Chapter 22
22
CELIA
I hadn’t been back to my family’s summer house since I lost David.
It had been my mother’s, her house before she married my father. I wondered what that was like, having your very own home as a woman, not living with either your father or your husband. I wondered how I would live my life if I chose for myself.
Or would I choose these men over my freedom?
My hands shook on the steering wheel. What did I want anymore?
The house rose out of the night, weathered like bone. The wheels crunched over the gravel and when I stopped the car, I got out and cast a look over the half-destroyed vehicle. Blood still streaked the windshield and there were bits that must be Royal stuck to the grill in the front. My stomach reeled as if I were falling.
“Can one of you take care of the car?” I asked. “After we talk.”
“We’ll dispose of it,” Luca promised.
I shuddered, surprising myself. I’d planned to kill Royal for a long time. There was still something about taking a human life that felt disturbing. It could never be undone.
But I thought my mourning period would be brief.
“Are you all right?” Dante asked me. “Can I carry you?”
“I’m…” I started to say I was fine automatically, but I was wobbly. Having Luca dig the tracker out of my skin had been painful and had left me feeling weaker than ever.
I’d wrapped it in Gabriel’s tie and dropped it off for him to find with a note. That part had left me feeling stronger.
Dante picked me up. I put my arms around his neck, still holding the gun in one hand. He smiled down at me anyway.
He carried me inside, and pulled the drape off the couch where once, the two of us had traded fumbling kisses. After he set me down gently, he sat down beside me
In the distance, I could hear Luca washing up, getting my blood off his hands from digging out the tracker and cleaning up the wound. Then he walked back into the room, drying his hands on his jeans.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, “And then I can tell you what needs to happen for you to even think you might get to touch me again one day.”
Luca eyed the gun as he sat down across from me, spreading his arms across the back of the couch. “I remember the last time you pulled a gun on me.”
“So do I, which is why I haven’t put it down.” I flashed him a toothy smile. “I would’ve set it down if it were just me and Dante.”
Luca whistled. “Hurtful.”
“But deserved. Dante, tell me everything.” I chewed my lower lip. “Start with what happened the day I thought you died.”
“The last time I saw you, Amato had you.” Dante’s voice was full of pain.
“Don’t feel so guilty, Dante,” I told him. “I wasn’t the one who was shot in the face.”
He shook his head. “It was just a blank. Gabriel took control of everything, beating me to the edge of unconsciousness. He always carried a few blanks. He knew he could shoot me and get away with it.”
The thought of Dante in so much pain—at his own brother’s hands—made me close my eyes to block out the image. “Did you know what his plan was?”
“No.” Dante shook his head. “With Gabriel…sometimes it’s hard to be a hundred percent sure if he’s on your side. He gets that cold look in his eyes and you just…”
“But he is,” Luca interrupted. “He’s a prick who will do things no one else will do, but for the people he loves…he’s always looking out for them in his own way.”
Dante scoffed. “That’s easy to say when you didn’t see him standing above you with a gun, right before you blacked out.”
“So, he shot you with a blank.” I prompted him.
“My face was damaged by the beating. He made someone else look like me for the funeral. I don’t know who, or how, and I don’t think I want to know.”
“Gabriel and I started planning then,” Luca said. “We couldn’t see Dante as he was recovering on the other side of the country. He had all these surgeries to reconstruct his face. And we had to make sure no one could connect him to us. It felt like we really had lost him.”
Dante shook his head, the pain of those days written across his face. To me, he said, “I was so worried about you.”
“And we didn’t trust him not to come racing back to find you, either,” Luca said.
“Needless to say…you’re not the first of Gabriel’s prisoners. And not the first one he’s sent Luca to take care of,” Dante told me.
Cold spread through my stomach as he confirmed what I’d thought.
Luca kidnapping me had always been Gabriel’s plan. He had probably even manipulated my “stalker”, ordering him into place and then killing him.
“Gabriel and I had a big public falling out, which wasn’t hard to convince people of, given he’d seemed to shoot his own brother to death,” Luca said. “I disappeared. A lot of people thought Gabriel had killed me too.”
