Chapter 3
BANE
Do you ever wonder what people do in the dark of the night when no one’s watching? When the lights are out and they think the whole world is sleeping?
Most people are creatures of habit. They stick with their routine of showering, brushing their teeth, and then trying to find comfort in something they enjoy. Could be a show, a book, a conversation with a loved one. Mundane, repetitive routines.
Figuring out a person and their lifestyle brought me comfort though. The organized way of life made sense above all else. Finding a person’s tics, motives, habits, and routines gave me an understanding of them. I needed people to fit into the box they belonged in.
It’s why Bianca Zarelli was such a fucking nuisance.
I watched her touch herself and scream my name like she loved everything I’d done to her earlier that day, but when she fell asleep, I read what she wrote about me.
I hate him. Hate who he is. Who he’ll always be. And who I am and will always be too.
I’m meant to be his forbidden sister-in-law and yet all I think about is being his girl, his obsession, his freaking slut.
What would it be like to have never met him? Or any made man for that matter? What would it be like to have my own choice in a man rather than be promised to one?
I’m about to be nineteen and want only one birthday wish to come true:
I wish my future husband wouldn’t get the right of taking my virginity but that a stranger would steal it. In the dark of the night like an unapologetic thief willing to risk it all for me. Just me. Just once.
I read it over again. And again. And then I placed it back exactly how it was.
Her entries didn’t always contradict her actions. And some days, her thoughts were written about absolutely nothing. The girl really and truly had no filter.
One day, she was mad she’d lost her lip gloss.
So I’d gone out and bought ten of them and threw them in her locker sporadically because she lost everything all the time.
She literally had no understanding of making mental notes about her surroundings either. And she never fucking planned anything.
She barely ate and was on the verge of low blood sugar all the time which was actually concerning considering she had fainted a time or two before.
Let’s not forget the number of times I’d watched her paint her nails or do makeup too instead of getting work done …
I fucking swear to God. She’d stayed up one night painting her nails four different colors instead of studying for a test that she then wrote about in the diary that she was sure she would fail.
I staged a fire that hour so she could study the next day.
I could actually count on her being completely spontaneous and not planning a single thing most of the time. I could count on her hate for me too.
What fucked with my head was her need for a stranger.
The way she wrote explicitly about a man she didn’t even know.
Her writing had gotten dirtier and dirtier over the years but not for men she didn’t know.
And still, after reading it, I wanted to stand over her and jack off, wanted my come to mark her.
I had self-control, I reminded myself. So, instead, I covered her back up, pulling the white sheet up to her shoulders, and stared at how innocent she still looked.
Although I’d always known her to be worse than she acted, Bianca gave a good show of being sweet, but the girl was my soulmate when it came to wanting more from our little worlds.
From the age of six, I remember how she’d sit and read.
First, in pretty little white dresses, holding children’s books, but then they became chapter books as she grew.
Or she’d write in that journal that she claimed no one could look at.
By thirteen, the dresses were skimpier, and her bright eyes were hypnotizing. And by that time, I’d figured out a way to read those stupid diary entries she thought were so coveted.
In them, she didn’t even write about her feelings much.
It was mostly about how our parents talked business, about how she wasn’t reading books when she was here but instead listening to them.
It was fucking obvious she did that too, because those azure eyes of hers never stayed pinned to the book by then.
Instead, they ping-ponged around my parents’ living room while the adults talked.
It was the first time I saw her as something different than what I’d categorized her as.
Everyone thought Bianca was a sensitive, fragile, soft little bird; a tender soul we never wanted to experience the world. She saved bunnies in the damn fields and picked dandelions to put in vases for her mother. She seemed pristine but she wasn’t.
Her mother had told her to sit quietly and that day the sun hit her brown curls at just the right angle that it looked like God was shining an angelic hue down on her.
Yet, she was taking in their conversation rather than reading and doing what she was told. It didn’t fit and I walked over to her to tell her so, “You should read the book, not listen to our parents.”
“I’ve read it already. It’s boring if you know the ending.” She waited, watching my face as she pointed to the title. Then she blurted out, “The dog dies.”
No look of guilt for ruining the ending and no look of sadness about the dog’s death could be seen on her features. Bianca instead studied me as I studied her. We assessed one another in silence long enough that I considered looking away.
I never looked away. Even at the age of thirteen, I liked to catalog when someone got uncomfortable enough that they broke eye contact. Bianca Zarelli was the first person to make me squirm enough that I glanced behind her and pointed outside at the meadow between our homes.
“Let’s go outside.” She was someone I couldn’t fit into a box, and I needed to figure out why.
We ran through the fields while our parents talked business.
Ezra and Rafe joined us. They’d always liked her much more than I did.
But neither of them watched her. They walked off to look at their phones while I stared at her weaving through the flowers like she was looking for something.
When she froze and waved me toward her, I peered over her shoulder to see a black snake in the grass. “Found him again.”
She put her tiny hands on her hips and glanced at me to ask, “You think I could have a snake as a pet?”
“They’re dangerous,” I told her in a condescending voice.
Instead of arguing with me though, she hummed and reached her hand out quickly as if to prove me wrong.
