Six Deadly Steps

by Sonya Jesus

  Six Deadly Steps

  Escaping the Mafia, 6

  Sonya Jesus

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Escaping the Mafia

  About the Author

  Also by Sonya Jesus

  Six Deadly Steps

  By: Sonya Jesus

  Copyright © 2020 Sonya Jesus

  Cover design by Touch Creations

  Edited by: Dr. Plot Twist & Dr. Book Nerd

  Edited by: Karen Hrdlicka

  Proofread: Cam Johns

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  For expressed written permission to use any likeliness of the characters or story, you may contact Author Sonya Jesus at her website below.

  www.sonyajesusbooks.com

  DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Any similarities persons, alive or dead, are purely coincidental. This book may contain strong language, sensitive subjects, and/or violent scenes. Reader’s discretion is advised.

  Prologue

  Isabella Santini, Six years ago.

  Saint Theresa’s stands tall in one of the more prevalent neighborhoods near the Hudson River in Manhattan. It’s a gated community, nearly impossible to leave, and my home for the last four years.

  In the darkness of the night, I wait for Luca and Pix at the entrance of the old chapel, overlooking the river. The winter breeze picks up and hits my cheeks, the strands of my hair moving to the rhythm of the night air. My heart aches to be in Luca’s arms, to feel his lips on mine and his skin against my skin.

  He’s late. And I miss him.

  My phone chimes with a message from my best friend, Charlotte Pixton.

  Pix: The booze is wearing off. I’m crashing. Don’t get caught.

  We had just spent an hour pre-gaming in our dorm room, an early pre-celebration for escaping our Catholic prison. Pix’s boyfriend had snuck in through an office window and joined our celebrating. Luca is running late, but only by a few minutes. I smile and lean against the church, texting her back and wishing I had brought gloves. My fingertips are freezing.

  Bells: Is it wearing off, or are your clothes coming off?

  Pix: Shh! Stop making me blush. He’s going to think it’s because of him.

  Bells: Text me when it’s safe to come back.

  She doesn’t reply, so I assume my best friend is happily getting her sexy on.

  A gate squeaks open from my right side, near the modern-style glass pool building that I loathe with every ounce of my being. I glance up from my screen to find Luca tipping one of the guards with a plastic-wrapped block of white powder. He doesn’t hide it, nor does he hide his presence. In this abandoned, squared-in courtyard, anyone can glance out the windows and spot him, but he strides toward me, looking like sin and a whole lot of I-don’t-give-a-damn.

  Connected. Straight-up badass and bad attitude.

  Which I fucking love. It appeals to the rebel inside me, but mostly because I know Luca Cabrali is different than any other guy I have ever been with. He loves me enough to show me the soft-hearted guy beneath his exterior. When it’s him and me, it’s just us, and our fathers don’t make a lick of difference. With all their power and all their influence, neither of them could control love.

  Then again, neither of them know about our little secret. I tuck the phone in my back-jean pocket and rest against the stone wall of the church, watching him.

  Basking in his smoldering presence.

  My cheeks redden with the heat travelling through me. It’s hot, and it’s fucking winter in New York.

  Luca defiantly cuts through the courtyard, cigarette stuck between his lips, eyes narrowed on my waist before they meet my eyes. He always takes his time, admiring my body—every damn inch—before his eyes latch onto mine and hook me forward.

  Always forward.

  Always desperate for his touch.

  And he knows it.

  “You’re late.” I pop my brow and cross my hands in front of my chest, purposely drawing attention to the rounded globes he loves so much.

  “Hey, Bells.” He drops his cigarette on the ground and grinds it into the cement with the tip of his shoe. “Well…” he wraps his arms around my waist and hugs me tight before his smoky breath lands on my lips. I breathe it in.

  Nicotine and mint.

  Like addiction-flavored gum.

  And when he kisses me, I kiss him again.

  Time evaporates along with distance, and where words should define our hello, he spells out his greeting with the tip of his tongue, dragging it along my bottom lip and sending shivers through my bones.

  They ache and break and almost bend.

  Nearly impossible, I know, and yet I’m malleable in his arms, contorting and twisting in ways I didn’t know possible—ready to mold my body around his and be skin to skin and heart to heart.

  “Want to go somewhere else?” he asks between quickened breaths.

  Pix is busy in our room, so I cock my head to the side and lead him into the empty, small church. Before I register it, Luca picks me up and takes the two steps up to the sacred altar. For a second, we pause and take in our surroundings, but then it doesn’t matter.

  The fleeting minute of consciousness is quickly replaced by the need flowing through us. It had been two weeks since I last saw Luca, and two weeks of hell for the both of us. Phone calls had not been enough. Nothing is ever enough with Luca.

  He trails kisses down my neck, stopping just before the dip of my collar bone. Blood rushes through my veins. With his lips, he measures my throbbing pulse, summoning it to the surface.

  One touch. One beat.

