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Luca
I’ve never enjoyed torture.
But I have to say, it hasn’t been as difficult this time as it so often has been in the past. In fact, it’s been almost harder to detach myself from it, to keep from going too far.
Whatever Viktor has threatened his soldiers with to keep them silent, it must be awful, because I use every method I know of, every trick I have, every painful thing I can imagine to try to pry out of them when and why and how they’re attacking us, why Viktor insists on a bride as his price for peace, what they possibly hope to achieve. I even make Franco take over for a while, just to mix things up, but he can’t get anything out of them either. By the time I exhaust the last of the Bratva men we managed to pick up, the warehouse floor is covered in blood and sweat, teeth and nails and piss. We’re no closer to figuring out a way forward than we were before.
And it makes me question everything.
The one thing every single one of them made clear is that Sofia is at the heart of this. They’re after her—Viktor’s insistence on Caterina as his wife now is just his own personal desire—and they want her captured or dead. It doesn’t really seem to matter which. But that’s as much as we can draw out, no matter what we do.
You can’t protect her.And you’re getting too close.
That’s the thought running through my head, over and over again, as I walk out to the docks. I hadn’t meant to get in so deeply with Sofia. I’d meant to keep my distance, to tuck her away somewhere safely after the wedding and forget about her for the most part. For exactly this reason—because she’s a distraction. My feelings for her are getting tangled up in the job I need to do, and it’s making me unable to detach and do that job in the way that I need to. I didn’t just have to hand things over to Franco for a little while as a means of mixing things up and trying to get them to talk.
I was also enjoying it too much. And I didn’t want to stop.
I wanted to kill them, for ever thinking they could lay a hand on Sofia.
The night of Caterina’s wedding, after Sofia and I finished for the second time, I knew I’d made a mistake.
I’d come damn close to telling her that I loved her. I’d been on the verge of it as I came for the second time, the words on the tip of my tongue, and I’d forced them back. Afterward, lying in bed next to her, I’d thought about the fact that since I’d rescued her from that hotel room, I hadn’t so much as wanted to touch another woman. I thought about how many times we’d slept together, when before, I’d made sure to never come back more than once. I’d thought about the way she made me feel, almost addicted, craving her again even after I’d just come, thinking about her while I was away.
I knew then that whatever I felt for her—love, lust, addiction, obsession—it’s too strong. Too powerful.
I need to step back. To put up the walls that were always meant to keep distance between us. Because nothing has changed. If I get close to her, if I let her close to me, if she starts tomatter—if I’m being honest, she already does—then she can be used against me. Viktor, or anyone else, could manipulate me. Change my decisions, make me do things I wouldn’t, otherwise. My head will never be completely clear again.
And if I’m being honest, I’m dangerously close to that already, if I’m not already there.
So when I head home, with blood still under my fingernails and my shirt still stained with it, I tell myself that however painful it might be, that last night with Sofia before I left needs to be the last time I ever touch her like that. If we do fuck, it needs to be colder, more practical, a means for satisfying lust, and nothing more. It can’t be so intimate, so—personal.
And then, as if my mood weren’t already bad enough, my emotions in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar tangle, I find out from Raoul that Sofia disobeyed me while I was gone. “She went to the hospital with Caterina,” he tells me, and for a moment, I’m so intensely furious that I see red. I don’t even hear the reason why, or another word that Raoul says, as I make my way towards the elevator up to the penthouse.
I’m almost shaking with fury by the time I walk in.This is why,I think, as I prowl the apartment looking for Sofia. This is why I can’t allow myself to feel for her, why I can’t allow that kind of intimacy, why it’s better for her to fear me than care for me. I was an idiot to think that elaborate dates on the rooftop and nights spent laughing at movies together were possible for us, that I could somehow have ordinary pleasures like that while being a man who is anything but ordinary.
I’m the head of the biggest criminal organization in the world, not a husband who comes home every day for dinner. Not a soccer dad. Not a man who gets to have the trappings of a normal life. It’s the price for the life I’ve led, the one I continue to lead, and I was always happy to pay it.
There’s no reason to start pushing against it now.
The only way to keep Sofia safe is to make sure that she’s too afraid to disobey me—for her to feel that my power over her is absolute, for her to know better than to ignore my orders. She can’t think that we’re equals, that there’s an intimacy between us or a partnership.
It will only get her killed.
And if I allow that kind of closeness between us, and she gets herself murdered, it will shatter me. I know that. I’ll do things I never would have otherwise, to save or avenge her.
I was never meant to have love. Never meant to have a wife that was anything more than a pretty trophy to take out occasionally and parade around, more than something to stick my cock into occasionally when I wanted to take my pleasure at home, with less effort than it took to pick up another woman. That was the mindset I’d clung to when I was told I’d have to marry Sofia to save her life.
I don’t know when I lost it. But that changes today. Now.
Sofia is in the kitchen when I find her. She turns around with a smile on her face, only for it to die when she sees the expression on mine, the blood still spattering my skin and shirt.Good,I think, my brain feeling thick and slow with emotion, with the amount of discipline it takes to force myself to follow through on this. Her smile fades to a look of apprehension and then fear as I stalk towards her, and her shriek when I swing her up into my arms and toss her over my shoulder makes my chest ache more than it should.
“Put me down! Luca, what’s going on—” she shouts, struggling in my grasp, but I hold on to her all the way to the bedroom. With a swift motion, I deposit her on the floor, trying to restrain the lust that rises up in me when I take in what she’s wearing—a denim miniskirt and a white crop top made of some soft material that begs for me to run my hands over it.
“I know you went to the hospital.” My voice is dark, gravelly, raspy from all the talking I’ve done today, trying to convince the Russians to roll over on Viktor so they could keep at least a few of their finger or toenails. “What did I tell you, Sofia?”
“You told me to stay here,” she says in a small voice. “But Caterina—”
“I don’t care.” I see her recoil at the harshness in my voice, but I don’t stop. “I don’t care what your excuses are. Do you know what I did today, Sofia?”
