Chapter 24
LUCIA
It all starts with the cheap trainers.
One month after we send La Fratellanza Nera off to freeze their tits off in Chicago.
The trainers sit on the edge of the polished gym floor like an insult, scuffed canvas and worn rubber in a room that cost more than most people’s houses, a room of gleaming machines and perfect mirrors and Dragoni luxury engineered to make everything feel controlled.
They don’t belong here. Neither did I… at the start. I’d like to think that isn’t the case anymore. And yet…
Why is throwing them away so hard?
I drive my fist into the heavy bag again, the impact jolting up my arm, sharp and satisfying, my breath loud in my own ears, sweat dampening the back of my neck. The rhythm is vicious, deliberate, something I can count on when my mind refuses to settle.
One.
Two.
Three.
The bag swings back. I meet it. This is what I brought back from the island. Not the sand. Not the sun. Not the illusion of freedom.
Boxing.
A way to keep my hands busy when my heart wants to claw its way out of my chest. A way to feel like I am not waiting. I punch harder and the bag groans on its chain.
Behind me, the door opens.
I don’t need to know my visitor because the very air changes when Giovanni enters a room. It always has. Even before I knew what he was. Even before I knew what his name meant.
For long minutes, he doesn’t speak while I punch, punch, punch.
He stands there, watching, and the silence stretches until it becomes its own kind of pressure.
I hit the bag again, harder than necessary.
“What?” I snap, breathless, irritation sparking too quickly. “Are you going to stand there all night or are you going to say something?”
His voice comes smooth, edged, intimate in the way it always is when he is not trying to be gentle. “I am saying something.”
“With your staring?”
“I am learning,” he replies, unhurried, sauntering in with grace that makes my belly jump, “what my wife does when she’s attempting to work through a thing alone.”
My jaw tightens. I pull off one glove with my teeth, then the other, fingers shaking with the adrenaline that never fully leaves my system anymore. “I’m allowed to be alone.”
His footsteps sound against the floor as he moves closer. “You are,” he agrees. “You’re also allowed to tell me what this is.”
I finally turn.
He is dressed casually, black shirt open at the throat, the scar on his chest visible when he breathes, a brutal reminder of the cost of the last few months. He looks healed. He looks dangerous. He looks like a man who has decided to stop waiting.
His gaze drops like a goddamn missile. To the trainers. Then up… to the gloves. To the small, ugly proof that I have not been resting the way he wanted.
His mouth hardens. “When,” he asks quietly, “exactly did you take up boxing?”
My throat tightens. I could lie. Except I’ve tried it before, and I’m pretty shit at it. “On the island,” I say.
His eyes lift back to mine. “Why? I seem to remember your relaxation tool of choice was yoga. And these days it’s sex. Boxing never featured.”
The words are flat. Not so much curiosity but a quietly seething demand.
I swallow. “I don’t want to fight, Gio.”
He steps closer, close enough that I can smell him, that familiar clean heat that makes my body react even when my mind is braced. “Then answer me, amuri.”
Amuri. Love.
I learned the word in secret, late at night, typing Sicilian into my phone like it might explain him, like it might explain what we are doing to each other. The way he says it now does not feel like tenderness.
It feels like a blade with a velvet handle.
“I wanted a way to defend myself,” I say, my voice sharper than I intend.
His eyes narrow. “From what?”
I hold his gaze because I am tired of flinching. “From men who think they can decide what happens to me.”
A pause. Then, quietly, he says, “From me.”
The air shifts and my chest tightens.
“I did not say that.”
“You did not have to,” he replies. His voice stays even, but something dark moves beneath it. “You ran from me. You hid from me. You packed a suitcase again. And now you are learning how to hit something hard enough that it cannot hold you.”
My pulse stutters. “You think everything I do is about you.”
“It is,” he says simply. “Because everything that happens to you becomes mine.”
“That’s the problem,” I spit back. “That is exactly the problem.”
His jaw flexes. “Tell me,” he says, controlled, “if I am the problem, why are you still here?”
The question lands in my ribs. I open my mouth but no sound comes because the truth is too complicated to fit into one sentence. Because I’m here and I’ve accepted and adapted and now I don’t know if that is courage or addiction.
