Chapter 16 Lucia #2
Instead, I do what I’ve done since the first day Salvatore Bellandi decided New York looked like a throne he deserved.
I begin turning the world against him without firing a single bullet.
By mid-morning, his port contracts have begun to stall.
In three days, his allies receive visits from my lawyers and my senators and my regulators.
In six, his money slows, and by the end of the first week after he dared to raise his men and his guns against me, Salvatore Bellandi’s name becomes heavy.
Every day he calls.
And every day I refuse to answer.
And when I hear he’s been summoned back to Sicily by La Fratellanza, I send a simple text.
This is how modern men fight.
This is how I fight.
Violence is easy.
Pressure is art.
Two Weeks Later
It’s late when I return.
The house is quiet, but quiet does not mean peace.
Quiet means listening.
Quiet means safe.
My men nod respectfully and Caterina greets me softly in the foyer.
“She is upstairs,” she murmurs, careful.
I nod once and start to walk away, but her soft, wise voice stops me.
“Gio.”
I turn, feign patience and relaxation even though I’m neither of those things. I want my wife and I want her now.
“She’s not happy. Whatever it is you’re doing to make this right, keep an eye on the clock too. Before time punishes you.”
I despise the unease stirring in my gut, but again, I nod.
“Capisci. Buona notte.”
My feet carry me through the halls with purpose, past the security posted outside our suite, past the door that has become a boundary no one crosses without permission.
Inside, the lights are low.
Lucia is sitting on the edge of the bed, her head bowed.
She’s wearing day clothes when I expect her to be in the lingerie she likes to torment me with.
Or, in my dirtiest dreams, completely naked.
I pause in the doorway, unease intensified.
She looks… wrong.
Her shoulders are too stiff and her hands are clasped too tightly. And I know, instantly, that something has happened.
“Lucia.”
She jumps, but her head remains low, her gaze avoiding mine.
I prowl towards her, an alien urgency invading every fibre of my being. “What is it,” I say. It isn’t a question. “Something has happened.”
It’s not a physical danger or my men would’ve taken care of it, and reported it immediately.
Her eyes lift, but there are more shadows in the hazel depths than ghosts in a Palermo cemetery.
“I’m fine.”
I stop. I stare. Then, quietly but with enough warning for her to know I’m not fucking about.
“Lucia. Take a moment before you repeat the ‘I’m fine’ line. You are a terrible liar,” I reply, voice flat. “Now tell me.”
Her breath shakes.
She hesitates.
And that hesitation is enough.
My blood cools.
“Bellandi has eyes everywhere,” I say. “So if you are hiding something from me, you are not protecting me. You are handing him a weapon.”
Her face twists.
And then she says, like ripping out a piece of herself.
“She called.”
The world narrows.
“Who?”
She swallows.
“Isabella.”
Something sharp moves through me. I keep my voice steady with effort.
“And what did she have to say for herself?”
Lucia’s chin lifts, defiant even in fear. “She said I’m the reason this is happening.” A harsh bark of laughter escapes her. “Like it was some sort of newsflash.”
I don’t blink, but my hands clench into fists in my pocket. “And?”
“And she said I should do the right thing.”
My hands curl tighter.
“That I should do everyone a favour and absent myself again. And if I didn’t…”
Her throat moves and I have to swallow myself to stop the snarl from unleashing.
My voice drops. “And if you didn’t?” I prompt.
Lucia’s eyes shine. “And if I didn’t, I’ll have no one to blame but myself if someone decides to absent me permanently.”
“Oh, and she said that I probably won’t see it coming because her father has men everywhere.”
The room goes very still.
I step forward.
And it’s only then that I see the phone lying next to her. The screen isn’t dark with inactive mode. It’s showing the red lines of a device still active. “You recorded the conversation?”
Her lips part, and for a moment she looks as though she might deny it out of sheer exhaustion, but then she exhales, steadying herself, and gives the smallest nod.
“Yes.”
Of course she did.
My smart, furious, impossible wife, who survives on instinct and spite and a kind of stubborn intelligence that refuses to let anyone corner her without leaving teeth marks behind.
Her fingers tremble as she reaches for her phone, the result, I suspect, of holding too much inside herself, and then she presses play.
Isabella’s voice spills into the room, smooth with entitlement and sharp with intent, every syllable carefully chosen to sound civilised while carrying something rotten underneath it.
A threat delivered politely.
A warning wrapped in elegance.
When it ends, the silence that follows feels heavy, as if the walls themselves are listening.
Lucia’s breathing has gone uneven, and I see fear and rage fighting for dominance in the same chest.
My wife is afraid, but she’s also furious.
Blindingly so.
My own breathing’s too controlled. Too calm.
That calm has always been the most dangerous thing about me, I’m told, because it is what arrives right before I destroy something.
I look at her, taking in the tightness around her mouth, the brightness in her eyes that she refuses to let fall.
“You are distraught,” I say, because naming it is the first step in containing it.
