Chapter 33 Luca
LUCA
The Andretti Grand sits on the south end of the Strip like a middle finger wrapped in Italian marble.
I’ve been inside this building a thousand times. Walked through the lobby, cut through the casino floor. Never thought twice about it.
A month ago, I wouldn’t have noticed the noise.
Tonight, it’s deafening. Slot machines screaming, chips cracking together, bass thumping from somewhere above, all of it bouncing off marble and glass and hitting me like a wall.
The air is freezing and recycled and smells like perfume and whiskey and money.
No salt. No sand. No wind off the water.
I miss the beach house so viscerally it catches me off guard.
The restaurant is half full. Couples, business dinners, a table of women celebrating something with too much prosecco.
Normal people doing normal things twenty yards from a back room where my father decides who lives and who doesn’t.
I used to be one of the people who belonged here.
Now I feel like I’m visiting from somewhere else.
I nod to the soldier posted outside the private dining room door. He steps aside without a word.
Lorenzo Andretti sits at the head of a table that could seat twelve. He’s using about two feet of it. Espresso cup, a stack of papers, a glass of something amber barely touched. Reading glasses low on his nose. He doesn’t look up immediately.
Dario’s here too, standing near the window with his arms crossed. He looks at me the way you look at someone who’s shown up to a funeral in the wrong clothes. Not surprised I’m here. Surprised I have the nerve to look like I’m fine.
Paolo is in a chair against the wall, legs crossed at the ankle, watching me come through the door with an expression I can’t quite read. He gives me one small nod.
Then my father looks up. Takes off his glasses. Sets them down slowly enough that the click of the frames on the table sounds deliberate.
I feel about sixteen.
My father doesn’t stand. Doesn’t smile. Doesn’t say welcome home.
He just sets down his espresso cup and says, “Well. The prodigal son returns.”
I let the door swing shut behind me. “Nice to see you too, Dad.”
He studies me for a long moment, taking in the healed cut over my brow, the longer hair, whatever else he thinks my face might tell him. “Do you have any idea,” he says at last, calm and dangerous, “what kind of chaos you created by disappearing for nearly a month?”
My voice comes out rougher than I want. “I’ve got a decent guess.”
“Do you?” He folds his hands loosely in his lap. “Because from where I’m sitting, it appears you went off-grid in the middle of a war, ignored every order given to you, and then strolled back into my city when it suited you.”
Dario shifts by the window. “That about covers it.”
My pulse is beating so hard in my neck it feels visible. I had a whole speech worked out on the plane. Not a rehearsed one, exactly, because I’m not that organized, but enough of one to keep myself from sounding like a complete asshole. It evaporates the second I look at my father.
Great. Winging it in front of Lorenzo Andretti. What could go wrong?
So I opt for the truth.
“There was a storm the night I went out there,” I say. “Boat flipped. I took the mast to the head and went overboard.”
Silence. The espresso machine behind the bar hisses faintly, filling the gap where words should be.
Then Dario mutters, “Jesus Christ.”
My father’s eyes flick over my face, sharp and fast, as if checking for damage. “And after that?”
“I don’t remember much of the first day. Not clearly. I woke up on a beach with a concussion, a busted wrist, and no idea who I was.”
Dario stares at me. “You expect us to believe you had movie-of-the-week amnesia?”
“I don’t give a shit what it sounds like. It happened.”
He takes a step forward. “Then the minute you remembered, you should’ve called.”
“I know.”
The words land hard because I mean them. Dario hears it. So does my father. The room stills a little.
Lorenzo’s gaze narrows. “But you didn’t.”
“No.” I drag in a breath. My hands want to do something stupid, like fidget or clench or broadcast every nerve in my body to the room. I force them still. “Because by the time I remembered enough to understand what was going on, there was something else you needed to hear first.”
His brows lift just a fraction. “Go on.”
“Natalia Kozlov saved my life,” I say. “She found me on the beach. She took me in. Stitched me up. Fed me. Housed me. Protected me before she had any idea who I was. Before I had any idea who I was.”
Dario’s jaw tightens. Paolo looks down once, then back at me.
“And when you remembered?” Lorenzo asks.
“I didn’t kill her.”
The room gets very, very still.
“Because I’m not going to. And no one else is either.” It takes everything I have not to look away. My father doesn’t blink first. Never has. “She’s not what we thought. She’s not a player in this. She’s a woman her father uses as a bargaining chip, and she saved my life when she had no reason to.”
