Page 108 of Devil's Tulip

His gaze holds mine, then he sighs. “Fine. Come back here.” He frames my face between his palms, stroking his thumbs gently over my cheekbones. I lean into his touch, my eyes fluttering shut with contentment. His hands slip into my hair, and I sink into his body, ear pressed against the warmth of his bare chest.

Michael stays quiet for a long moment, and I don’t push. Instinct tells me he needs the silence, space to gather his thoughts.

The anticipation builds within me like a crescendo.

Finally, he speaks.

“If I’m going to start from the very beginning, then I’ll say it all started with an incredible young woman.” He pauses, and Ihear a different note enter his voice. “Yes, it started with a girl. Emilia.”

His tone softens with the name, and I tilt my head up to catch his expression, my stomach knotting at what I find. His face has changed—his features gentler, his eyes distant, filled with an unmistakable affection for this Emilia. A vicious sting of jealousy bites me, but I push it down, forcing myself to be rational. Because somehow, I know this story isn’t going to be a romantic one. At least, not his.

“She got transferred to the high school the guys and I were attending at just sixteen. Smart as hell—so much so that she skipped two grades and landed right in the middle of our senior year. The guys and I were intrigued. Maybe even a little jealous.”

He chuckles, the sound fond with memory.

“The day we met her, we were shittalking—loudly—about this ‘genius girl’. Didn’t realize she was right behind us. And let’s just say… she had a lot to say to us about that.”

I can picture it so clearly—a group of arrogant teenage boys taken down a peg by a brilliant girl two years their junior. The image makes me smile despite my lingering jealousy. “I like her already.”

“So did Rafael, apparently. I expected him to be pissed—he hated when people talked back to us—but for some reason, he was amused. Declared to the whole school that she was under his protection. No one dared to mess with her after that. Maybe he even started liking her right then, just because of her spunk.”

Of course Rafael would be drawn to someone like that.

He pauses again, and I rub my hand down his chest soothingly, waiting patiently for him to continue. He’s not just telling a story—he’s reliving it.

“That same day, she got assigned as Rafael’s tutor. He’s smart, but you see, back then, the last thing on our minds was school. Rafael’s father was the don, and my father—” He exhalessharply. “My father found him useful. Took me to their house a couple of times. So by then, the guys and I were friends already. We couldn't wait to officially join the outfit and be part of the feared Moretti family. We ran errands for the syndicate any chance we got.

Something dark flashes through his expression, but he doesn’t linger on it.

“Anyways, Emilia tutored Rafael and began to sit with us for that first week. She and Rafael constantly argued. Maybe because they were both similar in a lot of ways; demanding and controlling. But by the end of the second week, her father was brutally murdered…”

A chill runs down my spine.

“By Alfonso Moretti, don of the Moretti family… Rafael’s father.”

My jaw drops in shock, and I push away from Michael’s chest to gape up at him.No. Fucking. Way.

Rafael’s own father murdered his friend’s dad?The pieces of Rafael’s complex personality begin to click into place.

Michael smiles slightly at my reaction, and lifts his index finger under my chin, gently closing my mouth.

“Tomassi Rossi, Emilia’s father, was a detective who had been sniffing around Alfonso for months. Nobody really knows how he died, but it was clear as day who the killer was.”

I shake my head slowly. “Emilia must have been devastated. How did she and her mother even cope with such sudden loss?”

“She didn’t have a mother. Lost her at a young age. No relatives, either.”

My heart constricts painfully.Poor girl.I can imagine exactly what she went through. Suddenly losing your parent and being orphaned is a trauma that reshapes your entire existence. I know that pain intimately, though unlike her, I had somewhere to go, someone to take me in. No matter how horrible my uncle and hisfamily were to me, I still had them. And despite how everything went to shit between us and Dario’s subsequent death, I’m still grateful to Uncle Aldo.

But she had no one.No one.

“She must have been out of her mind with grief because she took her father’s gun and stormed into one of Alfonso’s warehouses,” Michael continues, and my heart plummets into my stomach.Oh God. No.That couldn’t have ended well.

“The guys and I were out running some errands for the outfit, and when we got back, what we walked into was…” His jaw goes rigid. “It was horrible.”

I hold my breath.

“The men at the warehouse had overpowered Em. They had already roughed her up—payback for whatever fight she put up—and they were in the process of taking her clothes off and…” His throat works as he swallows hard, his voice trailing off, thick with barely controlled rage.

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