Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Lorenzo
It’s mid-morning. The sun’s already spilling heat and light through the windshield. I’m in the back seat, sprawled out with one arm across the seat, the other resting on my thigh, fingers tapping slowly against my leg. Vito is up front, eyes on the road, mouth closed, just how I like him.
I left Isabella in my bed, sheets tangled, her hair a mess, skin flushed from the night before.
She’s probably curled on her side with that pissed-off princess expression she wears so well.
I almost stayed. Almost waited to see how she’d react when she woke up and found I hadn’t run.
Would she have glared at me like I kicked her puppy?
Or crawled into my lap and tried to bite me again, ready for round two?
My money is on both. It always is with her.
She’s chaos incarnate, and fuck me, I’ve never felt more alive.
Fighting with her excites me more than anything ever has.
That mouth. That fire. She doesn’t just fuck me.
.. she ruins me. No woman has ever done that to me before.
I don’t think I could ever go back to fucking the way I used to.
Fast. Hidden. Dark corners of clubs where no one asked questions.
Where masks were easier than names, and I could fuck the ache out of my system without ever looking anyone in the eye.
One hand around a throat while they moaned my name like it was a fucking prayer.
I needed it back then.
The power, the control, and that rush of dominance to remind myself I still existed.
But with her?
It’s not the control I desire. It’s complete chaos. Her chaos.
The kind that tears through my system and leaves nothing intact. The kind that tastes like blood, salt, and satisfaction. She doesn’t beg. She bites. Doesn’t submit. She fucking dares. And I can’t get enough.
She makes me forget everything except her. The heat of her breath against my jaw, the feral noise she makes just before she climaxes, the scrape of her nails as she pulls me deeper, and her damned teeth sinking into my shoulder mid-orgasm as if claiming me. Laughing while she does it.
I think that’s what destroys me the most—the way she laughs while I lose my fucking mind over her.
She shouldn’t be my distraction right now. I have other things on my mind, more important things to get what I want.
This entire empire I was born into once felt like a chain. A crown forged from rusted iron and old blood. Matteo and Alessandro once turned it into a graveyard of loyalty, and now I’m the last one standing with the guts to pull it back from the dirt.
I don’t want the throne. I want the kingdom.
I want to crush whatever’s left of them beneath my boots, rebuild it from bone and fire, and rule it on my fucking terms. Matteo ran.
Alessandro hid. And I’m done waiting. I’ll drag them out myself.
Piece by piece if I have to. Burn down every safehouse, interrogate every rat, bleed every loyalist until I get a scent.
Because this time, I’m prepared to claim the kingdom and crown myself in their ashes.
We had gone in the middle of the night to chase a whisper. A sighting. Another desperate fucking thread I told myself might finally pull everything together.
Some street rat with nicotine-stained fingers and desperation in his eyes swore he saw Matteo near the docks in Saint George. Said he wasn’t alone either. A woman with long black hair.
Emery Moretti.
I remember her from before her father betrayed my uncle. Emery was the only softness Matteo ever showed. She meant everything to him. You didn’t need to know them to see it. You just had to watch the way his eyes locked on hers like she was the only thing keeping him tethered.
I wanted to believe I’d found them. That I’d finally uncovered a truth in this maze of lies. I needed something real to power this plan, something solid I could latch onto. A fucking glimpse of their ghost trail.
But all I got was static and shadows.
I searched every damn corner. Every alley. Every warehouse with busted locks and smashed windows. My men questioned dockworkers. Bribed guards. Paid off a vendor who swore he saw a man matching Matteo’s description boarding onto a ship that left two nights ago.
But there’s no footage. No paper trail. Not even a name on the manifest.
Just a few ghost prints on wet pavement.
Another dead end.
Next time I hear Matteo’s name, someone better be bleeding for it.
I lean my head back against the seat, tension bleeding down my spine.
For a second, I let my eyes slip shut. The hum of the engine fills the silence, as the warm leather presses into my shoulders.
My mind drifts back to the way Bella’s fingers scraped across my chest last night, to the sound she made when she came, to the fucking bite she left near my collarbone.
My phone vibrates against my thigh.
I pull it out, already sensing that something’s wrong.
