Chapter 12 Lucia
LUCIA
He looks up, unsurprised, when I slam the door to his office hard enough that the walls protest the sound in a rumbled echo. He raises one imperious eyebrow when I slam my hands on his desk.
“You paid my uncles,” I say, voice shaking with rage and something dangerously close to betrayal. “And now you’re going to explain exactly what you think that makes us.”
He doesn’t flinch.
He settles back behind his desk with the calm, predatory focus of a man who already knows why I’m there and has decided, long before I arrived, exactly how this conversation will end.
“Paid implies remuneration for a task. Is that what they told you?”
“Don’t play word games with me, Giovanni. You loaned my uncles money,” I amend, my voice shaking despite my effort to keep it steady. “You didn’t ask. You didn’t warn me. You just did it. And we both know there are poisonous little strings tied all over your supposed magnanimity.”
“Yes,” Giovanni replies evenly. Simply.
“You used them,” I snap. “You used their desperation as leverage over me.”
His gaze sharpens, but he doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t soften it.
“Yes,” he says again, quieter this time. “I did.”
The betrayal lands harder because of that honesty. Something fractures inside my chest, sharp and hot and humiliating.
“Just when I was beginning to trust you,” I say hoarsely. “When I was starting to think…” I stop myself, breath hitching. “I was starting to think maybe I was wrong about you.”
Giovanni stands.
The chair slides back smoothly, deliberately, as he rounds the desk, every step measured. When he stops in front of me, his presence fills the room, eclipses everything else.
“I keep telling you, Lucia, that this is not a game,” he says. “And now is not the time for half-truths or gentler versions of myself.”
“And you know why this pains me. You know my father died because of…” I pause. “Because of debts. Because of loans that ‘helped’ until they destroyed everything.”
“And your uncles would have followed him,” Giovanni says flatly, “if I hadn’t stepped in.”
My fists bunch on the smooth polish.
“You don’t get to rewrite my trauma to suit your narrative.”
“No,” he agrees. “But I get to make sure it doesn’t repeat.”
I laugh once, broken and disbelieving.
“At what cost? Tell me what this leverage is going to cost me.”
He studies me for a long moment, something dark and unyielding settling into his expression.
“Cost you? Nothing. But for them? Loyalty,” he says. “That is the cost.”
“And if someone doesn’t pay it? If they don’t toe your line when the time comes?”
“That will depend entirely on the crime. I’m not without mercy, amuri. But the only unforgivable crime is betrayal. That will be paid for in blood,” Giovanni replies without hesitation. “No exceptions.”
The starkness of it steals the air from my lungs.
I stare at him, horrified by the savagery of his words, by how brutally clean the lines are in his world, how little room there is for fear, or mercy, or nuance.
And worst of all, by how recently I’d been thinking he was kind.
“I can’t believe you,” I whisper. “An hour ago I was standing in my uncle’s kitchen wondering if I’d been wrong to run. Wondering if I’d built this wall around myself for nothing.”
Giovanni’s jaw tightens.
“You left because you were afraid,” he says. “Not of me. Of what being with me would cost. You ran without pausing to consider that I might be better equipped than most to protect you. I think you know this now, that you’re simply refusing to accept it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” he agrees. “But it is true.”
He steps closer.
“I reminded you last night,” he continues quietly, “that we planned a family.”
The memory hits like a sucker punch.
Late nights tangled in sheets. Careless conversations that turned serious when neither of us was looking. The way he’d said when, not if, like the future was already decided.
My throat tightens.
“But your uncles are my family now too,” Giovanni says. “Which means I protect them. And if they betray me, I deal with that.”
I shake my head, overwhelmed.
“You’re asking me to accept violence as… care?” I’m not sure why I stop myself from saying the L-word. Maybe because right in this moment, it feels too heavy. Or no… it feels too fragile.
“I’m telling you,” he says, voice low, “that care without protection is a foolish, careless fantasy.”
Before I can step back, he pins me against the wall, one hand braced beside my head, the other gripping my hip with possession that makes my pulse race despite myself.
“Now are we done fighting?”
“Giovanni—”
“Because I’ve missed your mouth,” he interrupts with a voice as smooth and deadly as bladed silk. “I’ve missed your body. I’ve missed you. Haven’t stopped thinking about breakfast.”
My heart flips, then melts into a puddle I fight my way through.
“No… we have things to—”
He kisses me quiet, and it’s not gentle or forgiving.
It’s savage, it’s desperate and intimate and infuriatingly familiar, and my body betrays me instantly, melting into his as though the last eighteen months never happened.
I hate myself for the sound I make, and oh yes, I hate myself more when I kiss him back.
Every day we go further.
Every day the line moves.
And I know, desperately, helplessly, that it’s only a matter of time before I fall all the way back into him.
I pull away first, breathless and shaking.
“We can’t.”
“We already are,” he replies softly.
A knock interrupts us and reality snaps back into place like a slap.
Giovanni exhales, his forehead resting briefly against mine before he steps away, adjusting his jacket with infuriating composure.
“Stay,” he says. “We’ll spend the rest of the afternoon together.”
I want to refuse.
But the thought of retreating somewhere else in this vast house without him, silent, echoing, watching, makes my chest tighten.
