Vicious Promise by M. James
Luca
Every time I see Sofia Ferretti, she’s in tears.
Last time was at her father’s funeral, when she was a round-faced, snot-nosed twelve-year-old.
Now she looks entirely different. She’s lost the baby fat, and her hair is platinum blonde instead of dark brown—dyed, no doubt. Something that I’ll put a stop to as soon as we’re married. Just like eight years ago, her face is tear-streaked and red, but there’s only one, startling thought in my head as I set eyes on Sofia Ferretti all grown up for the first time.
She’s beautiful.
“Luca.”
Don Rossi’s voice cuts into my thoughts. “There’s one still alive.”
My stomach twists. I don’t want to torture anyone else. I want to get Sofia out of here. The urgency of the thought startles me. I don’t want to care about her. But in this room that smells like gunpowder, blood and death, all I can think is that she shouldn’t wake up and see this. The look in her eyes just before she passed out isn’t something I’ll soon forget. She looked like a terrified animal caught in a trap—which is an apt description for the situation she was in before we arrived.
“I want to get my bride out of here,” I say calmly, turning towards Rossi. “I don’t want her to see the bodies.”
Rossi looks at me curiously. “I thought you didn’t give a shit about her.”
“I don’t.” I keep my voice cool. “But I’d rather her first impression of me not be—this.” I wave my hand around the room. There’s bodies everywhere, blood splattering the walls. Bullet holes in multiple surfaces.
Rossi glances over at the surviving Russian. He has a defiant sneer on his face, and I think I recognize him vaguely, though I wouldn’t know his name. One of Viktor’s brigadiers, if I remember correctly.
“Bruno can handle him,” he says finally. “Get Sofia out of here.”
“Thank you.” I nod respectfully, mindful despite everything that Rossi is the Don, the head of the family. It could have cost me a great deal to argue with him the way I just did, and I’m not sure why I risked it. So that Sofia could be spared the sight of blood and dead bodies?
Striding towards the closet, I scoop Sofia up into my arms. She feels very light, and her head lolls against my shoulder, her face paper-white and bloodless. I make a mental note to call the doctor who makes house calls for the family on the way back. If those dogs so much as laid a hand on her—
As her head tilts in the light, I can see that at least one of them did. Her bottom lip is split, and there’s blood dried there and on her chin. A faint bruise is forming on her cheek, and a hot, burning rage rises up in my chest as I walk through the room with Sofia in my arms. I hadn’t regretted a single Russian that I killed tonight, but now I’m glad of it. The thought of one of them striking her fills me with an unfamiliar, almost primal rage.
It’s an unsettling feeling.
I’ve made it a point all my life to care only about my job, my position, and my wealth. My father’s death taught me a lesson that served me well—everyone in the family lives a life that can end at any time. It’s not just the men, either. Our women can be murdered, kidnapped, used as pawns against us. I’ve seen men brought down, made men who broke the code of silence because they believed the threats against their wives or children.
Loving someone means a loss of control. It means that something can be taken from you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s not something that fits with the way I’ve chosen to live my life.
I lay Sofia carefully down in the backseat of the town car, taking a seat across from her. Leaning back as the car pulls out into the late-evening Manhattan traffic, I watch the slight rise and fall of her chest in the tight black dress that she’s wearing, study the pale hue of her face, the bow-shaped curve of her rosy lips. There’s a faint stain of lipstick around her mouth still, but the color there now is hers, warm and pink and soft. It makes my cock twitch, hardening slightly as I let my gaze drift over her prone body, and I think for a moment of what it might be like to have her as my wife, in my bed.
She’s not a child anymore. She’s a woman, and a remarkably beautiful one. By tomorrow night, my ring will be on her finger, and before the week is out, she’ll be my bride in all ways. Sofia might not know what’s coming, but there has never been a woman yet who refused my bed.
I’ve lost count of how many I’ve had, and yet the allure of a new body to explore, new lips to taste, has never lost its appeal. I’ve never wanted to limit myself to one woman, and one of the many privileges of my position and wealth is that I’ll never be asked to. Mafia wives know that their husbands aren’t faithful. All they ask is discretion, and being gentlemen, we give it to them. But looking at Sofia’s face in the passing light, I feel something that I’ve never felt before—a possessiveness that makes me uncomfortable. A need not just for the pleasure of a woman’s body, but for hers.
When Don Rossi told me that she’d been taken, the obvious answer had been to go after her. Sofia is too valuable an asset to be left in the hands of the Russians—the choice was always to save her or eliminate her entirely. On the surface, it’s easy to tell myself that the carnage I just left behind was part of the job, safeguarding the territory of the Rossi family—the territory that will eventually pass to me.
But deep down, I know the truth.
The dead Bratva in that hotel aren’t lying in their own blood because of the need to protect territory.
I killed them because they took what was mine.
* * *
Dr. Carella is already waitingwhen my driver pulls into the garage. I’ve never thought much about it before, but for the first time I’m glad that the doctor who makes house calls for Don Rossi, his associates and their families is a woman. Rossi thought that he was being very progressive when he chose her as our personal physician, but in this moment, I don’t care about the optics of it. The thought of another man putting his hands on Sofia, examining her, makes me tense all over again.
From now on, the only man who touches her, hell, who even looks at her, will be me.
