18. Change of Plan #2
“Let me the fuck out,” I roared, grabbing the steel bars and trying to rip them from their fixings.
Gio leaned back against the wall outside the cell as if he had all the time in the world.
With one hand on his shoulder, he rolled it, grimacing, popping the joint back into place, then folded his arms over his chest and stared me down.
His lip was split open, and an angry, dark purple bruise was appearing around his right eye, courtesy of yours truly.
What did he ?expect when he tackled me to the floor?
I’d thank him? It could have been a lot worse.
If he didn’t let me out of this cell soon, it would be.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been locked in my family’s cellars because they believed I needed to calm the fuck down. But it was the first time I’d felt like murdering my flesh and blood for doing it.
When he made no attempt to meet my command, I shoved off the bars, turned my back on him, and paced a few steps around the small, boxy cage.
I closed my eyes and tried to focus on breathing to gather my thoughts, because I knew that was what he was waiting for.
The rational Sani. The man he’d raised to think strategically before acting recklessly.
The problem was, I’d had to learn to be that way.
My instinct was to act first and deal with the aftermath…
well… afterwards. I was finding it very hard to think straight at all.
I wanted blood, Callum D'Ardenzi’s, to be exact.
I’d drink it from a chalice made from his skull.
“You’re going to leave the girl alone, Sani,” Gio demanded calmly, his voice full of authority, telling me this was him speaking as Boss rather than my brother.
I placed my hands on my hips and shook my head, glaring at the filthy, blood-stained ground beneath my pacing feet. “That’s an order, not a request.”
“No,” I said through clenched teeth. “Sorry, Boss. I can’t.”
The calm was gone. His face mimicked a raging bull as he stepped closer to the bars. “We may be family, Santino, but when I give you a fucking order, you will obey it.”
“Give me any other order in the world, and I’ll follow it,” I snarled through the iron bars, meeting his glare head-on. “But not that one. She’s mine. The only way you’ll ever keep me away from her is to put a bullet between my eyes, and we both know I’m your favourite sibling.”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “You’re so much like Papi it’s insane. Obsessed with the notion of soulmates. But there’s a thin line between unhealthy obsession and love, Santino. And if I let you out of here, you’re going to fucking cross it.”
I growled at him because, at that moment, all I wanted to do was smash my fist into his other eye.
“Says the man who’s so obsessed with his wife that he’s named a dish after her in every restaurant he owns.
Do you think forcing people all over Italy to order the Bambola in Michelin-starred restaurants is normal behaviour?
Or punching a waiter in the dick because he pulled out her chair and glanced at her ass? You’re a fucking hypocrite.”
“Maybe,” he shrugged. “But I’ve always given Liv a choice to be with me, and that obsession is appreciated.
All I’ve heard in the last few hours is that the mayor’s daughter wants nothing to do with you.
She’s made a statement to the police and is now marrying Rome’s Golden Boy in a shotgun wedding.
She couldn’t make her choice any clearer. ”
“This isn’t her choice,” I hissed. “This is Piero! And that fucking prick. They’ve gotten into her head. She’s running scared.”
“Yeah,” Gio said. “Of you.”
“No. Of herself.”
“So, what’s the plan? I let you out of here, and then you… what? Kidnap her? Keep her hostage in your penthouse, giving the mayor the perfect excuse to finally get your ass arrested?”
I paced the cell again because I didn’t have the answers. I didn’t know what I was going to ?do, but one thing I was certain of was that she wouldn’t be another man’s wife. Ever. But I needed Gio to let me the fuck out if I had any chance of stopping it.
“If she marries D'Ardenzi tomorrow, we lose our only leverage over the mayor. Aria is the only thing he cares about,” I said, forcing my voice into a cold calm.
“The case Piero was building against you is about to collapse. We don’t need her.”
“Are you really willing to risk our only leverage on that?”
Gio stared at me, his mind running in circles. He knew I had a point. But I still had another to make.
“You can either let me out of here now so I can stop this wedding before it even starts, or keep me locked up until it’s over. Either way, it will change nothing. I will still make Arianna Caruso mine.”
I held his gaze in challenge, showing him I would break the only unspoken rule the men of my family had.
Don’t fuck with married women. It stemmed from our mamma.
