by Bethany-Kris
She gave a little laugh. “He’s going to be fine.”
Siena bumped Lucia gently with her hip. “He loves you so much. Talks about you all the time, Lucia. He’s had a rough time this last year. I think you have, too. It might help you both if you just tried—”
“Probably not,” Lucia muttered under her breath.
Instead of trying to argue with her further, Siena gave her a look and then shrugged her shoulder when Lucia refused to break her cold, calm mask. “All right, don’t say I didn’t give you the chance to make the first step without help, you know.”
What in the hell did that mean?
Lucia would soon find out.
It seemed it wasn’t only her mother—her father had all but given up on trying to close the distance between the two of them—who was willing to play the Devil’s advocate for Lucia and her brother. Siena seemed ready to jump into the fray, too.
Great.
“John, you’re out of that jam you like, right?” Siena asked, looking over her shoulder.
Lucia’s gaze drifted to John, too, but the second he looked back at her, the coldness slipped into her heart once more to freeze it all over. Just like that, she went from feeling fire and fury to nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes, she hated that emotion played tricks with her now. Like she was feeling entirely too much one second, and then the next, she couldn’t feel anything at all. She wished it would just pick one goddamn thing or the other and stop giving her whiplash.
She quickly tore her stare away from her brother, refusing to give him more of her attention right then. She didn’t like the way it left her empty, and feeling more alone than ever.
John sighed behind her.
Siena looked Lucia’s way like she wanted to grab her attention. Lucia even refused to look at her.
“We can grab some of the jam on the way out,” John said. “Don’t worry about it, bella.”
Siena was quick to reply, “No, I can make a trip around. I need to grab something else that way, too. You and Lucia keep going. She wants to grab—what is that, again?”
Lucia didn’t look back at her brother as she muttered, “Some loose tea.”
Kind of wishing I didn’t want it at all, now. I wouldn’t have to be here to begin with. Hell, even her thoughts were a particular brand of nasty today.
“Yeah, so take her,” Siena said, dropping Lucia’s arm and giving John a pointed look. “And I will meet you at the entrance on the way out of the market.”
It further proved what she believed—the woman was going to attempt to force Lucia to make nice with her brother by not giving her a choice when she left her alone with him. That was laughable. Lucia could sit in a room with anyone and say absolutely nothing. They could be looking her right in the eye, and she could keep her expression blank, and her mouth firmly fucking shut.
Out of the corner of her eye, Lucia watched Siena drop a quick kiss to John’s lips and murmured something she couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it made her brother pout. Like a fucking little boy. It was almost amusing.
“I will meet you at the entrance,” John grumbled when Siena stepped away from him.
“Good,” she replied.
Siena patted his cheek with a soft hand, and then just as fast, headed into the crowd, back the way they first came. Lucia didn’t miss how one of two enforcers that were following them for the day headed after her without a word. She didn’t think to ask her brother why he had enforcers trailing this close to them, but she didn’t need to, either.
They were mafia kids.
Well, even if they weren’t kids anymore.
Something dangerous was always following close behind. The next attempt on someone’s life was always right around the corner. Not to mention, Lucia didn’t know all the details about the past year as she hadn’t thought to ask, but she did hear whispers. Her brother had taken over a rival family—people were unhappy.
That meant bad things.
Probably another reason for the enforcers.
With Siena gone, that left John and Lucia.
Alone.
Shit.
Lucia sighed, wanting to get this done and over with. At least with the buffer of Siena between them, she didn’t feel so out of place with her brother. Waving a hand at her brother and heading into the crowd, Lucia said, “Well, come on, then. It’s cold, and I don’t want to freeze out here for too long.”
John chuckled, and his footsteps followed behind. “You didn’t mind five minutes ago when Siena was here.”
Lucia stiffened.
Asshole.
He would have to say that, wouldn’t he? She wished he just wouldn’t start to begin with. Make this easy on her, and all that shit. Nothing could ever be that simple in Lucia’s life. It was never simple.
“Yeah, well …”
What else could she say?
Apparently, she didn’t need to say anything because John had all sorts of things to say. Fucking perfect.
“What do you need me to say, Lucia?” John asked quietly from behind her. She still refused to turn around and face him even as he spoke. Maybe it was rude, but it was better than him seeing the hatred shining back in her eyes. She didn’t want to hear anything he said, but here they were, it seemed. Just her luck, too. “Tell me what to say so that we can move on, and I will do that. Sorry isn’t going to be good enough—I get that. So what will do it for you?”
For a second, she stopped walking. Her heart stuttered—playing tricks on her again, as the emotions blew all around her like the people still swarming The Annex. The tension between her and John still felt thick and loaded with all the things she had said to him before this—things she knew hurt him because God, she just needed him to understand and feel the way he made her feel—and things they had yet to say to one another.
Did he really want to know?
Did he honestly want to know what would make this better?
Because she didn’t think anything would.
