Heartless Prince by Brook Wilder

 

Chapter 18

Lucas

 

Rocco opened the door for me, and I stepped out, my gaze going directly to Leda’s room as I did so. There was business back in New York City that I couldn’t put off any longer, so I had left Leda in the care of the guards.

 

She, of course, never knew I was gone, and that was how I wanted it. I wanted her to have that measure of uncertainty to keep her in her room until I was ready for her to cross the threshold.

 

The problem was, she hadn’t strayed far from my mind today. It didn’t help that the client I was meeting with had brought up the fact that I had D’Agostino’s daughter in my grasp, the glee in his eyes now far too common. The rest of the Dons thought that I was going to kill her and make a spectacle out of owning her. And maybe I was.

 

But it would be on my terms, not anyone else’s.

 

“She’s been in her room,” Rocco supplied as we walked to the side door of the house. “Hasn’t caused a scene or tried to kill herself by climbing down the balcony again.”

 

My grin was quick. “I didn’t expect her to have the balls to do so.”

 

“Yeah, me neither,” Rocco admitted. “She’s not what I would have thought.”

 

I welcomed the cool air in the house. That was one of the many reasons I had thought about Leda today, and the object of my thoughts disturbed me greatly. I didn’t think about anyone like that, especially not anyone where I could paint a vivid picture of what I wanted to do to her.

 

None of them included what everyone thought I was doing to her. Hell, I had a reputation of making people suffer before I killed them, using various methods that I had learned as an enforcer. My teachers had been more sadistic than I could ever be, but among those trainings, I had picked up some tools that had served me well over the last few years.

 

Now, as Don, I still liked to get my hands dirty. One of the lessons Cosimo had taught me was to feel my enemies’ pain, that it was the only way I could understand how to torture them effectively.

 

What could I say? I was a fucking monster.

 

And I loved it.

 

“I’ll go check the perimeter,” Rocco said when he realized I wasn’t going to carry on a conversation.

 

He left me at my office door. I stepped inside, ignoring the newly filled whiskey decanter as I did so. Hell, I no longer wanted to touch the stuff if it was going to have the same effect on my fucking dreams as it had last night.

 

I fell into my chair and leaned back, looking up at the ceiling. The meeting hadn’t gone well. The fucking client wanted to hire my Mafia out to move his guns, and while I wasn’t opposed to the idea for a few of my capos, he low-balled me on the price.

 

If he wanted me to do the dirty work, then he was going to pay the right price for it. He left with a threat to go to one of the other Mafias. So naturally I told him to fuck off, knowing he would be crawling back in a few days.

 

I could be accommodating when I wanted to be, but I wasn’t going to do it for pennies.

 

That wasn’t the sort of Don I would be. When I first took the title, the power had been tenuous. It wasn’t easy adapting to giving orders. It wasn’t easy managing everybody constantly asking for a share, or figuring out who was going to backstab me.

 

But I adapted to the task. I spent days trying to sort out information on the entire family, meeting with the capos—even the ones that didn’t see me as their Don—and laying down my version of the law.

 

It hadn’t been easy. Even now, there were still capos who whispered that I wasn’t the true Don.

 

Adrian hadn’t helped at all, of course. He kept giving me shit, did everything in his power to be a pain in my ass. He tried to sway the votes and get the other capos to call for me to step down.

 

An outright mutiny.

 

But then Carmine’s empire collapsed. A single article, a couple of dead men, and all of a sudden, the boot of the NYPD came down on Carmine’s neck. Seemingly overnight, there was no more D’Agostino Mafia.

 

His own son dismantled everything he built up. Now, I didn’t doubt that there were loyalties left for the old man’s name, but their days were numbered.

 

And suddenly, those capos’ whispers got a lot quieter. They’d all seen what happened when a Don falls:

 

The jungle tore itself down, and guys like them were caught up in it. Chewed up by the sea of change that churned through them. They knew this could happen to Cosimo’s empire. They knew, and so did I.

 

There were times I had considered letting the same thing happen to Cosimo’s empire and absconding with what I could. But I had a change of heart when even the most mutinous capo knelt down and pledged his life to mine.

 

All except Adrian.

 

I used the Cavazzo Mafia to crush the other Mafias, and I spent the last five years doing just that. I leveraged what was left of Cosimo’s influence to steal contracts. I took businesses that had been part of some other Mafia’s for generations.

