"This decision is wrong." I can't force myself to back down. "We should call off the engagement immediately. TellAlessandro we know what he is, eliminate him, and be done with it."
"And then what?" Dante's voice is sharp. "The Marchesis will know we're onto them. They'll scatter, regroup, and come at us from a different angle. This way, we end the threat permanently. We eliminate their leadership in one strike."
"At what cost?" I demand. "At the cost of your daughter's sanity? Her trust? Her?—"
"The don's word is final." Romeo cuts me off, and there's warning in his eyes. "Stand down, Luca."
I want to argue, to keep fighting. I want to make them see that this is wrong, that using Giulia like this is monstrous, that there has to be another way.
But I can't. I'm just a soldier. Just an enforcer. Just a man who has no right to care this much about the don's daughter.
"Understood," I say. It feels like it chokes me.
Dante nods, satisfied. "Good. We'll proceed as planned. We’ll move up the wedding a bit, but not by too much. That gives us time to prepare, to position our people, to make sure we're ready when the moment comes. Three months, maybe.”
Three months. Three months of watching Giulia prepare for a wedding that will end in blood, of knowing what's coming and being unable to stop it. Three months of being complicit in something that will break her.
"You're dismissed," Dante says, and I leave before I say something that will earn me a bullet in my skull and a trip to the bottom of the Hudson.
I sit in my car, and I think about Giulia walking down the aisle in three months. I picture her in that lace dress, her face pale and resigned, walking toward a man who's planning to destroy everything she loves.
I can see the moment when the violence starts, when the carefully planned wedding turns into a massacre. When sherealizes that her father used her as bait, that her marriage was never real, and that everything was a lie. I can imagine the look in her eyes when she understands what's been done to her. And I feel sick, because there's nothing I can do to stop it.
I'm bound by duty, by loyalty, by the oath I took when I joined this family.
The don's word is final. And Giulia is walking toward a wedding that will end in blood, and I'm going to stand there and watch it happen.
I'm going to be complicit in breaking her.
And there's nothing—absolutely nothing—I can do to save her.
11
GIULIA
The club becomes my oxygen, and I'm suffocating everywhere else. I can't stay away from Luca. I can't stop myself from slipping into Valentina's skin and walking through that unmarked door into the only place where I can breathe.
The next night I go, the room is different from the ones we've used before. It’s larger and more luxurious, with soft lighting. There's a massive bed against one wall, draped in dark silk sheets, and there are floor-to-ceiling mirrors that reflect our images back at us from every angle.
"I want to watch you," Luca says, closing the door behind us. "I want to see every expression on your face when I'm inside you.”
He positions me in front of one of the mirrors, standing behind me so I can see both of us reflected in the glass. His hands move to the zipper of my dress, sliding it down slowly, deliberately. The fabric pools at my feet, and I'm standing there in just my underwear and heels, watching myself in the mirror while Luca's hands trace patterns on my skin. "Look at yourself,"he says, his voice rough. "Look at how beautiful you are. How perfect."
Our reflections are everywhere. I can see the flush spreading across my chest, the rapid rise and fall of my breathing, the way my body responds to his touch, the hunger in his eyes as he watches me in the mirror, his hands moving to cup my breasts through the lace of my bra.
"Say you're mine," he demands, his mouth against my neck. "Say it."
"I'm yours." The words come easily, because they're true. They’ve been true since that summer, and since I came home, since the first time he touched me, since the moment I realized that no one else would ever make me feel this way.
"Again." His hand slides between my legs.
I gasp, moaning as he presses against my clit through the lace of my panties. "I'm yours, Luca. Only yours."
He makes a sound low in his throat, and then his hands are everywhere—removing my bra, sliding my underwear down my legs, positioning me so I'm bent forward slightly, my hands braced against the mirror while he stands behind me. I watch in the reflection as he undresses and positions himself at my entrance. And then he's pushing inside me, and I can see everything—the way my mouth falls open, the way my eyes go hazy with pleasure, the way my body accepts him like it was made for this.
"Don't look away," he commands, one hand gripping my hip while the other tangles in my hair, holding my head up so I have to watch. "I want you to see what you look like when I fuck you. I want you to remember this every time you look in a mirror."
The words are crude and possessive, absolutely filthy. And they make me clench around him, push back against him, desperate for more.
