Page 2 of Tempting My Mafia Monster

He told me his parents died when he was a child, and he was raised in a gang. How he’d got himself into debt with evil men and had to pay them back, so he worked for them. Then he got arrested. He wanted to leave the country the moment he was released, to start a new life somewhere beautiful, somewhere like Italy. That made me smile. After we bonded, we became flirtier and more direct. I may have had no experience flirting face to face, but ‌I was a shameless flirt behind a pen.

When Sophia would sneak his letters to me, I obsessed over them for days, rereading them again and again and jotting notes in my journal about what to tell him next. I even started sending him some of my compositions. He couldn’t play them, obviously, but he loved that I’d created them, and one day he hoped to hear me play one just for him.

A server brushed past my shoulder, carrying a tray of coffees. My mind jolted back to the present as I flinched at the unexpected closeness, my shoulders tightening instinctively.

“Everything okay, Signorina?“ Ivano appeared at my side as the sun dipped below the buildings. I shivered as the shade fell over me and nodded. Leaning over my notebook, I pretended to compose. The familiar position was a shield he knew well. He stepped back, leaving me in peace, but I felt anything but focused or peaceful.

The violinist packed up. The afternoon crowd thinned and slowed. My chest ached with each passing minute, a slow constriction that made it harder to breathe.

M was four hours late.

Invasive thoughts filtered through my mind. Had he come, seen me, decided I wasn’t for him, and left? Perhaps he was lost in Verona. They never released him. Something had happened. Or… he simply changed his mind.

My vision blurred at the edges as I stared at the empty table in front of me. I didn’t want to give up on this. On him. But I couldn’t sit there all night.

Ivano’s phone started ringing. I knew it was Giovanni, my oldest brother and the Boss of our family, before he even handed it to me. I inhaled, then answered quietly, trying to keep the heartbreak out of my voice.

“Soraya, why are you still in the city?”

“I–I lost track of time. I was composing.”

“Well, it’s getting dark, Raya. Come home now. Mamma’s been asking to see you.”

My chest fractured with indescribable grief and guilt at hearing those words, but there was no room to argue. There never was. That wasn’t who I was.

“Okay,” I breathed. “I’ll leave now.”

The call ended, and I closed my notebook, taking one last sweep of the piazza as I stood. No one could see the pain or the emotional catastrophe unfolding inside me. An entire year of hope and excitement condensed into one unbearable moment.

He wasn’t coming.

An Impulsive Mistake

Three months later…

I stared at the last one, feeling completely detached. If this marriage alliance went ahead and the Russians accepted it, there was no room for unrealistic expectations. I’d had those with M, and look where it got me.

The moment the words ‘then use me’ left my lips in that family meeting, I knew what I was signing up for. I doubted it would ever be love. I’d made my peace with that, despite what my overprotective brothers thought.

My family had only two rules they lived by: never kill innocent women or children, and never sell their women in marriage alliances to gain power or wealth. The Buccinis married for love. But what they couldn’t understand was that offering me in an alliance didn’t break the rules. I was marrying for love; the love of my family.

“Knew I’d find you out here. Have you seen my wife?”

I slammed my notebook shut as I glanced over my shoulder to find my closest sibling and best friend approaching. Santino scanned our immaculate lawns in search of the woman who had turned his entire world upside down.

I always knew he would one day find the woman of his dreams, the one who would make him lose the last of his sanity, not that he had much of it to begin with. Honestly, I’d spent most of my adult life dreading it. I’ve been his top priority ever since I was born; the centre of his world and the one he’d die for before he let anything happen to me. We’d been each other’s person our entire lives, and even though I knew my brother was a hopeless romantic and had always been in search of ‘the one’, a selfish part of me hoped he might never find her.

But he had. Seeing him so happy and besotted, well, it wasn’t as hard to accept as I’d thought it would be. Arianna was amazing and perfect for him. And I knew, without doubt, my brother would get himself killed before he ever let her twisted Irish uncle anywhere near her. He’d go to war for her. And so it was my responsibility to make sure he won that war.

“She’s upstairs, but I’m under strict instructions to distract you for an hour. She’s planning a surprise for you.”

His eyebrows shot up, and a wicked smile crept onto his face as he took a seat beside me on the back steps. He stretched his long legs and pulled his phone from his pocket, opening a timer and setting it for fifty-eight minutes. I rolled my eyes.

“I suppose that means I have fifty-eight minutes to convince you to become a nun and join a convent.”

I scoffed, shaking my head. “That will be an hour of both our lives we’ll never get back.”

“Just hear me out,” he began, opening a browser on his phone to show me a video of a Benedictine nunnery. “You love silence, right? Look how peaceful this place is. Stone-walled gardens full of flowers, hours of uninterrupted time to write, compose music and play for the pretty birds. And not the flying rats we get in the city. Classy birds, Raya.”