Chapter One, Pressure Cooker
It was hard to care about anything a man under five-foot-seven said. Yet here I was, on a rainy summer’s day, being lectured by a short, graying mafia don in my own damn dining room. A man that had more grease in his hair than on my mama’s fried chicken, to top it all off.
It was enough to make me lose my hair; had I not been shaving it off since puberty because I was too lazy to style it in that slicked back douchebag style my beloved brothers favored.
“You’re marrying her, Emilio. This isn’t a discussion. The decision has already been made.” My uncle Dante’s voice boomed, shattering through the cool air like a gunshot.
I wished it had been a gunshot. At least then I’d be dead instead of whatever the fuck this was.
As I blinked away my frustration, I loosened my tense jaw enough to speak. “But—”
The heavy mahogany table groaned under the weight of his fist slamming against it, the sound of it vibrating through the crystal glasses and silver cutlery neatly arranged around us.
He was such a stroppy cunt. What kind of old man felt the need to slam things around just to make his point heard? Pathetic.
“This conversation is asinine.” He snarled, as the too-large chandelier above us cast sharp shadows across the green painted room. It added no warmth to my family’s home. It just accentuated the harsh lines on Dante’s face and the clenched jaw of every pathetic excuse for a man sat at the table.
The five of them perched like vultures around me, their gazes nothing but calculating.
Empty of nothing but thoughts of power and control.
They weren’t just my father’s brothers or the heads of other branches of the De Luca family tree.
They were judges, executioners—men who had built their lives around wielding power, and now they expected me to kneel.
To fucking kneel. As if I was beneath them, not the man running the biggest-and most powerful-branch of our twisted family tree now.
As if I wasn’t the largest man in the room at a freakish six-foot-eight, with hands bigger than most of their fucking heads.
I’d caught the tall gene in my family; all of my brothers were more reasonable heights. My sisters too.
My uncles had the short gene. I presumed it was what made them so mad all the time. They couldn’t reach the top shelf in the house where the snacks were stored so my youngest sister, Violetta, couldn’t steal them all.
The dark velvet chair beneath me, at the head of the table, seemed to groan under the weight of their expectations and my barely restrained frustration. I felt for it. We were both suffering through the bullshit conversations. Both had to suffer with the presence of annoying De Luca’s.
It had always been my father’s chair. My father’s legacy.
It should have passed down to my big brother when Giorgio had done the world a favor and died.
I was never meant to have it, and all I wanted to do now was throw it at Dante’s puny head and watch his brains splatter on the recently painted wall.
Maybe if I got the angle just right, his mustache would deflect the blow and absorb the impact.
It was worth testing that theory. Even if it meant he would have pulled the gun from his belt and tried to end me with it.
“This is the deal your father worked out,” he said, tone tight with anger that made his hideous mustache wriggle.
It looked like a dying caterpillar and I had half a mind to lean closer and see if it crawled off his face.
“Months of negotiations, months of planning—thrown away because you’re whining about the fucking details?
You think you’re better than your father?
! That you can make choices smarter than he did? !”
The words cut deep, and I knew then and there that was what he wanted. My father wasn’t here to talk down to me, but he might as well have been. His siblings were no different from him. They were self-serving evil, like most mafia dons.
All Dante wanted was for me to kowtow to him and his brothers, and buckle under their unrelenting malice.
To do whatever it took to keep the De Luca name in line with their vision of power.
My fingers tightened on the edge of the chair, the frame pressing rigidly into my palms as I breathed in hard enough to choke on the vanilla candles my mama had lit earlier. It took every ounce of my self-control not to go all Hulk smash on the place. Starting with the chair.
Then the paintings. Table. Dante’s empty head. Then the rest of my uncles and finishing off with the vase in the corner I’d always hated.
It had naked women all over it screaming in pain. It was fucking ugly, outdated and just another lingering sign my father had once been alive. Damn, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to hit up Pottery Barn and buy something nice. But no. He had to be a cunt, even with his décor.
“I’m not saying I’m better than Giorgio was,” I muttered, staring at the whiskey glass sitting in front of me, just begging me to take a sip.
