Chapter 18 Lucia
LUCIA
The Dragoni lieutenants burst through the front doors with an urgency that obliterates the best laid plans of comfort and seduction.
Giovanni’s name is already on my tongue when I see him, because I know. I know before my eyes fully register the blood soaking through his jacket, the way his body is slack between the hands gripping him, the way his head lolls just enough to tell me this is not a scrape or a warning.
This is serious. This is bad.
Very bad.
“Giovanni,” I croak, and my voice sounds wrong to my own ears, too steady, too controlled, as if my body has decided panic will come later, when it is safer to fall apart.
One of the men swears under his breath in Sicilian, a sharp curse that curls around the edges of the room, and another barks orders that I don’t need translated to understand.
“Trauma suite. Now.”
They move with precision, with the practised efficiency of men who have done this before, which is both terrifying and grounding, because it tells me that this house was built for moments like this.
I move with them, because no one tells me not to.
No one dares.
The estate reveals itself in layers I did not know existed, walls sliding back, lights flooding on, equipment emerging with the quiet hum of readiness, and suddenly we are no longer in a mansion but in a medical wing that rivals any private hospital I’ve ever seen.
Doctors appear as if summoned by instinct alone, gloves snapping on, voices clipped and professional, their focus entirely on the man on the table.
My husband.
My gorgeous, infuriating, impossible husband.
I stand at his head, my hand finding his without thinking, because this is where I belong and I refuse to be moved.
“What happened?” I ask, and this time my voice carries steel.
One of his men answers, jaw tight. “He went to meet Bellandi.”
The words hit me hard.
“Salvatore has been begging for it,” another adds bitterly. “Weeks of calls. Said he wanted to negotiate peace. The fucker.”
I let out a sound that’s not quite a laugh. Of course he did. Of course Salvatore Bellandi wanted peace. The same way a cobra wants peace.
“And suspected it might be something else but he went anyway,” I say, because this is the part I understand too well. A dragon steeped in the knowledge that he’s infallible. Until he isn’t.
“Yes.”
My fingers tighten around his hand.
“There was another ambush,” the man continues. “We handled it but…” He stops, and I want to scream at him.
“But what?”
“The figghiu di puttana brought snipers this time. Close range. The Don took one before we could get him clear.”
“Where?” I ask, already bracing even as a chill invades every fibre of my being.
“Upper chest,” the doctor says calmly. “Missed his artery by millimetres. He lost a lot of blood.”
Millimetres.
That word is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.
The world narrows as they work, voices overlapping in controlled chaos, monitors lighting up, numbers flashing that I refuse to look at too closely because I know myself well enough to know I will memorise every rise and dip.
Someone tells me he’s unconscious, not dead. Another tells me they’re inducing a coma. A third urges me to step back.
I do not.
“You will let me stay,” I say, and the room stills just enough for them to register that I am not asking.
A doctor hesitates, then nods.
I take Giovanni’s hand and bring it to my lips, pressing my mouth to his knuckles, my chest tight with things I refuse to let loose.
“You absolute bastard,” I murmur to him, my voice low. “You do not get to do this to me.”
His face is pale, too still, the sharp perfect planes of it softened by vulnerability I have never seen before.
Time spins past as the doctors work on him, then a machine breathes for him.
I sit. And I do not leave.
Hours bleed into one another, then days, marked only by the quiet rhythm of his breathing and the low murmur of updates from doctors who have clearly been trained to speak to women like me, women who are suddenly very important and very dangerous.
Apparently.
On the second day, someone calls me Donna.
On the third, they stop asking for permission and start asking for instruction.
It happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, the way tides change without announcement.
A man I recognise from the dinner party approaches me with a folder and a careful expression.
“There are decisions that need to be made,” he says.
I look up at him. Frown my confusion. “About what?”
“About ports,” he replies. “And routes. And contracts that will not wait.”
I almost laugh. “You’re asking me to make decisions about Dragoni business?” I say, keeping my voice level, half ready to lay into him for joking at a time like this.
“Yes,” he answers simply.
I swallow. “Why?”
“Because the Don is incapacitated.”
I glance at Giovanni. Then back at the man. “I’m aware of that glaring fact. I’m asking you why me. Why is someone else not equipped to handle this?”
He clears his throat. “Well… because there is no consigliere,” he adds.
That gives me pause. “No consigliere,” I repeat.
He nods. “Giovanni does not keep one.”
Of course he doesn’t. Control is easier when you are the only voice that matters.
“Then you should sit,” I say, gesturing to the chair. “And start explaining to me why the absence of a consigliere means this falls to me.”
By the end of that first day, I know more about the history of the Dragoni empire than I ever wanted to. By the end of the second, I know how it works.
Shipping lanes. Port authorities. Security firms that operate under ten different names. Real estate acquisitions timed to political pressure. Serious money that moves quietly, lands hard and shifts destinies.
The end of the third brings even more enlightenment. I know where Bellandi has been bleeding support. And by the fourth, I understand something that settles into my bones with terrifying clarity.
Salvatore Bellandi wasn’t determined to wipe me out because I was merely an inconvenience or a liability. It’s because La Frantellanza knew what I’m only just learning.
That in Giovanni’s absence, the reins do not pass to his lieutenants or even the highest trusted man in his hierarchy.
His power passes to me. His wife.
Because of blood and law and the simple fact that no one wants to test what happens when they cross the Dragoni wife while the Dragoni Don lies unconscious.
The fear in their eyes is not subtle.
It is respectful.
And it feeds something inside me I did not know existed.
On the fourth day, I sit at Giovanni’s bedside, my fingers tracing the back of his hand, my voice low as I tell him everything he cannot hear.
“I’m here, Giovanni. I did not run,” I tell him. “I did not fold. And if you wake up and yell at me, I will yell right back, because you don’t get to leave me with this and then pretend you are still the only one who can hold it.”
His fingers twitch.
The doctor tells me it is reflex.
I don’t believe him. I know my husband heard me.
On the morning of the fifth day, I stand at the window of the master suite in the Dragoni Estate and I look at my reflection in the glass, recognising myself only in fragments, in the set of my shoulders, in the steadiness of my gaze.
Giovanni Dragoni’s wife does not break. She learns, she adapts, and she retaliates.
When my phone rings and Isabella Bellandi’s name lights the screen again, my mouth curves into something sharp and deliberate.
This time, I don’t answer.
This time, I already have a plan.