Caged by the Capo, Broken by My First Love

Gianna Moretti POV

The security on my penthouse was designed to repel a siege. It took Lorenzo less than three minutes to breach it.

I lay in bed, swallowed by the pitch-black of the room. I had been staring at the ceiling, mourning the boy Julian used to be before the rot of the syndicate had infected him. I had shed a single tear for the quiet, civilian life we could have shared.

The bedroom door splintered open, the sound of its frame cracking echoing in the dark.

Lorenzo stumbled over the threshold. The acrid stench of expensive bourbon and the metallic tang of fresh blood hit my senses immediately.

He dragged himself to the side of my bed and collapsed onto his knees. The most terrifying Capo in New York dropped his heavy head against my mattress, his massive shoulders shaking in the dark.

"Gianna," he whispered, his voice a fractured rasp. "Gianna, please. The child. I am sorry about the child."

My chest seized. A sharp, physical pain shot through my ribs as the memory resurfaced.

Not Siena's fabricated stunt. He knew. Somehow, after all this time, he had found out about the pregnancy I lost.

"Marco-my medic-he told me tonight," Lorenzo said, his voice breaking. "He said there was a miscarriage. Two years ago. After that night we fought. I didn't know you were pregnant. You never told me. Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because it wouldn't have changed anything," I said, my voice cold and flat. "You would have found another way to punish me for not loving you the way you wanted."

Lorenzo lifted his head to look at me. His eyes were webbed with red veins, the skin beneath them bruised with exhaustion.

"I don't know how to love you without breaking things," Lorenzo confessed, reaching out to grasp my hand. His fingers were rough, calloused, but his grip was strangely gentle, as if he was afraid of crushing something fragile. "I tried to make you care. I thought if I made you jealous enough, angry enough, you would finally look at me. Fight for us. But all I did was push you further away."

I coldly pulled my hand from his grip and sat up against the headboard.

"Siena was never anything to me," Lorenzo said, his voice raw, scraped clean of its usual arrogance. "She was a mirror. A tool I held up to make you see me. But you never did."

"What about her new pregnancy?" I asked, my voice completely flat.

Lorenzo's expression hardened into a mask of unforgiving stone.

"There is no pregnancy," Lorenzo said. "There never was-not the first time, not now. She's been lying to keep me tethered."

A sharp gasp came from the doorway.

Siena stood there, mascara making black rivulets down her pale cheeks. She must have slipped through the security gate Lorenzo had left broken in his wake.

"You used me!" Siena screamed at him, stepping into the room with violently shaking hands. "For three years, you used me as a shield! You let the entire city call me a whore just to make her jealous!"

Lorenzo stood up with a slow, deliberate grace. He turned his dead, empty Capo eyes upon her.

"I knew who you were from the beginning," Lorenzo said coldly. "I knew you were a rat trying to infiltrate my world. You were convenient. A pawn I could use until I figured out what to do with you."

A wave of bile rose in my throat. The suffocating sickness of their world was too much to bear.

"Take your violence out of my house," I commanded them both, pulling the heavy duvet up to my chest. I was unbelievably tired.

Lorenzo ignored me. He took a slow, menacing step toward Siena.

"I will never break my vows to my wife," Lorenzo declared. Reaching into his tailored jacket, he withdrew a thick envelope of cash and tossed it at Siena's feet. "Take the money. Disappear. This is your last chance."

Siena stared down at the stacks of bills, then back up at the man who had ruined her. In that fraction of a second, something inside her fractured.

She let out a guttural sound that was barely human-a shriek of pure madness. Instead of attacking the man who had broken her, she pivoted, aiming her rage directly at me.

"You!" Siena shrieked, her face contorted. "You hold the crown and you don't even want it! I would kill for someone to look at me the way he looks at you!"

She collapsed to her knees in a show of utter brokenness, but in one terrifying, fluid motion, she lunged toward the bed. A stiletto blade appeared in her hand, its silver edge catching the dim light. Lorenzo moved, his own hand closing on empty air an instant too late as Siena drove the six inches of steel into my side.

A sharp, clean fire tore through my side. The breath went out of my lungs and I fell back against the mattress, watching as a dark bloom of crimson spread across the white sheets.

Siena dropped the knife and stumbled backward, staring at her crimson-stained hands. Her face crumpled-not with satisfaction, but with horror at what she had become.

"I just wanted someone to love me," she whispered, her voice small and broken. "That's all I wanted. Someone to choose me."

With a roar, Lorenzo was on her, and the sound of bone giving way echoed in the sudden quiet.

My vision started to blur, the edges of the room bleeding into black. As my heavy eyelids fluttered shut, the last thing I heard was the frantic thud of heavy footsteps sprinting down the hall, and Julian's desperate voice screaming my name.