Chapter 7
Luke
I fell to the floor , stunned. My muscles were already protesting the pain from the fight. My back spasmed with dull throbs from the hard impact on the concrete. I didn’t have a chance to brace the fall, and without that simple form of protection, I was vulnerable to smack my side, too.
Groaning, I rolled and tried to curl into my side. Anything to ball up and fend off any other hits. They just kept fucking coming.
It wasn’t enough to have to face a man in an unfair match, someone clearly sent to kill me? Now I had to withstand further aches and suffering from being tazed?
They didn’t wait. The two masked men must have been waiting in here as a contingency. In case I survived the fight I shouldn’t have walked away from, they had a backup plan to ambush me.
Now, they rushed to roughly grab me and pick me up. It was more like a drag, but I supposed my dead weight wasn’t the easiest to maneuver.
My energy was spent. Catching my breath, I moaned and grimaced as they dragged me toward the doors at the back of the room.
If I had an ounce of energy, any scrap of levelheadedness, I would’ve called out. I would’ve fought back. Jimmy was in there. Sean was supposed to be hanging in there as well. They would be my backup, on my side. My uncle should stand with me, and when he realized I was no longer here, he’d have to care. Or wonder.
The pair of brutes put their effort into hauling me out and into a van too suddenly, too swiftly, and I didn’t bother to regret not having someone to rescue me.
I was the one who had to pull off that task. I was supposed to be the hero, hunting down Emma. I’d only come here for Jimmy to get a better read on the Marchese men. He’d promised me answers or suggestions about where I could find Emma—after this rigged fight.
And here I was, beaten and tired. Captured. These men forced me into the backseat of a car and sped off, taking me who the fuck knew where.
Some hero I was. Some rescue I could offer Emma. She was depending on me. I was the one who told her that nothing could pull us apart. I was the one who vowed to make sure we stayed together, in love and against all the odds stacked up in our way.
I never should’ve gone to that fucking fight.
It had been nothing but a diversion. A waste of time and something that pulled me off the track of looking for Emma.
Instead of being matched against a killer, I should’ve been demanding Jimmy or Sean for where Emma might be. Instead of getting so tired and worn-out from fighting for my life, making me vulnerable to get tazed and captured, I should’ve been out there scouring the city for Emma.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Emma.
I hadn’t tried hard enough, and that disappointment in myself was all that I needed to snap to. To force my body past this fatigue and hazy mental state of defeat.
I was defeated. I was breathing. I was awake, able to move, if slowly.
On the ride, I steadied my breaths and tried to will my exhausted muscles to relax. To shore up the energy and fight to stand and strike back when I could.
I wouldn’t quit on Emma. Not now, not ever.
Eventually, after a confusing amount of time because I wasn’t sitting upright to look out the windows, the car stopped. I was able to move and sit, but I opted to play into the image of looking numb and hurt. If they assumed I was whipped and too beat to react in defense, I could count on surprising them. Anger and wrath built within me. They fueled me, priming me to attack. If they dared to hit me with a fucking taser, trying to take advantage of me when I was down, they’d regret it severely.
They parked, and I let the swaying momentum of the car rock me from my supine position on the backseat.
“Out.” One of the two men stepped out and yanked off his mask.
I didn’t recognize him, but I would remember what he looked like for future reference. If he was taking his mask off because he didn’t count on me identifying him later, he would be wrong.
They weren’t going to kill me. Not like this. I was too determined to save Emma and be with her to ever lose. Her love—our love—was all I had to bank on to stay strong and survive this, too.
I slumped out of the car, keeping up the appearance that I was weak and almost ready to collapse. Fortunately, they bought it, dragging me into a warehouse. Other, better maintained buildings surrounded it, so I figured we weren’t in the thick of a crime-ridden area. Once they brought me inside an empty room with stained blood coating the floor, I realized this was, in fact, a site of many crimes.
“So this is the stupid fucker who thinks he can sleep with my fiancée,” Antonio Marchese said as he walked closer, sneering at me slumped on the high-back chair. It reeked of piss and sweat, likely embedded and sunken into the wood from all the others they tortured here.
“She’s not your fiancée,” I replied.
“Oh.” Antonio tipped his head toward the right. “You hear that?” he asked the few thugs in the room with him. “He thinks that Emma isn’t mine.”
“She’s not.”
“That just shows me how little you know,” he taunted. “You stupid, ignorant motherfucker. You should’ve paid attention before trying to take what’s mine.” He raised his voice with every word, stalking toward me as he cocked his head the other way.
Did he have an issue with his neck or something? I furrowed my brow, wondering exactly how unhinged this fool was as he approached.