Luca tapped his jaw. “I had a few alterations done too so no one would recognize me, and I could work my way up in Mal’s organization. I even have your family’s tattoo, which is…unpleasant.” He rolled up his sleeve to show me the family mark that Royal had carried too.
“And so, you came into my life, Luca.”
“I worked hard to get into your life, starlight.” He gave me a wink.
“Why?” I demanded.
“Because I begged them to protect you,” Dante said. “That was always more important to me than revenge.”
“This is what you call protecting me?”
“Yes,” Dante said. “It’s been ugly, and I didn’t want everything to go the way it did.” He managed not to look at Luca. “But you’re out of that house. And Gabriel’s gotten the chance to get to know you.”
“Gabriel saw the potential of marrying you to have a valid claim to take over your family once Mal and Royal were dead,” Luca said bluntly.
“And how the hell could you let Gabriel marry me when you and I…” I trailed off, my eyes filling with hot tears. I couldn’t see Dante through the blur of emotion.
“Whoever’s ring is on your finger…I still have you.” Dante reached out and touched my face, wiping away my tears. His own voice sounded choked. “That’s all that matters to me. I don’t need anything but to see your face every day.”
Luca scoffed. “That’s not very ambitious. I want to do more than see her face every day, and I’m not the one who’s been obsessed with her since I was fifteen.”
“Right. You ignored me when we were all in school.” I reminded him. What changed?
“I don’t ignore you anymore, do I?” Luca asked. “Once you stopped being interested in me, when we were kids, I felt this huge sense of loss. I missed your smile, the way you challenged me, the way people thought you were so icy, but there was so much warmth behind your smile when you knew someone.”
His deep green eyes were intense, honest. For once, Luca wasn’t teasing me.
“I wouldn’t do anything about it then because I knew how much you and Dante loved each other. But now…I don’t think I have to give up my claim on you just because he loves you. We can both love you.” Luca’s mischievous smile teased across his lips. “It seems like it’s going to take more than one of us to keep you safe and satisfied, anyway.”
The memory of Gabriel struck me, the conversation we’d had about my youthful crush. “Gabriel said the same thing about missing me once I stopped hanging around when we were kids. He was telling me your story, wasn’t he?”
Luca looked smug again, returning to his natural state as he flashed me an irresistible smile. “He was trying to be charming. He had to borrow from me.”
“I think maybe you’re hyping yourself up a bit too much,” I told him, but I didn’t mean it.
“I think Gabriel’s been falling for you despite himself, though,” Dante said.
“Because sticking someone in a cage and threatening them is a sign of affection?”
“For Gabriel? Yes.” Dante’s voice was dry. “I have firsthand experience. He’s a dick, but he’d do anything for Luca and me.”
I probed my head with my fingertips. “You’re all exhausting. I need to think. But first…just tell me what the plan was.”
“I’d work my way up on the inside of your father’s organization and help maneuver things. Gabriel would win your father over and approach him to marry you when the time was right. We needed to engineer a situation that would push your father over the edge, feeling as if he were under attack and needed new allies.”
“So, you terrorized me by sending a kidnapper after me, then murdered the stupid bastard,” I said.
“He was not a good man, Celia. You don’t have to feel bad for him.”
“I don’t. I feel bad for me . That was terrifying, and then you held me like you were my savior?—”
“I want to be.”
“No thanks, Luca. Princesses always have to save themselves.” I had to keep us on track. I couldn’t stop thinking, though, about how the three of them had a plan that might’ve worked to rescue me—if I’d known about it. If I hadn’t my own plans to save myself. “That let you maneuver your way into being my new bodyguard. Amato disappearing…anything you want to tell me about that?”
“That was us.” Luca didn’t look apologetic. “I enjoyed watching Dante kill him.”
“Good.” I wasn’t sad at all about that death. “So now Gabriel thinks he’s going to become head of my family when my father dies, hm?”
“When he kills him.”
“I’d like to be the one who kills him, actually. I’d like to put the crown on my own head. And then, if you help me…maybe we can all have a future together. I don’t want to be Gabriel’s pet.”
Not a pet. Never a pet.
But I did want to be Gabriel’s and Dante’s and Luca’s.
These men were dangerous and terrible and mine .
But first, we needed to set some boundaries, and they needed to learn some lessons.