Lorenzo drops his feet and stands slowly. The chair doesn’t make a sound. Everything about my father is controlled, measured, a man who has been running a machine for thirty years and knows exactly how much pressure to apply.
“You had one job.”
“I know.”
“One.” He steps around the table. Not toward me, exactly.
Just into the open space between us, where the overhead light catches the silver at his temples and the muffled noise of the casino hums somewhere outside, steady as a pulse.
“I trusted you with it because you asked me to. You came to me and said you could handle it. You wanted to prove yourself.” His mouth flattens. “Do you remember that?”
Every word is a blade, and every blade finds the old wound.
“I remember.”
“Instead, you disappeared, played house with the enemy, and came back telling me the daughter of Anton Kozlov should be under Andretti protection.”
“Yes.” My throat is dry. I clench my back teeth to keep from clearing it.
“So what am I looking at right now? A man who proved himself, or a man the Kozlov girl turned inside out in three weeks?”
That one hits. I feel it in my sternum, a dull, sick thud that spreads outward like a bruise forming in real time. Part of me wants to make a joke, deflect, buy myself time with sarcasm because that’s the move I know, the one that always works until it doesn’t.
I breathe through it.
“You’re looking at the only person in this room who’s been inside the Kozlov world in the last month,” I fire back. “And I brought something back.”
“Luca.” Dario takes a step away from the window, his voice hard. “You’re standing in front of Dad, telling him you caught feelings for the target, and you think he wants to hear anything else from you?”
I look at my brother. Hold the stare long enough that he knows I’m not dodging it.
“I do.”
Dario’s mouth thins. He wants to say more. I can see it loaded up behind his teeth. But he steps back, and that’s close enough to permission.
I turn my attention back to Lorenzo.
“Kozlov is building an alliance with a Colombian. Luis Restrepo.”
Dario’s arms uncross. My father’s chin lifts the way it does when new information rearranges the board he’s been playing on.
“Kozlov is marrying Natalia off to him to seal the deal.” Every set of eyes in the room lands on me at once. “The Colombians are sending Kozlov a large shipment of weapons as a show of good faith.”
“And you know this how?” Lorenzo’s voice is sharp.
“Because Natalia told me.”
He scoffs.
“And she’s willing to help us take him down.”
“Willing.” Lorenzo repeats the word like he’s testing it for poison. “The Pakhan’s daughter is willing to betray her own father.”
“Her father has done horrible things. She doesn’t owe him loyalty. She owes him nothing.”
My father stares at me. I can see the calculation happening. I can see him weighing the intel against the source, the source against my judgment, my judgment against years of evidence that I’m the son who finds new and creative ways to disappoint him.
“You’ve been compromised,” he says flatly. “You know that.”
“I know what it looks like.”
“It looks like the Kozlov girl wrapped you around her finger and now you’re standing in my restaurant asking me to bet this family on it.”
“Then you’re not listening.” I don’t raise my voice, but I don’t soften it either.
The back of my shirt is damp. Every muscle from my shoulders to my lower back has been locked tight since I walked through that door and I’m starting to feel it, a dull burn like holding a position too long at the gym.
“Natalia’s not lying, and this is something we can use.
If Kozlov’s trying to lock in an alliance like that, the first transaction matters.
If it goes bad, trust blows up before it’s built. ”
My father says nothing. Which, with Lorenzo, can mean anything from “keep talking” to “I’m deciding how angry to be.”
I keep talking.
“We’ve been hitting them like a hammer for two years, and they keep absorbing it. This is the first crack we’ve had, and I’m handing it to you.”
I press on. “Natalia is willing to help us. She thinks she can find out more about the shipment, and if she does, we can use it.”
Dario scoffs. “That’s a lot of if for a woman you’ve known five minutes.”
“I know enough.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I know she wants out. I know her father is selling her to that cartel bastard like she’s part of the cargo. I know she’s more scared of going back to that house than she ever was of me. That enough for you?”
Dario opens his mouth. Shuts it. That’s a first.
Lorenzo turns his back to me. Walks to the window. The Strip glows below, all neon and motion.
“Santino would have liked this plan,” I say.
He goes rigid. His hand, resting on the windowsill, presses flat against the marble. The knuckles go white.
“Don’t.”