“Morning, sunshine.” A loud, mocking chuckle sounded through the car. “Now, no more vomiting, please, I beg of you. We’re on a time crunch and I can’t stop?—"
My body lurched sideways, coughing up vomit and bile over the car seats like I was being purged. Only once it was over did my eyes peel open to find a pair of pitch-black eyes staring back at me through the front mirror, the eyes of a fucking psychopath.The realization of what was happening settled somewhere deep inside, causing me to retch again.
Cesare Fera was the true psycho of the Feras. He wasn’t the man Milan thought he was and he waskidnappingme.
He rolled his eyes, taking a swig of his coffee as he drove like this was just a road trip. “Don’t make me knock you out again.” He pouted. “The hospital I stole this crap from will notice if I don’t put it all back and it’s expensive as fuck.”
There was no life in his eyes, nothing that I could manipulate to get me back home. There was a fine line between sanity and insanity, and this man had crossed it. What the hell had happened to this fairly ordinary guy to make him like this?
I groaned as my stomach spasmed again, but I managed to snarl at him, my weak fingers dragging into fists against the front seats to yank me upward. “Go f-fuck yourself.”
Cesare clicked his thumb over a button on the steering wheel, cranking the strange pop music up and bopping his head from side to side as he reached into the door pocket and flicked open the cap of a plastic white syringe.
My body backed into the corner of the seat, my limbs still refusing to wake up fully, and my gaze caught on the car’s floor beneath me. There was a collection of used syringes, ones matching the one he had in his hand.
He was going to put me to sleep again.
“Maybe, Sicily,” he said, his voice the embodiment of an angry, fiery hell. “This will be the end of Milan fucking Lucca. Maybe Milan Fera needs to come out and play.” Before his words had even ended, he leaned backward, stabbing the syringe into my thigh.
Pain bloomed through my veins and brain as everything Milan had told me that night in my new studio replayed in my mind.
My body gave up on me, forcing my eyes closed and emptying me of my fight.
21
SICILY
ONE WEEK AGO
“I am not a Lucca,and therefore neither are you. My true father’s name is Stefano Fera. I unrightfully claimed the Lucca inheritance, and—and I am the reason my mother is dead.”
“What do you mean?” I whispered, unsure of what to do with a truth that large.
He took my hand, pressing my palm to his heart as though I would forget that it was there. “Stefano Fera, the Capo of the Philadelphia mob, discovered that my sister, Siena, was his biological daughter. He came into the house with a gun on the day of her birth, threatened her, the newborn baby—” Milan’s body spasmed as though his bones still lived that memory.
He inhaled deeply as he continued. “It was then that it was truly noted that Brenno and Cesare belonged to Hugo Lucca and that I was not his son. Stefano and Hugo created a contract, one that stated I would continue as the Lucca heir for public appearance purposes and that Stefano would take the boys back to Philadelphia with him to be raised as his heirs. The terms state that they are forbidden from entering New York, from coming home, and from claiming any hold on their true name.”
I could see why the Feras were hurting. They’d been shunned, withdrawn from their family by a man who was astranger at the time, told to live a lie, but it didn’t explain what it had to do with their mother.
As if he could see the question on my face, Milan brought his hands together, but he quickly replaced them with mine and squeezed them rhythmically. To be his calm, the answer to his internal systems, sounded like three too-big words that we would never say.
“My mother was deeply unwell, Sicily, you must remember this.”
I nodded rapidly, my heart clenching in my chest, my hands sweating inside of his.
Milan took a deep breath and didn’t let it out until he’d said it all. “She forced herself, right from the start, before I even realized I wasn’t Hugo’s, to believe that Stefano deeply loved her. She idolized me, loved me more, cared for me, mothered me when she was not having fits of insanity. Most of the time she refused to care for the other boys. Before they were taken she…despisedthem on her bad days for not being Stefano’s.”
“That’s why you had to raise them,” I whispered, my heart shattering in his hands.
He didn’t nod, but his eyes closed for a moment too long. “I looked after them before they were gone, from the moment they were born, despite being just a child myself. I figured it out. I got them through school, I cooked for them, I bathed them, rocked them to sleep on the corridor floors, stitched their wounds when Hugo beat them bloody.”
Bile rose in my throat but I refused to look away. People had looked away from him enough.
“The boys were taken only a few hours after she gave birth to Siena. It was too much trauma that she could not process, and she lost her mind worse than she already had. She spent hours threatening the baby, packing her things and saying that she and Siena were going to live with Stefano and her boys.” He lookedaway, shaking his head as his eyes grew a shade that I hadn’t seen before.
Glassy.
Broken.
