she also smiles and I realize she’s capable of smiling at someone exactly the way she smiles at me, and that maybe this whole time her smiles have been a part of her lies too.
I never considered that.
Something in my chest cracks in two with the ease of a hot knife slicing through butter. I was told the fucker was obsessed with his wife, but clearly that was a lie because he has his fucking hands all over my woman.
I’m going to cleave them off his body for daring to lay a finger on her.
Valentina lets him go, but keeps talking to him. Conversation flows naturally between them, speaking to an easy familiarity they have with each other.
The capillaries in my eyes must all burst simultaneously because my vision goes entirely red.
Blood red.
The betrayal burns me alive from the inside out. Unlike what Rocco did to me, it won’t leave a scar, but the damage is somehow far more devastating.
She isn’t mine, she never was.
She’s his, my enemy’s. Having a knife plunged in my heart would have been less painful than being subjected to watching this betrayal play out in front of me.
Valentina finally feels the pull of my gaze. Her head turns and she scans the crowd minutely until her eyes find mine.
Her reaction is immediate.
Her face turns ashen.
The briefest flare of panic flashes in her eyes before it’s replaced with a heavier emotion.
Guilt. It’s guilt.
And there’s the final confirmation I needed to know the awful truth—she’s a spy and she’s cheating on me.
The weight of her betrayal takes me out at the knees. I can’t bear to think about how else she’s double-crossed me.
Valentina doesn’t linger.
She didn’t run from him, but she does run from me.