Adriana's POV
12:05 PM – The De Luca Penthouse
I thought we were safe.
I was wrong. Danger doesn't leave breathing room in this life; it simply waits for you to lower your guard.
The envelope sat directly on his pillow. Pitched black, thick parchment, sealed with dark wax. No return address. No signature. Just a silent threat waiting to detonate.
Alessio saw it first. He went entirely still—the kind of absolute, unnatural stillness that made grown men breathe shallowly out of sheer survival instinct.
"Don't," he said. His voice was flat. Dead.
I picked it up anyway.
Photos.
Me. Three days ago at the warehouse. Standing directly over Moretti's bleeding body with a heavy firearm gripped in my hand, smoke still curling lazily from the barrel.
"Shit." The word fell out of me, cold and heavy.
Alessio ripped the envelope violently from my fingers. He flipped through the stack, his jaw tightening into stone. Photos. All of me. All meticulously timestamped. All completely damning.
The last item was a note composed of cut-out letters, uneven and crude like a classic ransom demand:
She shoots like a De Luca. She will hang like one too. $50 million. Or the Feds get the album. Midnight. Pier 9.
He strode over to the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out over the sprawling grey grid of the city. His large hands gripped the frame, his knuckles turning white from the force.
"They have you," he muttered, his voice tightening. "On camera."
"I know."
"They will put you away for life, principessa." He turned around slowly, his dark eyes looking like black holes, swallowing the light in the room. "Moretti wasn't just a syndicate target. He was a federal informant. Since '19. You didn't just kill a rival boss. You executed a federal witness."
The room didn't just tilt; the ground beneath my feet entirely vanished.
Witness. Federal. Life meant life. No appeals. No loopholes. No Alessio. Just a concrete cell and my name stamped on a death certificate that the De Luca family power couldn't burn fast enough.
"Why didn't you tell me?" My voice didn't sound like mine. It was a hollow whisper.
"Because you wouldn't have pulled the trigger if you knew the cost."
"Silence stretched between us, suffocating and sharp.
Then he let out a laugh. It was an empty, broken sound that chilled my blood.
"All that talk," he growled, pacing back toward me. "'Mine. Per sempre.' And I can't even keep the walls of a federal penitentiary from closing around you."
I crossed the room instantly. I reached up and grabbed his face, forcing his lethal, dark gaze to lock onto mine.
"Hey. Don." My thumb brushed aggressively over the hard line of his jaw. "Are you listening to me?"
His breath hitched.
"I chose this. I chose you. I would shoot him again, Alessio. I'd do it in front of the Pope. I'd do it in front of Zia Maria while she's holding her shotgun." I pulled him down, crashing my lips against his in a hard, desperate kiss. "So stop looking at me as if I am already gone."
He snapped.
His mouth crushed back into mine. There was nothing sweet about it, nothing soft. It was a furious, territorial consumption, as if he could literally kiss the threat of handcuffs off my wrists. As if he believed that if he claimed me hard enough, the Feds and the blackmailers would simply cease to exist.
His large hands tangled deep into my hair, sliding down to my waist, slipping beneath the fabric of his shirt. Skin on skin. Frantic. Feral.
"Alessio," I gasped against his lips, desperate for air. "We need a plan—"
"Later." He walked me backward, his massive frame caging mine until the backs of my legs struck the edge of the mattress. "Right now, I need to remember exactly what you taste like. In case they try to take what belongs to me."
My heart cracked at the raw panic hidden beneath his dominance. "They won't—"
"They will." He laid me down against the black silk sheets, instantly hovering over me. His eyes were wild, dilated with pain. "So let me have this. Let me memorize you. Every inch. Every sound."
His mouth dragged down to my neck, embedding itself right over the two existing marks—our matching set. He bit down, not enough to tear the skin, but enough to mark me violently. Enough to leave a third brand.
"Alessio," I whispered, my hands burying into his dark hair, pulling him tighter against me. "I'm not leaving you."
"You don't get a choice," he growled, his teeth scraping aggressively over my collarbone. "Not tonight."
The photos lay scattered on the floor. The blackmail note lay on the floor. The entire dangerous world was on the floor.
On the bed, it was just us.
Just the bruising weight of his hands. Just my name rolling off his lips like a dark prayer. Just the frantic, ragged rhythm of his breathing matching mine whenever I gasped his name back into the dark.
Faded.
Somewhere between the scattered photos, the threat of ruin, and the terrifying taste of his panic, I stopped being afraid of a prison cell.
