Luca glanced over my shoulder to where Veda remained in the car waiting for him, and I knew he was trying to put himself in my shoes. “She’s strong, and she knows what’s expected of her. She will survive until we can get her.” Luca reached for my shoulder and placed a comforting hand there. “It won’t be long now. I should have enough of the family on my side within a few weeks. She’ll be okay until then.”
That may be true, but I didn’t know if I would be.
“We have to do this, Enzo.”
I closed my eyes and breathed in through my nose, trying to find that place he spoke of. It used to be more easily accessible. After another few minutes, I nodded, and hid the last of my emotions behind my sunglasses.
We got back into the SUV, and Tristan took us to the reception.
CHAPTER2
Serafina
A few weeks earlier…
Iwatched Enzo walk into the elevator, my entire body numb with disbelief.
He was leaving me.
He was fucking leaving me.
How was this possible? My mind couldn’t correlate this man with the man I’d gotten to know these last weeks. The one who’d offered me an obscene amount of money just to fuck me. Who’d hunted down the bastard who’d sold me to human traffickers. The man who’d then stolen me back, killing everyone who got in his way. The man who’d lost his mind when I’d tried to leave him. I could not equate that man withthisman who had just cold-heartedly turned me back over to my father. The one person in the world I was trying to escape.
Luca was talking. Saying something to my father, then to me. But I couldn’t hear him through the roar of blood rushing through my head.
The next thing I knew, my father was throwing his arms in the air, spittle flying from his mouth, and then two of my father’s men appeared on either side of me. They took ahold of my arms, and in a daze, I stumbled along between them as they walked me into the elevator.
I was shoved into the back corner and nearly fell on my face when the heel of one of my shoes caught on the edge of the elevator floor, but I instinctively threw up my hands to steady myself on the back wall just in time. Yet, the world still tilted around me as I turned to face the doors. Between the shoulders of my father’s men who stood in front of me blocking my way out, my eyes clashed with Luca’s: hurt and disbelief in mine, anger and worry in his.
The doors began to slide closed and I blinked, waking up from the trance-like state that had held me immobile up until now. I lunged for the opening in a fit of panic and saw Luca take a step forward before he remembered himself and stopped. I was caught and held roughly. “Nooo!” I screamed as the doors slid shut.
A hand covered in rings flew toward my face, and then I remembered nothing else until I woke up on a private plane just as it hit the tarmac in Dallas.
* * *
“What doyou have to say for yourself, Fina?”
I was in my room. The one I’d walked out of months ago and swore I would never see again. We’d just arrived from the airport, and my father had had his two goons escort me up here. I turned around slowly, seeing my four-poster bed with the white comforter covered in giant pink watercolor flowers, the walk-in closet still full of the clothes I’d left, the large white dresser, the small white desk and chair where I would sit and do my homework when I was in school, and the hope chest at the foot of the bed that held nothing but some extra blankets because nothing in this house was private. “Don’t call me that.”
“What did you say to me?”
Anger rose up inside of me as I turned to face my father. “I said not to call me that. I hate that name.”
His neck and jowls flushed red. “It’s your father’s name for you. Are you telling me that you hate your father? That you hate me? The man who raised you? Who tried to protect you and keep you safe?”
“You kept me a prisoner.”
He stepped closer to me, but I refused to be cowed. Not this time. “Of course, I did. I did what I had to do, Fina.” His eyes swept over me, seeing past the pretty dress to the woman underneath. “Look at what happened as soon as you leave my house.”
“And what is that?” I asked him.
His mouth twisted in disgust. “You became a whore. Just like your mother.”
“Maybe if you’d kept her happy, she wouldn’t have had to find it somewhere else.”
A loud smack reverberated through the room. The sound hit my ears before I felt the pain. It started in my jaw before traveling up to my temple.
“You will remember who you are speaking to,” he hissed.
