The lamp shatters, and the lightbulb explodes off the walls.
“Fuck!” I grab the decanter and fling it across the room, joining the lamp on the floor in a dramatic wreck of glass and crystal. If Nicoli were here, he’d be whining over the spilled whiskey. It’s probably a good thing—the alcohol seeping into the lacquered floors rather than my veins. I can hardly control myself sober; imagine what a fuck-up I’d be drunk. Everything went from total bliss to complete shit at the speed of light. One minute we were in Italy making love under the moon and prowling the halls of Mito, and the next, it’s goddamn World War Three.
“Welcome to married life,” is probably what my late grandfather would say. “Good today, a royal fuck-up tomorrow.”
I pull my fingers through my hair, my muscles tense and strung tight. One would never guess I just had sex with my wife on my father’s desk. Her butt-print is still sitting fresh on the pristinely polished mahogany. For days, all I could think about was fucking her, every filthy fantasy playing off inside my head every damn minute. But spilling my load inside her did nothing to satiate me. Nothing.
Instead, I feel worse than I did before. The way she looks at me with those pretty doe eyes, it’s like she’s no longer staring at her husband but rather the man who screwed up her life. God, I hate that I have to hurt her to keep her.
“Jesus,” I mutter and fall back on the couch, rubbing my temples to block out the migraine threatening to drill a hole in my head from all this emotional fucking whiplash. How quickly happiness can turn into a total shit-show. It’s like our trip to Italy never happened, our romance nothing but a fleeting moment in time.
There’s a mess of broken glass and strewn papers on the floor. Good thing my mom’s not here, or she’d have a fucking stroke if she saw my dad’s office looking like this.
I wish he were here. Actually, I don’t. He’d be so pissed off with me, I wouldn’t be able to get a word in while he’d curse me in Italian, telling me how badly I fucked up.
The air in the room is still. Quiet. It still smells like the incense my mother would burn here—cinnamon, supposedly known for its ability to stimulate power toward wealth, prosperity, and business success. To four young boys, it meant pancakes.
It feels like yesterday when he summoned me here while reading his newspaper. He was an old soul. No matter how many times Nicoli and I tried to get him to use electronics to catch up on world events, he preferred to hold the paper between his fingers.
He pulled the rug from under my ass that day by demanding I marry. I couldn’t believe it when he gave me that ultimatum—get married and inherit the family legacy, or don’t get married and watch my uncle take what’s rightfully mine.
We sat here that day, arguing. I had to listen to him explain why taking a wife was vital to my role as head of this family and leader of the Dark Sovereign while he had to hear me argue that it was all bullshit. I didn’t want to get married. I liked my life the way it was. Simple and uncomplicated. Taking a wife, having a pretty face at my side wasn’t important to me. To me, that wasn’t power or influence. It was just another responsibility piled on top of a thousand others.
But my father disagreed, and I can hear his words now as clearly as I did then.
“A pretty wife is not just a fuck toy, Alexius. She’s not just a womb that carries an heir. A man’s power is communicated and reflected off his wife’s image.”
Looking back, it seems he was right, but I was too stubborn to see it—too arrogant to admit that my father knew better. I can almost see him smirking at me now with that I-told-you-so look on his face.
Everything has changed since I married Leandra. It started as a mutually beneficial agreement supposed to be temporary, but now it’s more. And as a man who didn’t want to get married, I crossed a big, bold fucking line to ensure I stay married. She’s made my life better in ways I never thought possible. Falling for her was not part of the plan. But when is it ever? People don’t plan to fall in love. They just do. So here I am, a man who didn’t want to get married in the first place. A man who had no desire to fall in love, especially not with the poor girl who waited tables at a dumpster diner. Yet that’s precisely what happened. I fell in love with my wife, who now means more to me than anything else in the world.
Now I know what my mother meant when she said, ‘Love is not the butterflies you feel when you’re with someone. It’s the brokenness you experience when you’re apart.’
That brokenness has been carving at my chest ever since Leandra demanded the distance that now festers between us. And I have no idea how to close the gap.
My phone rings in my pocket, and I sigh, closing my eyes, wishing the world would just go fuck itself. Can a man not take ten goddamn minutes to suffocate in misery without being interrupted?
Reluctantly, I pull out my phone. “Maximo.”
“Where are you?”
I inspect my father’s wrecked office, pausing at the desk I just fucked my wife on. “Aren’t you supposed to know where I am at all times?”
“Oh, I know you’re in your father’s office. I was just being polite by asking.”
“Did I not tell you to keep your eyes on my wife?”
“You did. How the fuck do you think I know where you are?”
I frown. “But if you’re with her now, how do you know I’m still in my father’s office?”
“Look out the window.”
I get up and place my hand in my pocket when I look up at the second floor and find Maximo waving at me from the hallway window, looking like an idiot.
“Omnipresent fucker,” I mutter with a grin.
“It’s what you pay me for. Just doing my job.”
I cock a brow. “You have that tone.”
“What tone?”
“That tone that suggests you’re going to tell me something that pisses me off.” I turn my back on him and lean against the windowsill. “What is it?”
“It’s about the other matter you asked me to keep a close eye on.”
Warning prickles my skin. “What about it?”
“There’s been a new development that might require us to call in a few favors.”
“Jesus Christ,” I curse, pinching my nose. “It’s like someone opened the universe’s asshole that keeps flinging shit my way.”
“Want me to take care of it?”
I sigh, closing my eyes. “I’ll go, but I want you with me. Get another set of eyes on Leandra and meet me out front. You can clue me in on what you know on our way there.”
“Got it.”
“Maximo?”
“Yeah?”
I rub the back of my neck. “Is she okay?”
There’s a slight pause. “I don’t think so.”
“Fuck,” I mutter, closing my eyes, my chest crushed under the weight of my wife’s heartache. “I’ll, ah…see you in ten.”
I hang up and loosen my shoulders, rolling my neck from side to side, when Nicoli appears by the door, staring questioningly at the broken glass on the floor. “Bad day?”
“No. This is me on a good day.”
“Ah. Sarcasm. That’s my talent, brother. Not yours.”
“Then what’s my talent?”
“To fuck shit up, of course.” He shoots me a cocky grin.
“Even though I’d love to stay and participate in some meaningless banter,” I straighten and grab my coat, “I have shit to take care of.”
Nicoli strolls in, shoulders squared and tie loosened. “Is there a problem I’m not aware of?”
“Yeah. But I’ll go deal with it.”
“Is it Rome?”
I shake my head. “No. This is something different entirely.” I scoff. “It’s not like I don’t have enough shit to deal with.”
Nicoli shrugs. “That’s the thing about shit. It rarely comes in bits and pieces.”
“Oh, my fucking God.” I blink, unamused.
“Yeah.” He winces. “Not my best joke.”
“Listen,” I turn to face him, “keep an eye out around here while I’m gone.”
“You sure I can’t help?”
“I got this.” I slip on my coat as I stomp out the door, righting my tie and squaring my shoulders. I’m just hoping that whatever new development there is to this potential problem is something Maximo and I can get sorted out as quickly and as discreetly as possible. For this thing to blow wide open is the last thing we need.
It’s the last thing Leandra needs.