I was ignorant when I met Emma. I didn’t know she was a mafia princess. Or that some idiot like Antonio thought she belonged to him. But then again, she was ignorant of me, too, in the same boat of not realizing I was the bastard son of another mafia boss.
But this man was wrong. Antonio was incorrect in his assumption that Emma belonged to him. She’d never accepted his offer for marriage.
She’d accepted mine.
“Emma’s not yours,” I told him simply.
He bared his teeth, growling as he lunged at me. His arm shot out, but when his fist hit my cheek, it barely cut the corner of my lip.
I didn’t react, letting my head swivel with the strike. He showed more of a response, wincing as he shook out his hand and then rubbed his knuckles with his free hand.
One punch was too much for him to bear? I huffed a laugh, amused by the irony.
He was a violent man, but he let others do his dirty work for him.
Pathetic.
“Emmali na Giordino will be mine,” he said, butchering her name. It tempted me to laugh again, but I wanted to hear the nonsense he’d spout. I wouldn’t gain any intel or information by laughing at his face and pissing him off any further.
“And you , you worthless piece of shit, will pay for taking out one of my best fighters.”
“ Best fighters?” I taunted. “That’s the best you got, Marchese?”
He tipped his head side to side again, like a bobblehead off-course. It only made him look that much more deranged. I was pissing him off, but it seemed that he knew how much it’d hurt to hit me again.
“You pay in kind for taking his life.” He sneered down his nose at me, looking like a monster with such hatred glowing in his dark eyes. “And you won’t have another fucking chance to try to keep me from my intended.”
I rolled my eyes, not giving him the satisfaction of a reaction.
“Finish him,” he ordered to the three men in the room. “And make him suffer.”
I bided my time as he walked toward the door. It should’ve sounded like a death sentence, but three against one? With this rickety chair as a weapon? That was doable. Marking the sound of his steps toward the exit, I let the excitement of a fight push me to be ready. The adrenaline rush at the promise of danger thrilled me.
“I’m going to get her,” Antonio told a guard at the door.
“Tonight?” the soldier asked. “So soon?”
Antonio scoffed. “I’m sick of waiting for what I want.”
It felt like so long ago that I’d teased Emma about that—being a girl who always got what she wanted. Now, I really knew the meaning of that kind of selfishness. Antonio was the master of it.
“We got word that Marlo’s damn near dead.”
I perked up, hearing my father’s name, but I didn’t let it show. Looking blankly at the ground, I listened to their hushed conversation.
“Which means I need to take over the Giordinos now, to complete the total transfer of power.”
I slotted this information away, learning at rapid speed how these politics would actually impact me. I was Marlo’s son. If there was a transfer of power waiting to happen, I assumed it would go from father to son—without any interference from the Giordino or Marchese forces.
He’s mad that I slept with her.
He’s angry that I killed his fighter.
But if he knew I was a Rossini...
With stark clarity, I started to understand why Jimmy was so insistent that I not reveal my true identity yet. When I did, it’d invoke plenty of danger.
“Yes, sir,” the guard replied to Antonio.
“Have a car waiting for me.”
Through my peripheral vision, I noticed Antonio smirking at me.
“I don’t wish to have blood on me when I take my bride.”
The fuck you will. I wished him to go so I could get this over with. If he was heading toward the location where Emma was being kept, I intended to follow.
In a roundabout way, I had found her. I thought that fight was a waste of time, but if I hadn’t gone through it, I wouldn’t have angered Antonio so much that he’d capture me. And if he hadn’t captured me, he wouldn’t have brought me here to overhear that key piece of information.
She was at her house, held there by her father, Damon, and all I had to do now was follow Antonio there.
The door shut, and the nearest man rushed at me.
Kicking him surprised him, just in time for the second man to attack with a club. Deflecting him and getting off the chair, I knocked him to the ground and had the club. I was almost too armed as the third man came at me with a knife and a rope. He put up more of a fight, having seen how effortlessly I dropped his companions to the bloody floor. After I grabbed the chair and busted it about, I ended it all, seemingly before a true fight could begin.
The back of the chair was wedged over one man’s head, trapping his arms. Another had broken kneecaps, unable to get up quickly, and the first one was out cold from a hard hit to the head.
“Better luck next time, assholes.” I limped, then steadied my pace as I rushed for the door.
Time wasn’t on my side. I had to hurry to follow Antonio.
He could lead me to Emma, and then I’d make sure she didn’t have to suffer another second in his company.
The next time he was near me , I’d end his life for trying to insist she wouldn’t be mine after she already agreed to be just that. My fiancée.
My future.