Page 37 of Broken Mafia Bride

I can’t build something new when my heart is still buried in the ruins I left behind.

“Are you all right, Ariel?” Marco asks, his voice low, careful.

I force a smile. “Perfectly fine.”

But the lie sits heavy on my tongue—because perfect was never mine to have.

12

RAFFAELE

“Another round,” I tell the server, motioning at my empty bottle of whiskey. She eyes me carefully before walking off to get me my drink. It’s a little pathetic to be drinking alone when it’s not even seven o’clock yet, but what else am I supposed to be doing?

There’s no fight set for tonight, and even if there was, I’m not sure I’d have bothered to make it. The underground fighting ring has started to bore me. There’s no real competition there. It’s been way too easy for me to knock out my opponents.

“Want some company?” a woman’s husky voice asks.

I raise my head and see a woman in a red dress that barely goes down past her ass. She has bleached white-blonde hair that falls in straight lines down to her ass. She’s beautiful in that Instagram model way, but I don’t need to waste my time trying to know that my body isn’t going to give a single reaction to her.

I’ve only had the pleasure of my hand for years now, and maybe it’s better I keep it that way.

The last time Giulia disappeared on me, I distracted myself by fucking through the entire female population of the city. When she came back, I felt so much guilt about ever touchinganother woman. If—no, when—I find her, I want her to know that I never lost faith in getting her back, that I waited for her.

Another thing is that I don’t wish my crazy ass on anybody right now.

“No,” I tell the woman, tearing my eyes away.

She lets out a startled chuckle. “Are you sure about that?” Her hands slide over my chest, and she squeezes my pecs suggestively. “I’m not interested in anything complicated. You look like you’d know how to make a girl?—”

“Not interested, get out.” I grab her wrist and fling it off me. “Fuck off.”

A frown mars her expression, but she quickly smoothens it out. “I’ll be at the bar if you change your mind.”

I don’t watch her leave, irritated that the server isn’t back with my drink yet. The reason why becomes clear a few minutes later when Gino slides into my booth, Matteo following after him with my drink in his hand.

“How did you find me here?” I sigh tiredly.

The last thing I need is Matteo nagging at me for being a miserable drunk. It’s all he’s done since he waltzed back into my life a few months ago. I suspect that Tommaso had a hand in getting him to come back, and while I act like his return is bothersome, I’m secretly glad that he returned.

His presence has kept me from completely coming undone—barely. I’m almost certain he was the one who fed Tommaso that last lead about Giulia. A name, a place, a thread just solid enough to chase. It led us to a forgotten fishing village that barely showed up on a map, a place so quiet it felt untouched by time. We didn’t find her. No trace. No witness. Nothing.

And yet… I swear I felt her.

I know how it sounds. Like I finally cracked. But the moment I stepped into that booth in the village church, something shifted. The air went still. The silence wrapped around me likea hand on my throat. And when I closed my eyes, it was like she was right there, just beyond reach. Her voice, a breath. Her presence, a pulse. I spoke to God like a man starved, begging for a whisper, a sign, anything to prove I wasn’t losing my mind.

It felt holy. Haunted. Like I’d brushed up against the edge of something sacred and terrible.

The following Sunday, I walked into Father Alberto’s chapel in Chicago for the first time in years. Sat in the front pew like some penitent bastard, waiting for that same divine heat to touch my chest again.

It never came.

But I keep going back anyway. Because for a moment, I wasn’t empty. I was close.

Too close.

It still hadn’t come.

“We just followed the stench of whiskey and misery,” Matteo says, sliding the bottle over to me.