“I’m fucking angry,” she snaps back immediately, and the sound of it is sharp enough to cut.
“I am terrified, and I am—” Her voice breaks on the last word, not from fragility, but from sheer frustration at how much she is being forced to carry.
“I know you’ve endured this kind of bullshit your whole life.
But I’m getting tired of being the thing people move around to get to you,” she finishes, and the hatred in it is not only for them, but for the position she has been shoved into. “You know how much I hate chess.”
I cross the room without thinking, closing the distance in two strides, and I take her face between my hands, forcing her to look at me.
“You are not a thing,” I tell her, voice rough with conviction.
She gives a bitter laugh that tastes like disbelief. “Aren’t I?”
“No,” I answer, harder now, because softness will not reach her in this moment. “You are my wife. The beginning. And the end.”
Her breath catches at the word, because it is both comfort and curse.
“And that,” she whispers, furious and shaking all at once, “is exactly why they’re circling. Why they won’t stop circling.”
There’s a finality in there that snags hard at something exposed and borderline vulnerable inside me.
…keep an eye on the clock too. Before time punishes you.
I’m not sure why Caterina’s words return, punching me hard in the gut. Not even sure why I turn away, needing air, needing space to think—
And why I almost wish I hadn’t.
Because that’s when I see it.
The suitcase.
Half-packed, careless in its haste, as though someone started the motion before they could stop themselves. Clothes folded too quickly. An old pair of sneakers, which miraculously escaped the purge, shoved in without care.
The passport lying on top like a final shock. The final fucking insult.
My vision sharpens instantly, the world narrowing down to that single object.
Slowly, I look back at her.
“What is the meaning of this, Lucia?”
Lucia freezes where she stands, her entire body going still in a way that tells me she already knows what this looks like.
“It’s nothing,” she says too fast.
“It’s just a suitcase,” I reply, my voice flattening into something dangerous. “Half packed with your things. It’s absolutely not nothing.”
Her mouth tightens, her jaw working as if she can grind her way out of this conversation through sheer will.
“I was…thinking.”
The word hits like a slap.
Thinking.
Of leaving.
Again.
My voice drops, controlled only by force.
“You were thinking,” I echo, and oh yes, I actively despise the acid devastation in my voice. “And thinking involved packing a bag? Did thinking involve breaking your promise?”
“I did not do it,” she fires back, immediate and fierce. “I didn’t go anywhere.”
“But you thought about it,” I say, stepping closer, because the thought is the betrayal even before the action.
Her eyes blaze, bright with defiance and something that looks too much like panic.
“Yes, I did. For like…one second.”
“One second is all it takes,” I tell her, voice low and lethal. “One second is how wives disappear in my world.”
Her throat works.
“I changed my mind, Giovanni.”
“Why?” I demand, because I need the truth more than I need the argument.
“Because—” Her voice cracks, and the rawness of it punches straight through me. “Because I don’t want to die alone on a beach.”
The honesty lands hard, brutal in its simplicity.
She swallows, perhaps furious with herself for saying it, most likely furious with me for pulling it out of her.
“I didn’t want to leave,” she admits, quieter now, as though the words cost her something. “I wanted to know if I could. And I…I couldn’t.”
My chest tightens as I stare at her, and for the first time since Red Hook, fear moves through me cleanly, sharp and unmistakable.
Not fear of Bellandi, because that vecchiu babbu’s days are numbered. Not even the fear of war that needs to happen for change to come.
No. This fear is entirely comprised of the thought of losing her again.
So I reach out, gripping her wrist with enough force to anchor her, not to hurt her.
“You do not get to test that,” I say, voice low with restraint. “Not now. Not when they’re watching you.”
Her eyes flicker, caught between fury and exhaustion.
“So she can call and toy with me all she wants, and I can’t do anything about it because I’m a prisoner in my own home?”
“Not a prisoner. You’re my priority.”
“That sounds the same,” she shoots back, because she cannot help herself.
“It is not,” I say immediately, because I need her to understand that I don’t know how to separate care from protection, or protection from control, when the world wants her dead. “And I promise, this will end soon.”
Her breath shakes.
And then I hear it.
“Giovanni.”
Not the Don or the Dragoni I’ve been hearing far too much of lately, whispered in fear or in reverence.
Just my name, spoken softly, humanly, as though she has reached past the empire and found the man.
Something inside me twists.
We’re balanced on the edge of something here, and I know it.
Trust.
Or ruin.
I step closer until my forehead touches hers, the contact almost unbearable.
“You stay,” I say, voice rough with promise. “You stay because I will not lose you again, and I will toss a million grenades in this city before I am forced to watch you vanish.”
Her whisper is raw, stripped of everything but truth.
“And what if I don’t know how to live inside what you are?”
My answer comes without hesitation.
“Then I will learn how to make it safer for you despite it.”
Her eyes close.
The suitcase sits behind us, a silent accusation.
And outside these walls, the war tightens its grip, patient and waiting, because it knows that this is where it can hurt me most.