Chapter 11 Lucia #2
And after a leisurely shower, I dress carefully, choosing elegance over defiance, strength over softness, because if I’m walking back into Queens, I’ll do it on my own terms.
The car ride feels longer than it should, the city rising around us with a familiarity that hurts.
Eighteen months.
That’s how long it’s been since I last crossed these streets without looking over my shoulder.
Home doesn’t look smaller.
It looks sharper.
And as we pull closer, I know with a certainty that settles deep in my bones that whatever this is, whatever Giovanni and I are becoming, it’s no longer something I can pretend I’m untouched by.
The war didn’t pause while I was gone.
It just learned how to wait.
Giovanni
The car hums beneath me as we leave the compound, the city rising ahead in a familiar sprawl of steel and intention, and I should already be focused on the chessboard I’m about to step back onto.
Instead, my mind betrays me.
Breakfast.
The table. The sunlight. The way my wife looked at me as she blew my mind and my cock like she was daring herself as much as she was daring me.
I adjust my position subtly, jaw tightening as I replay the memory of the mix of dark amusement and savage hunger that had culminated in the best release of my life.
Recollections that have no place in a moving vehicle surrounded by men trained to notice everything.
Things between Lucia and me have never followed a straight line.
From the moment she tore into my driver on a Queens sidewalk like she had nothing to lose, convention had been a casualty.
Unconventional doesn’t even begin to cover it.
A man in my position is supposed to marry for alliance, for leverage, for optics.
Instead, I married a woman who challenges me at breakfast and kneels because she chooses to, not because she’s told.
I exhale slowly, reminded of what I’ve known from the start. The ferocity of my emotions when it comes to Lucia is dangerous at best.
Absolutely lethal at their worst.
But then, isn’t everything worth having a supremely risky venture?
“Paolo.” The driver glances at me in the mirror.
“Let me know when we’re five minutes out,” I say.
He nods. “Sì, Don Moretti.”
I press the divider and the glass slides up smoothly, sealing me into quiet. Then I pull my phone from my pocket and make the first call.
It rings once.
“Giovanni.” The voice on the other end is sharp, alert. One of mine. Loyal. Smart enough to stay alive.
“Talk to me,” I say. “What’s the word after last night?”
A pause. Papers shifting and a breath taken. He’s not stalling for time, he’s taking a moment to deliver news that I know will commence seismic shifts.
“You made waves.”
I smile faintly. “Good.”
“Bellandi arrived expecting a different outcome. At the very least, an expectation that there would be a… softening. Let’s just say, he didn’t appreciate the optics.”
“Bellandi never appreciates optics he doesn’t control.”
“He feels disrespected,” my man continues carefully. “Not just by you. By… her.”
My smile fades. “He should, since he gave her none to begin with,” I reply evenly. “Continue.”
“He’s telling his people that you’ve gone soft. That you’ve let sentiment erode judgement. That letting your wife speak the way she did, sit where she did, wasn’t modernisation. It was weakness.”
I laugh once, humourless. “Anything else?”
“Yes. He’s floating the idea that New York needs balance. That maybe the Dragoni footprint has grown too dominant.”
My grip tightens on the phone.
Men liked to throw the term pussy-whipped around when they couldn’t locate a better insult. And in all fairness, having experienced my wife’s oral talents for the first time, I wasn’t altogether averse to admitting that there was a sliver of truth to Bellandi’s inference.
Enough to make any accusations of being soft stick, though?
Absolutely not.
And a simple precision strike to the heart of his little conclave was all it would take, if he continues to make waves.
“Interesting. And did he say that to anyone who matters?”
“Not yet. But he’s feeling out the room.”
“Let him,” I say. “If he wants to test the floorboards, I’ll enjoy watching them collapse, taking him with it.”
A beat. “Do you want us to—”
“No,” I cut in. “Not yet. We observe. We catalogue. We wait.”
“Understood.”
I end the call and immediately make another.
This one I don’t need to hear in real time.
The confirmation comes quickly, efficiently. Bellandi’s stance hasn’t shifted. If anything, it’s hardened. The dinner party didn’t intimidate him. It clarified things.
Good.
I prefer enemies who stop pretending.
The next call matters more. I scroll once, then twice, and hit dial.
“Senator Hale,” I say when the line connects. “Tell me you’re awake.”
A nervous chuckle. “For you, Giovanni. Always.”
“I don’t like surprises,” I tell him pleasantly. “Has Salvatore Bellandi spoken to you recently?”
A pause too long to be accidental. “No,” he says. “Not directly.”
