We stare at one another, me daring her to try something else, and her raising her chin defiantly. But she seems to have some self-preservation instincts at least, and she doesn't offer a counterattack, doesn't attempt to argue with me anymore. Good for her. She finally learned her first lesson—no one fucks with Adrian Bernardi. Not even the woman who stole my heart when I was just a little boy.
"One other thing," I tell her with a sick sense of pleasure. "No one in this house will speak to you, so you might as well not even try."
"What?" She glares at me, holding her lithe wrist as if she can still feel the burning touch of my fingers on her flawless skin. "Why?"
"Because I don't want you getting any ideas." I shrug. "You're a prisoner here, and you will be treated as such."
"Do you give all your prisoners pink bedrooms?"
"Watch that mouth," I hiss. "Don't make me punish you on the first day in the Estate. I'm not going to warn you again."
"You don't—"
She doesn't get to finish her sentence, because the doors to her quarters fly open the next second.
My father strides into her space.
Marzia recoils in fear when she sees him. I don't think she'll ever get over her fear of my father. After all, he did murder her parents.
"Father?" I narrow my eyes at him. "I was just finishing up with Marzia and—"
"I'll finish her off for you, then." He pulls a gun from the holster behind his back.
Marzia and Eleanora gasp in unison as he points the gun at my pretty captive.
I curse and step in front of him, ignoring the barrel of the gun that's now pointed right at me. "What are you doing?" I demand. "She's not a threat to us."
"She is…" Father grunts. "She's a liability."
"Put your gun down," I hiss.
"Get out of my way, Adrian." He attempts to shove me aside.
I refuse to move.
He lowers his hand with the gun and glares at me. "Are you really going to go against your father's direct orders, Adrian? You're going to disobey me like this? Have you no respect?"
"We agreed," I hiss at him in hushed tones. "The girl lives."
"Well, I changed my mind." Father grunts. "I want her dead, and I want her dead now." He sidesteps and raises the gun again, clicking the safety off.
Before he can shoot, I knock the gun out of his hand.
A shot rings out, a bullet digging into the floor. Eleanora lets out a gargled groan and Marzia shrieks in fear, cowering in the corner of the room.
I glance at her to make sure she's okay, doing my best to ignore the hurt puppy look on her face and the way her body is trembling with fear. "Are you crazy?" I demand from my father. "We agreed. The girl. Doesn't. Get. Fucking. Hurt."
"You think you can order me around, boy?" Father glares up at me.
I've towered over him for years, but he still intimidates me. But I'm not stepping down, not this time. He won't kill Marzia. I won't let him.
"I own you, this house, and this captive. If I say she's dead, she's dead."
"No." I shake my head. I glance over my shoulder at Marzia's whimpering figure. "Let's talk outside."
"If we must." Father takes one last look at Marzia, like a predator scoping out his prey. He tucks the gun back in its holster and storms out of the room.
I'm tempted to speak to Marzia first, but I trust Eleanora enough to know she'll make sure my captive is okay. Instead of asking if she's okay, I rush after Father and follow him into his office two hallways down.
He groans as he enters, the security guards stepping aside to let us pass inside. Father always has someone guarding him. In his line of work, you can never be too careful—and I don't mean the art collector business. He sits behind his desk.
I approach him with narrowed eyes, putting my hands down on the heavy oak desk. "Why did you try to kill her?" I demand. "I thought we had a deal."
"That girl is a fucking liability now that we know Vitto Donatti and her brother survived," Father spits out. "We can't keep her alive. As long as she's here, everyone in this fucking house is in danger. Vitto and her brother won't stop until they have her back."
"Didn't we know all this before we stormed the Da Costa house?" I run my fingers through my hair. "She was always a liability. You never wanted her dead before."
"Of course I did," he says easily, as if taking someone's life is a light topic. "You were just too pussy-struck by her to accept that."
"You can't kill her." I shake my head vehemently. "I can't let you."
"Let me?" Father laughs out loud. "You're forgetting yourself, boy. You remember who owns this house, don't you?"
"That doesn't give you the right to kill the woman I..."
"The woman you what?" He narrows his eyes at me, the sentence hanging unfinished between us.
I press my lips together, glaring at him in a silent face-off and refusing to give him the answer we both already know.
"Fucking hell, Adrian." Father groans. "Don't tell me you're in love with the enemy's daughter."
"Would you let her live if I was?"
He stares at me long and hard before shaking his head. "No, that doesn't change anything. Family comes first, and then the business. Love has no place in this world, Adrian. I don't give a shit about your feelings for her. Accept she's going to die."
"Never," I hiss. "Over my dead fucking body."
Father contemplates his next words while he pours himself a stiff drink.
I notice he's drinking the Da Costa grappa, probably one of the hundreds of bottles we took from the house after we raided it during the masquerade party earlier. Night has turned into morning and into day outside and I suddenly realize I'm bone-fucking tired. But the day isn't over just yet. I still have to convince Father to let Marzia live.
"Adrian, you've been a good son to me," Father finally speaks again. "Even though you are not my blood, I care about you."
It's the closest I've come to an admission of love from my father over all the years I've been alive. My heart pounds in anticipation of what he'll say next. Father never made differences between us brothers. There are five of us, and only one, Santino, is his flesh and blood. The other four of us are adopted from all around the world. My parents were Russian, and my father brought me here when I was three years old. I don't remember anything from my previous life except the pangs of hunger I felt when I was a kid.
We had nothing.
Now I have everything.
And yet I'd risk it all for Marzia Da Costa.
"You are making a mistake by killing her," I mutter.
"No, Adrian." Father shakes his head, taking a thoughtful sip of his drink. "You're making a mistake by allowing yourself to get weak for a woman. It never ends well. Trust me."
I don't know much about Father's private life, apart from the fact that his wife, Santino's mother, died in childbirth. But I don't question him further.
"You have to understand that you will never marry Marzia Da Costa," he goes on, "She can never be yours."