Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Lorenzo
The town is so small that it feels insulting.
One main street. A bakery with chipped white paint. A pharmacy that looks as if it has not changed in thirty years.
Nothing about this place suggests Matteo De Luca. That is exactly why he would choose it.
I sit in the drivers seat of the rental car I picked up at the airport this morning. The engine is off. The heat has settled into the glass.
I have been here for less than an hour, and I already hate this place.
It’s too quiet. Too soft around the edges.
The kind of town where people still wave from porches and leave their doors unlocked during the day.
Where the biggest scandal is probably Mr. Whoever sleeping with So-and-so.
Where violence is a foreign concept and men like me do not exist except in movies and nightmares.
My gaze tracks the street with the precision of a predator. Every detail cataloged. Every movement noted. The woman leaving the bakery with a paper bag. The way she smiles at the man holding the door. The ease in her shoulders. The lightness in her step.
This place is safe. A fiction people tell themselves so they can sleep at night. And this entire town reeks of it. This belief that the world is fundamentally good. That bad things happen somewhere else. To someone else. Never here.
They are wrong. Bad things happen everywhere. To everyone. And today, they are happening here.
I shift slightly, the leather creaking beneath me. I need to be ready because somewhere in this pathetic excuse for a town, Matteo De Luca is breathing. Walking. Existing.
My fingers drum once on my thigh.
When I go quiet like this, when I am hunting, the only thing that matters is the kill.
Except there is a part of me—a small, persistent part—that doesn’t want this. Doesn’t want to do what I came here to do.
A memory flickers. A burning building, smoke so thick I could not see or breathe, with the certainty that I was going to die. And then strong hands pulling me out, dragging me through the building and into clean air. Matteo’s hands.
He saved me when he could have left me to burn and now I am here to kill him. The irony is not lost on me.
I exhale slowly, letting the breath leave my lungs in a controlled stream. The conflict settles somewhere deep, where it cannot interfere with what comes next.
This is not personal. It’s just business.
Alessandro is circling again, rebuilding through whispers and old debts, while I’m still cleaning up the ashes Matteo left behind.
I know what it means if Matteo is still alive and free as his father starts making moves.
It means war. It means divided loyalty. It means every bastard who once bent the knee to the De Luca name will start choosing sides all over again. And I cannot allow that.
I lean forward slightly, my gaze fixed on the main street.
The cafe door up ahead opens. Every muscle in my body goes still as I see Matteo step out first.
For half a second, all I do is stare.
He looks different. Not enough to soften him, but enough to make me feel the time between now and the man I used to know.
His hair is longer, or maybe that is just the shadow of whatever life he has been living out here in this forgotten corner of the world.
His jaw is rough with stubble, unkempt in a way the old Matteo would never have tolerated.
But he is still Matteo. Still broad through the shoulders.
Still built as if God made him for bloodshed, with that same cold gravity that bends around him even out here in the middle of nowhere.
The kind of presence that does not ask for attention; it commands it without a single word.
He moves with the same controlled precision I remember.
A man who knows exactly how much force he can deliver and exactly when to deliver it.
In the way his eyes sweep the street before his body fully commits to the space.
In the way his hand stays close to his side, where a weapon would sit if he were carrying one.
Knowing Matteo, he probably is carrying one.
Emery steps out behind him. And fuck. She is heavily pregnant. Far enough along that there is no mistaking what she is to him now. Not just the girl he burned everything for or the woman he chose over blood, legacy, and every fucking thing that should have mattered more.
She is his future. His weakness. His whole goddamn heart, walking outside his body.
Matteo turns back immediately. One hand is already reaching for her as she steps down onto the sidewalk.
His palm settles at the base of her spine with quiet ease.
Protective and possessive in a way that doesn’t look forced.
It looks natural. Automatic. As if his body knows where hers needs him before she even asks.
Emery says something to him, causing Matteo to look down at her.
And there it is. That look.
I have seen Matteo with blood on his hands and a gun pressed to a man’s skull. I have seen him walk into rooms full of armed men and leave them quieter than churches. And I have seen him destroy lives with a nod and end empires with a single violent choice that would break lesser men.
