Chapter 1
BIANCA
The sound of Vincent’s skull smashing into the weathered brick walls of Blackstone at the hands of Bane Black should have been enough for me to realize that our relationship wasn’t healthy. Or maybe my behavior and the way I didn’t stop him from any of his tendencies was the real problem.
I stared at his violence without stepping between them. Most everyone would have reported back that I froze like a little itty-bitty deer in headlights but that wasn’t the case.
I was literally restraining myself from jumping his bones.
Bane was the forbidden Italian Mob member I could never have. He’d belonged to our Diamond syndicate too, but no one really ever accepted them as that even if his father had married Sylvia Bradshaw.
The marriage just solidified Mr. Black’s ties within our secret society and those ties gave him more power than my parents ever had.
Mob and syndicate together meant control of territories, businesses, politicians and people. The Black family had them all. Bane and his brothers were raised in it, while I was used as only a pawn to climb the ranks.
With our family right next door, I’d been a classic cliché of falling for the bad boy I couldn’t have. Because I wasn’t promised to Bane…I was promised to his older brother, Rafe, since the day I was born.
The Blacks were ruthless, vicious, and completely unhinged, but my father didn’t care.
He’d always wanted to have more money, more connections, more prestige and he thought he could charm the neighbors into giving it to him.
Bane’s father and him had been friends and colleagues until my father had tried to undercut the arrangement with a loophole in a West Coast investment, thinking the Black family wouldn’t notice.
They did.
Mr. Black traced the money, dissected the contracts, and instead of killing his friend, settled on torturing him and his wife with the ultimate bargaining chip: me. My mother was pregnant with the only daughter they would ever have.
I became the commodity that would restore balance, leverage, and respect after my father’s failed move. The deal wasn’t subtle either—every associate of theirs was told that Zarelli had given his unborn daughter to Rafe Black whenever he wanted for whatever he wanted.
“Shit,” I heard Bane’s brother, Rafe, growl from behind us.
Both he and Ezra seemed to have more sense than Bane, because they grabbed him off Vincent and the boy crumpled to the floor.
The blood pooled around his head, spreading on the white marble like it wanted to seep into the cracks and make its mark; showing that Bane was never to be messed with.
Or maybe it was me who shouldn’t be messed with because Bane turned then, his eyes as wild as a turbulent sea and locked on me. “Did you want him that close to you?”
The thing about Blackstone University was that we all got close. We had been cooped up rich kids in high school on a short leash until we were sent off to the university to pursue our “careers.” For me, that was a glorified major I would never use according to my father.
So, I acted out, away from him and the life he’d forced me into for as long as I could.
I crossed my arms, annoyed that Bane felt I needed to answer to him. Or any of them, honestly. Rafe and Ezra stood behind Bane, staring me down like I was their little sister and I’d done something wrong.
Me.
Not Bane, who’d just bashed Vincent’s head in.
The old floors of the university were stained with the evidence of his wrath, a silent testament to exactly how far he’d go without hesitation.
His dark hair fell just so over the sharp line of his jaw, and every movement screamed precision, control, and danger.
Truly, college had done nothing to soften that man.
Ezra, always the calm brother, wiped a hand down his perfectly symmetrical face, straightened his crisp shirt, and murmured, “Answer him, Bianca,” like he was the voice of reason in a storm of chaos.
Ezra always carried himself with that kind of elegance that made people respect him before they even realized why.
Rafe, older and nonchalant, leaned against the wall, not saying a word with his arms crossed, giving off a careless energy.
Together, they looked like the sort of men who could rule a room: handsome, lethal, and entirely untouchable. And I knew the Blacks to be all of those things but beyond that, the brothers had always been my protectors, rather than my enemies even if our fathers didn’t get along.
I stood there now in front of them, fully aware that I was a willing participant in a game I could never truly win.
“Aren’t you going to ask him whether or not his actions are justified rather than interrogate me about a boy standing by me?” I jutted out a hip and glared at Ezra before my eyes met Bane’s again. “You had no idea what was going on.”
“His hand was above your head as he leaned over you.” Bane licked his full lips and breathed out hard enough that his nostrils flared. “That was enough.”