Because I love him so much I do not know where I start and end without him.
And it’s fucking terrifying.
Before I can speak, gather scattered words into some form of coherency, the door opens again.
Caterina appears, hands folded neatly, expression unreadable in that old-world way that makes her seem carved from patience.
“Donna,” she says politely, though her eyes flick to Giovanni first, always. “What shall I prepare for dinner?”
I blink, thrown. “What?” She’s never asked me that before.
She looks pointedly at me. “The special dinner,” she says. “The one that was meant to be eaten before it went cold.”
My stomach drops as a memory flashes so fast it makes me dizzy.
A table set with exquisite candles.
My sexy dress. Sexier heels. My foolish hope that I could soften the war between us with something as simple as food.
Then the screech of tyres.
Blood.
Giovanni carried in. Everything shattered. What is this cunning woman playing at?
Caterina continues, serenely merciless. “Would you like a repeat, Donna? Or shall I truly pull out all the stops this time? I’m in the mood for a challenge.”
My face burns. “Caterina,” I hiss, frantic, “please—”
She pretends not to notice.
Giovanni’s gaze snaps between us. Then he turns to the genteel woman who is proving not to be as cleverly benign as she seems.
His voice turns lethal. “Caterina?”
“Sì, Don Dragoni?”
“Be a sweetheart and leave us.”
Caterina inclines her head and disappears without apology, but not before I catch the smug twinkle in her grey eyes.
The door clicks shut and the silence that follows is heavy.
Giovanni steps closer, plants himself between me and the sandbag, blocking the very light with his broad shoulders.
When he speaks, his voice is low, rumbling with cold wrath. “More things you are hiding from me, dulce?”
I lift my chin. “You do not get to—”
“No,” he cuts in. “You do not get to parry with what I kept from you. I have paid for every omission. In blood. In eighteen months without you. In a fucking bullet in my chest.”
His hand presses flat against the scar, not for drama, but because it is real.
“And still,” he continues, “I walk around my house discovering my wife prepared meals she never served and learning how to fight like she expects to need it.”
My throat aches. “You got yourself shot! That’s why you don’t know. You went and got yourself shot when I was all dolled up, ready to make it up to you.”
His laugh is short, humourless. “By feeding me? Or seducing me?”
“By showing you I am here,” I snap. “By showing you I’m not packing another suitcase, even when my mind is screaming.”
His eyes sharpen. “And is it screaming now?”
I inhale. My voice drops. “I am trying so hard not to break something else between us.”
His expression shifts, something raw flickering through the control. “Lucia,” he says, rougher, “it is already broken. Don’t you see? It broke on our wedding night when you fled. What’s happening now is us standing in the wreckage, deciding what we build next.”
My chest tightens, and I barely feel it when the gloves slip from my hands, fall to the floor, forgotten. My throat moves but I can barely swallow to say the words burning on my tongue. “And what do you want to build?”
His gaze holds mine with brutal honesty. “A life where I never have to wake up reaching for you and finding air.”
My breath catches.
He steps closer until there is no space left.
Then, quietly, devastatingly, he asks the question that has been sitting between us since the island. “Will you run again?” he asks.
And in that moment, I see everything I’ve done to this man.
The wound held open that hasn’t quite healed. I stare at him, my heart pounding so hard it hurts.
“I don’t want to,” I whisper, and the truth of it nearly kills me.
His face hardens, then cracks, just slightly. “Then we are not finished,” he says.
“No,” I breathe, tears burning behind my eyes, anger and love tangled so tightly I cannot separate them. “We’re nowhere near finished.”
He exhales, slow. “Good.”
His hand rises, cups the back of my neck, thumb pressing into my skin.
“Because I did not drag you back to me to live in silence or ambivalence,” he murmurs. “I dragged you back because I want all of you. Even the parts that still want to run.”
My throat tightens. “And what if those parts never go away?”
His gaze is unwavering. “Then we fight them together.”
The words are a promise as rare and precious as dragon’s gold.
And somewhere deep inside me, beneath the boxing gloves and the cheap trainers and the old fear, something shifts.
Possibility.
And that is more terrifying than any war outside these walls.