None of that unsettles me as much as the way he looks at her does. Because this is real. Not lust or some passing weakness men use to excuse the stupid shit they do for pretty women.
This is love, raw and impossible to miss.
It sits in his face when he watches her steady herself on the curb. It lives in the hand he keeps on her back or in the one that touches her swollen belly, as if she were made of something fragile, even though I know damn well Emery Moretti is anything but fragile.
He would burn this entire town to the ground to keep her safe.
I hate it instantly because I understand what it means. He didn’t just choose her in a moment of weakness. He keeps choosing her every day, which makes him more dangerous now than he ever was.
A man with nothing to lose is reckless, unpredictable, and easy to manipulate because he does not care what happens to him.
But a man with everything to lose. That man is a fucking nightmare.
That man will see you coming from a mile away. He will do anything to protect what is his, cross any line, and break any rule. And he will spill any amount of blood to keep his world intact.
Matteo has everything to lose now. The woman he loves. The child she carries. The life they are building in this quiet little town where no one knows who he used to be.
He will not let me take that from him, which means this is going to be harder than I thought.
When I come for him, he is not going to run. He is going to stand his ground and make me earn every inch of blood I take from him.
That was the job. Find him. End it. Cut the head off this thing before Alessandro can use it to start a war I am not willing to lose.
It should be simple. Clean. Efficient. One bullet. One body. One less problem standing between me and the empire I am building.
Then why the fuck does it not feel simple?
Maybe it is something obscene about seeing him this human.
Not the heir. Just a man standing in the sun with Emery beside him.
He touches her stomach before he does anything else.
A life carved out of the wreckage he left the rest of us standing in.
A life that looks nothing like the one his father built for him.
The one I am supposed to protect by erasing him from existence.
And it’s possible that is what sits wrong in my chest. The fact that he got out. That he chose something softer than power and somehow made it work. That he walked away from everything we were taught to want and found something better on the other side.
Or maybe it is simpler than that. Maybe it is just how he looks at her.
I think of Bella before I can stop myself. The one thing in my life that doesn’t make sense yet makes more sense than anything else ever has.
I think about how I would burn the world to ash if anyone tried to take her from me.
How I would hunt down every man who put fear in her eyes and make them beg for death before I granted it.
How there is no line I would not cross for her.
No rule I would not break. No amount of blood I would not spill to keep her safe.
I would gut anyone who fucking hurt her, and I would do it with a smile on my face.
Matteo and Emery turn down a side street next to the old florist shop.
I move before I can think better of it. The car door opens, and I step out.
The gun sits heavy at my back, comforting in the way only a weapon can be after a lifetime of learning how to use it.
My shoes hit the pavement soundlessly. I keep my head down and cross the street, moving fast enough to close the distance, slow enough not to draw eyes.
A man out for a walk. Nothing more, nothing less.
By the time I reach the side street, they are gone.
The lane is narrow and quiet. Cobblestones instead of asphalt.
Low fences with overgrown hedges spilling over the top in wild tangles of green.
Doorways recessed into old stone buildings.
Alcoves that could hide a body if you knew how to use them.
Shadows pool in corners where the sun doesn’t quite reach.
A hundred places to disappear. A thousand ways to vanish if you know what you are doing. Matteo knows what he is doing.
There is no sign of him or Emery.
I keep going, my senses sharpened. Every nerve in my body tuned to the space around me. This is the part I trust. The thing violence built into me. The thing that knows when the air shifts and death is close enough to taste.
It has kept me alive this long and it will keep me alive now.
I turn the next corner and find that the street is empty, too. It’s wider than the last, but just as deserted. For one brief, vicious second, anger flares in me at the fact that he is still somehow a wisp of smoke, even though he was standing in front of me.
“You really should stop following people, Lorenzo.”
Cold metal presses against the base of my skull. Positioned exactly where it needs to be to end me before I can turn around.
I smile before I can stop myself. Matteo has always been better at this than anyone. At turning the hunt back on the hunter before they even realize they have been made.
He may have gone soft, but he hasn’t lost his edge. His instincts remain. So does the ability to put a gun to a man’s head and mean it.
Respect flickers through me despite the gun to my head, because this is the Matteo I remember. And men die when they forget that.