Luca
She flinched.
At me.
At my hand as I raised it to touch her gently.
Fuck. It was an even bigger insult than anything her words could have conjured up.
It’s as if the tattoo on my arm starts to glow, reminding me of Stephano and how fucked up he is.
Steph doesn’t talk, but I know something happened to make him lose equilibrium when we were around seven years old.
Without a doubt, our fucknut dad was involved, and for years, I’ve waited for him to open up and tell me.
Our dad walked around with a shiner for a week and ever since, Steph punished himself, fought with himself for years to contain the rage awoken in him one night when everybody else was asleep.
We are close, but some secrets are so dark, you don’t even share them with your twin, and I get that. But suddenly, I also get what drove his anger. I can see where it’s coming from—maybe for the first time in my life—in the way Milana flinched, expecting me to hurt her.
Heat still glows on my fingertips from touching her. Delicate soft skin in such contrast to her harsh words, bracing for a slap some men wouldn’t hesitate to hand out after being insulted like that.
Red hot fury pulses through me, leaving me cold. If that fucker of an ex hit her, abused her—
What else did he do to humiliate and degrade her?
That video of her lives in my mind rent-free, and taking unauthorized nudes and posting them on porn sites is the deepest intimacy betrayal.
He took something beautiful and pure and trashed it as if it were meaningless.
No wonder Milana is broken and bitter. So freaking bitter.
She already said she’ll never trust a man again and I don’t blame her. And if he hurt her—fuck.
Wait until I find him.
I always wanted to know who filmed her, who was behind all those photos, but I couldn’t track her down and ask.
I couldn’t ask Ivan Petrov either, although he was on my suspect list at first. It wouldn’t be the first time some fucker tried to play innocent by requesting a scrub of the content he posted himself.
Now I know for sure Petrov had nothing to do with filming or uploading those images.
I always thought he was trying to protect his mistress… who turned out to be his sister.
This whole situation is personal now. She’s my wife. A Scalera. No Scalera wife, sister, or daughter will ever live through that again. Not while I’m breathing.
I smirk, but it’s joyless. Not stuck in the fucking Mafia for nothing. I’d love a little side quest to find this fucker and cut him to pieces. It is, after all, in my blood.
With Milana upstairs in the main cabin still having dinner, I keep listening out for her, wanting to constantly check in to make sure she’s okay.
At some point, I hear footsteps pass my door to the Luca cabin, pause for a split second, but nobody knocks.
It’s only much later that I head back up to the deck to check in with the steward and make sure she ate and went to bed.
Today was too much, so I let her be, wanting her to digest in peace everything that’s happened. Make that phone call to Russia she was so desperate to make, in the privacy of her cabin…if she dared, neurotic as she is.
The next morning, I’m sitting on the deck, working as I usually do at this time. To be honest, I’m bored as fuck. I stuck to my routine even out at sea and did some weights and ran on the treadmill, anything to kill time. There’s still no sign of Milana.
New day, new page. I want her to come out and challenge me, spar with me and rile me up so I have reason to do the same: mess with her and see if I can make her laugh, watch her bite her bottom lip because she doesn’t want to fall for my stupid jokes.
My promise that she’ll still beg for sex was a challenge I set myself.
Maybe it was an idiotic move, but the only way a woman like Milana will give herself to a man ever again is either in a fit of passion, or out of deepest love.
Get my little witch into a fit of passion? No problem.
Make her fall in real, honest-to-God love with me? Fuck. Not that easy. Not with the way she’s been betrayed.
It still bothers me how her mood shifted last night after she got that message from Russia.
The evening promised to be enjoyable, with small talk about Game of Thrones and her teasing me back.
That message…she said there’s someone in her life, but not in the way I’d think.
She seems to be done with men, so to understand what she meant, I’m going to have to get to the bottom of that statement.
It’s almost nine in the morning when the steward comes around with another offer of coffee.
“Has Mrs. Scalera requested anything?” I ask him.
“Not yet, sir.”
“I’ll take some coffee down to her.” Tempt her out for breakfast. I must check in on her. What if she managed to off herself during the night? Wouldn’t be the first woman to be that desperate.
