Chapter 3 - Blood and Espresso
The heavy silence inside the Silver Dollar Café felt thicker than the desert air outside.
Luca’s hand hung suspended in the air between us, trembling slightly—a betrayal of the cold, unshakeable mafia boss persona he projected to the world. His dark eyes searched my face, drinking in every line, every change, every year of survival etched into my skin since the night our world ended.
"Giana..." he choked out, his voice raw, stripped of all authority. "You... you bled out on those stairs. They told me you were gone. They found your robe..."
"They found my decoy robe," I interrupted, my voice sharp as a butcher's knife. I didn't lower the heavy iron skillet. "And you didn't check. You didn't look back. You looked at Elena, you looked at the case, and you walked away."
Luca flinched as if I had struck him across the face with a lead pipe. Behind him, his chief enforcer, Matteo, shifted uncomfortably, keeping his weapon trained downward while eyeing the dying form of Preston Stahl in the corner.
"I had to secure the ledger," Luca rasped, stepping closer, ignoring the shattered wood of the back wall. "Stahl had the codes to dismantle his entire syndicate. If I didn't take the case, he would have killed us both, and our unborn child—"
"Don't you dare talk to me about our child!" I slammed the skillet down onto the counter with a crack that made the remaining coffee mugs rattle. "You chose your war. You chose your informant. You left me to die on a marble floor while you played hero for a woman who was never your mistress in the first place!"
Luca stopped dead in his tracks. His jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath his skin. "You knew about Elena?"
"I figured it out long before your enemies did," I snapped, glaring at him. "I’m not some fragile doll you can lock away in a bakery and visit when you need a break from bloodshed, Luca. But the moment bullets started flying, you treated me like collateral damage."
Before Luca could answer, a soft, frightened noise came from the back storage room.
My blood ran cold.
Leo.
In the chaos of gunfire, broken walls, and shouting men, my three-year-old son had woken up.
Luca’s head snapped toward the back door instantly. His instincts—honed by a decade at the top of Miami’s criminal underworld—took over in a microsecond.
"What is that?" Luca demanded, his voice dropping into a lethal register. He took three long strides toward the back room before I could even blink.
"Luca, stop!" I screamed, dropping the skillet and lunging over the counter.
Too late.
Luca pushed the battered wooden door open and stepped inside.
I scrambled over the laminate counter, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird, and rushed after him. I burst into the cramped, windowless back room, ready to claw his eyes out if he so much as looked at my boy the wrong way.
The room was lit by a single dim overhead bulb.
In the corner, sitting up on his small cot with a ratty blue blanket clutched in his tiny hands, was Leo.
He had wild, dark curls tumbling over his forehead. He rubbed his sleepy hazel eyes with the back of his fist, blinking against the harsh light. And then, he looked up.
His gaze locked onto the tall, imposing stranger standing in the doorway of his room—a man wearing an expensive suit covered in dust and blood, staring at him as if he were seeing a ghost.
Luca froze.
Every breath left his lungs. The color drained completely from his face, leaving him looking hollowed out, as if he had just been struck by lightning.
Leo tilted his head, exactly the way Luca did when he was thinking through a problem at the bakery counter.
"Mommy?" Leo whispered, his voice small and sleepy, cutting through the heavy silence of the room. "Who's that tall man? Is he a bad guy?"
Luca dropped to his knees. The expensive Italian wool of his trousers hit the dusty, linoleum floor, but he didn't care. Tears welled up in his dark eyes, spilling over unheeded down his cheeks. He stared at the little boy—at the nose, the eyes, the stubborn set of the chin—and saw the undeniable truth staring back at him.
"My God," Luca choked out, his voice breaking into a ragged sob. "He... he has your eyes."
May you like
I stepped between them, my hands trembling as I scooped Leo up into my arms, pressing his small, warm body tightly against my chest. I glared down at my husband, my protector, my betrayer.
"He's my son, Luca," I whispered fiercely, tears finally hot on my own cheeks. "And you forfeited your right to him the night you walked away."
