Chapter 31 Chapter 31

Chapter 31 Chapter 31
“He… he’s spying for us?” I croaked, my heart pounding like crazy against my ribs. “He’s spying for himself. For his revenge,” Rafaele corrected me, letting go of my jacket. He turned away, leaned heavily with both hands on the edge of his desk, and let his head droop. The wheezing in his chest grew louder, and in that brief moment, he no longer looked like the aloof godfather. He looked like a gravely ill man whose time was almost up. “I’m dying, Vito. That’s the truth. And this family has no future if Nicolai doesn’t survive the Phantom. So you’re going to bury your personal feelings right now, damn it.” He turned his head slightly toward me, his gaze cutting through the darkness of the room. “You’re the enforcer of the De Laurentiis family. Your job isn’t to guard Nicolai like a jealous dog. Your job is to keep the front clean here while he dissects the De Lucas family from the inside. If you really want to protect him… then keep your feet still until he gives you a sign. Do we understand each other?” I stared at my uncle. Blood throbbed in my broken nose, and a murderous, dark resolve formed in my head. So Nicolai was in the lion’s den, armed with a file and Sebastian’s loyalty. He played the part of the loving husband, while Alessandro thought he was in complete control. “If I have to wake the monster to survive,” I thought grimly as I finally wiped the red liquid from my mouth with my sleeve, “then I’ll wait in the shadows until he unlocks the cage.” “Got it, boss,” I blurted out, turned on my heel, and left the bloodstained study. I stormed down the hallway, straight to the east wing to my own room, and locked the door behind me. Darkness enveloped me. The hot blood from my broken nose dripped relentlessly onto the carpet, but I barely felt the pain. What was eating me up was the image in my head. Nicolai. In his torn shirt. With that burning, wild look he must have had in the hallway after he’d climbed off Yvette’s body. A hate-filled, sick growl escaped my throat. I walked over to the nightstand, yanked open the drawer, and grabbed the cold metal of my Colt 1911. I sat down on the edge of the bed, pressed the barrel against my own forehead—just to burn away the heat in my skull—and closed my eyes. It was absurd. It was absolutely sick. He was my cousin. My flesh and blood. All my life I’d fucked women, fucked men, tied them up, used them—but none of them had sparked this murderous obsession in me. I didn’t want a woman to smell his skin. I didn’t want Yvette to scream his name. And most of all, the thought that Alessandro De Luca now had the right to run his fingers through Nicolai’s dark curls, throw him onto the bed, and take him whenever he wanted was killing me. I remembered the moment in the gym when I’d brushed his hair away from his face. He’d been so close to me. He’d blushed. He’d pushed me away because he thought I was his kindred spirit. He had no idea. Not a damn idea that every night I dreamed of pinning him against the wall just the way Alessandro did. To break him, to possess him, to have him all to myself. I hated myself for this toxic longing. It was a cancer eating me away from the inside out. But I couldn’t stop it. Every time I looked at him, I wanted to burn the whole world to the ground, just so he would look at me—not with brotherly love, but with the same raw, helpless submission that the Phantom was now demanding of him. With a sharp jerk, I pulled the gun away from my forehead and slid the magazine into the grip with a metallic click. Tomorrow morning, Sebastian would arrive at the De Luca estate with the boxes. He would install the encrypted line. He would be my ear in Nicolai’s bedroom. Play your part, Nico, I thought, and my fingers clenched so tightly around the gun’s grip that my knuckles ached. Let the Phantom believe he owns you. But if he breaks you… if he makes you look at him the way you should have looked at me… then I swear to you, I’ll blow this damn house to pieces with my own hands. Even if it drags both of us down to hell.

Nicolai’s Perspective

The monotonous hum of the tires on the wet asphalt was the only sound that broke the oppressive silence inside the SUV. Outside, the rain lashed against the tinted windows, while the lights from the streetlamps glided at regular intervals as pale streaks across Alessandro’s profile. We were both sitting in the back seat, as far apart from each other as the cramped space would allow. Neither of us was in a good mood. The air in the car was thick, charged with a murderous tension that made every fiber of my body tense up. Against my chest, the paper of the secret file I’d hidden under my jacket burned—a silent promise of revenge that kept me going despite my exhaustion. Next to me, the silver lighter clicked. Alessandro took a deep drag on his cigarette and slowly blew the smoke toward the ceiling. The faint glimmer of the ember illuminated his features for a moment. His lip was still slightly swollen from the punch I’d landed on him in the salon, and the fresh bandage Sebastian had applied was stuck to his temple. His mood was at absolute rock bottom. The Phantom was seething with rage, even though his mask of cold, calculated detachment sat as firmly as if cemented in place. “You remain silent, mio sposo,” he suddenly whispered, and his deep baritone voice cut through the darkness like a scalpel. “Do you still have the taste of your little slut on your lips? Or are you already thinking about how you’re going to land the next blow on me?” I didn’t turn my head. “I’m simply enjoying the peace and quiet, De Luca. Something that’s an absolute rarity in your presence.” He snorted contemptuously, took one last deep drag, and stubbed out the cigarette in the armrest ashtray with an abrupt, almost brutal motion. In the next split second, the atmosphere in the car changed abruptly. Before I could even react, Alessandro’s hand shot forward. His strong fingers clawed into the fabric of my black jacket and yanked me toward him with such force that I slid across the back seat. My knees slammed into his legs, and my freshly stitched gunshot wounds in my lower abdomen flared up in protest. I gasped softly in pain, but he ignored it completely. He pressed me mercilessly against the leather of the seats, his massive body pushing over mine until he completely pinned me beneath him. “Let me go, you bastard!” I growled, raising my hands to push him away, but he was faster. He grabbed my wrists and pressed them into the upholstery with an iron grip. His gaze was no longer cold. It was stormy, dark, and full of untamed, murderous rage. His eyes were fixed on my cleavage. The violent jerk had caused the collar of my new black shirt to slip—and the dim light of the streetlamps revealed what I’d overlooked in the mirror earlier. Red, fresh scratch marks stood out on my skin, just above my collarbone and extending deep beneath the fabric. Yvette. In the heat of our little staged show, she had dug her fingernails deeper into my flesh than I had realized. When Alessandro saw the marks, a deep, dangerous growl escaped him, rising from deep within his chest. His jaw clenched so violently that I could hear his teeth grinding. His mood, which had already been lousy, plummeted completely into the abyss. “What’s this?” he ground out, his voice vibrating with sheer fury. He let go of my wrists only to roughly grab the collar of my shirt with his large fingers. With a brutal jerk, he tore the fabric open further, sending the buttons flying through the car with a soft pop. His eyes were fixed on the red lines on my bare skin, and the next moment he pressed his hand flat and heavy against my chest—right over the wounds, directly over my racing heart. “I told you, you belong to me, Nicolai. Every single fiber of your body belongs to me. And you let that cheap bar slut dig her nails into my property?!” The physical dominance with which he pressed me against the seats almost took my breath away. I could feel his erection pressing mercilessly against my thigh through the thin fabric of our pants—just like this morning in bed, just like in the hallway after the staircase incident. He reacted to me immediately, physically, uncontrollably, driven by an utterly sick sense of possessiveness. He couldn’t stand the fact that someone else had touched me. Not because he loved me. But because he viewed me as an object he claimed exclusively for himself. But he’d made a mistake. He’d just put my greatest weapon right in my hand. I suppressed the trembling in my body, forced an icy, mocking smile onto my lips, and looked him straight in the eye—those stormy, gray eyes. I didn’t look away.