by Fiona Murphy
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
LUCA EDIT
First edition. February 15, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 Fiona Murphy.
Written by Fiona Murphy.
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
HIS : Luca (Sabatini Family, #3)
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23
Special Thanks to
Amber Wrought
Aimee Carvell
Luca Sabatini saved me and an entire truck full of women on our way to be sold into sex trafficking—but who will save me from him?
He tells me I belong to him, that a Sabatini keeps what is his. I shouldn’t want to belong to anyone, yet a longing I don’t understand thrums through me—an attraction I cannot deny. Except it’s not safe for me, or him. I climbed into the back of the truck of my own free will because I’m running from a fate far worse.
For the first time in my life I feel safe with Luca. He promises no one will ever hurt me again. He will protect me from what I’m running from; he’ll kill anyone who is a threat to me. I want to believe him—he’s run Vegas for the Outfit for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Only the man I’m running from has an entire army behind him. If I thought Luca could go up against him and survive, I would stay, but others have tried and paid with not just their lives but the lives of their families. I could never live with myself if Luca and the Sabatini family ended up dead because of me.
When I’m found the reckoning is one of bullets and blood, just as I feared. Only one question remains: Once the smoke clears, who will be left standing?
This is the third book in the Sabatini Family series however it can be read as a standalone and does not end in a cliffhanger.
This a dark mafia romance with elements that may be disturbing and include triggers.
Prologue
Two years ago
The call wakes me. I groan as I reach for my cell phone. Shit. It’s only a little after ten in the morning. I just went to bed three hours ago. It’s Carlo though so I don’t think twice, I answer.
“Yeah.”
“Johnny’s dead. You need to come to Chicago to pay your respects.” He sighs. “And get the answer to the question you’ve been asking. The funeral is tomorrow. Get on that private jet you love so much and be here today.”
What the fuck? I sit up as I try to figure out what the hell he meant—the question I’ve been asking...who is my father? I’ve been asking the question for four fucking years, ever since Al died. Carlo is Al’s brother, and with Johnny’s death the new Don of the Chicago Outfit. The last four years he’s said he didn’t know who my father was. I knew he was lying.
I call Sandro and tell him I’m going to Chicago, and he’s coming with me. He needs to set it up and inform Gianni, the right-hand Carlo dumped on me, and I can’t stand. Tracy moans, telling me to go handle business in my office so she can sleep. Rolling out of bed, I go into my office.
Sitting down behind my desk, I consider the question fucking with my head for the last four years. I pull out the photo album. It’s the only place I have pictures of my mother, Al, and my childhood. I hate the way anxiety churns through me even now, years later, as I study the family picture on the front of it. In this picture, I was six. It’s any family photo: Al is standing, my mother is sitting, his hands are on her shoulders. I’m sitting beside my mother with her arms around me. My mother is smiling, my smile is forced, Al isn’t smiling—as usual. This was the first year I remember the family picture ordeal completely.
Every year it was the same thing. Al and my mother would argue about every fucking thing—from what we wore, to the poses, to the way Al wouldn’t smile. These photo sessions, like Christmas, were hell. Al hated them. I hated them. Until my mother stopped scheduling them when I was ten. Even though we were relieved, both Al and I felt guilty enough we offered to do the family picture. Al promised he would smile. But she was done. The week we usually did the picture, she attempted suicide.
I open the album. The first picture is me only a few hours old. I’ve stared at the picture for hours. Al is holding me. He looks happy, proud, like any new father. My mother is beside him, tension in her smile, relief in her eyes. A copy of this picture used to sit on the desk in his office, until my mother died. Once she died all the pictures of me were cleared out of his office and their house. It didn’t surprise me.
What surprised me was the pictures of me stayed up after he got shot and I took over running Vegas. Once he was out of the hospital, he raged I wasn’t fit to run Vegas. At only eighteen, I was nothing. I didn’t know what I was doing.
As a Moretti, running Vegas was my birthright. My grandfather was the Don of the Chicago Outfit; my great-uncle, then my uncle ran Vegas. From the age of five, I was raised without any illusion of what world I was in. My uncle I was named for, Luca, who practically raised me told me that I was mafia and one day I would run Vegas.
I refused to step down. Al had taken over from my uncle and for the last six years he’d done a piss poor job of running the city. I wasn’t going to let him keep doing it. If he wanted Vegas back, he would have to kill me to take it.
Within weeks he gave in and kept to himself and the small hotel and casino I left him in old Vegas. After a few months he pretended me taking over was his idea. There were still things, people that I let him handle, but they were few.
There are a few more pictures in the book, of my uncle’s funeral. I was twelve when he died. It felt like I lost my whole world. My first memories are of him; for years I thought he was my father. Several times I called him Papa, and neither he nor my mother corrected me. When I found out from Al’s doctor as he lay dying in the hospital that I wasn’t his biological son, couldn’t be, I was relieved. It explained so much of how I grew up. For a solid five minutes I wondered if I had been my uncle’s son, especially with all the depression my mother carried. But the reason I couldn’t be Al’s biological son was the same that I couldn’t have been my uncle’s—the blood type was off.
