Page 46 of Mine Again (Mafia Bride #2)

Chapter Forty-Five

Isabella

L uca’s face tightens. He drags a hand through his hair, his jaw clenching.

“I’m glad we didn’t take you along,” he says finally, his voice raw, as if the memories of the night it all broke apart still choke him from the inside out.

Still, the words hit me like a stab to the heart, and I lean back, needing space. Distance. Anything to stop the sting from settling deeper.

He takes a step toward me, but I shake my head, my body stiff, my eyes warning him to stay where he is.

He stops. Sighs. A quiet, resigned sound that somehow makes it worse.

“I didn’t agree with my father often, but on that one point, he was right.

It would have been too dangerous.” His tone is urgent, like he needs me to understand.

“We barely made it out of Sicily as it was. Twice, De Marco’s men nearly caught us.

We had nothing. No safe house. No allies. We were ghosts, Isa.”

His voice lowers.

“I didn’t want you hunted. I didn’t want you afraid. ”

“But I was afraid, Luca. For you.” I take a breath, but it doesn’t steady me.

“Every single day, I wondered if you were still alive. If that day would be the day I got news you were dead… or the day you’d sneak in through the tunnel to come for me like you promised.”

He doesn’t move. He just watches me.

“I’d rather have faced it all with you. The trials, the fear, the unknown. Anything, instead of suffering the pain of being apart, wondering every day where you were, what you were doing… and why you wouldn’t come back.”

“Isa. I…” He stops himself, his lips pressing into a hard line.

His gaze shifts away from me and locks onto the sea below, where whitecaps churn and crash like a mirror of everything swirling between us. His jaw flexes, a muscle twitching in his cheek. For a second, he looks like he might speak, but then he shakes his head.

I don’t fill the silence. Too many emotions are warring inside me, each louder than the last.

“You were on my mind all the time,” he says eventually. “You never left me.”

He swallows hard, and when he speaks again, his voice is strained. “I wanted to come back to you so badly. It’s what kept me going all this time—”

“All this time?” I interrupt him. “Luca, it’s been five fricking years.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” His tone is raw with anger now.

“Then why? Why did you wait so long?”

He exhales, the breath long and weary. Without answering, he walks over to the bench and sinks down beside me. His proximity makes my pulse skip, but I stay where I am. He sets the backpack between his feet and rummages inside.

“At first, it was about getting my parents and me somewhere safe. Making sure we couldn’t be found.”

“Well, you succeeded with that. Not even Uberto could find you.”

He pulls out a thermos and unscrews the lid, steam curling into the cold air between us. The smell hits me instantly. It’s rich, familiar, comforting.

“To warm you up,” he says, holding it out.

I take it slowly, my fingers brushing his. They’re as cold as mine, but the spark that jumps between us yet again is anything but. I do my best to ignore it.

I lift the thermos to my lips and sip. The thick, velvety cioccolata calda spreads warmth through my throat, chest, and stomach.

God, it’s good.

It still tastes the same. Just like when Luca used to make it for us on that little stove in our hideaway with real melted chocolate, milk, and whipped cream on top. I haven’t had it in five long years, never wanting to ruin the memory without him there.

But now…

He’s here. And so is the taste. And for a second, I’m sixteen again, hidden away with the boy I loved, dreaming of a forever we never got.

“Uberto came close to discovering us a few times,” Luca says quietly while I sip the drink. I don’t want to acknowledge how thoughtful it was of him to bring something warm, but it clings to me anyway.

He shifts beside me, his gaze still on the sea.

“It was a steep learning curve, figuring out how to cover our tracks, how to stay off the grid without making a single mistake. Every time I thought we were safe, something would happen. A near miss. A close call. I couldn’t afford to be careless.”

I stay silent and keep sipping the chocolate, its warmth softening the ache in my chest a little. It anchors me in the present even as my mind spins backward.

For so long, I imagined a hundred different outcomes of what might have happened to him after that night. Most of them dark.

I used to lie awake, building mental timelines, playing connect-the-dots with clues that didn’t exist. I tried to make sense of the silence until that first box of chocolates on my eighteenth birthday finally told me he was alive.

Hearing him now talk about how close they came to being caught? It sends a ripple of fear through me, chilling me more than the wind ever could.

Because if De Marco’s men had found them… if they’d caught him… he wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t be sitting next to me, watching the sea churn like it holds the answers.

And as furious as I am with him right now, I can’t ignore the relief that he’s alive.

Not that I’m willing to admit it to him.

