16. Luca
LUCA
When Milana joins me in the main cabin half an hour later, I’ve had time to digest our tug-of-war exchange. She’s dried her hair, and it hangs in silky waves down her back. The light blue cashmere sweater she’s wearing accentuates the stark blue of her eyes, rimmed by thick lashes.
My wife. Delicate. Beautiful. On guard. Anxious, frightened—desperate—but she’s trying not to give it away. But I can read her easily. I’ve honed my sixth sense to people’s emotional state for years.
It’s weird how an obscure sex diet—anything goes, as long as nobody knows who the fuck you are, therefore you’ll be confined to this dark room—can fine-tune you to sensing human emotions.
Our fucked-up Don and father made sure to introduce me to this concept early and ensured I never ventured out into the light.
Maybe I do have a special skill—I’ve just never needed to use it outside of the black-out room where I’d wait for a woman to walk in, feeling her way to me, following my quiet instructions, reaching out, touching in the dark, exploring, daring to do things with me in complete anonymity.
Me cracking jokes to put her at ease. After all, I also wanted to have fun.
Just a man, a walking erection with tension that found one true escape.
In the dark, I could be someone else too.
We all have secrets, desires, insecurities. I’ve learned to navigate around all of them, right to a woman’s core, to the heart of her sensuality and her forbidden fantasies that trigger the deepest release.
And I’m fucking good at it. This is how I’m going to lure my wife to me, allow her to find her own way to me in the dark, give up her secrets one by one, hand them over, treasures to guard.
Only this time, I get to look my wife in the eye, see her reaction instead of just sensing it, watch her arousal compound as I spur it on, gaze at her as she comes for me.
I can’t fucking wait, but my princess needs patience, and that’s another thing my dark-room adventures have taught me in spades.
Plus foreplay. Restraint. And stamina. All in endless amounts.
She sits down next to me on the sofa, and as her face comes into profile, it hits me: this is why I’m obsessed with that video of hers.
Not only because it isn’t porn, scripted and staged.
Our camgirls do the same. It’s all just an act.
But with Milana, I saw sex translated into love for the first time, from her side at least. As for the death-row fucker who filmed her, he’ll still pay… with his life.
“Is there more news?” she asks as she curls her feet under her.
“No, but we’re working on it.” I put my laptop aside, wave for the steward to bring breakfast over to the coffee table, and then tell him to leave.
Her eyes track the steward as he walks out to the deck and closes the sliding door behind him.
“How are you working on it?” she asks, reaching for the fruit platter.
“There’s a connection between the Italian Mafia and some Bratva member our sister got promised to. We are—sadly—related to the fucker who is the Italian piece of the puzzle. We need to figure out who the Bratva pieces are and how the whole lot fits together.”
“We?” she asks, then bites into a slice of pineapple.
“My brothers. You. Your brother. All of us. We’re a team now, princess, and this is my sister we’re talking about.” I catch the flash of dismay in her eyes. “I know this isn’t what you’ve been plotting, but you’re in it now.”
“I haven’t been plotting.”
“Oh, you’ve been plotting so hard, fumes from that factory in your head are escaping your ears.”
She gives me the stink eye, but it has a sparkle in it as she takes another bite. She chews, pensively, then nods.
“Okay. This is what I know for sure.” She reaches for a napkin.
“Even before the fall of the Berlin wall, various Bratva factions had established trade routes outside the old Communist bloc. When the wall fell, things became easier. This is one of the reasons my dad came to America. But you know how it goes. Sanctions are the one thing Russians have always had to deal with, but the Bratva has ways and means of circumventing all of them, most of them illegal.”
“Sounds like your standard villain origin story.”
“Oh, we’re all the same.” She shrugs as if this is just fact, which it is.
“A lot of people became very rich, the oligarchs of our time, but you know the saying: it’s never enough because the world is constantly shifting, changing.
In Russia, things changed, but they’re still the same.
You still buy your way in and out of power.
My dad saw this coming and made the decision to leave when the wall fell to take his chances here for a better life. For freedom for his children.”
“I see. I won’t say my dad’s motives for leaving Sicily were that noble. In any case, how would the Bratva connect with the Italian Mafia?”
“The usual,” she says with a shrug. “Your Mafia connection and whichever Bratva group was involved would have been in a merger of sorts, giving each other a helping hand, protection on home turf, but most importantly, access to networks hard to obtain as an outsider. Gabriella served as security on the deal. As usual. A woman is just a powerless little pawn.”
“Sweet,” I say, but her words are bitter. “Which Bratva are we talking about?”
“Really? Aren’t Dons a dime a dozen? It’s the same for the Bratva. Pakhans here, there, everywhere.” She chooses a croissant from the basket on the coffee table, puts it on a side plate and places it in her lap.
I smirk. “Come now, Milana, not in the Il Consiglio orbit. Not in Randazzo’s orbit. He was the top dog in Italy.”
“And where is this Randazzo now?”
“Died like a dog, as he deserved. Earlier this year.” I don’t share more. We’re not there yet. “He was into human trafficking. Sex trafficking. Drugs. Any Russians you know who has a flair for the same? Would like a piece of the Italian pie? Or shall we go with a slice of the pizza?”
“You know the Petrov Bratva isn’t into any of that, right?”
“I’d hope not.” It might have been the old Don’s springboard into business when he arrived in America, but Matteo started that deep cleanse over a decade ago.
Now’s the time to say what I really would have said last night if the tension between us hadn’t reached boiling point.
“We host camgirl sites, but that’s where it ends.
And nobody is going to convince me it’s fucked up to have people working—anonymously—from the safety of their homes, doing a job that allows them to catch a break, pay for their kids’ kindergarten, or whatever other reason they have for choosing to make porn.
It’s not our place to judge other people’s choices here. ”
And some of them become very rich and money savvy, pulling their families out of generational poverty. I’m not messing with any of that ever.
Her hands still where she’s peeling the croissant to pieces. “I agree with you.”
“You do?” I expected her to contradict me, so her calm response leaves me stunned.
“I’m a woman, Luca, and I’ve already had to ask you for money for tampons.”
Fuck my life. I want to touch her hand, to reassure her somehow, but this conversation is too important to let it get derailed now.
“I’m working on it, okay?” I say, keeping to myself that addressing her money issues was something I already arranged two days ago.
“Now, which Bratva, princess? Tell me what you know.”
She bites her lip and shakes her head, staring at me. “The Sointsev Bratva? Orekolov, maybe. Chertnikov…even the Tambovs. Honestly, I don’t know.”
“Do any of them mark their women?” I ask, coming back to the reason we’re having this conversation in the first place.
“What type of marking? Did Ivan elaborate?”
“No. He shared no details. I can easily describe the tattoos Randazzo forced on his prostitutes, or the scarification some other Mafia are into. No details means the marking isn’t visible in places that are generally seen in public. It’ll be somewhere more private.”
I have a good inkling what and where it could be, but I’m not going there yet. If she knows, let her tell me. She will, soon enough.
A blush blooms on her cheeks, and she drops her gaze to the croissant she’s shredded without taking a single bite.
“No, I have no idea.”
And that, right there, is a lie.