Page 15

I would love to say I remember what getting married felt like. That’s the problem with being hyper-focused. Being so in the moment with tunnel vision makes you miss the rest of the cues, all the things necessary to build a memory. My senses are so hyper-aware, they register and blip out, never latching onto anything.

I know we rolled into Vegas in the dead of night. We obtained a license at the Clark County office—it’s packed even at this time. Guess Vegas is the actual city that never sleeps. We stumbled into the first chapel we could find, and then we were married. Done, dusted, executed.

I’m keeping a steady eye on Kaya all this time. She seems out of it, but not enough to raise flags. What she needs is restorative sleep but I can’t allow her this yet. She can’t appear to have checked out physically or be unconscious—too many flags raised. We have another five-hour flight ahead of us to Newark, so a slew of CCTV cameras catching us at every junction on the way. Valentino has taken care of this, too. Another smiling person greets us at the airport and escorts us to first-class on a plane from the same airline that brought us here from Portland.

Time stops in hyper-focus even though the clock turns in the blink of an eye. I allow myself to breathe once we’re back inside the Andretti household. Ina, the housekeeper, delivers my request right as I’m bundling Kaya into our bedroom.

She can’t be in shock any longer, not physiologically anyway. But it’s clear her mind hasn’t received the memo yet. She looks exhausted, detached, almost a zombie. It’s not every day you watch your asshole of a father killed in front of your eyes before the assassin turns on you and tries to off you then you manage to get the drop on him and kill him. If this had happened to one of my soldiers, I would’ve been worried sick. For her, a civilian… I can’t let myself think of this.

I press the glass of water into her hand and push the Xanax between her lips.

“Take it.”

My chest clenches when she opposes no resistance and lets me effectively drug her. Where’s her spirit? Is it gone? Is she broken now?

Her eyes are fluttering closed almost instantly. Right, she took the tranquilizer on an empty stomach. Based on the dosage and her weight, she’ll be out for about six hours. She needs the rest, for her brain to effectively conk out and give her some respite. We’ll decide the next steps when she wakes up and see what she remembers, how she feels.

I lay her down gently and take her shoes off, then pull the covers over her. Everything inside me wants to crawl in with her and hold her close to me, but I can’t. It will break me to see her like this, to wonder whether she’ll ever recover from this ordeal.

Jasir Daku is a dead man! I will kill him with my bare hands when I get back to Italy. If we hadn’t needed more intel from him, this would’ve happened already.

My steps take me downstairs, where I find Valentino in his study. One look and he’s pouring me a Scotch, handing it to me when I fall in a heap on his sofa.

“Everything went well?” he asks.

I nod and take a sip of whiskey. “Took care of the trailer. All evidence there should be toast. Those men. What did they do?”

“The body has been dismembered and then offloaded in the Columbia River. Based on the currents, it should wash up across the state border on the Washington side.”

One less way to track it to what happened in Oregon.

I nudge my glass his way. “ And you? What did you have to do? Sell your soul?”

He chuckles. “Not my soul, no.”

“So it’s something.”

He shrugs. “One of my companies. I called my contact in Salt Lake. He’s been hounding me to buy me out for a while now.”

My gaze narrows on him where he’s propped his ass against the solid wood of his desk. We all tended to skip right over Valentino Andretti when he was in Torino. The man never drew attention to himself, preferring the shadows. It wasn’t hard to forget he’s a really savvy venture capitalist with a portfolio that makes him share the same rarefied air as the rest of his fellow newly minted billionaires.

Cerebral is how his father used to describe him. Valentino asked him for an advance on his inheritance when he turned twenty-five. Within two years, he’d quadrupled the money, and it only grew exponentially from there. He’s great with planning and strategy. But being on the ground, in the field, that’s what we were slowly training him for.

Did we do it? Have we imparted enough? Only time will tell now.

“So now you’re married,” he says softly.

My gaze drops to my left hand, to the gold band on my ring finger. I don’t recall buying the rings. I don’t recall much of Vegas, to be honest.

“And now I’m married,” I breathe out.

“How’s Kaya handling it?”

“Holding on.” I hope. Anything else— No, I won’t think of that.

“So what’s the plan now?”

“Hunker here, until we can get her Family Reunification visa. If you’ll have us.”

“You know you’re always welcome in my home.”

I raise my glass at him in thanks.

“The Don is handling things in Italy?”

I nod. Now that’s one notion I didn’t want to dwell on. His comment brings it back to slam full force into my chest. I can’t unhear the words, can’t undo the thoughts that have crossed my mind since the night I came to see Kaya only to find she wasn’t at her studio. The night she was having dinner at the Don’s house, then we all left Italy before we could really talk.

“I think she’s met Giuseppe.”

The words blow out of me like the pin from a grenade.

Val frowns. “She did?”

“The Don asked her to dinner at his house. No one visits his place without an invite because that’s where his son is.”

And he called her “ cara ” more than once. Did he mean it as a superfluous endearment, or literally like ‘my heart’? He also asked her to trust him, to come back to him…

“What do you think it means?” Val asks with a careful measured tone.

The truth I’ve refused to see, imagine, or face in the past few days.

“He wants her.”

She was his before she ever became mine, after all. He let her go, but now, we’re all going back. She’ll be under his protection—mine might hold weight in most circles as an enforcer. But he’s a full-fledged Don.

“You can’t be serious,” Val chides.

He’s not dismissive, just thinking I’m being paranoid.

“You only met Giuseppe after two years in Torino. She… He never introduces any woman to him.”

“True. But that’s still—”

“Far-fetched? He asked me to bring her back to him .”

“But you’re married to her.”

“You think that’ll mean jack-shit? He’s a Don.”

My Don, I don’t add. My vow of allegiance is to him, even superseding the ones I made to my wife.

Silence blankets us for a long moment. Val takes a deep long breath. “What are you going to do?”

Hell if I knew how to answer that. All I know with one hundred percent certainty is that every fiber of my being screams that she will forever remain my wife.