  One soft kiss. And it skips.

  Lips collide with skin.

  Together we introduce ourselves to the kind of love that marks the soul—that fuses two strangers together and makes them a part of each other forever. One shy kiss hello. Two for stay. Three for never leave.

  When his lips touch mine for the fourth time in the church, the butterflies in my stomach fly up to my throat, stealing my ability to breathe and tickling a moan out of my vocal chords. My lips tingle and ache at the gentleness, at the urgency of his touch, and between fluttering wings, we kiss our innocence away.

  Whatever is left of it.

  He’s not my first kiss, because that title was given away freely—much too carelessly—but it’s the first time I see a future with someone.

  Each kiss intensifies as the distance between us diminishes, fully-clothed bodies coming together as if the fabric doesn’t exist.

  His hands are everywhere, in my hair, cupping my cheek, on my thighs. He lifts me in the air and places me on the table-like altar, nestling himself between my thighs as he kisses me. This isn’t an oath of marriage, but it’s an oath to each other. Neither of us need words to show love. His heart is in his eyes, and mine is on my sleeve—palpable, visible love. My past didn’t matter with him. It never has.

  What Luca and I have isn’t chemistry…

  It’s acid, dissolving shame, past, and guilt as it spreads over my skin, corroding through my defenses. Here, tonight, he isn’t Luca Cabrali and I’m not Isabella Santini. I don’
t care that our fathers hate each other. The love between us is enough.

  His fingers slide into the waist band of my jeans, and with one thumb he unfastens the button. After lifting my shirt up over my head, and placing a kiss to my belly button, he angles my upper body back so I’m propping myself up on my elbows. With his teeth, he pulls down the zipper of my jeans. His warm breath right at my entrance.

  I moan as he lifts my hips up and slides my jeans and panties off. My sneakers get in the way, and we giggle as he fumbles with them and yanks them off, cursing in the process.

  He spreads my legs and nestles himself between my thighs again. Right there, right at the entrance of my gate, he parts my folds and kisses me slowly. It’s not long before heaven flows through me. Angelic or devilish… or pure fucking voodoo.

  It’s witchcraft—sexual fucking magic—and he’s the spell.

  I’m under and over, and all in my heart. Anywhere but in my head.

  Because there, in my mind, between the grooves and safely tucked between the folds, my secrets lie.

  In Luca’s presence, they don’t exist.

  No blood. No water. No death.

  No guilt casting shadows in my heart.

  Chapter One

  No One Remembers

  Isabella Santini

  My fingers brush over the soft material of my wedding dress. The soft as silk tulle is lightweight and stunning in the warm lights of the mirror-less dressing room, yet I’ve never felt so weighted down before.

  I sigh softly as the woman pins and plucks at the fabric. She’s seated beside me on the velvet carpet floor, the length of the train wrapped around her stout shoulders as she carefully examines, inch by inch, the placement of the appliques. Instead of a pin holder, she balances the pointy metal pieces between her rosy lips, carefully threading one out whenever she finds something out of place.

  Missing the obvious one—me.

  The framework of the ball gown dress is beautiful, like something out of a couture bridal magazine. The built-in corset with sweetheart neckline hugs my breasts just right, rounding them perfectly to accentuate my bust, while reducing the size of my waist. I’m not quite sure where the extra twenty-or-so pounds relocated to, but there’s no back chub or hip humps where the corset ends.

  Smooth. Elegant. Sparkly.

  Obnoxiously ostentatious.

  None of this is me—not the silky tulle imported from Milan, or the Swarvoski crystals embellishing the bodice, or the miniature sparkles adorning the invisible sleeves. Not even the delicate appliques recovered from my mother’s wedding dress are enough to bring a smile to my face—because despite being custom-designed for me and fitted to me, it wasn’t made for me.

  It was made for Beppe Santini, the Don of Chicago. This extravagant gown, meant to highlight his daughter on the happiest day of her life, is meant to trick the guests into admiring his love for me. It’s a façade, just like the rest of my life.

  My wedding guests are people who judge me for my past and cluck their tongues at me anytime I walk by. Old women, who view my youth as an outcry, will watch my father give me away to the man I chose to marry, sporting tears in the corners of their eyes. Men, who my father calls Family, will witness the oath that will turn my fiancé into the next Don—all of them will smile proudly to cover up the jealousy bubbling beneath their skin. None of them will be there to rejoice with me.

  That’s not how things go in the Mafia, and there’s nothing about forcing me to marry Tony Astori that’s worth rejoicing over. Because to the Mafia, I’m nothing more than a bambola, a doll.

  Dress up, look pretty, and shut the fuck up. That’s been my job since I got kicked out of boarding school at eighteen. For five years, Beppe’s kept me tucked at home, reforming me into a woman fit to be at the side of a king. While he molded my skin with beatings and threatened the rebellion out of me, he never bothered to learn anything about me.