I don’t have time to examine these new feelings, and I don’t particularly want to either. Instead I simply scoop Sofia out of the backseat of the car, striding towards the private elevator that will take us up to my penthouse with the doctor following in my wake.
She doesn’t ask questions. Dr. Carella has kept her job and her life while working so familiarly with the family because she knows the meaning of discretion, and she knows that she’s better off with less information, rather than more. So as I lay Sofia down on the bed, she merely gives me a reassuring smile, and says calmly: “Mr. Romano, step out of the room while I examine her, please. I’ll come get you in a few minutes when I’m finished.”
My immediate reaction is to refuse. The sight of Sofia’s delicate body laid out on my black bedspread tightens something deep inside of me. She looks very pale, very fragile, very breakable.
It shouldn’t excite me as much as it does.
“Mr. Romano,” the doctor prods. “Luca.”
Her saying my given name is what finally snaps me out of it. “Fine,” I growl. “But don’t take too long.”
I stride out of the room, feeling every muscle in my body tensed. My hands are clenched at my sides, and I shake them loose, walking briskly towards the floor-to-ceiling glass window on one side of my living room as I try not to think about how Sofia looked in my bed. Every inch of her, from her delicate pale face to her slender body, to the halo of her golden hair around her head, evoked a sleeping angel, a rescued princess, something innocent and pure and lovely.
Which is why you have no business marrying her.
I’m the furthest thing from pure. I’ve tortured men, I’ve killed them, I’ve fucked as many women in this city as I could get my hands on, and up until this very moment, I never had the slightest intention of stopping. In order to keep my city and my territory, I’m going to have to torture and kill even more men, and nothing in me balks at that for even a second. But it’s not my seat at the head of this city that I feel compelled to spill blood for in this moment.
It’s Sofia.
I’ve never given a single woman that I’ve touched a second thought. My relationship with them ended the second that I threw the condom away or watched them swallow my cum. I hadn’t expected to give Sofia a second thought either, beyond the day that we exchanged the vows that would protect her and consummated our marriage. Once, after all, is all that’s necessary to make it legal. Once would satisfy any lingering curiosity about what kind of woman she’s grown up to be.
A few more times, maybe, during the right time of the month, if I decided that I wanted children. But children were never a part of the plan. My seat is meant to go to Franco’s son when I die, if Angelica gives him one.
All I can think as I stare down at the city below, this city that belongs to me, is that I want Sofia Ferretti more than once. More than for a night. When I saw her face staring up at me from the floor of that closet, something changed.
Everythingchanged. And I’ll burn this entire city to the ground if I have to, in order to keep Viktor Andreyev from ever taking her from me again.
* * *
When Dr. Carella comes out,she looks relieved, which in turn calms me a little. I meet her halfway across the room, sinking down onto my leather sofa as she takes the seat across from me.
“Physically, she’s fine,” the doctor says. “She has some minor bruising on her face and the injury to her lip, as well as some bruising around her wrists, but overall they don’t seem to have harmed her. I’ll run some blood tests, since she was most likely drugged, and I’d advise you to keep an eye on her once she’s conscious again. I didn’t see any signs of a concussion, but if she seems ill, it would be wise to call me in case she suffers any adverse effects from the drugs.” Dr. Carella pauses. “I didn’t see any signs of—abuse, either.”
“Meaning?” I want to hear it clearly. If those dogs violated my fiancée—
“She wasn’t assaulted beyond the bruising that I mentioned. And I’m fairly certain that she’s still a virgin, if that matters to you.” Dr. Carella’s mouth twists downwards when she says that, and I can see plainly on her face exactly what she thinks of that idea.
If she’d mentioned it earlier tonight, I would have said that I didn’t give a fuck if Sofia Ferretti was a virgin or if she’d fucked every guy between her apartment and Fifth Avenue. But as with everything else tonight, that seems to have changed.
The thought of another man touching her makes my stomach clench with rage. And the thought of her being a virgin, of me being the first one to see her naked body, to touch her, to slide inside of her and take her for the first time—
I’m hard just thinking about it. The desire that crashes through me is something primal and vicious, and I have to breathe in deeply and force the thought of what I want to do to Sofia’s virgin body away, just so that I’m able to stand up and shake the doctor’s hand.
“Thank you for coming,” I tell her, my voice cool and formal. “I’ll call you if I notice anything out of place.”
Dr. Carella hesitates.
“Yes?” I can hear my tone harden. “Is there something else?”
I want to be alone with my bride. I’m itching for her to wake up so that I can speak to her and explain the situation, how things will be from here on out. She’ll be grateful to me for rescuing her, of course, and then we can discuss the future—our wedding, and what will come after. What will need to be done to ensure her safety, and the safety of everyone that I’m responsible for.
“Her physical injuries were minor,” Dr. Carella repeats. “But her emotional and mental state when she wakes up may be—fragile. I’d be cautious of that, Mr. Romano.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I stride to the front door that leads out into the hall, opening it wide. “Good night, Dr. Carella.”
She presses her lips together thinly, and I can tell that there’s more that she wants to say. Wisely, she thinks better of it, and nods, walking out of the apartment without another word.
With the door closed fully behind me, I turn towards the bedroom, my pulse quickening as I think of what’s waiting for me there.
It’s time to talk to my bride.