Slowly, Lucia turned to stare at her brother. The familiar prickling behind her eyes said the tears were coming, and she bet John could see the water shining back at him, but she held it all at bay. She would not cry. Not then.
“You’re right,” Lucia said, “sorry won’t be good enough, John.”
“But I am sorry.”
She believed him for no other reason than the truth staring back in his gaze, and the way he dropped every pretense he’d been holding onto before this moment. She heard the truth in his voice, and how it colored his tone thickly with emotion she understood all too well.
Regret.
Pain.
She knew that well because she felt it constantly.
So, yeah, she believed that he was sorry.
Lucia nodded. “Now.”
“The day it happened. The day I found you. The day Renzo was taken away. That very second, Lucia, I was sorry,” her brother muttered, his tone aching. “That was not what was supposed to happen.”
Oh, God.
There was so much she wanted to say to him. So many words that wanted to snap out of her tightening jaw just because she could. It would be easy, and it had become habit for her to cut her brother or father with her words to hurt them instead of trying to listen to them. She tried something different, and not for John, but because she was goddamn tired.
Way too tired to be angry right then.
“Did you know he hated me?” she asked softly.
John’s brow dipped. “Who?”
“Renzo,” Lucia said. “At first, he thought I was just some little rich bitch with an air-filled head, and a pretty face. I didn’t know what it was like to be poor, or to struggle. I didn’t know the streets, or how hard they are on people like him. I didn’t know what it was like to come where he comes from, or how to survive without a trust fund.”
“Lucia—”
Lucia shrugged, feeling the bitter laugher rising in her throat, though she managed to hold it back somehow. “He was right, too. And maybe I should have tha
nked him for making that obvious to me, you know? He woke me up. It took thirty days to change my life, and seconds to make it worse all over again.”
John dragged his hand down over his jaw, and looked away from her. Lucia didn’t know what to expect from her brother, then. She wanted him to understand how different her life had become because Renzo stepped into it, and then how irrevocably worse it had changed yet again because her brother and father took him away from her. If he could know those things, and understand what it meant for Lucia, then maybe … God, maybe, she could work on this wall between them.
He had to understand, though.
That had to come first.
John slipped a hand into his pocket, and without a word, pulled out a piece of folded up paper. He held it out to Lucia like he wanted her to take it, but she stared at it, unmoving.
“Here,” John said.
Lucia didn’t move a muscle. “What is it?”
“A better apology.”
What?
Lucia took the paper from his outstretched hand, but didn’t take her eyes off him. She didn’t have a reason to distrust her brother at this moment, but he’d given her one in the past. She didn’t know what she might find when she opened that damn paper up, and she was not willing to find more pain and heartache in whatever he was giving to her.
Simple as that.
Lucia unfolded the paper, and felt the air catch painfully in her chest as she read over the information that had been scribbled down in her brother’s familiar, messy handwriting. To someone else, this information might be nothing. To her, though, it was fucking everything.
And more.
Renzo Zulla, it read at the top. And then right below, an address had been written down. She could tell it was just a PO box, and nothing more. Not an actual address to a home or … something. Not even a prison address with an inmate number.
She’d searched for him in the system. Tried to find him time and time again. No one seemed to know where Renzo had been moved after New York. It was like he vanished into thin air. Lucia was mad—too mad to ask her father what in the hell was happening with Renzo, but she didn’t think Lucian would be honest with her even if she did ask him for the truth. But she knew … something wasn’t right. Something had happened with Renzo.
But what?
Where was he?
Here, apparently. This fucking PO box. In Nevada?
Lucia’s fingers tightened around the paper, and crumpled the edges. She glanced up at her brother to see the firmness in John’s gaze as he stared back at her. She had so many more questions than she had answers as she looked between her brother and the paper.
Where is he?
What happened to him?
Can I see him?
All she found staring back from John was a silent request to not ask a damn thing. Sometimes, that’s how their life went. Sometimes, she couldn’t ask questions. None of them could. Sometimes, it was just better not to know.
Even if all of her was begging to know.
Hadn’t a year been long enough?
She just wanted Renzo back.
“You don’t have to say anything,” John told her, finally breaking the silence between them. “Not thank you, or fuck you, or anything, Lucia.”
She didn’t know what to say.
Well, except one thing …
“Does Dad know you got this for me?” she asked.
“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s also not about Dad. It’s about us. Sometimes, I think Dad just worries too much about us. He wants us to be safe, and happy, and fulfilled. In the process, his protective nature sometimes smothers us, too. And that’s just Dad—he is who he is, and we have to love him regardless, Lucia.”
“I do love Daddy, but—”
“You’re angry with him, too.”
Finally, those tears she’d been holding back decided to make themselves known whether she wanted them to or not. A single tear slipped down her cheek, but she didn’t wipe it away. For the first time in a long time, that tear felt good. “So fucking mad, John.”
“It’s cliché, kiddo, but what’s meant to be, will be, and fuck the rest.” John pointed at the paper in her hand, saying, “There’s your lifeline, Lucia. You want to talk to Renzo—you want to know? He’s right there. I’m sorry it’s not more.”
