Page 77 of Corrupted Temptation (Mafia Kings: Corrupted 2)

My mind was elsewhere.

My own words rang in my head, the vibrato of my own voice bounced around the walls.

“Because you’ll always be a Luca.”

The truth was, after this web of lust, loyalty, and suspicion that bound me to Raven was untangled, what was left waschickenshit.

I was too much of a chicken to tell her the truth. I was shit-faced scared. Shit-faced scared of my heart continuing to twitch and spasm, as if being revived.

Shescared me.

So instead of protecting her, I shattered her, broke her.

Chickenshit.

“Si, Mamma,” I said, clenching and unclenching my fists. My knuckles were sore from punching the steering wheel on the drive home.

I followed her through the foyer, past the parlor to the sun-filled solarium where she spent most of her days. I watched as she walked, one foot in front of the other, prancing along the invisible straight line she never veered away from, much like trains ran on tracks, unfailingly, that led them to their destinations.

“Sit down, Nico,” my mother said, motioning to the sofa that sat facing the wall of windows.

I stood in place. A million things ran through my head.

Raven.Sofia. “Because you’re a Luca.” Maria Luca. Lorenzo. Avalone’s son. Fiorenzo. Diego Berlusconi—a nobody who managed to lure soldiers from families all over the country. And his most abundant source: what remained of the Novas.

Eventually, I sat down on the sofa. It overlooked the rose gardens behind the house. My mother’s rose gardens. When she wasn’t in the solarium, she sat on the bench in her garden, surrounded by hundreds of roses.

I waited while she retrieved something from the chest she kept locked in the corner. She sat down beside me with a file folder in one hand, her other free hand gently placed upon mine.

I glanced down. I ached at the memory of my mother’s hands damaged, her wrists broken.

“I know what happened that day, Nico,” she said with a knowing look I found myself not liking one bit.

I was brought right back to three days after my sixteenth birthday. The first day my mother had ever looked at me the way she looked at Lorenzo.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied, keeping a straight face.

She laughed, a sad sound. “Of course, you do. You might be able to fool the world with that face, but I know you, Nico.”

“Mamma, I—”

“Hush,” she said, pressing her hand down more firmly on mine. “I know you didn’t do it, Nico.”

Rosalie Santo had been a maid in my family’s home for two years when she snuck into my bedroom. She was young and hot. I was just young.

One night, Rosalie snuck into my bedroom, and I woke up with her mouth around my cock. She thought she could blackmail my family into keeping her silence with the bruises she wore a few hours later. They must have bought her story because the problem went away fast.

“I thought you believed I did it,” I said, my voice thick and raw at the memory ofthatday.

“I wish I could tell you I didn’t even consider it, but your father had gotten hold of you by then. I can’t deny I wondered, but then I saw the truth in your eyes,” my mother said.

Even all these years later, it was like another boulder off my shoulders.

“I know you didn’t do it, but I also know that what that woman did to you changed you, maybe as much as what your father did to you. I feared you would forever be angry and bitter, and under Lorenzo’s tutelage, it would be far too easy for you to lose sight of who you really are.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She sighed, but her jaw hardened with determination I couldn’t remember ever seeing in her. “In all my years as the wife of Lorenzo Costa, I seldom used the power the position granted me. Only twice.”

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