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I hung up, then pulled back up the picture. My family had a history with theirs. After all, when my father had my mother murdered, the entire hit had been set up to look like it had come from the Catalanos. I hadn’t known it at the time, but I’d had one of theirs taken out in retaliation. Now, my fiancée was in the arms of the twin I’d had assassinated, and looking very comfortable with him. In the beginning, I’d asked my father numerous times where he had met Viviana, but he’d only told me that it’d been here in Naples. He knew nothing of her past, and he didn’t even care. If he had done any research on this woman, he might’ve seen she was friends with one of the many women he’d killed over the years. Instead of using his fucking head, he used the smaller one in his pants.
He’d allowed Viviana to use her beauty and sinful body to seduce her way into our world. He’d brought this deceitful jezebel into our lives, and now I was stuck to clean up his mess. I should’ve killed her the same day my father died, but seeing her lying on the floor, I fell into the same trap as my old man. I’d wanted Viviana just as much as he had, and the little bit of her I’d had prior to that wasn’t enough. I thought I was offering her a solution... a means to an end... something from which we could both benefit... but instead, I had been played as the fool.
“Just let me go,”she’d told me as I cleaned up her head wound that day.
“I can’t just let you go. You tried to kill the head of our family,”I’d told her and even though I hadn’t fully known what I would do at the time, I kept talking until the idea floated out there.“If I spare your life, you must agree to become my wife.”
She initially resisted the idea, but hours later, we celebrated our engagement the only way someone like us could. We’d consummated our agreement with my father, her ex-lover’s body, still warm in the other room. I’d fucked her over and over until we were both overcome with exhaustion. After, when she was lying in my arms, I came up with the idea to get the one thing from her that my father had desperately wanted. It would be my final middle finger to the man I’d hated my entire life.
“Don’t be foolish, figlio. My Bellissima is young, beautiful, and able to bear children. She’ll provide me with the heir I once wished you would be,”Stefano had told me on the last trip we’d taken together.
Now, she was pregnant, and it didn’t even matter whose child it was. To the Catalanos, it would be a Vaccaro heir, and a casualty. They might even kill Viviana. She was in Palermo with even bigger monsters than I was, and she acted as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Was it possible that her plot to trap and kill my father had been for more than simply vengeance over her dead friend? Was she sent to him by our enemies to take us both out? The latter was more than possible, especially since I had firsthand knowledge that my father had murdered my mother and blamed it on them. Our family bonded together, and although I was too young to help, I saw the war waged with the Sicilian counterparts, and had grown to despise them as much as everyone else.
“Now, you’re with them and breaking bread as if they are fucking friends.” I couldn’t believe it. I suppose I should’ve been able to because she’d used deceit to trick my father. I’d thought I was much wiser than that, but I’d been had.
Why would she run to them now and not before? The remembrance of her pregnancy made me scowl. I’d threatened to have her and the baby killed, so had she gone to them for help? If she had, she’d see that they would no sooner save an heir of mine or my father’s unless...
Again, my thoughts turned to the ways they’d hurt her and the child. It wouldn’t matter to them if I actually wanted the kid or not. They’d still use it to further their vengeful agenda against me, and she would help them. She’d had to have learned things about my family from them to begin with. I was almost fully convinced of that, so when the phone rang, I snatched it off the desk.
“What have you found?”
“I’ve found no trace of her in Palermo before starting a relationship with your father. She was in Naples, then nothing for several years. She then reappeared in Naples as if she’d crawled out from under a rock.”
“Cazzo! There’s got to be something. People don’t just disappear into thin air.”
“There’s no paper trail at all. No bank accounts, utility bills, places of residences, or even credit cards in her name. She either lived with others and used their names for things, or she literally was—”
“It was them,” I said, then glanced back down at a picture of her in Fantino Catalano’s arms. His twin, Angelo, had the same smirk, even right before he died. He’d known something and it had to be that an enemy was in the ranks. That viper was none other than the woman I had made come before practically shipping her off to them.
“I’m not leaving until I get what I came here for. Get in my way, Nazario, and it’ll be your last fatal mistake. I am not about taking prisoners. I am collecting body bags,”she’d told me when inside the walls of the club. Then later when I had found her inside of my room, she also reiterated.“No, I won’t leave until I do what I came here to do.”
