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“I’m sorry! I didn’t have a choice!”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say,” I snort before crouching in front of him, reveling in the bruising that’s already blackened both of his eyes, his cheekbone, and his jaw. The boys had a good time subduing him, and I wasn’t about to hold them back. “What did they offer?”
“Man, it wasn’t like that.”
“Then tell me what it was like,” I murmur. “Come on. You could always tell me anything, remember? Like that whore in Atlantic City who OD’d in your hotel bathroom. You told me about that, didn’t you? When you needed my help.”
He blurts out a sob and tries to look away. “Or what about that night on the parkway when you were coked out of your fucking mind and hit that car full of girls on their way back from a bachelorette party?” I whisper, watching him squirm in shame and soak up every last drop. “Remember that? The way their car flipped? Refresh my memory. How many of those girls ended up flying out of the car and skidding across the pavement until their skin peeled off? I’m a little rusty on the details.”
“I needed the money!” he screams, shaking, tears and blood mixing as they run down his cheeks.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath in hopes of warding off the nausea gripping my stomach. After all we’ve experienced together, it boiled down to money. “You know I love the kid, but he can’t be trusted.” Papa’s warning echoes in my head. How many times did I hear him say that? “Frankie is a live wire, unpredictable, undisciplined.”
“For what? Gambling?” I ask, and his head bobs. “And you didn’t come to me?”
“I couldn’t. I couldn’t!” he insists when I turn away. “You told me never again, man. And I guess… I don’t know… they heard how much I owed. They paid it all off.”
“How lucky for you. Now, you’ll die debt-free.”
“No.” His pleas rise in pitch until they’re more like shrieks. “No! Luca, we’re fucking brothers!”
Brothers? The word leaves me shaking off a twinge of pain in my chest. “That’s what I used to think.” I run my hand over the array of tools resting on my plastic-covered desk. Which to use? “If anything, I should thank you.”
“Wh-what? For what?”
“For reminding me of the dangers of letting someone get too close. It can blind a man, and I can’t afford that. Better to lose a single shipment and have the lawyers work overtime than lose anything more precious.”
I decide on the hammer and turn to him, testing the weight and balance in my hand while he moans and sobs and pleads. “All the love I felt for you has turned into disgust just as deep. Just as powerful.”
“Luca.” My name is a plea, and I can almost hear the kid he used to be in his weak, heartfelt whimpering. “Please. I love you, man.”
All I can do is offer a grim smile as I stop in front of where he sits and waits for the inevitable. “I know. And I loved you too.”
With my eyes locked on his, I raise the hammer and get to work.
3
EMILIA
How is everybody else in the club going through the motions of a night out when I’m sitting here, utterly certain a storm has swept over me?
My hand is still tingling in the moments after Luca Santoro touched his lips to it. It ran through my body and lit up the darkest places until I was still breathless and too shaky to get out of the booth after he left.
What did the man do to me? A simple kiss on my hand, and I’m swooning?
“What the fuck are you thinking?” Craig’s accusatory voice barely pulls me out of the trance Luca left me in before his hand closes around my arm. Suddenly, he’s hauling me out of the booth and practically carrying me to the front of the club, close to the entrance.
“Get off me!” I snap, yanking my arm from his grasp and quickly looking around. “Way to go. Cause a scene and blow my cover.”
His head snaps back as if I slapped him, which I wish I had. “Blow your cover? What do you think this is, a cop show on TV?” He jerks his thumb in the direction of the booth he unceremoniously yanked me from. “What are you doing, flirting with that asshole?”
I sincerely hope for both our sakes that this looks like a fight between a couple rather than what it really is. “What do you think?”
“Honestly, I don’t have the faintest idea. What do you hope to accomplish? Flashing your tits isn’t going to get you anywhere. Not this time,” he states like he has any idea.
It’s my turn to react in surprise, gasping before squaring my shoulders to face him. “What does that mean?”
He knows he made a mistake. Scrubbing a hand over the top of his head, he then rakes back his thinning sandy-blond hair before blowing out a sigh, his large belly expanding. “Forget I said it.”