The screen lights up.
SECURITY ALERT — MOTION DETECTED ON OFFICE CAMERA 3.
My spine snaps straight. The chill hits first, slicing through my chest like cold steel. My blood spikes, rage flickering beneath the surface.
I access the surveillance feed, fingers steady despite the adrenaline rushing through me.
The office. My office.
No one enters there. Not staff, not even the men I trust with my life. That space is locked, monitored, and sacred. And there she is. Isabella. My black-dress-wearing, sharp-tongued, chaos-wrapped-in-skin wife. My political pawn with eyes full of war.
How the hell did she get in there?
The thought hits hard, but I don’t pursue it now. Not yet. I’ll review the footage later. I’ll analyze every second, every angle, every blind spot she might have used. I’ll figure out how she broke through my security and who helped her, if anyone did. That issue can wait.
Right now, I am just watching.
The camera feed remains steady as she moves further into my office. She isn’t rushing or nervous, which annoys me more than anything. She looks relaxed.
That space is sacred. It’s the one room in the house where I let the monster breathe and where I stop pretending I’m anything other than what this world shaped me into.
She stops in front of the back wall.
The corkboard dominates that side of the room, cluttered and honest in its rawness. Pins stuck deep in the surface. Red thread connecting names and places. Photos curling at the edges from too much handling. It’s ugly. Obsessive. Necessary.
Matteo. Alessandro. Emery.
Every contact I’ve questioned.
Every rat I’ve interrogated.
Every loose end I’ve tracked across cities and borders. Safehouses marked. Ports charted. Dates jotted in the margins.
That wall is my mind exposed.
I watch her eyes scan over it as she reads it. Studies it.
She turns away, and for a moment I think she’s finished, but then she pauses.
My fingers curl around the phone as she reaches for the framed photo on the side table. The glass catches the light as she gently lifts it.
My family.
My mother’s smile. My father standing proud. My little sister pressed into my side, laughing at something I said just before the shutter clicked. The last photo ever taken of us together—days before blood soaked the floors and I was shattered into pieces.
Something hot and vicious coils in my gut. I fucking hate that she’s in there. That she’s seeing parts of me I kept locked away for a reason.
She puts the frame back carefully, exactly where it was, down to the millimeter. Her fingers linger for half a second on the frame before she steps back, her eyes flicking once more to the board on the wall, before she turns and walks out.
She shuts the door behind her and I exhale through my teeth, as my pulse still pounds frantically.
I switch cameras.
Rewind. Fast forward.
The feed jumps back, skips, then steadies.
I’m watching the hallway camera now as she comes into view further down the corridor, moving slowly. She pauses when she reaches the corner and glances over her shoulder once. She’s sharp, alert, checking for shadows, guards, and cameras she doesn’t know about.
Smart girl.
She crouches by my office door and I lean forward without realizing it.
I see her hand reach up, fingers going into her hair, and pull something free. A thin metal pin slides between her fingers. She studies the lock for a moment, then gets to work.
Fuck me.
Her hands move with practiced ease. Gentle pressure. Tiny adjustments. She leans her ear near the lock, listening, feeling for the right resistance. It takes her a moment, but not long. Certainly not as long as the men I’ve paid obscene amounts of money to open doors exactly like that.
The lock gives.
My lips part, and my breath hitches before I can stop it.
She straightens up, pushes open the door, and disappears inside.
I sit back hard against the seat.
The pride hits me first; she’s fast, clean, precise, with no wasted movements.
Then the anger crashes in right behind it, because she not only got in there, she cracked my lock faster than the professionals I trust with my life.
I shut off the phone and toss it onto the seat beside me. Hard enough that it bounces once and then lands face down.
My palm brushes my jaw, feeling the rough burn of stubble. I’ve killed for less. But this feels different.
Who the fuck does that?
Isabella Serrano, apparently.
She’s pushing past the lines. She walks into the lion’s den, as if it’s nothing. And fuck me if it doesn’t turn me on.
It’s intense. Twisted and fucked to the core. But Isabella Serrano, or should I say Isabella De Luca now, makes my cock hard. That woman makes my blood run hotter than anyone has ever done. She’s going to learn exactly what happens when you push a man built for war.