Chapter 19 Lucia #2
“You’re not righteous,” I continue calmly.
“You’re not justified. You are not protecting tradition or legacy or anything noble.
You are a bully, Isabella, and worse than that, you are the kind of bully who convinces herself that her violence is necessary, when all you are really craving is power and recognition and the sick thrill of watching someone else bleed for your frustration. ”
Her breath comes faster.
“I would’ve married him, if you hadn’t turned up like a—” She stops her vitriol, caught between venting her spleen and fear of retaliation. But it only lasts for a moment. “If you had not taken him, I would be his wife by now. We would have ruled together. We would have been unstoppable.”
The words crack with envy and something far more personal.
Instead she—
She stops short as one of the men steps forward and strikes her across the face, not brutal, not excessive, just enough to silence her and remind her where she stands.
She gasps. For a moment she’s stunned.
Then the tears come.
Ugly and humiliating.
I hide a flinch and flick a look at the capo. No more.
He nods and steps back as Isabella breaks down sobbing, shoulders shaking, mascara streaking, the image of composed Bellandi perfection dissolving into something small and raw.
I roll my eyes. “Compose yourself,” I tell her flatly. “This performance does not move me.”
She looks up, mascara smeared, rage simmering beneath the tears. “You think you’ve won,” she snarls. “My father will burn this house to the ground.”
I step back, turning away as if she has already exhausted her usefulness.
“You will tell me everything,” I say over my shoulder. “Every plan, every ally, every whispered conversation you’ve had with him in the last six months.”
I pause at the door.
“And you will not lie,” I add. “Because I know how close you are, and because if you do, I will stop threatening what you treasure most and start removing it.”
I glance back at her, my gaze sweeping her face slowly, deliberately.
“Take a moment,” I finish. “When I return, I expect something more useful than tears.”
The door closes behind me.
Giovanni
I wake to light and sound and the low, relentless hum of machines, and the first thing I feel is pain, deep, sharp, unmistakable, followed immediately by fear so sudden it steals what little breath I have.
Lucia.
My head turns sluggishly, heavy as if it does not quite belong to me yet, and for a fractured second I expect the worst. I expect absence. I expect loss.
Then I see her.
She’s standing there, close enough that I could reach her if my body would cooperate, unhurt, upright, very much alive. She looks tired and furious and entirely herself, and the relief that hits me is violent enough to leave me dizzy.
“Fuck,” I breathe, my voice rough, scraped raw by tubes and disuse.
She’s at my side instantly, one hand pressing flat against my chest as if to anchor me to the bed, the other reaching for the monitor with practised ease that tells me she’s been doing this longer than I would like.
“Easy,” she tells me. “You are not allowed to die. I have too much to yell at you for.”
Even now, she threatens me. My mouth curves despite myself.
“You okay?” I manage, every word dragged out of my lungs.
“I am,” she replies without hesitation. “Mostly.”
My eyes move over her automatically, cataloguing every detail the way I always do when assessing risk. No visible injuries. No tremor she is not controlling. No fear she has not already put to use.
“You look beautiful, and—”
“Flattery? Really?”
I try to shrug but freeze when agony tears through me. Machines whine in protest, the fucking little snitches.
Lucia glares at me, even as her face twists with concern. “For God’s sake, Gio, please don’t move. Use your mouth or hell, just blink your way through whatever you want to say.”
I cough back laughter. Stare harder at her. Breathe through the pain as I catalogue every inch of her face. Sí, she’s a sight for sore eyes. But there’s something else.
“How long have I been out?” My throat is thick and scratchy.
Her chin wobbles for a fraction of a second before she catches and kills the weakness. “Too damn long. But if we’re counting, you’ve been flirting with consciousness for six days.”
Fuck. Six days.
When that vecchio puttana could’ve made serious moves.
But for the first time, as my eyes drift past my beautiful wife to the capos dotted around the room, I don’t sense the twitchiness that comes with imminent danger or the frantic intent signalling the need for action.
Hell, they seem… satisfied, even smug, and not at all like the vicious, bloodthirsty men I know them to be. The same men who would raze the city to the ground to avenge their downed Don.
Something else settles in my chest when I shift my attention back to my wife. When I note the peculiar light burning in her eyes. It takes a moment to recognise it. To register that everything I expected to see in my men I see in her.
That they’re staring at her with… pride.
Unfiltered. Abiding.
And even before I open my mouth to ask, I feel it too. No… not true. This feeling has been there all this time. Insistent and confusing as fuck. But present.
Growing.
In full bloom now as her eyes meet mine.
“What did you do?” I ask quietly, because I already know the answer will matter.
She meets my gaze without flinching.
“We had a few problems. I handled it.”
A single beat passes, and then understanding hits me squarely between the ribs.
My wife.
My Donna.
No longer hiding or waiting or running.
Acting.
The line I’ve spent my entire life walking, between protection and annihilation, vanishes in that moment, replaced by something far more volatile and stupidly exhilarating.
Partnership.
She adjusts my pillow without asking, issues an order for the doctor to return that is obeyed instantly, makes decisions about my care with a certainty that tells me no one questioned her authority while I was unconscious.
When the sedatives begin to pull me under again, my hand tightens around hers on instinct, as if my body understands before my mind fully does.
I let myself drift. Because I trust her to hold the line.
When I surface again briefly, she’s still there, still standing, still guarding what’s mine and what is hers. She calmly answers my questions, apprises me of the wonderfully impressive thing she’s achieved.
And I can’t help but lift her hand, kiss the back of it.
Then I laugh the way a man satisfied with life, even with a bullet hole doctors tell me came too close to killing me, has the right to, then calls fuck it. My dragon has found its true mate.
And somewhere beyond these walls, a terrified Isabella Bellandi who should’ve known better than to cross my wife is waiting.
And Salvatore Bellandi is ready to be put on his knees.
I see his name light up Lucia’s phone.
She does not answer.
And for the first time since I wake, I smile, knowing that whatever comes next, it will not be handled gently.
But with sublime, unstoppable Dragoni brutality.