He didn’t wait for my answer, walking away to pay his fees and gather his prize.
“Calm down,” Rocco grabbed my arm. “You don’t want to make a scene. Not right now.”
“That fucking bastard,” I seethed, my eyes still on the spot where Adrian had vanished to. “He played me like a fucking fiddle.”
He wanted what I had. Not just the title.
Everything.
“You can’t go after him,” Rocco cautioned. “Not here.”
He told me that giving up Leda meant peace within the Mafia. The fucker played me.
“Come on,” Rocco was saying. “It’s over. We gotta go.”
But I couldn’t, and he knew that. I had fucked this up. I had put Leda on that auction block because I thought it was the only option I had. Instead, I betrayed the one person I loved more than anything in the world.
And now, all I wanted was to get Leda back.
“Shit,” Rocco swore. “You are going to do something that I am going to regret, aren’t you?”
I ground out my jaw. “I have to.”
“Like I said before,” Rocco sighed. “You are going to be the death of me.”
Chapter 58
Leda
Moments Before
“Let me go!” I yelled, trying to pull myself out of Rocco’s grip as he marched me back into the one place I had hoped I would never see again.
“Listen, I don’t know why he’s doing this,” the second-in-command said softly, for my ears only. “But he’s got a damn good reason, so just be patient, all right?”
I didn’t want to hear anything he had to say. Lucas lied to me. He had brought me back to the place where it all started, and I highly doubted that this time I would be looking at him at the end of the night.
The same old woman from what felt like a lifetime ago met us at the door. The disapproving glare on her face was the same as it had been. “You know the drill,” she replied, throwing a small scrap of clothing at me. “Come on. You’re late already.”
This time I didn’t argue with her, numb to the fact that I was going through this again. My clothing fell onto the floor in a tangled heap, and I slid on the thin, trying to keep myself together as I did so. Once I was dressed, she nodded. “Come.”
I walked the familiar path to the stage, my feet barely making a sound on the cold floor. The auctioneer gave me a passing smirk, but I held my head high. Screw them all. It didn’t matter. So what if Lucas had ripped out my heart and fed it to the room full of sharks?
So what if I had believed that he could be my future?
So what if I had thought that he was different?
He wasn’t.
Lucas was just like the rest of them, and I should have known better than to trust him in the first place.
The lights were blinding as I stepped up onto the stage, barely able to make out the shapes of people beyond them. Was Lucas out there, watching this with a smirk on his face, knowing that he had won? I really wished I could see him now, so that he could see the anger in my eyes.
How much I hated him.
“First up, one that has been here before with us, and we are pleased to see her again,” the auctioneer stated, catching my attention. “Leda D’Agostino. We will start the bidding at five million dollars.”
The number didn’t even faze me. Five million dollars. I had gone for twenty to Lucas.