He pulls me against him, one hard, solid second, his arm around my back like a wall between me and everything, and then releases me. No drawn-out moment. Just that one second of him making sure I know he is there. My husband. The man who expressed his love for me in so many different ways on our honeymoon.
I let him. For the moment, I don’t ponder on what rocked our marriage yesterday morning. What put distance between us. Now isn’t the time.
Ritchie hauls Ettore upright and starts dragging him toward the stairwell door. The man who sent soldiers into my childhood home, who stole my mother’s unborn child, who built himself a throne out of other people’s terror, is bleeding and screaming and alive.
Exactly how I needed him.
The bullet would have been too fast. Too clean. Too much of a mercy for a man who has never once extended any.
Now the real pain begins.
Chapter Twenty-Four
SERENITY
As much as I’d love to go to my house and pull Madden out of the panic room, I can’t. He has to stay there until the five families and the Cichellos can divide the territories.
I step in front of Aleksandr. An evil smirk lifts my cheeks. “Welcome to your new humble abode.” I lift my gloved hands, fanning them like showing off a new car on display.
Large hands land on my shoulders from behind. “This place has everything we need,” Nico adds.
“I’m trying to remember who started the glamorous warehouses…oh, my cousin Catch. He was in Chicago with our cousin Ritchie, keeping an eye on Lexis, Luca Esposito’s girlfriend. Now Catch and Ritchie are married to women they met in Chicago.”
I try wiggling out of his grasp. “The same cousins who went along with you switching out my birth control pills,” I sneer.
“Trouble…in…paradise,” Aleksandr grits out through his puffy, swollen, bloody lips.
His short blond strands are streaked with blood. And he’s dressed down in a white undershirt and red silk boxers.
Nico leans into my body. The feel of his muscles against my frame almost makes me forget we are at odds.
“Our marriage is none of your fucking concern. Now back to our decked-out torture warehouse. The chair you’re sitting in is a limited edition. I bought two. Just for you and Ettore. The Espositos were the first to have this chair. They’re trendsetters in the mafia underworld within the five families.”
Nico slips a possessive arm over my shoulder and across my breasts, locking me against his body. I want to kick him in the balls.
“Nico, release me.”
“Wife, tell him about the amenities,” Nico pushes.
I know my husband is getting a kick out of this moment.
So is Aleksandr.
“Want out of your arranged marriage, huh, Serenity?” He chuckles.
“Like my husband said, our marriage is none of your concern. You’re here because you partnered with Ettore and was okay with him harming innocent women and children.”
“Maybe that’s something you do in the Bratva world. We don’t do it in the mafia world.”
A scream is heard in the distance.
“Fuck you. Motherfucker,” he cries out.
Aleksandr tries peeking over his shoulder in the tall chair.
“Oh, that’s Ettore crying like a little bitch. Miff and Kicks are dropping bricks on his stomach. I want him to endure similar pain my mother did when her stomach was being kicked in.”
Nico’s arm protectively curls tighter around my neck and he whispers in my ear, “Would you like to lie down for a little while?" You can torture these assholes later.”