I was only terrified of a forever without him.
His hands memorized my body like I was a country he was actively losing to war. As if he believed that if he mapped my skin perfectly right now, he could always find his way back to me after the world burned everything else down.I let him. God help me, I let him destroy and rebuild me all at once.
2:15 AM – Same Bed
I woke up to the heavy sensation of him watching me.
The sheets were draped low around his waist, the moonlight catching the stark, silver lines of his fresh stitches. I was tangled completely in his arms, still clad in his oversized shirt. Again.
His long fingers were slowly tracing the newest mark he had left—the third one. It sat lower on my skin, right where a standard scarf wouldn't cover it. Where only he could see it.
"You are thinking," I murmured into the quiet room.
"I'm planning," he replied, his voice sounding like rough gravel. "We don't pay."
"Alessio—"
"We hunt." His dark eyes met mine, the vulnerability from hours before completely erased. There was no boy left in his gaze now. Just the Don. Just the executioner. "Whoever took those photos belongs to Moretti's crew. They were inside my house. They think they can bleed me for money. I am going to give them a war instead."
He rolled his weight, pinning me flat against the mattress. He was mindful of his stitches, but entirely careful of me.
"But first," he whispered, his mouth hovering mere millimeters over mine. "Tell me you are mine. One more time. While I can still hear it without a glass wall separating us."
I reached up, grabbing his face, and kissed him until the room spun and we were both shaking with the intensity.
"I'm yours, you stupid, beautiful bastard." I bit his lower lip sharply. "Now get off me. We have blackmailers to kill."
A dangerous, predatory grin broke across his face. Wolf. Killer. Mine.
"That's my girl." He stood up fluidly, pulling me up off the sheets along with him. "Zia's already downstairs. She's loading the shotgun."
"Of course she is."
He reached into the waistband of his trousers and pulled out a heavy firearm, handing it directly to me. A real one. Heavy. Mine now.
"Principessa," he murmured, cupping my cheek, his thumb resting deliberately over the new, lower brand on my neck. "If this goes bad... if they manage to take me?"
"They won't."
"If they do," he insisted, his voice breaking for a fraction of a second. "You run. You disappear. You live. Promise me."
I looked at him—at the man who had died three times for me, the man who gave me his shirt, his name, and his scarred heart.
"No." I raised the weapon, cocking the slide back with a sharp, metallic click. "I promise you this: I go where you go, Alessio. Always. Even to hell."
He stared at me for a long, heavy second, his dark eyes absorbing the fierce finality in my expression.
Then he laughed. It was a rich, unhinged sound, completely lacking in sanity yet overflowing with a desperate, all-consuming devotion.
"God help the bastard who sent those photos," he growled. He leaned down, pressing his lips firmly to my split knuckles, then tracked his mouth down to kiss the cold, steel slide of the weapon in my grip. "Because they just made a mortal enemy of the Don's wife."
Wife.
The single syllable hit my chest with the force of a point-blank bullet, sinking deep and anchoring itself into my marrow.
3:00 AM – Pier 9
Thick fog rolled off the black water, carrying the sharp, bitter stench of stagnant brine, gasoline, and impending blood.
Zia Maria sat rigidly in the driver's seat of the armored SUV, her hands steady on the steering wheel. A short-barreled shotgun lay resting heavily across her lap. Her mouth was painted in her signature, blood-red lipstick, her sharp eyes staring ahead through the sheer lace of a black mourning veil. She looked exactly like she was heading straight to a funeral.
She was.
It just wasn't going to be ours.
Beside me, Alessio drew his weapon, checking the magazine with a mechanical, practiced precision. He looked up, his gaze locking onto my face, then tracking lower to the three raw, purple brands stamped into the flesh of my neck. Visible ownership. A physical warning that read Property of De Luca.
"Ready, Mrs. De Luca?" he murmured, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that sent a thrill straight down my spine.
Not yet. Not completely. But I would be the very second we stepped out into the dark.
"Born ready, Don," I whispered back, my grip tightening on the heavy firearm.
The heavy doors clicked open, breaking the silence of the night.
The car doors swung wide, and the war officially began.
Alessio reached across the console, his massive hand catching mine one last time before the violence consumed us. He laced his fingers through mine, squeezing hard, locking our hands together in a dangerous, beautiful collision of cold gunmetal and heavy gold wedding rings.
"Per sempre starts now, principessa!"