Scanning the pictures from my uncle’s memorial service, I wonder if one of the men in the photos is my father. That whole week was a bad dream. It didn’t matter I was only twelve; I was paraded as my uncle’s successor. For only the third time in my life, I met my grandfather. I wouldn’t see him again until I took over Vegas and he blessed the move.
With a sigh, I drop the album back into the drawer. Of all the people I’ve lost, I only really miss my nanny Marissa, and my uncle. I wish I could call Marissa now. Even though it’s been two years since she died, I still miss her every damn day. She would tell me how to feel, what to think.
Looking back, the signs were everywhere Al wasn’t my father. My uncle spoke often of my father. The man he described was nothing like Al. In the other drawer, I find the books I was told my father wanted me to read. I read them all within days of him handing them to me. Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Seneca, and with them a dictionary to figure out what I was reading. Often as I was growing up I would reread the books, studying them as I plotted my moves in taking over and keeping control of Vegas. It was in those times I knew Al had never read the books, and I wondered who the hell my uncle meant when he said my father would want me to read them.
My cel
l phone goes off, the plane has been prepared and is ready to leave when I am.
***
The landing is smooth, as always. Sandro sighs as he stands and stretches. “I always knew Carlo knew. I’ve asked and the name was locked down tight. Which never made sense to me with how much men in the mafia love to gossip. It makes sense your father would be here, instead of Vegas. In Vegas you would have known before you were five.”
I nod as I follow him down the stairs of the jet. Carlo had told me the private jet was a waste of money. I didn’t give a fuck and considered it necessary. Although I don’t leave Vegas often, and I usually only go to Los Angeles, I’m not going to do it flying commercial.
My nerves are growing tighter by the minute. The guy who picked me and Sandro up from the airport is eyeballing me again. I’ve texted Carlo I’m here and not gotten a response.
Fuck. Was this a setup? The driver doesn’t get out of the SUV when he stops in front of Carlo’s house. I give Sandro a look to stay in the SUV, he goes still and nods.
The house feels empty. I call out for Carlo as I make my way toward his office. The door to the office is open. I walk through the open doorway and all the air is sucked from my lungs.
It’s me, but it’s not me. Blue eyes when mine are black, but otherwise I could be looking in a mirror. I feel the weight of someone else’s eyes and turn. Another pair of blue eyes, my face again but older, with deep lines of pain. All my questions are answered: he hadn’t known about me. He hadn’t known the hell I went through with Al Toro as the father he was supposed to be. Regret and pain radiate from him.
“Anthony Sabatini, your father. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. If I had, I would never have allowed what you endured.”
All the anger I had been holding on to since I discovered Al wasn’t my father falls away. This man hadn’t known; he knows now, and he’s here attempting to make amends. “Quel che e fatto, e fatto.”
What’s done is done, the words as much for him as me. I offer him my hand. “It’s good to finally meet you.” The words come out without much thought.
He takes it. His hand is bigger than mine. Gripping me tight, he pulls me to him. His arm comes around me. He’s bigger than me. It’s so rare that for a minute it overwhelms me. Two inches taller than my own six foot two, he’s also at least four inches wider. There is strength in every inch of him.
Anthony Sabatini...from the deep recesses of my mind I recall all the small things I’ve heard of him. They were few, but first and foremost was—he was all about family. His grandfather came from Sicily after Capone went to prison to set the family right. Tony’s father and his sons were the most important things to him. He had kissed goodbye his path to becoming Don to avenge his son’s death. Sabatini is also deadlier than most people have a clue—the Berlucci family massacre comes to mind.
All of it hits me in a flash, strong, powerful, yet his grip on me is gentle. The word gentle isn’t something I’ve encountered with the people in my life—not even my mother. No one except Marissa. Marissa, the only person in my life who I ever felt genuinely cared for me.
I give in and hug him back.
***
“What I want to know is why you didn’t tell me when I asked you. Al was dead. My mother was dead. Why the hell did you keep it from me?”
Carlo shakes his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Why don’t you try and make me.” I need him to give me a good reason not to kill him.
“Tony Sabatini has everything, always did. You were the one good thing that has the name Toro.” His head is down, refusing to meet my eyes.
Carlo’s two sons had died over the years, one of an overdose of heroin and the other killed during the war the Berlucci family had started. He has two daughters, both from his housekeeper, a woman from Brazil. However, Carlo doesn’t seem to care much for them.
Al had talked big about how the Toro family was strong, stronger than the Moretti family. Through the years of their marriage one thing that had driven him crazy was my mother’s refusal to take his name. Until the day she died she called herself Moretti.
“I know I should have, but... I don’t know. A part of me hoped I would never have to.”
I can’t look at him anymore and leave before I kill him.
