A grin stretches across my face and I feel a warm fuzziness settling into the pit of my stomach, knowing that Roman doesn’t mean for me to show her my scars. After all, she’s already seen those.
My hand falls to my thigh and I yank on the knife that sits in the tight holster, having absolutely no idea what happened to the one Roman placed right in the palm of my hand. I stride up to her, a wicked excitement brimming in my chest. Ariana’s eyes are wide and she looks at me in fear. I bet Lucas told her exactly what he had planned, but never in her wildest dreams did she expect the tables to turn on her like this.
My gaze sweeps over her body, taking in the miles of flawless flesh that I can't wait to decorate, just as Lucas decorated mine. Her eyes spit venom, a silent message for me to watch my back, that if I were to go through with this, my life wouldn’t be worth living. But I disagree. If I don’t settle this score, I would never be able to live with myself.
“Where to start?” I muse, taking the tip of the blade and gently sailing it across her skin. The blade trails over her arm and leads down to the hand that’s pinned to the door. “You know what he did to my arm?” I question. “I still remember it so perfectly. The way his blade dug into my skin. How it stung. How I wanted to die.” Then without warning, I press down on the blade, letting it pierce her flesh just as Lucas had done to me.
Her screams consume me, giving me life and making my blood pump faster. I yank the blade out and immediately stab it deep into her thigh until I feel her bone beneath the tip of the blade, right where he got me, reliving the memories all over again. “This,” I seethe. “This is what you did to me. What you put me through.”
“ENOUGH,” Giovanni roars as his hand curls around my arm and throws me down on the floor at his feet, the gun at my back falling out of my waistband and sailing across the marble tiles. The wolves instantly bare their teeth as they creep forward, pissed off with what they see.
Giovanni turns to face his sons, his gaze glossing over the protective wolves and noticing how his sons have all crept in closer. “You mean to tell me that you’re putting on this ridiculous show just for her?” he spits, kicking his leg out and hitting me in the ribs. “She’s nothing, and yet you stand there and allow her to mutilate my wife?”
Marcus laughs. “Yet at any point, you could have stepped in and stopped her yourself. You could have saved your wife all of this humiliation and pain. Hell, you could have even freed her from that knife pinning her to the door, but you haven’t. What kind of husband does that make you? No,” he continues. “Don’t answer that. The fact that your wife was out in dive bars meeting men like Lucas Miller in the middle of the night answers that. Right along with the fact that your first wife lay dead in a glass coffin, rotting away at the top of your sons’ prison.”
“Watch your tone with me, boy.”
Levi laughs. “Careful, Father. You don’t want to piss him off. You know how Marcus gets once he’s got the taste for blood. It’s nearly impossible to stop him and it looks like you’re his next victim.”
Roman shakes his head, holding out a hand that has the wolves backing down. “No,” he says, a slow grin stretching over his face as he meets his father’s stare. “He’s mine.” Giovanni’s face falls as his three sons begin to stalk him. “The guards and Ariana, that was merely for our entertainment, but you, Father. You’re what we’ve come all this way for.”
“You locked us up for ten years,” Marcus says, his tone lowering to a venomous whisper. “You took our freedom. You chained us to a fucking castle when we should have thrived. We should have ended you the night Antonio whispered in your ear. We were wrong to have let it go on for so long, but Ariana needed our protection.”
“That’s over now,” Roman says. “And now there’s not a damn thing standing in our way. Your reign is over. The DeAngelis family is ours.”
Giovanni stands tall, staring his sons down as though he’s hoping this is all some kind of bad dream. “They will never follow you,” he spits. “You’re nothing but a joke, all three of you. My brothers will stand against you and destroy you before you even see it coming.”
“Your brothers will destroy each other for us,” Levi says as Giovanni backs up closer to his wife, her whimpers barely audible against the overwhelming tension in the room. “They’ve already started.”