His hand slammed on his desk a few seconds later and scared me half-to-death. “I promised the Binachis twenty kilos of that cocaine. If I don’t have it within seventy-two hours, I’m holding you personally responsible. Do you understand?” He let out a muddy chuckle. “I knew you would.”
I was so stricken with shock that I didn’t hear my dad’s heavy footsteps make their way to the door. When he pulled the door open, I crawled on my hands backward until I was bumping into the wall. I expected him to be mad at me for eavesdropping, but instead, he just perched himself against the doorframe and crossed his arms.
He looked down at me with a devilish grin. “Are you ready to learn what it really means to be a Varasso?”
I nodded because I’d only ever been an outsider. I hoped that learning the business would make my brothers respect me, but it only made them resent me more, at least the older two. I could even see Alessandro looking at me with envy out of the corner of his eye. I never knew if it was because they thought I shouldn’t be entitled to the business as a half-breed or because they knew my relationship with our dad was vastly different from theirs, but I spent my entire life chasing their approval. Approval I would never truly get.
Still, as I perched my gun against the wood of my dad’s office door, I knew what had to be done if there was a threat inside the office. I had spent a long time keeping my hands clean of the destruction Varassos left everywhere they went, but if I needed to shoot to protect my family, I would do so without hesitation.
I opened the door and, to my surprise, just Luca was sitting inside. I could barely see the top of his head poking out over the top of the imposing chair because he had his back to the door and he was looking out the window. I brought my gun down. “Jeez, total darkness is a little brooding for a fight with your wife, don’t you think?”
The chair slowly turned, and chills peppered over my skin. It wasn’t Luca, at all.
Dario Binachi flashed me a toothy grin, rivaled only by the glint across the pistol he was aiming right at me. He and both of his sons were supposed to be in prison. Why was he sitting in Luca’s office chair?
“Dario.”
“Gabriel Varasso.” The voice crashed into me like an eighteen-wheeler. It was one of the voices I’d heard across Stacy’s door the night she was attacked. “How nice of you to join us.”
“Us?” It was all I got out before I felt something slam against my head, and my world turned to darkness.
25
Gabriel
I opened my eyes and felt a gentle breeze sliding over my body. The bed I was in was unfamiliar to me, but it still hugged me like a warm embrace. I stretched my hands above my head and jumped a little at the shifting next to me. I looked over, and Stacy was laying there beside me. There was nothing but her lightly tanned skin against the white comforter that was gathered around us, and she was breathing in and out gently. I scratched the back of her head lightly before leaning down to kiss her. Though I would find her beautiful in any condition, her unbroken, unbruised skin made me smile. I wanted to run my lips over it, kiss it, feel it. I wanted her to know, with my hands bending against all the curves of her body, that for as long as we both lived, I would never let harm befall her again.
The sun peeked over a blanket of blue stretching out infinitely into the horizon, and I knew she’d have words for being awoken so early, but we had an endless amount of time to sleep. Something in my body compelled me to spend as much wide-eyed time with her as possible. I didn’t want her to slip through my fingers again. I wanted to feel her against me, around me. If it killed me, that’d be fine, as long as it was her. As long as it was real.
I shifted my way further into the bed until my face was at hers. I pecked her on her nose, on her cheeks, on her lips, and on her chin. She twisted next to me, and a smile curved up her cheeks. I kissed each of the corners, and then I tried to put a kiss on every freckle.
“You’ll dry your mouth out doing that,” she joked.
“I don’t care.” I took her lips against mine. “Are you complaining?”
She shook her head. “Never with you.”
I grinned. “Then, should I continue?”
Her eyes peeled open, those jewel-cut emerald eyes dancing over me enough to boil me down to nothing.
“I would say yes,” she said, “but I don’t know how much time we have.”
I tilted my head, and she laughed.
“Don’t tell me you forgot. We’re meeting your family in,”—she reached behind her and lifted her cell phone off the bedside table—“half an hour.”
I let out a long, drawn-out moan. “I don’t wanna.”
Her fingers threaded into my hair. “I know, but after this, we have nothing else planned for the rest of the day. We can do whatever we want,” she said and leaned a bit closer to me, “however many times.”
“Um, if you’re trying to convince me not to do it right now, you’re failing.”
Stacy giggled then rolled
away from me, and I threw a tiny temper-tantrum in the form of chucking one of my pillows across the room. She laughed.
“That was mature.” She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Her long, blemishless back flashed at me, beckoning me towards it like the long, curling fingers of steam over a cartoon pie. “Why didn’t my alarm go off?”