Respect it.
Revere it.
Crave it.
Even down to the scent of it.
But I had yet to meet a woman who challenged me in other aspects—mind, heart, soul. If those things were in line with mine, her body would blow me to pieces in the bedroom, then she’d collect them and tuck them away deep inside, so I would always come back for them.
We were told as children that we all had lions inside of us.This is who we are—theFaustifamiglia.We are a family that balances on a sword. One side is ruthless. The other side is romantic.
Ruthless came as easily to me as breathing. That half of the lion was awake since I was a boy. We opened our eyes and took our first breath at the same time. But the woman who would stir the romantic part of him...she had yet to make my heart roar.
Shewould feed the ruthless.
Shewould make me more bloodthirsty.
I would kill to have her. I would welcome death to keep her safe.
Beni lifted the phone, and Elettra’s gorgeous face seemed to gaze at me. “Does she make you roar,cugino?”
My heart was quiet, not even a double beat, but I decided not to say anything to Beni. It did not matter if my heart roared or not. My father had made the deal, and my future was set. Even more so than it would have been before. After a stray bullet fromZioEttore’s gun had struck myNonnodown, and my father rose in ranks to king, life was moving in a direction I had never anticipated.
My father was out to make a name for himself in our world and beyond the boundaries he reigned over. He was headstrong about solidifying his position and keeping the crown until he passed it down to me. This marriage was a play out of that book. He knew it would please thefamiglia. And being the third spare to the heir, he was almost desperate to keep them entranced by a rosy glow.
Beni and I were quiet as we made our way together into the cabin where my father and his guards were just rising from their seats.
My father fixed his suit and met my eyes. I could feel Beni stiffen next to me and straighten his shoulders. My father’s eyes flicked to him before they came back to me. He had no interest in Beni, who was tall, a bit lanky, and didn’t have the Fausti “look” about him. Some even said he didn’t belong to his father. He was nothing like him.
Unlike me and my brothers, Aristide and Leandro. There was no doubt we belonged to Lothario Fausti. Mamma did not even seem to have a hand in creating us. When my father looked at us, he looked into three mirrors. We were younger versions of him and his father. Except I resembled Marzio Fausti the most.
“Nazzareno.” My father took his long coat from the stewardess and slipped it over his wide shoulders. He mostly spoke in Italian. “We will not be late for the dinner with the Burattis.”
I nodded. It was easier that way. He could not confuse or question a nod with anything else but what it is—acceptance.
“You will ride with me.”
I nodded again.
“Walk with me.”
I barely nodded at Beni as I left the aircraft with my father. He took the steps as though he was a king about to set foot on land he ruled. His eyes reflected the lights around him, burning in their depths, like he continually stoked the fires of the eternal city. His cologne wafted in the air when a breeze swept past us. It matched my scent, purposely done or not.
One of his guards opened the door to a waiting SUV and he slipped inside. Another guard opened the other side for me, and I slid in next to my father.
He sighed and ran a hand down his face. In all the years I’d known him, he’d never looked so tired. He was at odds with his older brother, myZioLuca, and it was wearing him down. My father knew if he didn’t concede power to him soon, it was going to spark a war. A war that would take place in a private place between the two of them. Small battles might erupt here or there, but it would come down to the two of them eventually.
ZioLuca was no fucking joke. He was formidable. And he wouldn’t hesitate to kill my father, brother or not, for what was rightfully his. The entire kingdom.
More than once, I felt an urgency to sit down with my father like this and tell him to step away, that the kingdom had never truly belonged to him, and it never would. But to speak the truth out of turn meant I lost my tongue. If it came down to my tongue or what would come of my father’s bullheaded pride, it would be his bullheaded pride. It did not help that Mamma and Leandro stoked his ego and urged him to go to war. Aristide stood on the fence.
The outcome was clear to me.
My father’s reign wasn’t going to end well.
Leandro and I rammed heads because of our differences of opinion. He craved power as much as my father did. But holding that much power in the Faustifamiglianever appealed to me like it did to them. We had enough of it. Men would cower when my father would walk into a room, or if our surname was even whispered.
“Your uncle is settling back into his small kingdom. You remember it. It is between Florence and Lucca.”
