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Chapter 29
Lucas
It took a second for the implication to sink in. He wanted to use Leda as bait. Or himself.
“No.” I said. “No fucking way am I going to allow it.”
Nico gazed at his sister, and I had never seen him look so serious before. “Do you think I’d want to do this anymore than you?” he hissed. “It’s the only way. My father is more than willing to bleed what’s left of Adrian and the Cavazzo Mafia. He’s more than willing to bleed what’s left of every other Mafia as well. There’s a never ending supply of desperate, poor, and ambitious young men all across the city looking for a chance to claw their way out of the hellhole. Especially now.”
He wasn’t wrong. But the thought of doing something like this. It was too dangerous. It wasn’t that we hadn’t thought about this before.
Leda would never risk Nico, and I would never risk Leda.
She was my future.
Leda swallowed hard. “Are you sure?”
“Has your war done anything to bring him into the open?” Nico asked back.
“No.” Leda admitted.
“Then,” Nico responded. “It’s the only option.”
“I understand,” she said. “But I want to make something clear: I want to kill him.”
“Leda,” I stated. “You don’t want to do that.”
She turned to me, and I could see the anger in her eyes. “Don’t tell me what I want, Lucas,” she said softly.
“He’s not wrong,” her brother stated, concern flickering in his expression.
I didn’t know how many times he had witnessed his sister’s temper, but I doubted it was the first time he had seen her in such a state.
“You don’t want to do that, Leda,” Nico said. “Killing a man is not something you come back from. It changes you.”
I knew that feeling myself. Some would say that there was no way that one could remember all the kills in a lifetime, but I was proof that one could. I remembered all the kills I had made with my own hands, how it had felt to have warm blood slide out and onto my skin. My kills had been made in a variety of sick, twisted ways that if I was to tell Leda, she would likely look at me in a far different manner.
The twisted thing was that I had enjoyed it, and I imagined Nico would say the same. Maybe not all of them, but there were some that had brought me great satisfaction over the years, and there was likely a special place in hell waiting for me one day.
But with every kill, a piece of my soul was stripped away. It was the reason that I hadn’t thought twice about purchasing Leda, no matter how sick that sounded.
It was because I didn’t have a soul left.
I wasn’t about to let the same happen to Leda. I knew why she wanted to be the one to face down her father and kill him. Hell, he deserved to look her in the eye as she pulled the trigger and ended his pathetic, miserable life, but no amount of anger was going to make her feel better once she did so.
No, she would remember that final look that he gave her, or the way the gunpowder smelled when the bullet fired.
Or perhaps it would be the way he looked once he was dead. There was always a memory that haunted me about my killings.
It would tear Leda in two to deal with something like that.
“It sucks out your soul,” I finally said, pushing back the wealth of emotions that had suddenly hit me. “I can’t let that happen to you.”
But Leda wasn’t listening to me. She was facing off with her brother, staring him down. “You don’t understand,” she continued, her hands balled at her sides. “You don’t understand how he’s made me feel. He was going to marry me off to save his own ass! You didn’t have to deal with that. You didn’t have to worry about him coming after you, wanting you to wed some nameless person because it benefited him! He planned to sell me, ever since I was a child. He made that crystal clear for years.”
Nico flinched at Leda’s words, and I felt her raw pain come out, wanting to pull her into my arms and remind her of what she had now. Her father couldn’t touch her now that I was here. I wouldn’t let him.
Besides, she didn’t need him any longer, not that she had ever needed him. I was her future. That kid in her stomach was her future, and none of it had an ounce of shit to do with Carmine D’Agostino. Nothing that fucker could do would lessen the feelings I had for her, nor would it chase me away.
