Chapter 6 Lucia
LUCIA
My mind is spinning.
Firing a million questions at once, none of them polite or calm, and all of them screaming to be answered now.
Before I can get a single one past my teeth, Giovanni cuts in.
“Before you start debating options with me,” he says coolly, “know that there is only one. You really have no choice in this matter, Lucia.”
Something inside me detonates.
I don’t scream. I want to scream. I want to claw at the walls, rake my nails down something solid until my hands ache, until I bleed, until he understands what those words do to me.
No choice.
The phrase scrapes against every nerve I possess.
“I don’t have a choice?” I snarl. “Newsflash, caro. You don’t get to decide that for me. You don’t get to stand there and—”
“This isn’t a discussion,” he interrupts. “It’s a directive.”
I laugh. It’s sharp and ugly and entirely without humour. “Oh, that’s rich,” I fire back. “A directive. From my husband who just casually informed me that men are discussing whether killing me will improve their confidence in his leadership.”
He doesn’t flinch.
That might be the worst part.
“This is not about control,” Giovanni says evenly. “This is about survival.”
“You keep telling yourself that,” I snap. “It sounds much nobler than what it actually is.”
He steps closer. I don’t retreat because I’ll be damned if I give him the satisfaction.
But inside, my thoughts have already betrayed me, skidding wildly in a direction I don’t want them to go.
Isabella Bellandi.
The name lodges in my chest like a splinter, scratching and burrowing deeper with every second.
He was supposed to marry someone else. Someone with a sexy-sounding name I’m sure goes with a killer body and appropriate personality.
Someone… not me.
I don’t know why that matters or why my brain fixates on it now, of all moments, when bloodthirsty men in suits with guns are circling and my life has apparently become a chess piece.
But it does.
I imagine her before I can stop myself.
Tall. Elegant. Dark hair perfectly styled. Raised in marble hallways instead of cramped Queens apartments. The kind of woman who knows which fork to use without ever having to ask. The kind of woman who understands Giovanni’s world because she was raised in it.
A woman who would never have run.
The thought hits my belly like a physical blow, and a sick, heaving sensation, sharp and unwelcome, like rejection manifesting as nausea.
Someone else in my place.
In my place.
In shoes I’m not even sure I want, but the idea of her wearing them makes my chest burn, and my belly churn in disgracefully pathetic ways.
Giovanni is still talking.
I know he is because his mouth is moving and his voice is steady. But I can’t hear him over the roar in my head.
Would she have accepted it?
His violence? His blood? His careless ruthlessness and certainty that the life he was born into is the right destiny for him? For them both?
Would she have looked at him and seen a crown instead of a cage?
“And therefore,” he says.
The words snap through my spiral like a whip. “We leave tomorrow.”
I blink. “What?”
His jaw tightens. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
“Repeat yourself,” I demand.
“We leave tomorrow,” Giovanni says, impatience creeping into his tone. “Emerald House is secure, but it is not defensible long-term. I will not have you here while Bellandi decides whether making you disappear will embolden him.”
Before I can respond, Caterina enters quietly with dessert.
A small porcelain plate is placed in front of me: limoncello panna cotta, pale and glossy, topped with sugared citrus peel.
Coffee for Giovanni. Black. Strong.
He pauses, turns his head, and thanks her in Sicilian for the meal.
The sound of it, soft, familiar, intimate, does something treacherous to my chest.
He raises a brow at me.
I glare at him.
Then, because apparently this is the night my pride keeps getting strangled, I mutter, “Thank you, Caterina.”
She smiles gently and leaves.
Giovanni gestures to the dessert. “Eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
His mouth curves faintly. “You eat when you’re stressed.”
I hate that he knows that about me, hate that I opened so much… too much of myself to this man who doesn’t hesitate now to use it against me.
And so yes, it’s with a thick chunk of self-loathing that I take a bite anyway.
And fuck, it’s exquisite. Damn him.
He sips his coffee, unhurried, watching me with the patience of a man who has already won. Who knows which buttons to push without compunction.
“Since I don’t think you heard me the first time,” he says calmly, “I’ll outline what happens next.”
My stomach tightens.
“You will leave with me tomorrow,” he continues. “A private flight. No manifests. No advance notice. You will be under constant security.”
“I won’t be imprisoned—”
“You will be protected,” he cuts in. “There is a difference.”
“To you,” I snap.
“You will return to Dragoni territory,” he goes on, completely unfazed by the storm he’s setting off inside me. “Not New York. Not yet. Somewhere quieter. Somewhere I can control.”
The word control lands like a slap, sharp and humiliating.
“I’ve already relocated my senior security team,” he continues, as if we’re discussing shipping routes instead of my life. “Bellandi has been under surveillance for months. His people are restless, but they’re not stupid. They will test me.”
“And I’m the test,” I say bitterly, the truth scraping my throat raw as I say it out loud.
“Yes,” he replies without hesitation, without apology. “Which is precisely why you will not be accessible.”
I push my chair back slightly, my pulse hammering hard enough that I can feel it in my ears. “You’re talking about my life like it’s a logistics problem,” I say, my voice shaking despite my effort to keep it steady.
“In my world,” Giovanni answers quietly, “that’s exactly what it is.”
The walls don’t move, but the room feels smaller all the same. Psychologically, with a hint of cruelty, as if every word he speaks tightens something invisible around my ribs, compressing the air from my lungs inch by inch.
“So you’re uprooting me again,” I whisper. “Deciding where I get to exist.”
“I already have,” Giovanni says evenly, with the maddening calm of a man who planned this long before I ever caught up. “You’re only just realising it.”
The trap is closing.
I feel it in the precision of his language, in the way every sentence has been constructed to leave no space for negotiation, every step already mapped, every possible resistance already neutralised.
This isn’t a request.
It’s inevitability.
Fear curls low in my belly, cold and sharp, settling there like a living thing. But beneath it, coiled tight and burning, something else begins to stir.
Anger.
Resolve.
My father didn’t raise me to roll over and accept the verdict of powerful men. He taught me to look danger in the eye and decide, in that exact moment, whether I would kneel… or fight.
And I didn’t survive this long by waiting for men like Giovanni Dragoni, or Salvatore Bellandi, to decide my fate for me.
I lift my chin, even as my hands tremble.
I may be frightened. I may be cornered.
But I am not finished.
And as the knot in my stomach tightens with dread, one truth cuts through everything else with brutal clarity.
I will not sit back and let danger come for me.
I will meet it head-on.
Just like my father taught me.