1
Isa
A violent shudder tears through me as I watch the door close behind Augusto. The moment he’s gone, I run for Mundo’s phone. It’s the phone he told me to hide. Only to be used in an emergency. I haven’t touched it in the ten months since he gave it to me. This is definitely an emergency.
“He found me. He’s telling me he’s arranging another marriage for me.” The words spill out of me in Spanish, too freaked out to use the English I’ve spoken for the last ten months. “I can’t. I’m not doing it again. I would rather die. Dying would be better. Manuel Rodriguez, he’s trying to sell me to that psychopath.”
Mundo sighs. “Calm down. Give me a minute to wake up. I’ll call you back.”
I can’t stop from shaking as my mind races. There is no guarantee Mundo will help me. He might be my big brother, but he’s more than ten years older than me. Augusto, our father, didn’t encourage closeness among his children. We didn’t grow up in the same country, and over the years I only saw Mundo a handful of times. As the oldest of my father’s sixteen children, children had with more than seven different women and who varied in age from thirty-seven to toddlers, Mundo felt it was his responsibility to ensure all of us were more or less safe and taken care of.
Augusto Reyes didn’t care about his children. We were nothing more than pawns used for his gain in his drug empire. My older brothers all run cities, drugs, and women. I have two sisters who I’ve never met—they were also married for my father’s gain.
I was already married off into a marriage made in hell. My husband died last year. With his death I believed I was free from all of this, the world of the Reyes cartel and all the pain that went with it. I don’t understand how Augusto found me. I haven’t talked to him since he called me to tell me my husband died ten months ago. That call from him was the first time I’d spoken to him in over three years. His call lasted less than a minute: my husband was dead, I was to pack my things and be prepared to leave. My husband’s brothers wanted me out of the home that now belonged to them.
Mundo arrived the next day. He woke me up, gave me the documents my husband had kept from me—my American birth certificate and passport. As well as five thousand dollars and the phone. He told me to run and hide.
I did the best I could. The two social media accounts I had were under my business name. I used a VPN out of Europe for everything I did online. Where had I messed up? This couldn’t be happening, not again.
Augusto had threatened me with a marriage to his benefit since I was twelve. Since I only saw him once or twice a year, I didn’t think it would really happen. When Augusto demanded me and my mother come to Mexico, we were told it was for my seventeenth birthday celebration. However, once I was there I was told in three days, the day after my birthday, I would be married to Ignacio Ortiz—a man I had never met before. A man who was more than forty years older than me. A man who only wanted me to provide him with children.
I refused, telling Augusto I wouldn’t do it. The gun appeared in the blink of an eye. It was pointed at my mother’s head. His voice was ice as he told me if I refused, he would kill my mother then me since I was of no use to him. By that day I had watched him kill five different people in front of me—three of them his own sons. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind he’d kill us both without hesitation.
Before the wedding my future husband demanded proof I was a virgin. In the doctor’s office my mother managed to convince the female doctor to give me the birth control implant. She was certain if there were no children he would divorce me and find another woman to give him what he wanted.
After four painful years of rapes and beatings Ignacio gave up, but he wouldn’t free me. Instead he
sent me to a home he had but never used in Tampico. I was there for two years, until his death ten months ago.
In America there is no documentation of my marriage. Even in Mexico there was no changing of my name or paperwork other than the marriage license I was forced to sign. Since I returned to America I haven’t made any friends, still wary of people—afraid they’ll see me for the broken wreck I am. My only real interactions are through my clients for the graphic design business I have.
During the two years in Tampico I found a forgotten laptop of Ignacio’s. I was determined to do more with my time than escape into books as I had done while living under the same roof of Ignacio. I needed to do something. I’d wanted to be an artist growing up, so I put to use my art skills by researching how to become a graphic artist in order to make money for a time when I would one day be free.
How had Augusto found me? I shouldn’t have come back to Dallas.
Nerves have me jumping when the phone rings, almost an hour after he hung up on me.
“Yeah,” I mumble.
“Don’t fight them when they come for you.” Then he hangs up.
***
Three days later
Opening the sliding-glass door to the balcony, I look down on the large semi-truck taking up the enormous parking area behind the mansion of Augusto’s home here in Guadalajara, Mexico. It’s only nine in the morning, yet it’s already so hot and muggy I want to take another shower.
Several men are working on building what looks like a shipment of boxes of baby clothes, but is actually empty in the middle in order to hide something. There are almost a dozen men with huge guns patrolling the large estate. Two men spot me; even from here their aggression is clear.
I back away into the room I’ve been locked in for the last two days.
I’m shocked to find Mundo standing in the center of the room. I didn’t know he was here. There was no sign of him and Augusto didn’t mention him. I’m afraid to ask him; he’s always so intimidating. At six foot two, he’s a whole foot taller than me. I’ve never seen him smile. His silver eyes have no hint of his thoughts or emotions. “Please, are you going to help me?”