“I love you,” he pleaded. “Nothing has to change between us. We can still be together, just like this. This is great, isn’t it? I’ll just have a wife to keep up appearances.”
I scoffed in disbelief. “Right. So you’ll spend weekends fucking me, and then Monday to Friday you’ll be a devoted husband to your wife? Is that it?”
“No, it doesn’t have to be like that. I won’t even sleep with her if you’re not okay with it. There are other ways for her to have my baby.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “If I’m not okay with it?” I half-shouted, half-laughed, feeling like I was going insane. He was making me feel insane. “Of course I wouldn’t be okay with you fucking a woman or another man, Enzo. Because I fucking love you. I want to be with you. And I shouldn’t have to share you with anyone else!”
“Then you won’t!” he rushed, grabbing my face and forcing me to stand still and look at him. “My heart and body will only be yours. I won’t be with her in any way other than being legally married. It will all be for show.”
“Yeah, as long as no one else knows, right?”
He swallowed, his eyes glistening with pure panic as he watched me slip away from him right before his eyes. “Please, Finn. I can’t lose you. But I have to marry a woman.”
I stepped back from him. “And how will you explain to your wife why you won’t have sex with her? How will you explain where you disappear every night to end up in my fucking bed, Enzo? You’ll marry a woman for an alliance and then keep her trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. She’ll be miserable! You’re okay with that?”
He dived back at me. “I don’t know! I haven’t thought all of that through, but I don’t care. As long as I have you, I don’t care.You can’t leave me, Finn. Please. I love you so much. Just give me some time to sort this out.”
He started kissing me, his hands threading through my hair. I tried to push him off, but he held on tighter, biting my lips and thrusting his tongue into my mouth until I submitted. We kissed with feverish need, hating the world for what it was while loving each other despite it.
“I love you, I love you, I love you. I’m sorry,” he husked between our frantic kisses until we fell back onto the bed. We rolled and rutted and panted until we could erase the pain, then clung to each other through the night. I stared at the ceiling with Enzo’s head on my chest, never feeling more terrified of losing what we had at that moment.
“I hate that I can’t give you that dream. The beach house. The children. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a future and be happy. It might just look a little different. I’ll figure it out, Finn. I promise. I’ll never let you go,” he whispered.
I continued to stare at the ceiling in emotional turmoil. I felt as if I’d just been thrown into a hurricane, and the only way to survive was to hold on to him with everything I had. I was madly in love with a man who wasn’t ready to love me openly. A man who had been so poisoned and manipulated into believing he’d never be accepted for who he was. A man trapped in a life he didn’t want to live.
I pressed my lips together as I fought back the unsettling emotions, trying to imagine my life without Enzo Aiani if I were to walk away and move on. The pain was excruciating, and I didn’t want it. I only wanted him. Could I stay in this, hoping that one day he would find the courage to accept who he was and share it with the world? And until that day, could I stay his lover in the dark, even if that meant watching him marry someone else and have their children? Did I love him enough to trap myselfin his life of secrets and lies just so I didn’t have to live without him?
I think I did.
Chapter sixteen
The Past
“We need to hit the Leones where it hurts,” Gio said, balancing his cigar on his ashtray and spinning his laptop screen towards me, revealing a website for a sex club, La Cassetta, in Venice. “They opened it a few weeks ago. It’s Lorenzo’s first solo venture to impress his father. I say we burn it to the ground.”
I nodded. “I’m in. Just tell me what you need.”
The Leones and the Buccinis had been at each other’s throats for as long as anyone could remember. The current bloodshed was over Venice—its ports, routes, and money—and neither family was willing to give up an inch. As head of the third most powerful family in the North, I didn’t have the luxury ofremaining neutral. I had to pick a side because refusing to was practically signing my own death warrant.
Mypadrehad chosen for us. He backed Salvatore Buccini, sealing our loyalty with a marriage alliance with Camilla because he believed they were the more stable and less volatile option. Which was laughable, really, because look where he ended up. With a Buccini bullet in his head and six feet under. Which was my first lesson as a mafia boss: there is no such thing as safe in this life. Only sooner or later.
For the year and a half that Giovanni and I had been working together, we’d grown close enough that outsiders might have mistaken us for friends. We shared drinks, enemies, and victories. But I wasn’t naive. As long as I stayed loyal, backed him against the Leones, and remained his most reliable arms dealer in the North, I was useful. A good ally. But completely replaceable.
Men like Giovanni didn’t protect assets. They used them until they lost their value or a better offer came along. One wrong move, one bad shipment, or even a whisper in the wrong ear would leave me out of favour. I needed more than contracts and handshakes from the Buccinis. I needed to become untouchable.
I needed to find a way into his inner circle, made up of the few people he didn’t just do business with, but he extended his protection to. The people who mattered most to him. I was sick of constantly looking over my shoulder and feeling completely alone. I wanted his protection, but I didn’t know how to get it.
“Max is working on the plan, so I’ll let you know.”
“Okay. Sounds good.” I stood, assuming the meeting was over, but he held up his hand to stop me, gesturing for me to sit back down.
“I wanted to talk to you about something, Aiani. Something that has come to my attention.”
I kept my expression neutral, but my heart was racing. I felt sick. Did he know I was in love with one of his soldiers? Did he know I liked being fucked all night by his sister’s bodyguard?
Gio shifted back in his chair, his eyes narrowing into an intimidating glare that made sweat bead beneath my hairline. He fucking knows. I’m done. He’s going to kill me. They were irrational thoughts, given that he’d just asked me for help against the Leones seconds earlier, but I wasn’t thinking rationally. It was pure panic.
“Max has hinted that you are interested in Elenora. In dating her.”
