Chapter 31 - Luca
Faith kneels at her mother’s grave, arranging yellow roses.
We’ve been coming here together, though not regularly.
Sometimes weekly when the ghosts get loud, sometimes not for a month when the living demand too much attention.
The smell of earth and roses mingles with her jasmine perfume, making my chest tight with possession.
My body registers the threat before my conscious mind: elevated breathing from behind the monument twenty feet northeast, the subtle click of an expensive camera shutter. Someone thinks they're clever, thinks they're invisible.
I'm behind him in three seconds, my hand closing around his throat before he can lower the camera. The telephoto lens dangles from its strap as I press the PI against the tree, bark rough against his expensive jacket.
He tries to speak but I'm controlling his airflow too precisely. The camera swings between us, and I catch it with my free hand, checking the display. Hundreds of photos. Faith at the grave, Faith walking through the gates, Faith and me together. Weeks of surveillance from the timestamps.
"Luca, are you being dramatic again?" Faith calls without looking up from the flowers. "I can hear you threatening someone from here."
"Private investigator," I inform her. "Been photographing you."
"Oh good," she says, still arranging roses. "I was worried it might be something serious. Morning, Mom. I brought Luca again. He's being overprotective."
The casual dismissal of violence, the way she talks to her dead mother about my current threat assessment like discussing weather. This is why she's perfect.
"Who hired you?" I ask, scrolling through his photos while maintaining pressure.
The PI tries for professional ethics. "Can't… reveal… clients…"
"My father," Faith says, finally standing and walking over. "Right? Let me guess. Worried about his little girl after she chose the villain over Sunday breakfasts."
The PI's eyes widen seeing her approach. Pretty blonde in a sundress, looking like salvation. He doesn't understand she's just another predator.
"Ma'am, this man is…"
"My fiancé," she finishes cheerfully.
She takes the camera, scrolling through images with clinical interest. "Oh, this one's actually flattering. Luca, look. You caught his good side while he was killing… is that the Morrison dealer?"
I glance at the photo. Me, mid-violence, blade catching streetlight.
"Tuesday," I confirm. "Outside the warehouse."
She shows the PI the photo. His face drains of color.
"You should delete that," I tell him. "For your health."
"You're doing your scary voice," she tells me fondly. "It's very dramatic, but he's just hired help."
"He violated your privacy," I point out.
She laughs and kisses my cheek while I still pin the PI. "My psycho protector. What would I do without you?"
"Probably kill people less efficiently," I respond seriously.
She can tease me while I hold a man's life in my hands, calls me 'psycho' as endearment when anyone else would die for the insult. Her unique privilege.
I systematically destroy his surveillance equipment. Memory cards crushed to powder, phone shattered. "Your employer will receive a message. Faith Winters is under Rosetti protection. Permanent protection."
"He skinned the last PI," Faith adds cheerfully. "Well, partially. Started with the fingers. Did you know each one makes a different sound when separated? I interrupted before he reached the wrists."
The man goes pale, looking between us like trying to decide which is worse.
I release him completely. "Tell Judge Winters his daughter is exactly where she wants to be."
He runs, abandoning his destroyed equipment. Faith watches with satisfaction.
"You've gotten soft," she observes. "Old Luca would have broken something."
"You're a terrible influence." But she's right. I don't torture for minor infractions anymore, only real threats. She's given me purpose beyond empty violence.
We settle beside her mother's headstone, morning sun warming the granite. I study Faith in the golden light.
"I was wrong about you," I admit.
"Wrong how?"
"At first, thought I was drawn to your innocence. The church girl performing children's songs." I touch her face, thumb tracing her cheekbone. "But that wasn't it. It was the darkness underneath. Could see it that first day. How you held yourself apart, watched everyone like threat assessment."
"You saw through my performance."
"And you saw through mine. The psycho brother act."
"Oh no," she corrects. "You're definitely psycho. Just not only psycho."
Both true. I'm the psycho who found purpose. She's the killer who found permission.
My hand goes to the collar of my shirt, adjusting it. She glimpses what’s beneath—the purple bite mark she left last night when she made me come with just her mouth and teeth.
"Does it hurt?" she asks innocently.
"Every time I move." I lean in close. "I want more."
She giggles. “Any time.”
A soft breeze plays with her hair, pulling wisps of blonde around her perfect face. I could stand here forever watching the strand of hair tickle her full lips.
"Marco thinks we should marry," I say.
Faith goes still. "Because I'm pregnant?"
