As if Lucian can hear what I’m thinking, he stops and steps toward me. “I know how it feels to not be able to control your emotions.” He lifts his pad and taps it against my temple. “It fucks with your head. When you feel like your head is pounding and your body is tensing and you have nowhere to release it, I want you to come here, and we’ll fight the frustration out of you.”
He lifts my chin with his pad, forcing me to look at him. “You’re not broken, Matteo. You just need an outlet.”
“Where were you?”Dominick asks when I stroll into the house a few hours later. “Dad’s been waiting for you.”
“I’m sure he has been,” I mutter, too drained from the gym to get worked up again.
I sit beside him at the island and steal one of the cookies he’s eating from his plate—thanks to our housekeeper, Martha, who makes the best damn sweets.
“Heard you beat the hell out of Anthony.” He chuckles.
“He was talking shit. Saying he’s going to marry Bri.”
Dominick freezes, his cookie an inch from his mouth.
“Dominick, tell me he was just talking shit.”
He shakes his head. “I wish he were. Dad talked to me about it last night, but I didn’t have a chance to tell you. Apparently, I’m being forced to marry Daniella.”
“Daniella’s a fucking baby!” I hiss.
“Shh.” He glances around to make sure Andrey isn’t near. “I know, but our father, Giuseppe, and Joseph have it in their heads that if I marry Daniella and Anthony marries Brielle, our families will be connected and unstoppable.”
“They’re fucking nuts.” I look over at Dominick. “Tell me you aren’t going to go along with this bullshit idea.”
“I don’t want to,” he mutters. “But you know I have to go along with whatever he says until we can figure out a way to get rid of him.”
“I say we kill him in his sleep … tonight.”
I’d gladly put a bullet between his eyes, and with our family’s connections, I’d get away with it.
“We can’t,” he says. “He wants me to go to college. Says it will look good. And he’s not handing anything over to me until I do. He said if anything happens to him, everything goes to Giuseppe.”
“Motherfucker!” I slam my fist on the marble countertop.
“Stop,” Dominick says. “It might take a little longer, but one day, our father will be six feet under, and everything will be ours.” He hands me another cookie. “We just have to be patient.”
1
Matteo
Twenty Years Later
“Fuck yes,”I groan, my eyes closed and my head tilted back. “You suck me so?—”
My phone buzzes on the end table, and I debate whether to answer it. On one hand, it’d be rude to answer the call while Charmaine has her lips wrapped around my cock, but on the other hand, it’s late—nearly two in the morning—since she insisted on talking about herself for fucking hours after dinner.
I glance at the screen and see it’s my best friend, Lorenzo. Fuck it. If he’s calling this late, there’s a reason.
I reach for my phone, and the sucking stops. “It’s okay, baby. Keep going. I’ll only be a minute.”
She nods and goes back to sucking my dick, and I pat the top of her head in praise. The shitty, overpriced food at the country club, mixed with her incessant talking, damn near killed me, but I gotta give it to her—she can suck a cock like a pro.
“Russo,” I say, “this’d better be important. I’m in the middle of having my?—”
“Matteo,” he breathes, forcing my body to tense up. “My parents are dead. There was a fire at their house, and neither of them made it out.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
