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He opens his eyes again and meets my gaze steadily. “You deserve better than all of us, Lucia, but I won’t let you go. If you’d stayed away, if you’d run outside of my reach—but you came back, over and over, and chose us. You want what only I can give you. I don’t care if you feel the same. If you say you love Angelo and Santino but not me, that won’t matter, as long as you’re at my side.”
“So that’s how it’s going to be?” I ask, my voice a little bitter. “It doesn’t matter what I want? You’re just going to… shove me in a chest, store me in a closet, beat the shit out of me? Now that I don’t have a gun on you, you’re awfully arrogant. I should’ve just shot you,” I mutter.
“You had ample opportunity,” he agrees. “But you didn’t shoot me. You didn’t tell Pavone about our plans. You delighted in everything we did.” Then he sighs, stroking my shoulders. “The closet, the chest—I needed you to need me. Make you desperate for me. But I think I’ve accomplished my goal. Nothing so drastic will happen again, at least not on my order.”
“I’m not desperate for you,” I tell him sharply. “You’re just like… a fungus that won’t go away. If I want Angelo and Saint, I’m stuck with you as well.” But I don’t mean it. It wouldn’t be the same without him.
“I’ve accomplished my goal,” Victor repeats. Suddenly he props himself up on his elbow and looks over me. “If you have something to say, Angelo, Santino?”
I startle when I realize they must’ve woken up while I was talking to Victor. I glance over my shoulder at them, only to see them watching us.
Angelo flips Victor off, then drops the hand to my ass. “Princess, you were fucking hot when you got all bloodthirsty today. And I’ve risked my life a lot, but never by doing something so obviously stupid as fucking Pavone’s fiancée right under his nose. Which is to say, yeah, I love you too, and I’m with Victor. I want to keep you around.”
“And you’re not going to let me go either, I suppose,” I say, even though that’s not what I want.
“You promised me you wouldn’t bail on me if I helped you,” he reminds me. “But no. If you leave, I’ll hunt you down and bring you home, where you belong. With us.”
It’s strangely flattering, though I don’t understand why. I should be pissed.
But he’s right. I did agree to this—to him, to Saint, and Victor… Well, Victor can be terribly convincing when he wants to be.
“Why am I the last one who gets to tell her?” Saint complains. “The two of you have been fighting it the whole time. I was the one who loved her from the start. Which is to say, I love you, Lucia.”
“Saint…” I pause, momentarily at a loss. “You do realize the three of you have really twisted ways of showing you care, right?”
“If we were normal, we wouldn’t be in this line of work,” Angelo says. “So, Princess, you’d better get used to our twisted ways.”
“No more drugging me without warning or permission,” I say. It’s ironic, that Saint is the one I feel most threatened by. Against my better instincts, I do believe that Victor is done with the extreme ways of pulling me under his control. And Angelo… “And no more guns,” I say quickly.
“But knives are still on the table?” Angelo grins widely at me. Before I can protest, he says, “I can live with that.”
“I didn’t agree to knives,” I gripe.
“You’ll love it,” he says. “Just give it a chance.”
I shake my head, but I don’t argue. Angelo can be insistent when he wants to be, and it’ll be easier to talk him out of it later.
“And one more thing,” I say quietly, looking between the three of them. “You’re going to help me get my sister back. No matter what it takes. I’ll castrate Damien Rossi myself if he’s laid his hands on her.”
Victor nods easily. “Of course. Giulio Pavone made it clear he didn’t care what happened to his father, but I don’t think he’s entirely done with Benton City either. But he’ll have a much harder time getting a foothold now, with so many dead and more believing it was Pavone Senior who double-crossed them.”
“I’ve already started looking into their operations in New Bristol,” Saint adds. “Once we’re home, we can assess where we currently stand and what our best course of operations is.”
I nod slowly.
“Got a taste for blood now, huh, Princess?” Angelo asks, grinning broadly. “Let her help mutilate one man, and suddenly she wants to torture more.”
“Vanessa isn’t like me,” I say, with a pang. “She can’t… She can’t handle things the way I can. And Giulio is into sex trafficking. He was already talking about paying mymotherfor sex and asking what club Rossi thought Vanessa would be best in.” My stomach twists. I can only imagine what she’s going through.
I can only imagine what she’ll think of me when she finds out I decided to stay with Angelo, Saint, and Victor of my own volition. If she finds out the things I’m willing to do to get her back. She won’t ever see me the same way again, but then…
I’m not the same person I was before, and I can’t ever go back to that.
Everything has changed.
I close my eyes with a shudder.
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