The realization weighs heavily on me.I am not free.I have never been free.And I do not know if I ever will be.
Chapter Thirteen
Lorenzo
Thetownissosmall that it feels insulting.
One main street.A bakery with chipped white paint.A pharmacy that looks as if it has not changed in thirty years.
Nothing about this place suggests Matteo De Luca.That is exactly why he would choose it.
I sit in the drivers seat of the rental car I picked up at the airport this morning.The engine is off.The heat has settled into the glass.
I have been here for less than an hour, and I already hate this place.It’s too quiet.Too soft around the edges.The kind of town where people still wave from porches and leave their doors unlocked during the day.Where the biggest scandal is probably Mr.Whoever sleeping with So-and-so.Where violence is a foreign concept and men like me do not exist except in movies and nightmares.
My gaze tracks the street with the precision of a predator.Every detail cataloged.Every movement noted.The woman leaving the bakery with a paper bag.The way she smiles at the man holding the door.The ease in her shoulders.The lightness in her step.
This place is safe.A fiction people tell themselves so they can sleep at night.And this entire town reeks of it.This belief that the world is fundamentally good.That bad things happen somewhere else.To someone else.Never here.
They are wrong.Bad things happen everywhere.To everyone.And today, they are happening here.
I shift slightly, the leather creaking beneath me.I need to be ready because somewhere in this pathetic excuse for a town, Matteo De Luca is breathing.Walking.Existing.
My fingers drum once on my thigh.
When I go quiet like this, when I am hunting, the only thing that matters is the kill.
Except there is a part of me—a small, persistent part—that doesn’t want this.Doesn’t want to do what I came here to do.
A memory flickers.A burning building, smoke so thick I could not see or breathe, with the certainty that I was going to die.And then strong hands pulling me out, dragging me through the building and into clean air.Matteo’s hands.
He saved me when he could have left me to burn and now I am here to kill him.The irony is not lost on me.
I exhale slowly, letting the breath leave my lungs in a controlled stream.The conflict settles somewhere deep, where it cannot interfere with what comes next.
This is not personal.It’s just business.
Alessandro is circling again, rebuilding through whispers and old debts, while I’m still cleaning up the ashes Matteo left behind.I know what it means if Matteo is still alive and free as his father starts making moves.It means war.It means divided loyalty.It means every bastard who once bent the knee to the De Luca name will start choosing sides all over again.And I cannot allow that.
I lean forward slightly, my gaze fixed on the main street.
The cafe door up ahead opens.Every muscle in my body goes still as I see Matteo step out first.
For half a second, all I do is stare.
He looks different.Not enough to soften him, but enough to make me feel the time between now and the man I used to know.His hair is longer, or maybe that is just the shadow of whatever life he has been living out here in this forgotten corner of the world.His jaw is rough with stubble, unkempt in a way the old Matteo would never have tolerated.But he is still Matteo.Still broad through the shoulders.Still built as if God made him for bloodshed, with that same cold gravity that bends around him even out here in the middle of nowhere.The kind of presence that does not ask for attention; it commands it without a single word.
He moves with the same controlled precision I remember.A man who knows exactly how much force he can deliver and exactly when to deliver it.In the way his eyes sweep the street before his body fully commits to the space.In the way his hand stays close to his side, where a weapon would sit if he were carrying one.
Knowing Matteo, he probably is carrying one.
Emery steps out behind him.And fuck.She is heavily pregnant.Far enough along that there is no mistaking what she is to him now.Not just the girl he burned everything for or the woman he chose over blood, legacy, and every fucking thing that should have mattered more.
She is his future.His weakness.His whole goddamn heart, walking outside his body.
Matteo turns back immediately.One hand is already reaching for her as she steps down onto the sidewalk.His palm settles at the base of her spine with quiet ease.Protective and possessive in a way that doesn’t look forced.It looks natural.Automatic.As if his body knows where hers needs him before she even asks.
Emery says something to him, causing Matteo to look down at her.
