Scorned Obsession (Scorned Fate)

Was I fucked in the head? I derived immense satisfaction from seeing the shock on her face. But I wasn’t sure whether it pissed me off, or it was self-directed anger. Relief. I should be feeling relief that I was finally rid of her obsession. But last night, I saw the disgust on her face when I was about to kiss her. Her rejection was an unexpected kick in the gut and I felt hollowed out. It fucked with my head. I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to barge into her room for a do-over.

Fuck me.

“What?” she rasped, eyes widening. “What do you mean? You went through all that trouble.”

“Smoke and mirrors,” I told her. “Tommy is taking over, but neither Raffa nor Gian knows that’s my plan. They have to believe that I’m serious about being the boss.”

She looked at me doubtfully. “But how will Tommy take over? You’re simply stepping down?”

I stared at her, not answering. She caught on. One simply didn’t stop being the boss. He either died or got injured enough from fulfilling his duties. Bianca’s eyes glistened with what suspiciously looked like tears and they unraveled my insides. Fuck stopping myself from touching her. I cupped the side of her face. “I’ll have to disappear, baby. Fake my death. That way they won’t come after you.”

Fury flushed her face red. She shoved my hand from her cheek and stood. “That’s crazy talk. Surely there’s another way.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But right now, that’s how we’re playing it.”

Her shoulders sagged, and she sat on the barstool again as if the revelation weighed her down. A slew of emotions crossed her face. Sorrow, as if she’d already lost me. She would never lose me. I would always watch over her as long as I lived. I watched her sleep last night. There was a camera installed in her room. I wasn’t a total pervert. I shut off the feed when she undressed. Something rolled through my chest when she picked up the silver bracelet I’d given her for her twelfth birthday. She fell asleep holding it and I hoped it gave her comfort.

When she left her room this morning, the sensor under the floorboard alerted me she was awake and on the move. It was time to tell her my plans, if only to gain her cooperation.

But there was one secret I had to keep from her because I didn’t know how to move forward with it. To take over from Gian as boss, I had to consummate the marriage with Bianca and produce an heir. That was one of Raffa’s conditions. His three weeks was a minimum time frame for getting Bianca pregnant. He pointed out that Cesar would do everything in his power to file for a divorce, but the existence of a child with De Lucci and Rossi bloodlines would complicate things.

“If there was any other way, I wouldn’t have forced you to marry me,” I told her.

Anguish etched her features. “But what about the dance club? The life you built in Harlem. What will happen to that?”

“I’ll sign it over to Tommy. Don’t worry. I survived a Russian prison, I can survive this.”

“And I’m supposed to be okay with your plan?”

“You’ll get to return to your family. Have a life. Marry someone else.”

“Fuck you, Alessandro Rossi.”

“Do you want to?” I returned evenly.

Her mouth fell open.

And fuuuuck. I fixated on her mouth so I wouldn’t fixate on what her pussy would taste like. Goddammit. As much blood I had on my hands, it felt dirty to think of her in terms of sex or blow jobs because, for the longest time, she was like a little sister to me. Then she lost her virginity to that fucker and it made me realize she wasn’t a child anymore. Still, it would be another two years before I realized Bianca had grown hips and tits and mastered the way to drive a man crazy with a flick of her hair. That was when things started changing—fast. And once they did, there was no turning back. The first time she got me hard, I was so horrified, I got drunk, puked my guts, and stood under a scalding hot shower as though it would burn off my guilt for lusting over her.

Even now, the flames of hell licked at my heels as I challenged her with my eyes.

When she was a child, her face reminded me of those mischievous angels. Chubby cheeks and bouncy dark brown curls, which glinted red in the sun. Bianca’s face had lost the baby fat of youth and had morphed into an exquisite, heart-shaped face with defined cheekbones and a stubborn chin. But her power was in her eyes. Deep-set, thick lashed. When the lighting was just right, each dark iris was surrounded by a burst of yellow gold that flared like the petals of a sunflower into an outer ring of dark brown. Other times, like when she wanted something they darkened into a soul-gripping shade of brown.

Her family called that look her puppy-dog eyes. And I agreed with them until, in the last four years, puppy-dog eyes slowly transformed into the call of a siren. Now I wanted to drown in them before I devoured her lips and sank into her heat.

Our conversation had shifted, including our silent one.

Her mouth slammed shut and her eyes dropped to her plate. Her cheeks were still pink, but I knew it wasn’t anger anymore but an awareness of me as a man.

My cock hardened behind the zipper of my jeans. I shifted in my chair and adjusted myself.

She caught my movement, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or groan. I opted to take a sip of coffee.