“Indirectly?”
Another pause. A sigh this time. “He’s been asking questions. About zoning. About port contracts. About who owes who favours he can buy.”
I nod slowly. “And what did you tell him?”
“That I don’t move without you,” Hale replies quickly. “Which is the truth.”
“It is,” I agree. “If he approaches you again, you will tell me immediately.”
“Of course.”
“And Senator?” I add.
“Yes?”
“Don’t forget who built the ladder you climbed to the top floor.”
I kill the line and then lean back, staring out at the passing streets, the city that knows my name even when it pretends not to.
One of my advisers had suggested a private meeting. A neutral location. A quiet conversation between men who understand the cost of war.
I won’t do it.
I won’t be the one to ask.
New York belongs to the Dragoni because I bled for it, because I modernised it, because I refused to let the old guard turn it into a museum of violence and fear.
If Bellandi wants a piece of it, he can come for me openly.
On my ground.
I roll my shoulders once, tension settling into something familiar and welcome. I shouldn’t be uneasy. My wife is back at my side. Visible. Unapologetic. A complication my enemies will not hesitate to exploit.
And yet—
Would I rather have her hidden? Sheltered? Removed from the board?
Fuck no.
The thought barely finishes forming before I dismiss it.
Lucia has never been safe in the shadows. She was born for collision, for friction, for standing exactly where she isn’t supposed to and daring the world to adjust.
So I will adjust with her.
Protect her. Arm her. Stand with her.
If war is coming, and it is, then my wife will not be watching from the sidelines.
She will be beside me where she belongs.
And if Salvatore Bellandi thinks that makes me weaker?
I almost pity him.
Because he’s about to learn what it means to provoke a man who has everything worth losing, and has decided he will lose nothing.
Lucia
Queens still smells the same.
It’s not a single scent so much as a collage of them layered together: coffee burned too long on the burner, fried dough from a corner shop that’s somehow survived three decades, car exhaust and old brick and something faintly sweet that reminds me of Sundays when my mother used to open all the windows no matter the weather.
The car slows, then stops, and for a moment I don’t move, because memory rushes in too fast and too loud, and my chest tightens with it.
Home.
Not Giovanni’s house, although that place is… growing on me, especially since I discovered Isabella Bellandi didn’t have her claws anywhere near it.
No, this place doesn’t come with marble and glass and guards with earpieces.
But it’s still home.
The first and only true one I’ve known.
An exact replica of my Uncle Lazlo’s place next door, the house I grew up in looks exactly as it always has: a squat red-brick building with a narrow stoop and a stubborn refusal to be gentrified out of existence.
The paint on the door is chipped, the railing still wobbles, and I feel twelve again before I even step out of the car.
The door opens before I can knock.
“Lucia.”
Uncle Milo says my name like it’s a prayer and a reprimand rolled into one, and then he’s pulling me into his chest, squeezing hard enough that my feet lift off the ground. He smells like sawdust and aftershave and home.
“Jesus Christ,” he mutters. “You’re here. You’re real.”
Then he yanks me back, frowning as he takes me in from head to toe.
“Are you okay? Where the fuck have you been?”
Behind him, Uncle Lazlo freezes mid-step, his face going pale before it crumples into relief and fury in equal measure. Then he ambles towards me.
They remind me of Papa so much a lump jumps into my throat.
“For Chrissakes, let the girl breathe, pazzo!” He slaps his brother’s shoulder.
Then he narrows pale blue eyes at me.
“You don’t get to disappear for eighteen months, or ever again, you hear me?” he says hoarsely, then crushes me into his arms anyway. “You don’t get to do that to us.”
I cling to them both, blinking hard, my throat closing with everything I didn’t let myself feel while I was running.
I was an only child, but I was never alone.
Milo and Lazlo filled every gap my mother’s early death and my father working all hours left behind, every silence, every scraped knee and late-night panic.
They taught me how to throw a punch, how to balance a chequebook, how to stand my ground when men twice my size tried to talk over me.
They loved me like I was theirs. I loved them like the blood and surrogate fathers they were.
Inside, the house feels smaller than I remember, but warmer too, the walls lined with photographs that stop my heart mid-beat.
Me on Milo’s shoulders at a street fair. Me scowling in a karate gi while Lazlo pretends to be terrified. Birthday cakes, graduations, Sunday dinners where no one ever left hungry or quiet.
“I missed you,” I whisper, uselessly. “So much.”
Milo cups my face, his eyes fierce and shining.
“Don’t ever do that again.”
I nod. I don’t trust myself to speak.