  Everything is always about him. My father needs this wedding—needs me—so the truth doesn’t come out.

  It’s a well-known fact around Old Ridge, Chicago that Beppe’s business is more than just buying and selling buildings. The real estate tycoon persona is just for show. This small town is full of rich people—rich people who got rich with help from my father. So, him being a Mafioso isn’t a secret, but they don’t know all his dirty little secrets.

  Not like I do.

  Not that anyone would believe me.

  Everyone thinks of me as the rebel Mafia princess, the girl who screwed a rival Mafia prince on the altar of her Catholic boarding school, desecrating the holy place of worship, and getting kicked out for burning down the chapel. Granted, as a teen, I did shit I shouldn’t have—smoked weed in the basement of the dorms with my best friend, Charlotte Pixton, and stole the money from the fundraiser to break us out of the prison our father’s put us in. I escaped constant protective detail and put myself in danger—but I’ve also seen a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have.

  Like the bloody massacre of my four brothers and my mother in the very home my father and I still live in. I heard it all from the Tree House.

  I guess every one of my future wedding guests forgot I found my family’s bodies. That at the age of twelve, I held my younger brother while he gave his last breaths, tears pouring down his blood-streaked face, blood pooling from his lips as he tried to speak and breathe. I pried him out of my unconscious mother’s hands—one bullet sufficed for two humans. It took me over a minute of staring into his beautiful blue eyes, inundated by an ocean of goodbyes, to realize he was no longer blinking.

  That part, no one remembers.

  Alone, I found my oldest brother, shot in the back of the head near the pool. Blood soaked the light brown stone beneath him. His hand dangling over the circular protrusion into the tinted water, as if he had been reaching for my other brothers, who lifelessly floated in the rectangular pool. It took me almost drowning to realize they were dead.

  No one remembers how I hid behind the large thick pillar, my feet firmly planted on the first step of the pool, the bottoms of my pants soaked through with blood-infused water while someone rummaged through the wicker lawn furniture for something. My fingers tingled as I flattened my back against the pillar, hyper-focused on controlling my breathing. I’ve always been afraid of water, and that day, my fear became a phobia.

  Because my eyes were closed—strained shut from the fear—while I prayed for God to hide me, I saw no face, heard no voice, just the rustle of fabrics brushing against each other and the sound of glass breaking. When the mercury scent, mixed with chlorine and pine from the wooded area in the backyard, evicted my breakfast from the clutches of my stomach, I was sure my position was discovered.

  But just before the feeling overwhelmed me for a second time, a light went on in my father’s office. I sloshed out of the water and dragged my wet sneakers through the house, almost slipping on the kitchen tile. Had I stayed at the pool, they would have seen me.

  I tiptoed around the house, unsure of where to hide, trembling as I found not one guard in sight. Sundays were brunch days at Cielo, and I was alone in the house with a murderer.

  With no one to help, I tucked myself between the sofa and the wall in the living room; my hands curled around my ankles. The wet material clung to my calves as I silently cried in the room where my little brother had died, where I thought my mother’s life had ended, but she softly whispered my name.

  With the little strength I had, I crawled over to her in haste, nearly giving my location away when a strangled cry twisted my vocal cords and threatened to ring them like a fire alarm.

  Yeah. No one remembers how I tried to drag my mother’s body by the arm as she weakly gasped for me to run. She didn’t cling to life then, not like I clung to her. She didn’t even try to get up because she knew—her babies were all dead. She gave up on living before she died. With her last words, she begged me to leave—to run to save myself.

  I should’ve stayed or called the police or died
with them, but I was too scared.

  Too scared to live without them.

  Too scared to move.

  Too scared to disobey and interrupt my father.

  But I ran up the stairs, tucked into my closet, and carefully moved the old toy box, blocking the small latch to the tunnel, only my brothers and I knew about. I ran in the dark until I hit the lawn, followed the unknown path to the side gate, and kept running and running until I reached the small town center my father always frequented. When I swung the doors to Cielo open, I was out of breaths, out of tears, and out of words.

  “Lady? You turn?” The woman with the heavy accent gently taps my hand, her fingers, unintentionally hitting the large circular diamond and jolting me out of my flashback.

  I lift my hand up to stare at the gaudy halo cut engagement ring. An outer row of twenty-four small diamonds, shaped in tears, circled a smaller row, both haloing a large stone that stuck out at the center.

  “Like this,” she says when I don’t move. Her palms latch onto my calves, and she uses her elbows to hold out the layers of the gown so that on my pedestal, I am able to move freely.

  As I shift in her direction, I glance down at the top of her head. Just a little bit of black peppered hair is visible; the rest of her is buried in the pristine white material.

  I snort. Not because of her actions, but because this dress and the stupid ring on my finger are symbols for me—for my life as a Santini.

  Never able to move freely, always confined within four walls. A circle of guards always haloing me, and like the bright shiny diamond in the center, I’m always on a pedestal.