The snake proved her wrong instead. The little reptile snapped at her as if teaching her if she went looking for trouble, she was bound to find it. Yet, Bianca didn’t cry or screech while my stomach bottomed out.
I figured it was because I was going to get into trouble, but some other instinct, one I couldn’t understand then was there too. We both watched the blood on her finger bead up where the fangs had pricked her skin before I grabbed her wrist quickly and sucked the blood from the cut.
She stood there in a daze, watching me. “It doesn’t hurt,” she told me, but she stumbled a little like she was unsteady on her feet suddenly.
I pulled her finger from my mouth and said, “Can you walk?”
“Yes. I’ve been walking since I was one.” She lifted her chin.
“You’re wobbly.”
She finally didn’t hold my gaze like she didn’t want to show any sort of weakness.
“Time for you to go inside.”
“Great.” She rolled her eyes and started to walk past me.
“I’ll carry you.”
“I can walk.” She stomped past me, but even then, I wouldn’t let Bianca do anything dangerous. I went after her and carried her in kicking and screaming.
She was right that I’d found the snake and killed it without remorse after I set her down inside that day.
She didn’t talk to me for a week after. And instead of just asking her why she was ignoring me, I waited until the dead of the night and broke into her bedroom to find her diary so I could see what the hell she was thinking by avoiding me.
“I do not like the Black brothers. Not even Rafe who Mom continues to tell me will be my husband. But I really loathe Bane. Mostly because I can’t stop thinking about him.”
From then on, Bianca became my obsession.
She was a contradiction that didn’t make sense, but I still needed to figure her out.
I watched her every move, followed her where I could, and obsessed over her.
I was resourceful as the son of Stefano Black.
My father had made sure of it. I could climb a window in pure darkness and stalk someone without them ever knowing.
I felt no remorse when I did so with her.
I climbed into her window to read her diaries, to dig through her belongings, and sometimes just to stare at her.
No one knew. I was meticulous about becoming her friend and by the age of sixteen, I was just one of the Black brothers who fit by her side during the summer months.
The school year, we all went to separate boarding schools.
And when she came back, her gaze was sharper and her actions more strategic.
She didn’t play with us outside and didn’t pick flowers for her mother anymore.
Our birthrights changed us. They had to. By the time she was in college, we’d all been hardened by the syndicate and the mob.
No one was pure anymore.
I spoke four languages fluently, was trained in hand-to-hand combat, could shoot a gun precisely with my eyes closed, but I could swindle a man faster.
Fraud and tech were easy. I was an astute businessman and a deadly killer.
Strangling a man with my bare hands was my favorite.
I got to feel the life leaving their body.
It’s why what I’d done to Vincent or the dean of that university didn’t bother me one bit. Unfortunately, my brother didn’t feel the same.
“Don’t murder for Bianca again, Bane. I don’t give a fuck what she does, and you know it,” Rafe grumbled to me when I walked in that night.
My brothers and I all still lived on campus grounds even though we’d finished our bachelor’s. The master’s program was a fucking formality. Everyone knew it.
“He won’t be missed.” I was annoyed we were even talking about it. “Men shouldn’t be near her. It doesn’t send the right message.”
“What message exactly? Until we’re married, I don’t care what she does because I’m going to do what I do too.” Rafe rolled his eyes and walked out onto our porch to light a cigar. He handed me one and we both breathed in the biting smoke as one of our guards came to stand outside with us.
“Well, it’s coming soon enough.”
“And so what?” He turned to capture me with a frustrated stare I knew well.
His blue eyes mirrored my own but his irritation wasn’t the same.
My older brother just didn’t like to be tied down to any girl, let alone have a lifelong commitment hanging over his head.
“Father’s dragging out this damn penance with Zarelli like we need them .
I don’t need Bianca when I’m trying to run the family business.
Marriage takes effort, and with Father acting like he’s fucking retired, I don’t need the burden. ”
Something unraveled in my gut with his words.
He wanted to wait longer, which meant she remained free.
It’d been the line I’d drawn in the sand, the one that made my obsessive tendencies acceptable.
Not that what I’d done today was forgivable by any means.
“She’ll be more of a burden if she’s fucking every guy at this university …
Oh by the way, the dean lost an eye today. Pay off his family, would you?”
“Jesus, should I be concerned?” Rafe waited.
It shouldn’t have been my concern. Rafe was much too lenient with her, and she basically searched for damn problems now that he and I weren’t around as much.
We were running the family business, and I’d only gone into the master’s program there to stick around a bit longer.
Father wanted our eyes and ears everywhere. And I agreed that it was necessary.
My father was of old Italian blood. There were few Italian families now in the nation that had as much pull as we did especially after my father had married my mother and become a part of the Diamond Syndicate on the west coast too. We were impenetrable as long as we were vigilant.
And my father had taught us how to do that until we became better at it than him. Now, I protected the family along with them protecting me. Always.
“What would you ever be concerned about with me?”
“About your outbursts with her.”
“Not at all. I’m putting men in their place because they should never disrespect us. She has nothing to do with it. Famiglia Prima, Sempre.” It was our family mantra, one we lived by and died by.
I repeated the words.
Family first, always.