It wasn’t until they left the bridal store that Lucca finally spoke his mind, and when he did, he didn’t raise his voice, instead speaking quietly, making it all the more frightening. “Maria, you have five seconds to tell me why you are here.”
She just flipped her hair, simply saying, “Kat needed a dress.”
“And where the fuck are my men?”
When she didn’t answer right away, it was Dom who spoke, “Kat asked me to drop her off here, and when I came, I saw Maria alone.” He lied trying to save the dumbass Caruso. This next part, however, wasn’t a lie, and he looked Lucca right in the eye to prove it. “Instead of getting her in trouble, I decided to watch her for you and was going to bring her back home safely when they were done.”
Maria nodded, adding to the lie when Lucca looked like he was about to kill Dominic. “I called Kat to meet me here, and then I just snuck out and took a cab here.”
After another second of staring her brother down, he changed his attention to Maria. Now it looked like he just wanted to kill her. “We’re leaving.”
“Yep, so are we.” Dominic pulled Kat with him, who was still under his arm at the opposite side of the Caruso siblings.
“Bye, Kat.” An unbothered Maria waved.
Looking back, she smirked at the brave girl. “Bye, thank you for everything.”
“You’re welcome.” Maria’s smiling eyes moved to the Luciano brother before he got too far. “Bye, Dominic.”
He, on the other hand, just kept walking, giving her his back, pretending he hadn’t heard her.
It wasn’t until then that Maria appeared to be very… bothered.
“That was rude,” she whispered to her brother.
“Don’t care.” Dominic slowed down a bit when they got farther from the Caruso siblings. “That psycho is on a mission to get every man in Kansas City murdered today, and I’m sure as fuck not going to be one of them.”
Fourteen
RSVP
Fifteen
We Knew This Day Would Come
It was going to be a day no one thought would come.
The day when a Caruso would marry a Luciano.
The event of a lifetime.
And it was finally here.
“May I come in?”
Kat’s sorrow-filled eyes went to the door and saw Angel standing there. She managed a nod, and he came in, carefully sitting down beside her.
They were quietly watching the clock move closer and closer to seven. The air in the room felt almost as heavy as the weight on their shoulders.
Licking her dry lips, she tried to speak. “When I do this… there’s no going back for us, is there?”
His eyes didn’t move from the clock. “No, there isn’t.”
A shaky breath came out when her fears were confirmed. This marriage wasn’t just sealing her fate. It was sealing Angel’s too.
“As long as you’re a Caruso, I will be too.”
The tear that had been captured in her eye finally slipped free at his words. Regardless of what happened with Angel and the Caruso girl he loved, he could have finally walked free when Lucca let him go. Her marrying Drago, however, was going to take that away from him forever. He wasn’t going to leave her here in the hands of the Carusos without a Luciano on the inside to protect her. Him gaining Lucca’s trust more and more every day as well as being in love with a Caruso made him that inside man.
But as sad as she felt for Angel, there was someone her heart hurt just a little bit more for. “I don’t know how much longer he has....”
“You let me worry about Matthias.” Her brother grabbed her hand. “You just get married and save all our asses.”
Reminded of why she was about to do this, she wiped the tear and held in the rest that were threatening to ruin her makeup.
Giving her hand a final squeeze, he stood tall as he looked down on his little sister while she sat there in her beautiful wedding dress. “They can make us dress differently, act differently, and even change your last name, Katarina, but they can’t change where we were born, who our father is, or our blood.” There was a sudden sadness that veiled him. “Not even we can.”
* * *
Drago was looking into the mirror finishing tightening up his black tie when a different reflection appeared behind him. Turning, he looked at a very different-looking Dominic, man to man. This wasn’t the Luciano brother he had seen with his underboss; this was a man coming to protect what was his.
“You do anything to hurt her or be any fucking less than what Lucca has said about you,”—Dominic began making him promise—“you’ll have wished the boogieman had come for you when I fucking kill you.” Unafraid of who stood before him, he gave him a glimpse of who Dominic truly was…. “And this time, there will be no coming back, Drago, because unlike my father, I don’t fucking miss.”