Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 95046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
The entire arrangement becomes complicated—that special kind of complicated that corrodes everything it touches. Nothing stays contained. Nothing runs smoothly. It all requires constant orchestration, endless negotiation, perpetual management.
I can already picture it with painful clarity: splitting days of the week like divorced parents with a custody agreement, arguments erupting over whose turn it is and how much time each person gets, resentment building every time someone feels shortchanged. Schedules becoming weapons. Proximity becoming currency. The whole delicate dynamic we'd need to maintain—the precise balance of power and submission, dominance and care—reduced to a logistical nightmare of calendars and compromises.
It's a recipe designed specifically for failure.
No amount of careful planning or good intentions will overcome the basic mathematics of distance and human nature.
And that sucks.
Because I'm falling for Emmaleen Rourke.
No. I fell for this woman that first day. When she babbled about PowerPoints and Starbucks.
When she stood in those red shoes—too big on her feet, absurd and beautiful—alphabetizing invoices like her life depended on perfect order.
When she forced herself behind the wheel of my Lamborghini, hands shaking, determined not to let fear win.
Every single time I pushed, she pushed back harder. She never just survived my tests—she escalated them.
That's when she stopped being a project and became something I couldn't afford to lose.
And she writes me poetry—actual fucking poetry.
Maybe I wasn't down on one knee planning a wedding or picking out china patterns. But somewhere along the way, without consciously deciding it, I started seeing her as a permanent fixture.
Not just in my bed or at my table, but woven into the fabric of whatever life I was building here in Riverview. Long-term. Years kind of long-term. The kind where you stop imagining scenarios that don't include someone.
And now—now I'm standing here watching that entire imagined future crumble into ash and dust.
Because suddenly, impossibly, I'm obsolete.
Replaced before I even realized I was competing.
Rendered irrelevant by someone who apparently understands exactly what she needs in ways I never even tried to comprehend.
And the worst part—the absolute worst, most fucked-up part of this entire catastrophic situation?
Rico fucking LaRiccia is the one who did this to me.
Even dead, buried in an unmarked grave in Bucks County, Rico LaRiccia is still ruining my fucking life.
He's the reason Emmaleen can't come home.
He's the reason Lorcan was here in the first place.
He's all nine circles of my own personal Hell.
I walk away.
"Giovanni—where the hell are you going?"
Jino's voice cuts across the space, sharp with confusion.
I don't answer. Can't answer. My brain is a goddamn catastrophe—a writhing mass of imagery I can't shut off.
Octopi squeezing through impossible cracks, three hearts beating in impossible rhythms.
Emmaleen's grin from between my thighs.
Lorcan's crimson robe like some fucked-up Catholic fever dream.
Her voice reciting prayers to Saint Lorcan with the same reverence she used when she called me King.
Her throat beneath Lorcan's hand, her eyes rolled back in ecstasy I've never once given her.
The sound she made when she came—guttural, broken, free.
And underneath it all, the sick realization that I trained her for him. Made her perfect for someone else.
I shove through the door and hit the driveway.
Everything's slipping. Every carefully maintained element of control I built over years—the routines, the discipline, the absolute certainty that I could shape outcomes through sheer force of will—all of it disintegrating.
I can't even jerk off anymore. Can't summon basic fucking arousal unless I'm watching footage of him with her.
The Aventador's door opens, and I slide behind the wheel.
The engine roars to life and take off down the driveway, punching the gate remote and accelerating before it's fully opened, scraping through with inches to spare.
No destination in the GPS.
No music.
Just me and the road and this relentless spiral of thoughts I can't escape.
Emmaleen can't come back. That's the fundamental truth everything else crashes against. Luca LaRiccia is prowling around the edges of our world, sniffing for blood, looking for any excuse to justify what his instincts are already telling him—that I killed his son.
And if he finds her, if he discovers she witnessed it, he'll make her death last for days.
I accelerate. The countryside blurs past.
I could call my father. Ask Salvatore to intervene, to use his influence to smooth things over with Luca, to create some kind of protection for Emmaleen that would let her come home.
Except I won't.
Because Salvatore wouldn't help me anyway. He'd laugh—that cold, dismissive sound he makes when I've disappointed him.
Why would he protect what I love when he's spent my entire life teaching me that love is weakness?
I matter to no one in this world.
Marco and Angelo have wives and kids. They're established—legitimate branches of the Bavga tree with roots sunk deep.
I'm the rotten fruit Salvatore pruned off and shipped to Riverview.
The miles eat away beneath my tires.
My thoughts loop and loop and loop—
Emmaleen's face. Lorcan's hands. The collar I put on her throat that someone else gets to hold. Rico's ghost laughing from his unmarked grave. Salvatore's indifference.