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“You should take the night off,” she called after me. “Relax. Celebrate with us.”
I kept walking. It was easier this way. Easier if I kept things professional, a clear line in the sand.
It hadn’t always been like this. When Nicco and Arianne first got together, after we buried the hatchet, for a while there, I was one of them. A trusted member of their innocent circle.
Family.
But last year, things changed.
Shechanged.
And I could no longer be around her. Not when she was so far off-limits we might as well have been on different continents.
Alessia Marchetti was the Marchetti family’s crown jewel. She was pure and good and she deserved a life better than the one she’d been born into.
Safely out of sight of my cousin and her husband, I allowed myself a second to look at her.
Really look at her.
The emerald green dress clung to her slender curves, taunting me. Taunting every fucking guy in the room. Her dark blonde curls were pulled into a messy ponytail, a few loose tendrils falling around face. Her makeup was light but enough to make her blue eyes pop. She was a fucking vision. A goddess among men.
And she didn’t even realize the effect she had on them.
As if she felt me watching, Alessia’s head turned and our eyes collided. A bolt of awareness went through me. Powerful and a little unnerving. Her lips parted and even from across the room, I saw her breath hitch.
Look away, asshole. Look. The. Fuck. Away.
I forced myself to break the connection and walked in the opposite direction, not sparing her a second glance.
Even though I felt her eyes on me the whole way.
* * *
I foundLuis in the hotel’s security room, running a keen eye over each of the camera feeds.
“Everything good?” I asked, slipping inside and closing the door.
“Nothing out of the ordinary. Everything okay inside?” His brow went up.
“Fine.”
He snorted at that. Luis was Arianne’s bodyguard long before he became Nicco’s head of security. They trusted him implicitly, and so did I. I wouldn’t want anyone else guarding my cousin and niece but sometimes, it stung knowing that she no longer needed me.
She hadn’t for a long time.
There had been a time when Arianne was poised to take over our family’s empire. Capizola Holdings. With me by her side, we would have taken the reins of her father’s company and watched it soar to new heights. Until she fell in love with Nicco and that dream went up in flames. I couldn’t resent her for it, not after everything she’d been through, but I hadn’t only lost my cousin to Nicco. I’d lost my purpose, my future.
No matter what role Nicco offered me within his family, I would always be a Capizola.
“You know, you didn’t have to work—”
I leveled Luis with a dark look.
He chuckled, holding up his hands. “Message received loud and clear. The girls give you any trouble on the way over?”
“When doesn’t Bella give me trouble?” It was her middle fucking name. “Caught her drinking out of a hot pink hip flask.”
“Did you tell Michele?”