I’d thought she was just here to avenge her friend, but it was more than that. Her confidence wasn’t just ego because she had managed to find her way inside our lives. She knew she could do what she came there to do, and that was because she was prepared. If not them, where would a bookworm like her be able to come across the drug that induced temporary paralysis that fateful night?
“Keep looking and don’t call me back until you uncover something.” I hung up and raked a hand through my curly hair. I glanced back down at a photograph of her standing alone near a boutique. “Have I really underestimated you so completely?”
I could almost hear her laugh and see the smirk on her face. No matter what I did or said to her ever seemed to faze her, before or after my father. While I was confident her reactions to my touch were genuine, I honestly couldn’t be sure. I’d completely overlooked her and chose to believe she was weak due to emotion. I was the one now left weak, and all because of pride and arrogance.
“You can’t make me get rid of this child,”she’d told me the day she broke the news to me. We’d been arguing, and I wanted no part of raising the heir Stefano wanted, even if the child would know only me as his father.
We’ll have it tested when able, and if it is his, you will get rid of it, or else I will get rid of you both,”I’d told her that, and she’d not taken lightly to it. Was that the reason she’d run off to Sicily, and into the arms of the enemy? After all, she once warned me about threatening her.
“Cazzo!” I opened up the drawer and removed my flask. I took a healthy swig of the gin, then used the back of my hand to wipe my mouth.
Viviana had run off to break the news of her pregnancy to men she had an alliance of some kind. There’d never been any evidence to prove they’d even known each other, but the friendly familiarity in those photographs proved otherwise. What she didn’t know was that there was no honor amongst stone-cold killers, and we all fell into that category. These men would see an opportunity to stick it to me, and they would use Viviana and her unborn child to do it. She might not even get to come back. The next words I hear from her could be from others, and as I took another swig of the liquor, I wondered if it would be that bad.
The gin burned its way down my throat. I felt like my cold, dead heart was being revived, only to be twisted as the truth finally hit me. I did care what happened to Viviana because I fucking liked her. Actually, it was more than that. Even when she was with my father, I was completely obsessed with her to the point that I had sent away all the whores from this estate and even the club. I hadn’t touched another since the day she was introduced to me by my father.
“Cazzo!” I sounded like a broken record, only able to repeat the F-word over and over again. I had no idea when I had developed feelings for this woman, but I had, and now my enemies would use her as collateral damage. No one could know how I truly felt, including Viviana. Maybe if I ignored it long enough, the emotion would dissipate. Or, it would grow stronger. I was truly fucked.
VIVIANA
NAPLES, ITALY
The Catalanos were strongly against my going back to Napoli, but I needed to try to make this work. My plan had been to come to town simply to kill Stefano, then after, I assumed I would go somewhere else to live out the rest of my days. They’d be numbered, but avenging Donna would make those last ones worth it all. It’d started off so perfect. Everything was falling into place, until an obstacle I’d been unable to overcome appeared and it all went to hell.
During training in Sicily, I’d prepared myself for any scenario I could think of, and I had almost succeeded. I had overlooked one barrier, and I was paying for it now. I’d never bargained on running back into Nazario after all of this time, then developing an attraction unlike any I’d ever felt for someone before. When he’d kissed me that first time, it ignited a fire inside of me that even close friends like Andrea, Fantino, Marcu, and Angelo could not. They’d prepared me well to be able to pass whatever tests Stefano put me through, but I couldn’t say the same about Nazario. I was naïve, foolish, and shameless when it came to that man, and I hated it.
I hated him, too. Well, I normally dangled over the line between love and hate like a drunk during a sobriety test, and I landed far too often on the side currently causing bile to rise in my throat. I was on my way back to the place where I could potentially meet my end, but I was at peace with my decision. I didn’t want a life that didn’t include Nazario. He didn’t feel the same about me, because how could he? From threatening my life and this baby’s who he shared blood with, there was no way he could love me. As I said before, shameless. I didn’t care because somewhere deep inside of me, I wanted to believe I could heal his wounded soul. He’d loved and lost before, and while I couldn’t bring back his mother or former girlfriend, I could offer him myself.
