Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Lorenzo
By the time the car turns through the gates, the rain is coming down so hard it smears the world beyond the windows.
The storm has teeth tonight. It claws at the glass, hammers the roof, and turns the long drive into a river of black water.
Vito slows at the front of the house, the wipers working overtime, barely keeping up with the sheet of rain trying to blind us.
The men stationed at the entrance are soaked to the bone, dark suits plastered to hard bodies, rain dripping from their hair, guns hidden beneath fabric grown heavy with water. None of them move. They stand there in the downpour as if carved from the same brutal stone this house was built from.
I am finally home.
Home.
The word settles in my chest and lingers.
For the first time, I don’t experience that old, restless itch under my skin. That constant pull toward violence. That need to keep moving, keep hunting, keep watching my back, because the next betrayal is always crouched around the next corner waiting to strike.
Tonight, it’s quieter inside my head. Maybe because there is relief that I didn’t kill Matteo. Not when I saw him with Emery—his hand on her back, his mouth softening as she spoke, the full curve of her stomach carrying the future he tore the empire apart to protect.
I finally understand it now. Why he did what he did. Why a man can spend his whole life believing he is built for power, for blood, for loyalty, only to meet one woman and realize none of that means shit when her life is on the line.
A woman changes you. She sinks beneath the skin, beneath the armor, beneath every brutal thing you built to keep yourself standing.
Then one day you realize your pulse depends on another person breathing.
You become a wound with a pulse. Every breath she takes matters.
Every threat aimed at her lands in your chest before it ever reaches her.
Every choice starts bending around her without your permission.
It’s pathetic, weak, and also the truest thing I have ever felt.
That’s what love does in a world like ours.
It doesn’t make a man soft. It makes him vicious and terrifying because the second a man has something to lose, he becomes capable of a whole new kind of brutality.
He fights for one heartbeat, for a tiny bit of peace in a life that has never offered him any.
Maybe that should unsettle me more than it does, because somewhere along the way I have become the same kind of man who walks into blood with one name on his mind. Isabella.
The car comes to a stop in front of the house, the engine humming low before it dies. One of my guards is already moving, quick down the steps, shoulders hunched against the storm as he yanks the door open for me.
I get out of the car and walk away before he can say a word.
The rain hits cold against my face. It’s sharp at the back of my neck. It soaks through my suit in seconds. Thunder growls overhead, as if the sky has its own grudge tonight.
I take the steps two at a time, already thinking about where to find Bella.
I can see it too clearly. The way her eyes lift when I walk into the room.
The way she pretends she didn’t miss me, because God forbid that woman ever hands over a soft truth without trying to stab me with it first. The way I drag her into my arms anyway and kiss every smart-ass answer right off that wicked mouth until she forgets whatever insult she had lined up.
I am halfway through the front door, rain dripping from my coat onto the marble, when instinct sinks its teeth into me.
Something is fucking wrong. The foyer feels off.
I see Rafe first. He’s standing near the foot of the grand staircase with two of the others, their postures rigid, hands clasped in front of them. Rafe’s broad shoulders are locked tight, his jaw set, his dark eyes fixed on me the moment I step through the door.
“Boss,” he says.
I stop dead in the middle of the foyer. “What?”
Rafe glances once toward the hallway leading to the east wing, then back at me. His throat works as he swallows. “Can I have a word?”
The knot under my ribs cinches tight instantly, pulling everything in my chest into a fist. Rafe wouldn’t be asking for a word or standing there looking as though he wants a fucking priest to witness the conversation unless something has gone wrong.
I move without another word, crossing the foyer in long strides and leading him into the study off the main hall. I step inside. Rafe follows, closing the door behind us.
I turn on him fast, my body coiled tight. “What the fuck happened?”
Rafe’s jaw flexes, the muscle jumping beneath his skin. He doesn’t look away, but there is tension in every line of his body.
“Your brother-in-law was here,” he says.
The words land with the force of a gunshot.
“A fucking Serrano was in my house?”
