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Chapter Forty-One

LUNA

A split second of nowhere. Too short to scream. Too empty to notice. Too confined to move.

Whatever Etta’s drug did to me is gone.

The speed of light leaves no time for fear. No room in my heart to wonder if I made a mistake, because it’s full with one, single desire.

Him.

After a little over two days, an infinity collapsed into a moment, thousands of miles traveled at literally impossible speed, and still, everything is him.

Carmine.

In that split second, my awareness is so complete my mind stretches to a breaking point. Then it’s over.

I am spit back into the world, body blasting into existence midair, then—realizing it’s again a subject of gravity—it falls onto Nunzio, who oofs like an old man dropping into a chair.

“Sorry.” I roll my back onto the floor.

The ceiling is painted in sage, cream, and impossibly reflective gold. The chandelier sparkles in the light of a three-quarter moon. Sounds. Low-volume pop standards. The hum of ventilation. Car horns. A bus.

This is not the villa.

There’s a groan in a language I don’t understand and another I do.

“ Vaffancculo .”

Nunzio. And Mom.

“Lunagirl. Are you?—?”

“I’m fine.”

Fine, yes, but I don’t want to move, because I can feel him. I can’t smell him or hear him, but the air hums with his presence. My blood wants to jump through my skin, abandon ship, put in two-second notice.

I get up on my elbows.

Empty room with tables, chairs, cabinets, tall warehouse windows.

Not someone’s house and not quite a restaurant.

This is swank. TV-show-about-rich-people swank.

The upholstery is as clean as new, woven with modern patterns.

The wood all matches, and there’s not a scratch on it.

But it’s not just what I can catalog. Everything is intentionally placed to give me the feeling that I don’t belong here.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know.” Nunzio stands over me and holds out his hand. I take it by the wrist, and he pulls me up so hard I have to grab his arm to steady myself.

“Luna.” Mom is wild-eyed, and for a minute, I think she’s reverted to the woman I always knew. “What have you done?” She approaches the window and holds onto the jamb as if she’s trying to keep herself from jumping. “Jesus, what did they do to Gansevoort?”

I don’t join her, because Carmine’s on the other side of a glass door. Opaque curtains block the view of the room behind them, but he’s there. I don’t need eyes to see.

“Where are we?” Nunzio asks. The snake drops from around his neck, no worse for the wear. He picks it up and puts it back over his shoulders.

“Manhattan. The Meatpacking District.” Mom spins to face me. “I was trying to bring you to California.”

“You brought me to him.” I step toward the curtained doors, but Mom puts her face in front of mine so close I can’t see a world outside her.

“ You brought us here,” she says. “You did it. I felt something shift, but it was too late. I thought?—”

“I didn’t.” I know I’m lying, but the truth makes no sense. The trip happened faster than I could have made a decision, much less figured out how to push in any one direction.

“You’re too powerful.”

“Stop it, Ma. Let me go.”

“Before you see him.” She holds my arms when I try to move. “Let me fix what he did.”

“He’s here.”

“You can’t see him like this. You are in thrall. He’s going to use your power against you.”

“I need him.” The whisper is barely out of my mouth when I feel her attention reaching inside me.

She’s going to rewire me without my consent, and I have no control over my heart.

It doesn’t know how to stop her anymore.

Its only purpose is— “Carmine.” But I’m too soft.

Too mousy. A man like him would never hear that voice on the other side of those double glass doors. “Carmine!”

I grab both knobs and push. They open.

One thing. Him, framed by the arch into a conference room, pushing its limits, curving the world to his shape. I try to propel myself forward, but Nunzio holds me back.

The place is dimly lit, or maybe everything in the world just seems darker and quieter compared to him.

Maybe it’s the thrall that makes him seem taller, stronger, more beautiful.

He is all there is. Is this how his made men feel? It can’t be. Their world couldn’t have narrowed this much or they wouldn’t have betrayed him to the Scangas. There would have been no messages in magazines or bloody battle of fire.

Corrado though. The way I see Carmine must be the way Corrado sees Ferrante. My blood speaks his name. My cells cry for him. The tiny hairs on my skin point in his direction. He is gravity. He is breath. He is the only desire that’s ever meant anything to me.

Resist this. Resist it. Wear it down . See him as he is. See him with your head, not your heart .

The curative power of my blood must have worn off.

His golden beauty is gone. He looks as normal as he did when I met him, which is to say too pale, too powerful, too perfect.