So I press my lips together until I can’t hold back my response. Then I nod.
Despite everything inside me screaming that this issue is far from resolved. That he effectively shut me up with a kiss.
But… I can’t help but be aware that it’s only unresolved on my part.
Since my husband tracked me down on the island, he’s been nothing but brutally clear with his every intention. And having laid out the course of action and consequence, what more is there to talk about?
My uncles, as disappointing as it’s been to find out, are grown men who went into this with their eyes wide open. And while I know they wouldn’t betray Giovanni, the ghost of past trauma won’t leave me alone.
So I guess I have to make sure it never comes to that. Right?
I push my shaky feelings away as Giovanni takes my hand and walks me to the sitting area in his study.
We eat a late lunch brought in quietly, almost reverently, and afterward he installs me in the corner of his office with a tablet, a casual command disguised as consideration.
I barely touch it. Instead, I watch him.
I watch my husband run his empire with polished ease, switching languages mid-sentence, fielding calls, approving contracts, dismantling problems with a smile sharp enough to draw blood.
Legitimate. Elegant. Deadly.
He’s a chameleon.
And as confusion coils tighter inside me, one thought refuses to let go.
If this is the man I married…
What else is he still hiding?
And how close am I to discovering it the hard way?
Giovanni
The loan was never about money.
Money is noise. Numbers. Replaceable.
Loyalty is not.
I sit behind my desk after Lucia leaves, the door closing with a finality that lingers longer than it should, and I let myself breathe for the first time since she stormed in like a force of nature with my name already sharpened into a weapon.
My office hums softly around me, screens glowing, calls queued, decisions waiting to be made, but my attention is elsewhere.
With her uncles.
With the wire transfer.
With the calculated risk I took knowing exactly how badly it would wound her.
I don’t regret it.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t cost me something.
Long before Lucia, I learned that blind trust is for fools and the dead. My father made sure of that.
He was old-school Dragoni in the truest sense: iron rules, iron hand, loyalty bought in blood and repaid the same way.
He believed fear was the cleanest currency, and for a long time, he was right.
Until he wasn’t.
The first betrayal came from a man who kissed my mother’s cheek and taught me to drive. The second from a cousin who smiled as he poured wine and sold our routes to a rival syndicate for a promise that evaporated the moment it was made.
By the third, I stopped being surprised.
By the fifth, I stopped forgiving, and by the time the empire was mine, I understood something my father never did: fear keeps people obedient, but only pressure reveals whether they’re loyal.
So I test everyone.
Always have.
I test my captains with silence and wait to see who fills it. I test my allies with opportunity and watch who resists temptation. I test my enemies by giving them just enough rope to see if they’ll hang themselves.
And now…
I tested my wife’s uncles.
I knew the risk. I knew exactly how it would look to her.
A Dragoni loan carries weight even when it comes wrapped in generosity. It binds. It brands.
And it tells me something invaluable: when the time comes, and it always does, whether the men who took it will stand with me, or fold under pressure and sell blood they claim to love.
Lucia calls it leverage and she’s not wrong.
But leverage isn’t cruelty. It’s foresight. And foresight is how I keep people alive.
Even when they hate me for it.
I lean back in my chair, staring at the ceiling, replaying her face when I didn’t deny it. The moment when she realised that love and violence are not opposites in my world, but parallel lines that intersect more often than she wants to believe.
She’s horrified. She should be.
And yet…
I close my eyes briefly, unbidden memory intruding.
Breakfast.
Her defiance. The choice. The way she offered herself not as surrender but as negotiation, as power, as something she owned and wielded.
Unconventional doesn’t begin to cover it.
Nothing about us ever fit the shape it was supposed to.
I’ve taken cities without flinching and yet that moment nearly undid me.
Dangerous.
Everything about Lucia is dangerous.
I straighten as movement catches my attention.
She’s back, standing just inside the office now, half-hidden by the doorway, watching me with an expression I can’t immediately decode.
Bewilderment, yes. Defiance, absolutely. Something softer underneath, something that unsettles me more than anger ever could.
She hasn’t said a word in hours.
Neither have I.
I know she’s still stewing over her discovery and my response. And for a heartbeat, I wonder, unsettlingly, if I’ve gone too far.
The thought alarms me.
I don’t go too far. I calculate. I adapt and I survive.
Even with her. Hell, especially with her.
And yet, as she watches me like she’s trying to map the man behind the mask, I feel the same disorientation I saw on her face earlier mirrored back at me, sharp and unexpected.
I want to laugh, not because it’s funny but because it’s absurd.
Because the woman I married, the one person I didn’t test before putting a ring on her finger, is now the only variable I can’t fully predict.
And that should terrify me.
Instead, it does something far worse.
It makes me curious.
I meet her gaze, letting her see just enough of what I am to keep her guessing, because uncertainty keeps people close, and closeness, real closeness, is the most dangerous thing of all.
The loan will do what it’s meant to do. Her uncles will either stand or break.
And Lucia?
She will learn.
About my empire. About the lines that blur. About the truth that there is no clean separation between protection and possession in my world.
The question is not whether she’ll survive it.
It’s whether she’ll ever stop fighting it.
And whether I want her to.