Then a glass. Then a bottle. “But the girl’s eighteen the day of the wedding.
You’re essentially asking me to marry a child and, whilst I didn’t think I had to say this, I do not want to marry a child. ”
Everything—the fact that I didn’t know her, nor love her or even want to get married yet—took a back seat in my mind at that fact.
Really, despite most mafia men that seemed to feel otherwise, I wasn’t interested in a virginal child for my bride.
I didn’t get hard at the thought of staining my dick with the blood of an untouched kid.
As though that was all she held of value.
I liked women. Grown up. Fully formed. With curves, and sharp wit, and life experiences.
Even more so ones that knew exactly what they wanted in the bedroom and how to get it from me.
Not someone whose prefrontal cortex hadn’t even finished fucking developing.
Or was currently sitting in maths class, no doubt ignoring the advances of some spotty jock whose mother still washed his boxers.
“I don’t want to do it.” I added, knowing better. “And seeing as this is my branch of our family tree now, I really don’t understand why I’m supposed to do it just because you tell me to.”
The words hung in the air for half a second before Dante slammed his tattooed hand down on the table again. The glassware rattled, one tumbler tipping precariously before settling. My pulse spiked, temper begging to come out and play, but I didn’t flinch.
He didn’t scare me. I was just doing my best to pretend to know what I was doing as the unwanted don of my shattered family tree, so couldn’t react how I wanted.
I was doing my best to pretend that everything was normal, and I didn’t know exactly how my father had died a handful of weeks ago.
“A Romanov,” Dante growled, voice rising.
His tanned face darkened, with the veins at his temples bulging as he leaned in closer, and I wondered if it would be fun or gross to watch his head explode.
“You’re marrying a Romanov. The daughter of Sergei fucking Romanov himself.
Do you have any idea what that means for this family? !”
Salvatore chuckled from his seat to Dante’s left, his face splitting into a lazy, condescending grin.
“Eighteen ain’t a child, nipote,” he said, his voice oily enough that I was surprised President Shit-For-Brains hadn’t invaded it.
“You think your father cared how old your mother was when he married her?” He tipped his glass, the ice clinking softly as he took a slow sip.
“The girl is legal. She’s fertile. That’s all you need to worry about. ”
Christ, they talked about women like they were livestock. If he started talking about dowries next, I was going to spit in his whiskey. Knowing Salvatore, though, he’d get turned on. He was a dirty old man. Worse than most.
He was who I wanted to kill next. Before he could look at my mama again and get any ideas into his head about her.
My stomach churned, the acid biting at my throat, but I kept my expression blank.
They’d know how many lies I held in my brain if I showed even a hint of weakness.
That’s what they wanted—a crack in the armor, a reason to tear me apart.
Instead, I let my gaze drift to the chandelier, to the way the light hit the crystal pendants and scattered across the walls in fractured rainbows.
It did nothing to improve my mood. Nothing would but the promise of oblivion that still called to me from the glass my hand moved closer to.
“As much as you think being in your father’s position gives you power, when it comes to things for the greater good of our family, you don’t have a choice,” Dante yanked my attention back to him.
“This family needs that alliance. Sergei Romanov is giving us his daughter and in return we get his forces, his resources, his connections. You saying no would be a fucking insult. And trust me, boy, you don’t want him as an enemy.
Nor do you want me as one if you embarrass us like that. ”
I let out a slow breath through my nose; the bitterness welling up in my chest like bile as I struggled not to point out that at twenty-seven, I was no boy.
“I’m not saying no then,” I said with careful words that were burning the second they left my mouth.
“I’m just saying. There has to be another way.
Something else we can offer. She’s too young. She doesn’t need to—”
“To be what? Your wife?” Marcello interrupted from down the table; his voice thick with mockery.
He slumped back in his chair, arms draping lazily over the armrests as though none of this mattered.
“You’re not exactly a prize yourself, you know.
Maybe she’s the one getting the short end of the deal with the second son.
” He snorted. “If Giovanni hadn’t told the world that he was a faggot, he would have married the girl first. You ought to be pissed at his corpse instead of us. ”