I’m still waiting for the steward to prepare the coffee tray when my phone vibrates. Matteo. Fuck. Now my big brother is going to check in with me. Ask a bunch of awkward-as-fuck questions about my wedding night and take the piss out of me for not sleeping with my bride.
“Matty,” I say, answering with a sigh, bracing myself. “What’s up?”
“Where are you?”
“No clue. Open ocean, somewhere between Boston and New York. We’re just chilling. Do you want co-ordinates—”
“Fuck, Luca. I just had a call from Ivan Petrov.”
My stomach turns. Gabi.
No.
No-no-no.
“What’s going on?” I ask, my pulse immediately stuck in my throat. If that fucker Petrov hurt her— “Is she okay?”
“For now. I don’t know what went down last night, but Petrov called me to tell me all the signs are there that Gabriella is being hunted.”
Hunted. I push my laptop to the side and drop my head in my palm. Fucking knew it. Would have called it too, if I’d had more information. “What signs? Who? What for?”
“We’re not sure. Petrov rambled something about Mom’s childhood Bible, code words hidden in it. Benedict is going to look at it—”
As he breaks off, in my mind’s eye, I see the exhaustion on his face. Nothing’s been easy since he became the Don, and I called it days ago, telling him things weren’t under control.
“This has to do with Mother Lucia’s murder? Someone else was looking for Gabi?”
“Yes. Now we know it was Russians.”
“Russians? How? No fucking way.”
“Yeah. I don’t have the exact details, but Petrov hinted that Gabriella is physically marked in some way. A way known amongst the Bratva—”
“What the actual fuck, bro?” I bark as I shoot out of my seat, fisting my hair, tugging at the strands. I’ve seen some dark shit in my life, and my mind doesn’t need to wander far to know all the ways in which Gabriella could have been mutilated. “Is she okay?”
He audibly swallows and sighs. “I’m not sure, but Randazzo had the same—”
“Fuck Randazzo. He only stuck to tattoos. Franco Fiore sliced Gigi up—”
“You don’t know—”
“I know.” I haven’t seen Gigi’s scars, but I know Stephano like I know myself. His words that day in the warehouse to Franco still haunt me. You cut into her flesh, leaving a mark I’ll still erase. There’s no way to erase scarification. You can’t laser that shit away.
“Which fucking Russians have been messing with our little sister?” I hiss, dread cascading through me.
“We don’t know. Gabi doesn’t recall, either. She was out of it and—” He breaks off to drag in a strangled breath. “Only thirteen.”
“What the fuck? Jesus.” I sink back in a chair, my blood seeming to expand in my veins, nowhere to go, making me claustrophobic with shock. “Who else knows? Who the fuck else was there?”
Matteo sighs, and the weight of it all seems to circle like fog all around me.
“Randazzo was involved. Promised her to this Russian as his bride when she was older.”
Fucking Randazzo.
“I’m surprised this Russian bothered to wait,” I choke out.
A man marking a thirteen-year-old as his future bride has no scruples.
And this is what I meant about us skirting around what really happened to Gabriella in the twenty-two years we didn’t have her under our wing.
Of course Randazzo was there. Everything circles back to him.
“Is she safe with Petrov? Beyond me having Milana?”
“Yes. Ivan sounded genuinely concerned, protective and fucking pissed off, wanting to get to the bottom of this too.”
I saw the look in Petrov’s eyes when he and Gabriella tied the knot: he cares for her. I bet he is as fucked off by this as we are. I rub with a knuckle at my forehead, trying to digest this mind fuck. “What are your plans?”
“We plan to bring Randazzo’s tattoo artist over. She might know something. That’s what we can do from our side.”
He grows quiet, and the tension stretches as all the questions he wants to ask hover between us.
Milana.
She could have the same marking. She’s a born and bred Bratva princess, after all.
She might even have an idea who is behind this.
But how did Il Consiglio’s world get woven into that of the fucking Bratva?
So subtly, thread by thread, row by row, knot by knot, until the only way to get out is to destroy the whole.
“I’ll see what Milana knows,” I say, finally having a real reason to barge into my wife’s cabin. “Keep me posted.”