"The damage was done the moment our eyes collided."
~Xavier De Luca
***
One life-altering night ignites a soul-scorching passion between a gangster and a good girl...One that could burn everyone they know and love to ashes.
Loyalties and legacies...
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The last time I vomited in public, I was running long distance and track for Stanford and suffering from heatstroke during a meet. I was also mildly dehydrated and trying to power through a skull-splitting hangover.
I felt like that fraternity jockstrap all over again. Weak knees. Fuzzy vision. Mushy gut. Red-faced. Excruciating headache.
We'd moved to Luigi's home office after our disastrous lunch so he could elaborate on his newly discovered treasure away from his sobbing mess of a wife.
Luigi's treasure, as it turned out, was a raging trash fire for everyone else. He wouldn't tell us how exactly, but Gannon's untimely death led him to the leverage he needed to make a power play none of us saw coming.
Within seconds, my family's fortune and our hard-won standing with la Societa, along with all of our assets, like our properties and our businesses, were to be ripped out from under us like a rug.
Worst of all, I was never to see Grace again.
"How-?" I dry heaved, unable to get the words out. Christian was no better. He'd been sitting next to me, motionless to the point of comatose and staring out at the austere cliffs of the Pacific coastline through the nearby window wall. "How the fuck did this happen?"
My brother vaguely shook his head as if he'd heard me, but Pa and Andreas were rigid as a pair of stiffs.
"Why so glum, Xavier?" Luigi's heartless chuckle bristled my spine. "You should be just as happy as me. You get to keep your homes. You get a beautiful wife in my daughter, who will eventually learn her place, just like you. Plus, you will one day earn a position in our newly formed conglomeration, which is more than I can say for the rest of your family and their unfortunate associates. And I...Will take everything else, including your seat at the table, Vincenzo."
He paused to sip the amber liquid he'd been swirling around the ice sphere in his tumbler, eyeing Pa over the rim.
My father's face had long since hardened like a petrified tree, with furrowed lines in deep timeworn grooves. Andreas sat next to him, silent as a gargoyle. They were a pair of morose bookends with nothing left between them.
"Like hell, you will." Christian's attention finally snapped back to the moment. "The others wouldn't allow it!"
"What others? No one knows about your father's egregious mistake but us! And, if he wants it to remain hidden," Luigi threatened, leaning over his own bulging stomach to drill my brother with a hideous look. "It'll cost him his voting rights, and whatever he's got left, which isn't much."
Luigi turned to Pa once again.
"You must have known something about the deal was dirty, Vincenzo since you didn't tell anyone that you'd sunk most of your net worth into it. Not even your own consiglieri or your underboss by the looks on their faces."