“Enough for what, exactly? He could die.” I waved a hand behind me, not even looking at the body. “You do not get to attack someone just because they’re near me when you don’t know the situation, Bane. This isn’t a snake in the grass like when I was thirteen.”
That instance was the first time I knew the Blacks were just as ruthless as my father. Rafe called me soft for caring about the snake. The youngest of them all, Ezra, called me normal. And Bane? He didn’t call me anything at all.
I was only thirteen when we’d been playing outside and I’d tried to touch a black racer snake that retaliated by biting me.
Rafe and Ezra didn’t even notice at first but Bane’s gaze latched onto mine as I tried to hide the pain and then he sucked on my cut before not-so-kindly ushering me inside before going right back out again.
When I went to the sink to wash the bite, I glanced out the window and saw him whipping the snake into the brick wall of the house.
It hung dead from his hands and still he removed a switch blade from his pocket and cut off its head in one swift movement.
Tears pricked my eyes then but Rafe and Ezra told me it was for the best. They said Bane needed an outlet and repeated what his parents did too: Bane Black was a devil of a child. Meticulous and calculated in his vengeance. Always.
What no one understood was I never was crying for the snake. I was crying for the boy who’d protected me from it. I became obsessed with him in that moment and loved him in secret ever since.
Now, he held my stare, a small smirk playing on his features, like he knew I acted out just to get his attention. “Sure Vincent’s not another snake? The crack of his skull sounded a lot like that reptile when I beat it against the wall.”
A crowd had gathered now, and my friend, Angela, gasped when she arrived. “You guys! Did you get help?”
We all stared at each other, our gazes ping-ponging around, sharing our opinions. We’d grown up together. We’d endured our family’s shit together. And we’d adapted to our world the only way we knew how.
Help was never called when there was blood on the floor unless it was our own.
“Jesus. This is the problem with a syndicate and Black allegiance. You’ll kill us all without ever blinking an eye.”
I winced at her accurate observation, stepped over Vincent, and quickly made my way toward the headmaster’s office. “I’ll get help right away.”
As I turned the corner, I heard his steps approaching me quickly and just as I was about to call for faculty to get a nurse or, well, maybe we actually did need an ambulance, Bane’s hand wrapped around my neck, crushing my windpipe as he slammed me into the wall so he could stare me down.
“You think I’m going to let you save your boyfriend? ”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. He was cutting off my voice but also the oxygen I could breathe in. My eyes bulged at his forceful hand holding me there, controlling whether I lived or died, controlling my breath.
Something had changed in his eyes today. They were a wild, dangerous blue now. Full of chaos that wasn’t tethered anymore.
He growled in my ear before his other hand whipped out to open the locker room door beside us, and then he dragged me in.
No one saw or followed.
I’d known Bane all my life, and he’d never put his hands on me like this. He’d lurked behind his brothers most times we were all together and let everyone else take center stage.
Yet, I knew something was different the second I saw him walking up to me today.
He’d been absent for months now after everyone claimed that he’d finally lost it.
I’d seen him on campus all the time before but when he wasn’t with his brothers months ago, I finally asked Rafe what had happened.
“His tendencies got the best of him. He snapped and mother and father had him sent off.”
Snapping meant he’d waited until one of the older students who’d rearranged his dorm was alone in the practice gym.
He didn’t just confront him. He cornered Barry, moved the weights around in an almost ritualistic way, forcing him to be trapped in.
Then, with surgical precision, he slammed a dumbbell across his knee, shattering it, and followed that up with striking his other one, leaving him incapacitated.
It wasn’t really snapping. That would have been a disorganized mess of torture.
That wouldn’t have been Bane. Bane was perfectly measured, calculated, and in control.
His “tics” were still there, almost beautifully so.
This didn’t actually seem like too much of a breakdown to me.
Instead, he’d just used what people thought was a weakness as a strength and a weapon.
I knew how particular he was, and quite frankly, it’d been their own faults for preying on what they thought was someone’s instability. In my mind, Barry had paid the price.
Nothing else.