The words stop everything. I turn to stare at her, processing.
Pregnant. The data reorganizes in my mind instantly.
Dozens of tiny changes I tracked but didn't connect.
The way she's been turning away when Dante lights cigarettes, something she never minded before.
How she tensed when Maria mentioned the smell of coffee yesterday.
Her breasts fuller, more sensitive when I touch them.
All the evidence was there. I saw it all, filed it away, but didn't make the connection because I was too drunk on finally having her to analyze properly.
"How long have you known?"
"Three days."
Three days. While I was documenting every breath, every movement, she was hiding this. Not through deception but through my own blindness. Too focused on external threats to see the change happening inside her.
"And you didn't tell me?" The words burn. Not anger at her, but at myself for missing something so crucial.
"I wanted to decide first. If I could raise a child in blood."
My hand spans her still-flat stomach, feeling for changes too subtle to detect yet, but knowing they're there. Possessive and gentle simultaneously. "Our child. Raised in truth, not performance."
A child. The word rearranges everything in my mind like a chemical equation finding balance. We who deal in endings creating a beginning. Our enemies will see this as weakness, leverage. My hands will have to get so much bloodier to keep this child safe.
"Little psycho junior," she teases.
"Or perfect actress," I counter.
She turns to the gravestone. "Mom, I'm pregnant.
With a serial killer's baby. Living in a mafia mansion.
Helping plan murders. And I'm happy. Actually happy.
" Wind moves through cemetery trees. "I think you'd understand.
You fought to the death rather than submit.
I fought my way TO him. Different battles, same war. "
I add my own vow: "I'll protect her like you would have. Except I'll succeed."
Not criticism, just fact. I have resources Jenna Winters didn't.
"We're not good people," Faith says. "Never will be. Our child will grow up knowing violence as a lullaby."
"Good. Better an honest sinner than a lying saint."
She pulls me to my feet. "Promise me something. When I'm gone, however that happens, bring our child here. Tell them the truth. All of it."
I promise, though I plan to die first or together. I can't conceive of a world where she's gone and I remain.
We walk back through the cemetery, hands linked, my thumb rubbing circles on her pulse point. Other mourners arriving step aside instinctively. A grandmother hurries her grandchildren past, primal recognition making her clutch them closer.
In the car, Faith puts her feet up on the dashboard. She knows I used to hate that, now find it endearing. She guides my hand between her legs, already wet through her underwear.
"The violence makes me need you," she admits, no shame anymore.
I finger her while driving, making her come just as we pass her father's courthouse, her cries of pleasure a declaration of what she's chosen over his version of justice. She tastes like victory when I lick my fingers clean at the red light.
"Take me home," she says.
"Which one?"
She guides my hand back between her legs, still soaked from her orgasm, her pussy clenching around nothing. "Wherever you can fuck me hardest. The baby makes me need it rougher."
My cock hardens instantly, pressing painfully against my zipper. Nine more months of her pregnant and insatiable. Nine months of her body changing, swelling with my child while her hunger for violence and cock only intensifies.
"The basement?" I suggest, already knowing her answer.
"Yes," she confirms, her fingers working at my belt while I drive. "I want to celebrate our child where we celebrated our revenge."
She unzips my fly carefully, and her hand wraps around my cock, stroking with that perfect pressure that makes me swerve slightly. "Faith…"
"I've been ready for you since you threatened that PI," she confesses, thumb circling the head of my cock, spreading precum. "The way you look when you're about to hurt someone for me… God, Luca, it makes me need you inside me."
I press harder on the accelerator. The mansion is eight minutes away. Eight minutes before I can bend her over the same table where Neumann bled out, fuck her until she screams loud enough to wake the ghosts we've created.
"You know what pregnancy hormones do?" she asks, still stroking me with maddening slowness.
"They make everything more sensitive. Every touch, every orgasm.
And the violence…" She moans, her free hand sliding under her dress.
"Watching you work makes me so fucking horny now, I had to change my underwear twice during your interrogation last week. "
My cock pulses in her grip. The thought of her watching me torture someone while dripping with need, carrying my child while craving more violence. It's everything I never knew I wanted.
"The world doesn't know," she continues, releasing my cock only to pull her soaked underwear aside, showing me how wet she is. "What we're creating. What we're becoming."
I want more of her. Nine months isn't long enough to fuck her in every possible way while she's swollen with my child. This hunger between us will only grow stronger, darker, until we consume everything around us.
And I can't fucking wait.