I nodded down at the floor. That didn’t leave me much space to get out of this.
“Now, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to live here with us. You’re going to go out in society with us. You’re going to pretend to be madly, impossibly, life-changingly in love with me… and you’re going to make it convincing.”
Dante burst out laughing again, and Dominic smirked. I started feeling sick. “You can go fuck yourself, asshole.”
“I would like it so much better if you helped me out with that.”
I spun around to find Luca smiling at me with that sharkish grin of his. His flashing eyes suggested so much I didn’t want to think about.
He broke eye contact first and strolled across the room. I shouldn’t look at him. I commanded myself to look away, but my gaze remained riveted to him with some powerful magnetic… It couldn’t be attraction. I couldn’t call it that. No fucking way.
“Anyway, as I was saying, you’re going to pretend to be my girlfriend… or whatever you want to call it. You can hate me all you like as long as you convince the rest of the world.”
“What the hell for?” I blurted out. “What can you possibly stand to gain by pretendingthat?”
“You’re going to help us lure the Vittorios into a trap.”
“The what?”
He rolled his eyes and smacked his lips in annoyance. He turned to the twins and changed his tone instantly. “Can you believe this? She doesn’t remember anything.”
“We’ll just have to teach her.” Dante’s gaze migrated down my body too. Did he mean what I thought he meant?
“The Vittorios are our main rivals in Boston,” Luca replied. “We’re going to make them think you and I can’t live without each other. They’ll kidnap you thinking to blackmail me, and that will give us an excuse to start a war. We’ll destroy them and drive them out of Boston forever.”
“You… What?” I could barely speak above a whisper.
Luca shrugged. “You can go home to your parents if you want to. Just remember this. Your father and his whole family should have been executed for betrayal a long time ago. If you don’t do this, we’ll have no choice but to exact our revenge, not just on your father, but on you and your mother too.”
My throat went dry, and I wilted in my chair. I was trapped with these murderous fiends. That would be bad enough, but pretend to actually like them?
I turned my face away, but Luca’s voice kept worming into my brain no matter how much I tried to stop it.
“You don’t know how much I missed you, Ari. It’s going to be wonderful to have you back at Archhurst. I know it’s gonna be just like old times.”
Chapter5
Luca
Istepped out of Ariana’s room and shut the door behind me. “You both did magnificently!” I whispered to the twins. “That was perfect. I couldn’t ask for better.”
“What are gonna do with her now?” Dante asked.
“Just what I said. I’m gonna make the Vittorios think we’re dating. They’ll try to take her, and that will give us the excuse to destroy them.”
Dante frowned toward the door. “I don’t like it. I don’t like putting her in danger.”
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I won’t let anything happen to her. She’s far too valuable for that.”
Neither of the twins said anything. Dante kept scowling toward the locked door, and Dominic scowled at me. I could read their thoughts. They didn’t like this plan of using Ariana as bait to spring a trap on the Vittorios.
I didn’t much like it myself, but I couldn’t tell them that. I put this plan in motion. Now I had to follow it through.
I turned away and headed downstairs to my office, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her looking up at me from that chair. She looked so vulnerable and breathless then. Her pupils dilated when she looked up at me like that.
She wasn’t looking at me with love or admiration, though. She feared me. A don should want people to fear him, but I couldn’t bring myself to want that from her.
I wanted her to trust me, but that would never happen now, not after I had her kidnapped and threatened her and her family to get my way.