Or myself.

Not yet.

“Once I finally made us invisible,” he continues, “I knew that wasn’t enough. I had to make real money and build something solid for you and me. The idea of you, of us, scraping by was never an option.”

“I wouldn’t have cared,” I say, and I mean it.

He glances at me, his expression unreadable.

“You say that now, but neither of us had ever known what it meant to go without. It’s easy to romanticize struggle when you’re not in it.

But the stress, the pressure… it changes people.

Breaks them. And I wasn’t going to let that happen to us.

I had to make sure, if you were with me, you’d still have a life worth living. ”

My lips press tightly together. I don’t know whether I’m angry or tired of him deciding what I can and can’t handle.

But that’s in the past. Nothing can be done about it now.

“I started taking on hacking jobs,” he says after a pause. “Freelance at first, then contracts. I kept my head down and worked. Got good. Real good. It didn’t take long for me to make a name for myself. In certain circles, at least.”

I glance over at him, my chest involuntarily filling with pride.

Of course he thrived in the hacking world. He was always going to.

His mind had the perfect blend of discipline and creativity, precision and intuition. He could see patterns where others saw chaos and break down the most complex systems with a quiet obsession that made him stand out early on .

“Uberto would have had access to those same circles,” I murmur. “You must have had a solid pseudonym.”

He nods once.

“And Uberto never figured out it was you?”

His mouth twists, amused. “At one point, he even hired The Venom to help him on a high-stakes job.”

“The Venom?” I echo, brows lifting.

He chuckles darkly. “The name stuck early. Simple. Lethal, in a digital sense. No theatrics. Fast, silent, and effective.”

He looks out toward the sea.

“In the hacking world, everyone knows… if Venom gets into your system, you’ll never even know it until it’s too late.”

A chill prickles my skin.

“Clean. Elegant. Untraceable. That’s the kind of legacy I built,” he says quietly, though his pride is unmistakable.

A sound escapes me, half chuckle, half disbelief.

“So you were working for the man who was trying to find you.”

“There’s some irony in that,” he admits.

Then he adds, “But Uberto was never the enemy. Nor were the De Marcos. Their problem was with my father. Mother and I were collateral.”

“How magnanimous of you,” I say sharper than I intended. “Where is your father now?”

He shrugs. “Probably still in the Bahamas. I set him and my mother up there when we disappeared. I haven’t spoken to either of them in years.”

“Oh.”

He pauses, his gaze unfocused. “I just couldn’t. Not after what my father did. Betraying the De Marcos for decades and thinking he’d never pay for it. He got arrogant. He thought the rules didn’t apply to him anymore.”

Luca’s voice drops, and I can feel the tension roll off him.

“He didn’t think about what it would cost the rest of us. About the fallout. That it would tear everything apart. ”

His gaze connects with mine. “It tore you and me apart. And that’s not something I’ll ever excuse or let go of.”

I’m not sad that he’s no longer in touch with his parents. I liked his mother, Leonara, but his father? He was too much like my own. No wonder they were friends.

“Why didn’t you settle in the Bahamas?” I ask, because clearly, wherever we are, it’s nowhere near warmth and sunshine.

“I wanted to be as far away from my father as possible,” Luca says. “Plus, nobody would expect a Sicilian to hide out somewhere cold.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” I murmur, just as an icy gust slices over the lookout. The chill settles into my bones.

I look out across the rough sea. “So did you go farther north or south of the Bahamas?”

He grins. “Is this your subtle way of asking where we are?”

I shoot him a look and lift my brows, too cold and too wrung out to play games.

His grin lingers, and his voice softens. “We’re on the west coast of Canada. Queen Charlotte Islands.”

I shudder at the word Canada .

“Does it snow here?” I ask. I’ve never seen it. Never touched it.

“Yeah,” he says. “It does. There’s a cold snap forecasted. We’ll probably get some.”

I don’t know how I feel about that. The warm-blooded Italian in me recoils at the thought. But the girl who’s never experienced much outside the walls of her family estate? She’s intrigued. Maybe even a little excited.

“And this island,” I say slowly, “do you own it?”

“Of course I do.” He sounds almost offended by the question.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Hacking clearly pays well. At least, when you’re the best. Which reminds me…

“We got off track. You were telling me about your success as a hacker. Which I presume paid for all this… the house, the island, the helicopter.”

He nods once, his eyes never leaving mine .

“You said you wanted to secure our future before coming for me. So if you were making this kind of money…” The next words come out unsteady. “Why didn’t you?”