Papi gave up his life to save her from being taken hostage by a rival mafia family, and it changed her entirely and us too.
Mamma was never the same. Raya and I grew up without our father and with a mostly absent mother.
Gio and Elle lost the man they admired most. We all changed because of it.
But where we kids healed over time… Mamma never did.
He didn’t say a word. He knew it wouldn’t change my mind.
Instead, he turned and stormed out of the cellar.
I watched his broad back disappear up the stone steps, growling through a clenched jaw.
Time was not on my side. When would the wedding be?
Tomorrow morning? Afternoon? A fucking sunset ceremony?
A low, garbled chuckle slithered out from the neighbouring cell, wet and broken, as if he were choking on blood, and my head snapped towards Damiano Vrene.
I thought he was unconscious or dead; his body slumped in the corner of his cell, his head lolling towards his chest, one ear missing and stitched over with something that was definitely not medically approved.
His bloodshot eyes lifted to meet mine through the bars, and he gave me an almost toothless grin.
He looked far too ?cheerful for someone who had been tortured at the hands of Buccini soldiers for the last four days. That he was still clinging to life would have been admirable if I gave even half a shit.
“Go ahead. Laugh while you still have a jaw.”
“I hear congratulations are in order,” he sneered, his words thick beneath the groggy, raw sound of pain it must have taken to speak. “Oh, but wait… I thought,” he heaved, coughing but still fucking smiling through it. “...you were planning to marry the pretty cunt.”
I turned and stalked over to the bars separating us, sliding my forearms through them and resting my weight on the cold metal. “Keep fucking talking, Vrene. Every word about her that comes out of your rancid mouth is another piece of you I’ll cut off later.”
“Will that be before or after D'Ardenzi fucks her on their wedding night? You already have, haven’t you? Was her sweet pussy as tight and warm as I imagined it?”
I ground my jaw, clenching my fists and pinning him with an ice-cold glare that said everything I couldn’t.
This was his entertainment, a last attempt to provoke me before the devil finally welcomed him home.
I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I didn’t need words.
I was too busy fantasising about all the ways I would steal his final breath.
When I didn’t rise to the bait, he quirked an eyebrow.
“Interesting. I was sure she’d spread those soft thighs for you to make you this deluded.
Pussy drunk, I like to call it. I don’t blame you, Buccini.
Want to know what else I’ve imagined over and over?
Those big blue eyes would look so pretty with tears of pain.
Perky tits and that rounded ass jiggling with every thrust as I break her.
” He rolled his eyes and stroked his hardening cock over his sodden trousers.
“Makes me hard just thinking about her cries of mercy.”
The haze of violence erupted, too powerful to contain as I slammed myself against the bars, trying to bulldoze through them, bend them, fucking melt them with my rage so I could get to the sick fuck and skin him alive.
“And I was so ?close to making it happen. That was the deal, you know? I only had to wait until after the wedding.”
I forced myself to stop ramming my body against the bars before I broke something, and I panted heavily. The words he’d just spoken took far too long to register, drowned out by the thundering need for violence in my ears.
There was something there. Something in what he’d just said that I shouldn’t overlook. But I couldn’t think straight when the world tasted of metal and murder.
“Sani?”
I spun around at the sound of Soraya’s concerned voice, soft but urgent, coming towards the cells.
Her big hazel eyes took one look at me, and then she swallowed hard.
I must have looked like a wild wolf cornered in its cage.
My eyes feral, my body trembling, and my sanity dangling by a thread I had no interest in holding onto.
“Where the fuck is Gio? He needs to let me out of here so I can gut that piece of shit from his chin to his balls.”
She blinked, her gaze drifting past me to the corpse-in-waiting in the cell next to mine. Soraya visibly shrank, as she always did in front of strangers, not from fear of him or the gore smeared across his flesh, but from her crippling social anxiety, which made her voice drop to a whisper.
“He’s on the phone with Alessio. They’re making a plan to try to postpone the wedding.”
I huffed out a sound that scraped my throat raw, pacing again and clenching and unclenching my fists as if they were deciding who to crush first. My neck cracked as I rolled it.
“I’m the fucking plan. They just need to let me out.”
“They don’t trust that you won’t do something reckless, Sani,” she whispered. “You need to calm down.”