Lucia clenched the paper between her fingertips again, and stared at her brother. She didn’t know what this paper or the address on it was going to lead to—but it was something. A first step. An option for her to take. Maybe it would give her everything she had been searching for this last year. Maybe it would fill the emptiness she constantly felt now.
She wouldn’t know unless she used it, right?
“This is perfect, John.”
Her brother smiled. “That’s all I wanted to—”
John never got to finish his sentence. It was drowned out by the screams of people in The Annex, and the sudden swell of a crowd rushing their way when in the background, she heard, “She’s got a gun!”
Maybe it was the look in John’s eye—the fear staring back from her brother—that told Lucia … this wasn’t random. So was their life, it seemed. Even hiding herself away in California couldn’t keep her safe and untouched by the mafia. Nothing would ever keep her safe from it all.
Lucia had been right, too. It was about them … or rather, her brother and Siena.
Later in the evening, while she sat in a hard plastic chair of an emergency room as Siena Calabrese fought for her life … Lucia managed to convince a nurse to find her a pad of paper and a pen.
She wrote her first letter to Renzo as her family paced in the waiting area. She watched the clock, counting the minutes of a surgery that took longer than normal on Siena for her brother who was barely able to breathe. She heard her father demand someone get Lucia a ticket as soon as fucking possible back to California just in case.
To keep her safe.
Like it would ever make a difference.
Lucia penned that letter, then.
Renzo, it started. And then, right below, she wrote, Do you feel like this, too? Alone all the time? Empty, too? That’s me without you.
ONE
“Fair warning.”
The man walking in stride with Renzo down the dark corridor grinned. It was almost a creepy sight, if Renzo was the type to let that sort of shit bother him. A sly smile that curved a little too much at the edges, and in the darkness, all he could see was the man’s white teeth and his eyeballs glowing under the black lights.
Why did they need black lights in the hallway anyway? Except at the far end of the corridor without doors, he could see a red light flashing over top of what looked like the only door. A stark, black door. What did that lead into?
They’d covered his head for a portion of time—most of the fucking time. He didn’t know what kind of a building they were in, or even where in the country considering they’d driven for what felt like days. They covered his head, then, too.
Hell, he still wasn’t sure if he should even ask where he was. It didn’t seem like the right time. The team of people walking behind him and the man beside him didn’t seem up for conversation.
They walked in rows of three—there were nine of them in total—shoulder to shoulder, and the only thing visible beneath the bandanas wrapped around their faces were their eyes. And not one of them would look at him. They didn’t meet his gaze, and they didn’t speak a word. Maybe they weren’t allowed, or maybe they couldn’t. Renzo wasn’t sure.
What had Lucian Marcello gotten him into now?
What was this deal?
Lucian hadn’t said anything like this was going to happen when the man visited him in the prison. Sure, he hadn’t said this wouldn’t happen, either. In fact, he hadn’t given Renzo a lot of details about this stupid deal. Just his freedom for five years of his life. That was it, that was all. Renzo was starting to think he should have demanded a hell of a lot more info.
“What’s th
at warning?” Renzo asked, rubbing his raw wrists while he had the chance. They’d cut the broken cuffs off him from the prison after snatching him during a transfer, and they weren’t easy about it by any means. “Is it going to help me?”
The man laughed.
Renzo didn’t even know his name.
Or the others’ names, either.
“This place, New York, is gonna break you.” The man nodded, his smile gone in a blink. “It’s gonna break you—that’s inevitable. You’ll come out better for it, that’s how it works. Just accept it now. Better to learn to enjoy it instead of waste energy hating it. Let it go now.”
Christ.
He’d been told that before. The whole let it go thing. It never did make much of a difference for him. It never helped to get rid of the bitterness and contempt bred deep into his sinew for the shitty hand life had dealt him in some ways. No, he’d never let it go, but he had handled it.
It was basically the same, right?
All too soon, the end of the hallway was right in front of Renzo. He finally realized what that blinking red light was for when the guy who had been walking with him, looked upward, raised a hand, and nodded. Renzo followed his gaze to find the gleam of a lens trained right on them.
A security camera.
Fuck.
What was this place?
Renzo was sure he was going to be asking that question a lot for the next while. Who knew for how long, because he sure as hell didn’t know a thing.
“You’re going to enter this door,” the man beside him said, “and everything is going to change. That’s all I can tell you.”
The white skull design on the man’s bandana hanging loosely around his neck—he was the only one in the team of ten that came for him who pulled his face covering down—lit up a funny purple color under the blacklights.
“Can’t even tell me your name?” Renzo asked.
“Not yet,” the man returned.
A loud ring echoed throughout the hallway. It was distracting enough that Renzo almost wanted to cover his ears. It took his attention away from the guy for just long enough that he didn’t see him pull his bandana back up, never mind the rest of the nine people behind them who quickly closed the distance to come closer.
