I closed my eyes when my phone rang, knowing it was my secretary reminding me of my meeting with the security team. It was time to get back to work. The rest of my day passed in a blur of meetings, phone calls, and security walkthroughs.
The highlight of my evening was receiving a call from Sienna letting me know she would be here in the morning. She and her guard. Apparently, that guard was Stefano DeLuca. Stefano wanted to come by and check out the casino to make sure it was safe.
Considering he’d provided most of the security guards, he should’ve known it was safe. Men in love did weird shit, so I kept my thoughts to myself. By the time I finally left the casino, the sun had already started setting over the water.
Exhaustion weighed heavily on me as I stopped by the restaurant in the casino and ordered some food to take home. The entire drive home, my thoughts stayed chaotic.
Marcel.
Pasquale.
Juliet.
Thoughts of them were on repeat in my mind.
Find information for Marcel, so he could finally start to live again.
Kill Pasquale, so that he wouldn’t be a threat to the casino when I was gone.
And then, find Juliet, and find out if she was a temptation or a threat.
Once I got home, I ate while standing at the kitchen counter. I stared around my place, a place the DeLucas had gotten for me last year. Nothing in the place belonged to me. When I left, I would be leaving it all behind.
All the furnishings. All the art on the wall. Everything.
Nothing here belonged to me. Yet, it felt like home. Because even when I was home with things that belonged to me, furnishing that was mine, art I’d selected, I still felt lonely as hell. I still felt... empty.
Even when I was with my brothers, there was this void that couldn’t be filled. I couldn’t tell them that, of course. They’d assure me that I wasn’t alone. They’d assure me that I had them, I would always have them.
Those had been the exact words Raz uttered to me after I killed... our father. But he couldn’t understand what I felt. He couldn’t understand me. I wasn’t like him and Cas. Raz was a natural leader. It’s what he was raised to be.
Cas’s mere presence made everyone feel good. He was a charmer. But I’d always been the quiet one. The observant one. I saw the way Dad looked at Cas all those years. It was nothing like the way he looked at Raz and me.
Yet, I hadn’t figured out the reason why. I hadn’t figured out that the look in his eyes was one of pure disdain. How could a father feel that way about his child? That look was what kept me from feeling close to my dad growing up.
I obeyed him. I was a good son. But I couldn’t love him the way my brothers did. Even at a young age, I’d felt the need to protect them, even from our father. Even when they didn’t think they’d needed protecting from him.
So when it came time to end the man, I couldn’t let Raz do it. I hadn’t been able to let him carry that burden for the rest of his life. So I decided to carry it for him, for all of us. I always stepped in when things got hard, when things got bad.
I was always the one who was willing to do the dirty work, willing to kill to protect my family. I was still doing the dirty work. When I found out who provided intel on Marcel to the Bianchis, I would make that person wish they’d never heard the name, Marcel Cattaneo.
And I would be the one who killed Pasquale to keep him from fucking up our plans. As for Juliet, if someone had truly sent her my way for nefarious reasons, she, too, would have to be handled.
And it would be me who made sure it was taken care of. Swallowing, I stared down at my food that suddenly tasted like cardboard. Pushing my plate away from me, I glared at the wall.
The room suddenly felt too quiet. Sometimes being the one who handled the dirty work became exhausting.
And lonely.
Lonely as fuck.
CHAPTER FOUR
ROME
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No longer able to eat, I just stood there, staring down into my plate until the food eventually turned cold. Only then did I get up, dump the rest into the trash, and carry the plate to the sink.
