Bratva Sinner (A Possessive Mafia Romance)

I hated him for that. All I wanted to do was to climb a tree.

Luke came in, his hair still wet from his shower. The bandage over the cut on his eyebrow was gone and the stitches looked ugly, though he managed to pull it off. “That’ll scar,” I said.

“I’ll look tough.”

“You already do.”

“Are you hitting on me?” He poured some coffee and grinned. “I guess you don’t need to hit on me, not after yesterday.”

I stared at the table. “I was just playing around.”

“I was too. It’s my favorite game.”

“What are we going to do?” I blurted out suddenly. The guilt was getting more intense, a stabbing feeling in my right side, like a knife slid deep between my ribs. “Maher’s going to keep coming and the Lionettis still want me. How are you going to help me without getting one of your guys hurt?”

He sat down slowly. “You really care if they get hurt?”

“I don’t want anyone to die for me. My dad was bad enough.”

“Your dad didn’t die for you, he died for his own stupidity.”

“Doesn’t matter.” I stared into my mug, unable to meet his eye. “Listen, there’s something I need to tell you.”

Saying those words broke some kind of block inside of me. I’d been wanting to confess the truth to him for a while now, but I kept coming up with some reason to delay, some stupid excuse to keep everything quiet. Now though, after watching him fight for me, bleed for me, hurt for me—after feeling his hands pin my wrists above my head—I couldn’t keep it inside anymore.

“Go ahead,” he said, not sounding surprised.

“Don’t get mad. That’s all I’m asking.”

He sighed, ran a hand through his hair. “I know you’ve been lying or keeping something from me. All I want is the truth, Cara.”

“I know where the dossier is.”

His eyes went wide. “What?”

“That’s why my dad called me to that bar. It wasn’t to say goodbye, or I guess it was partly to say goodbye.” I felt it spill out like a broken hose and it felt good to get it off my chest. “He was going to leave town he said, but he didn’t want to bring the files with him. He called me down to ask what he should do with it all. I don’t know why he wanted to ask me, but he showed me the stuff and I just, I panicked a little bit.”

“Where is it?” he asked quietly.

“The women’s room,” I said, still unable to look at him. “There’s a drop ceiling. I stood on the toilet and hid it up there.”

He laughed once, sharply. “Fuck. It’s been there the whole time.”

“I’m sorry.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I don’t think you’d want it though, Luke. I looked through it.”

I opened my eyes again and he leaned toward me almost eagerly. “What’s inside?”

“Blackmail,” I whispered.

He let that hang in the air while he took a long sip from his mug. “Blackmail,” he repeated.

“I didn’t go through it all, but I recognized a politician in there. It was a picture of him sitting on a hotel room bed and there was a woman, uh, between his legs, she was—”

“Sucking his dick?” he finished for me.

I blushed and nodded. “I think so. I guess it wasn’t his wife.”

“What else?”

“More pictures like that. Men with women, I guess prostitutes, doing sexual stuff. I didn’t recognize most of them, just that one guy.”

He let out a long breath. “The Lionettis run a lot of girls. It makes sense that they’d build a blackmail portfolio, but god damn, how did your father get his hands on it?”

“I don’t know, but that’s everything, okay? I hid the file in the bathroom because I freaked out when I looked inside. Then when I came back out, my dad was gone, then I heard the gunshot, and—” I had to take a few breaths to calm down.

“And we killed him,” Luke said softly. “Bad timing, or maybe good timing, depending on how you look at it.” He tilted his head, eyes narrowed. “You think it’s still there?”

“I haven’t moved it.”

“Then let’s go get that thing and end all this.”

I didn’t get up. For some reason, I desperately didn’t want to go back to that bar—probably because it was the last place I saw my father alive. I kept thinking about him sitting in that rundown dive with his elbows splayed out and a drink in his hand, his skin sallow and aging, his eyes red-rimmed and baggy. His voice was laced with desperation like he knew how badly he fucked up and how much trouble he was in.

“I’m not sure I can face it.” I laced my hands together nervously.

“Look at me.” When I didn’t react, he moved into my line of sight. “Cara, look at me.”