His eyes are still an indeterminate color, but they don’t glow anymore.

They only cut through me like a sharpened steel blade.

He wants me, but at the same time, he doesn’t want me here . I’m not hurt by that. In his presence, I don’t need an identity or a will of my own. I am taller and stronger under his regard, and yet, it is uncomfortable to be where he doesn’t want me to be.

He’s stripped you of everything .

“Luna.” In his mouth, my name is a magic spell.

“Carmine.” In my mouth, his name is a prayer.

“Nunzio.” Carmine comes toward me, staring at Nunzio’s hand gripping my arm. “Stand down.”

Nunzio lets go, and my body, with pure instinct, launches into his arms. I bury my face in his neck and let his arms curl around me, holding me as tight as a boa constrictor. He breathes on my neck so deeply, my blood pauses there.

“I’m so mad at you,” I whisper, face tingling with ready tears.

“And I, you.”

“I might hate you.”

“I wish I could hate you.”

I pull back to look Carmine in the face.

I need to see the cold cruelty, the immorality, the immortal arrogance.

It’s all there in the hard set of his mouth and the smoothness of his brow.

But his eyes are fixed on me with a vulnerability he despises, and the devotion in my eyes must be colored with the doubt in my mind, because his grip loosens.

“What are we going to do?” I ask, knowing he’ll understand that I mean not the situation, not the place, or the quantum-particle travel. I mean everything.

“Nunzio.” He changes the subject like a man who doesn’t want to answer a question. “That snake stinks up the entire room.”

“I’ll move him.”

I’m about to tell Carmine to leave Puzzo alone, when Mom stands between me and the center of my world.

“You keep away from her.” She has her arms behind her, trying to hold me in place. If he tells me to, I’ll break her arms worse than I broke her mind. I hope he doesn’t.

“Giulia?” He regards her for the first time, saying her name with a shocking tenderness. “Little one?” When he comes closer, her shoulders shake, but somehow she stands straight under the pressure of his presence.

“I’m not a little girl anymore,” she says defiantly. Her feelings vibrate into a bubbling, overwhelming fear inside a halo of determined control—yet her voice is dismissive, as if nothing’s happening but a disappointment she expected. It’s a level of emotional competence I never expected from her.

“Ah, now I see Luna’s face in yours.”

They stare at each other. What’s going on?

“If you hurt her…” My mother points at me as if that finishes the sentence. If she’s trying to threaten him with an imagined consequence, it’s not landing.

He puts his hand on my mother’s shoulder and bends just enough to send my mind into screaming denial. “As you have?”

Carmine can issue a threat in a lullaby. His question carries the promise of retribution and more than a little disappointment—as if he expected better from her.

She knew him first. There’s history there. My heart is seething with jealousy over my mother .

For the first time, those two voices inside me—mind and heart—link up, snapping together for a single purpose.

“If you hurt my mother, I won’t forgive you.”

Not much of a threat, but it’s the only one my heart can make good on. For a moment, I’m not sure he heard me, then he smiles at her before standing straight and looking at me over her shoulder.

“I cannot live long without my wife’s mercy.” He drops his hands, and the spell he’s woven thins enough that I can react to the other people in the room. They don’t seem quite real.

First, the ancient lawyer from the plane. I gasp with recognition, and he makes eye contact with me. Il Blocco . Nazario Corragio. He looks me up and down, then lands his eyes on mine.

“ Signorina Beneforte ,” he says with a smile. “ Bienvenuto .”

“ Bien —” I start to answer, but Carmine cuts me off.

“ Signora .” Carmine stands directly in front of me to block the old lawyer’s gaze. “You know very well she’s a married woman.”

A red-bearded man in his forties, wearing jeans and boots, makes a little tsk that reads snide.

Behind the gray shell guarding his emotions, there’s another shell.

He is unreadable by design. His orange vest has strips of reflective tape sewn into the hem and shoulders, like a construction worker of some sort, whistling as the girls pass, then smiling with teeth so white I wonder if blood is redder on them.

“Signora Montefiore.” Construction holds out his hand with a leer that has zero actual interest behind it. I put my hands behind my back and make a little bow, because fuck this guy for trying to trigger Carmine. “I am Tommy Lugano, the alpha of the Eastern Islands pack.”

“Excuse me?” I ask.

Tommy Lugano sighs as if I’m a child, counting off on fingers that have nails that are just slightly too long. “That’s Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and?—”

“No, the other part. I’m sorry. Alpha and pack?”