“Yes.”
“Why the fuck was a Serrano in my house?”
“He arrived unannounced,” Rafe says. “Mrs. De Luca chose to see him.”
I take a step toward Rafe, closing the distance. My hands clench into fists at my sides. “Did you leave him alone with her?”
He shifts on his feet and I notice the tension in him.
The expectation, the readiness for whatever comes next.
He’s seen what I can do when it comes to Isabella.
He was there when I beat the last man half-senseless for thinking he could stand there and eye-fuck my wife while pretending he was only doing his job.
He knows what I’m capable of. But he also knows that I trust him, and that’s the only reason my fist isn’t already in his face.
“She wanted privacy,” he says. “I stayed close, posted outside the door. When voices rose, I went in.”
My eyes bore into his, searching for any sign that he failed her, but Rafe holds my gaze without wavering.
I exhale slowly through my nose. “Did he threaten her?”
“He put his hands on her.”
I turn away from Rafe and brace both palms on the edge of the desk because if I don’t put my hands on something solid, I’m going to tear through this room looking for something to break.
My fingers dig into the polished wood, the grain biting into my skin.
My whole body is one hard line of rage, every muscle locked, every nerve firing with the singular, consuming thought of someone’s hands on my wife.
She was right. Her father won’t fucking stop. Not until someone ends him.
I grip the desk tighter.
If Luca Serrano were standing in front of me right now, I would put a bullet through his throat and leave his body on Arturo’s marble floor, with a fucking note stapled to his chest. A message. A promise. A declaration of war.
“What did he want?” I ask, my voice low, the rage barely contained.
“Information,” Rafe says behind me. “I heard enough to know he was pressuring her for details about your movements. She denied knowing anything.”
A cruel, savage pride swells in my chest alongside the fury, twisting together until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
My wife is stronger than most of the men who circle this house, pretending to understand what power is.
She was raised in a cage and still learned to bite through iron.
She’s steel wrapped in silk, and she doesn’t break.
That doesn’t make the thought of Luca’s hands on her any less unbearable.
I straighten slowly, releasing my grip on the desk, and turn back to face Rafe. My breathing is controlled now. The rage is still there, simmering just beneath the surface, but I’ve pulled it back into something useful.
“Where is she now?” I ask.
“She went out into the garden.”
I stare at him. “In this storm?”
“Yes.”
Shit.
I’m already moving before he can say another word. I yank the study door open and stride down the hallway toward the back of the house, my footsteps echoing off the floors. I shove the terrace doors open and step straight out into the storm.
Shards of rain hit me immediately.
It’s cold and brutal. It runs down the back of my neck, into my eyes, and over my mouth. The sky is a churning mass of dark gray clouds, and the wind whips through the garden with enough force to bend the branches of the trees.
I stop at the edge of the terrace, scanning the grounds, my eyes narrowing against the rain.
I don’t see Isabella.
I step off the terrace and head toward the old cypress at the garden’s far edge, the one I know she goes to sometimes when she needs to think. When she needs to be alone. She’s mentioned how much she likes it there.
I head that way fast, my strides long and purposeful. Gravel shifts and crunches under my feet, the sound swallowed by the roar of the rain. Water splashes up my trousers, soaking through the fabric, but I don’t slow. Thunder rolls beyond the trees, a deep, rumbling growl that shakes the air.
I can barely see ten feet ahead of me. Lightning flashes overhead, briefly illuminating the garden in stark white light.
And then I find her sitting on the stone bench, drenched through, her head tipped slightly back, rain pouring over her face as though the sky itself had come down to grieve with her.
Her eyes are closed, her lips parted just enough for the water to run over them.
She doesn’t move. She just sits there, letting the storm wash over her.
Christ, there’s a kind of beauty in her sadness. The kind that makes my chest ache because I know what it costs her to let it show. Isabella doesn’t break easily. She doesn’t bend. But here, alone in the rain, she’s let herself fracture just enough for me to see the cracks.