 

Money talked, and Cosimo’s dead pockets were deep.

 

And the entire time, Adrian kept undermining me. Say what you wanted about that little shit, he had a way of swaying enough men to his cause.

 

Did it matter that I reminded him Cosimo’s will made it plenty clear that I was Don?

 

No.

 

And even though the will had been upheld, Adrian had spread the poison of dissent among my ranks. Those capos wouldn’t last long anyway. Either they would fall to me, or I’d send them onto their deaths.

 

That was the real point of Leda at my side. Once the war inevitably came, the unfaithful would be the first ones to die.

 

Adrian thought I was bringing Carmine’s wrath down on the family’s head by taking Leda. Not mine, you little shit. Just yours.

 

My cell rang, and I fished it out of my pocket. Number withheld. Probably that client who came crawling back.

 

I answered it. “Yeah?”

 

“You think you’re some hot shit?”

 

Grinning, I braced my arms on the desk. “Hello Carmine, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

 

“You have my daughter,” he growled.

 

“I do,” I replied evenly. “I trust you’ve also heard the price she fetched?”

 

He huffed into the phone. “I made a deal. How the fuck did you get your hands on her?”

 

Well, I wasn’t going to tell him that he had been sold out by his own men hired to take Leda to her husband. But he should’ve seen it all coming.

 

Men like him were old fashioned. Always bloodline this, and family ties that.

 

The moment I had heard that he had been arrested, I knew that he would be looking for a way to cover his ass. His son Nico wasn’t looking to become Don, just to destroy his father.

 

Which meant Leda was Carmine’s only card left to play. It hadn’t taken much to figure out her whereabouts, track her, and see the moment when she was practically dragged to prison, I had seen my chance.

 

They had no idea she was already mine before she stepped foot on that stage. They never stood a chance at getting their hands on her.

 

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I replied casually. “It’s too bad, Carmine. I imagined you had other plans for your family.”

 

“I’m not dead, asshole,” he seethed, his anger clear through the phone. “You think that I don’t have back-up plans? You think you’re untouchable? You think you got away with this scot-free? Do you have the slightest idea who you are messing with?”

 

“I know exactly who I’m messing with,” I growled, dropping all pretense of a casual conversation. “A pathetic man who’s nothing but a has-been. Whose own son dismantled his empire. A man whose supposed allies were tossing down stacks for the chance to fuck his daughter. You are done. You’ve been done.”

 

Carmine chuckled, not fazed by my words. “If you think that this little setback is going to ruin me, Don Valentino, you have another think coming. I earned that fucking title the old fashioned way. The dignified way.”

 

The sneer in his voice made me want to reach through the phone and wrap my hands around his neck. He thought, like the rest, that I got to where I was because of what I used to me. He thought that I didn’t claw my way to the top.

 

“Think what you want.” I kept my voice smooth. “But I’m on the outside, and you are inside that fucking prison cell, with nothing more than time on your hands.”

 

“I will give you this offer only once,” Carmine said after a moment. “Give my daughter back to me, and I will forget this ever happened.”

 

Never!

 

I let out a snort. “Give her up? I’ve bought her for twenty million, and I intend on getting every penny’s worth out of her. Would you like to know what I’ve been doing to your precious little princess, Carmine? Would you like to know in excruciating detail of how I made her beg?”

 

“Fuck you,” Carmine growled. “If you even think—”

 

“I’ll take good care of your little girl,” I interrupted. “Don’t you worry.”

 

I ended the call and smirked as I thought about how the old man was likely raising hell that I hadn’t given him the respect he thought he had earned.

 

Blowing out a breath, I slammed the cell phone down onto the desk, feeling some of the anger drain from my body from the exchange. There had been one thing that had bothered me all day, one thing that I hated above all else.

 

When Carmine demanded his daughter back, a feeling sliced through me.

 

I was worried about Leda.

 

I was worried about what would happen if she were to go back there. So much so, that I wanted to protect her from her shithead father and anyone else that came to lay claim to her. It wasn’t in my nature to be a protector.

 

I was the savage that did the hurting.

 

I was supposed to be her worst nightmare, yet after our exchange hours earlier, I had an uncomfortable feeling when it came to my captive Mafia princess.

 

The same feeling that I had right now, after my parting words with Carmine.

 

I was going to take care of Leda, but not in the sense that he thought.

 

“Fuck,” I breathed, my eyes straying to the liquor on the sideboard.