“Are we consummating the marriage? Because…it’s not like I’m a virgin.”

“Don’t remind me.”

Her gaze snapped to mine. “Why? Because you’re the reason I lost it?”

I raised a brow. “Are we talking about this now?”

She stood, picked up her plate, and rounded the counter to head to the sink, turning on the faucet. “I was stupid.”

I barely heard her above the rush of running water.

Getting up from the barstool, I strode to her, turned off the faucet, clasped her shoulders, and turned her around. “Maybe. But you were only seventeen and you let Griselda goad you.”

Her eyes flashed. “And how does Griselda fit into our drama? I’m going on a hunch—she’s not really pregnant, is she?”

“I never asked for confirmation.”

“Then what’s the deal about being engaged to her?”

“We were never going through with marriage, but simply discouraging Gian from forcing her to marry into the Philly mob and forming an alliance from hell. Gian called our bluff by throwing us an engagement party.” That was another level of fuckery. I agreed to help Griselda because we’d been engaged before. Even when she broke things off with me first, I had already tainted her chances of a lucrative marriage match. No one wants Sandro Rossi’s leftovers, Griselda screamed at me more than once. Guilt about that festered after Griselda remained unmarried year after year. That was why I practically handed over control of the club to her and why I didn’t want the same thing to happen to Bianca, but too late for that now. A widow had a more respectable status than a former fiancée. That was why faking my death was one avenue I was considering so Bianca could escape my family. The De Luccis would never abandon her.

“The three of us have formed a weirdly toxic relationship.” She meant me, her, and Griselda. “I want to leave the past in the past. I’ve yet again screwed with your life and hers. Maybe I deserved this, but not Renz. He got caught up in my preoccupation with you.”

“Preoccupation?”

She glared at me. “Obsession, all right? But I’m over it.”

I crowded her against the sink and caged her in, lowering my head, and said, “Oh, no, baby. We’re going to show how obsessed we are with each other. We’re married, remember? We’re crazy about each other.”

She narrowed her eyes, but I could almost imagine the pounding of her heart. Her chest rose and fell with her rapid breaths. “We don’t have to pretend if it’s just the two of us.” She pushed at my chest.

When I refused to budge, she hissed, “Sandro.”

I let her scoot out from under my arm and put distance between us. She shifted her attention to the bags on the counter. “We need to put these away.” She glanced around the kitchen. “I don’t know where you want these.”

I sauntered lazily over to her. I never thought I’d like playing house with a woman, but with Bianca, I was looking forward to it, however temporarily.

“I hardly use this property. The pantry is empty. Do as you please.”

“There’s enough food for six months in here.” She was exaggerating, but she still wouldn’t look at me. I followed her around the counter where she found a large cooler. She flipped the lid open. “Okay, there’s enough meat in here to feed an army.” She let the lid fall and looked at me. “Are we entertaining while we’re holed up in here?”

“I don’t know.” I lowered my head. “You’re changing the subject.”

She averted her gaze, but not before I saw the irritation in them. She was still a far cry from being on board with being married. It had only been a day, so why was I so impatient? She had years of patience waiting for me to react to her as a woman I could fuck, and when I was finally coming around to the idea of it, she was icing me out.

The irony.

The future remained murky, but I would worry about that later and it seemed she was still digesting the news I gave her about faking my death.

“We need to put this away.” She opened the freezer. “The meat will not fit in here.”

She was determined not to discuss learning to be man and wife.

“There’s a chest freezer in the garage.” I lifted the cooler. “I’ll put it there.”

“Good.” She stared at me as if seeing me in a different light. “It’s strange.”

“What? Like we’re living in domesticated bliss,” I teased.

She narrowed her eyes. “Go.”

“Yes, wife.”

She held open the door for me as I hauled the cooler into the garage. As I unloaded the meat into the freezer, I thought back to the different points of the conversation we never finished. Bianca felt guilty about the second time Griselda and I broke up. That was the time I just returned from Russia. The time after my father’s funeral and I was reeling from sordid revelations about my parentage. The time Griselda became a bad habit, a familiar body, and a reliable hookup. I spoke nothing about love or a relationship and made it clear our connection was simply sex. But after the damage she’d inflicted on Bianca because of me, I was done with her. It wasn’t only Griselda’s scathing words, but I found out she set a sociopath in Bianca’s path. And I confirmed the boy was indeed a sociopath five years later when he came into my club, roofied coeds, and raped them. But I had always kept an eye on Warren Winslow ever since that time Bianca called me the night that fucker took her virginity.

I almost didn’t answer my phone.