All Chapters of IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

56 Chapters

Chapter 1: Two Pink Lines

They say your life can change in two minutes. Mine changed in two pink lines. I'd been staring at the pregnancy test for so long that the word "positive" had started to blur at the edges, like if I looked at it hard enough it would rearrange itself into something less catastrophic. It didn't. It just sat there on the edge of my bathroom sink, glowing on that little digital screen with the kind of calm confidence that I absolutely did not have, while the November rain hammered against the single window above the toilet like it was personally offended by everything happening in this room. I was twenty-one years old. I was a junior at Velmoor University studying literature because I loved words more than I loved common sense, apparently, and I was supposed to be thinking about my thesis and my internship applications and the very long list of responsible adult things I had been putting off since September. I was not supposed to be standing barefoot on cold bathroom tile at seven in

Chapter 2: Plural

The front door opened before I could breathe. Heavy footsteps. Not Maya's. Not my roommate's. The kind of footsteps that didn't apologise for themselves, deliberate, unhurried, belonging to someone who had never once in his life walked into a room and wondered if he was welcome. Bryan heard it too. His jaw went tight. "Natalie. Whose car is that?" I couldn't answer. My throat had closed up completely, because I knew exactly whose car it was. I knew whose footsteps those were. I knew, before he even appeared at the bottom of the stairs, what I was about to be standing in the middle of, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop it. Luca Wolfe didn't knock. He never knocked. He stepped into the hallway like he owned it, the building, the air, and me, wearing a black shirt and dark jeans with the kind of effortless danger that made every other man in the vicinity look like they were playing dress-up. His eyes moved once across the space: stairs, me frozen at the top,

Chapter 3: The Wolfe's Den

Five minutes. That's all Luca Wolfe gave me, five minutes to say goodbye to the life I had before he walked through my door and detonated it. I stood in my bedroom doorway staring at the duffel bag he'd packed, at my clothes folded inside it with the kind of ruthless efficiency that made my chest hurt, and I thought: this is it. This is what the end of your old life looks like. A bag you didn't pack yourself, sitting on a floor you're about to walk away from. Downstairs I could hear my mom's voice. Low. Scared. The specific scared that mothers get when they know something is wrong but don't know how wrong yet. "Natalie, who was that man?" I didn't answer. I couldn't. Because the answer was the father of my twins, and I wasn't ready to say those words out loud to anyone else. I could barely say them inside my own head without the floor doing that disappearing trick again. I grabbed my phone and the hoodie, Bryan's hoodie, my hoodie, the one I had stolen at a bonfire in tenth gr

Chapter 4: Always Real

I heard it before I understood what I was hearing. Luca's voice first, low, controlled, with that particular edge underneath it that I had learned meant something had interrupted a plan he'd already made, and he was deciding how much it was going to cost whoever was responsible. Then another voice answered him, and the moment I heard it every single nerve in my body went completely still, because I knew that voice. I had known that voice for six years. I would have recognised it through walls, through sleep, through the end of everything, it was wired into me in a way I had never examined too closely because examining it would have meant admitting things I wasn't ready to admit. Bryan. Bryan Rollins was in this house. I was off the bed before I even made the decision to move, across the room in four steps, hands on the door handle, locked, still locked, of course it was locked, it was always going to be locked, I pressed my ear flat against the wood and held my breath and li

Chapter 5: The Vitale Name

I didn't go back to sleep. I told myself I was going to lay down, I closed my eyes, pulled Bryan's hoodie tighter around me like it could block out the sound of a woman's laugh drifting up through the floor of a house I didn't know in a life I hadn't chosen. But sleep wasn't interested in me tonight, and honestly, after everything that had happened between seven this morning and whatever time it was now, I wasn't sure I deserved it. So I lay in the dark and I listened. Not obviously. Not with my ear pressed against the floor or anything that would have felt as desperate as it actually was. Just... listened. The way you listen when your body is too exhausted to do anything else but your brain refuses to stop. Voices below low, occasional, the kind of conversation that had a history to it, a familiarity, the easy back and forth of two people who had been in the same rooms enough times that they didn't need to fill the silence. Her laugh again. Twice more before it stopped. I

Chapter 6: Two Heartbeats

The clinic was nothing like I expected. I don't know what I had been imagining something cold, maybe, something that matched the house and the gun on the counter and the general aesthetic of Luca Wolfe's life, all steel surfaces and the absence of warmth. Instead it was a private practice forty minutes from the compound, small and quiet and decorated in the kind of muted colours that were designed to make people feel calm, which was doing absolutely nothing for me personally. A receptionist who didn't look up when we walked in. A waiting room with two other people in it who didn't look at us either. Luca had called ahead. Of course he had. We were seen within four minutes of arriving. I changed into the gown they gave me and sat on the edge of the examination table and looked at the ultrasound machine in the corner and thought about the fact that in approximately five minutes I was going to see, on a screen, the two lives that had detonated mine. That they were going to stop b

Chapter 7: Blood Business

The phone call lasted four minutes. I know because I counted. Standing in the driveway with my mom's hand in mine and Maya's eyes still fixed on the ultrasound images and the folder shaking slightly in my grip, I counted every second of the silence that had fallen over the compound the moment Luca answered that call and his whole body changed. Not dramatically. Not the way it happened in films, where someone gets bad news and staggers or drops things or makes a sound. Luca Wolfe did not do any of those things. He simply went still in a way that was different from his usual stillness, turned slightly away from all of us, and spoke in a voice so low I could not make out a single word from where I was standing. Four minutes. Then he hung up. He stood with his back to us for a moment longer than was necessary. Just a breath. Just one. Then he turned around and his face was exactly what it always was and I would not have known anything had changed except that I had been watching

Chapter 8: Quit

The car did not come in. It sat at the gate for exactly three minutes, engine running, and then it left the same way it had arrived, slowly, deliberately, without hurry, in the way of things that want to be remembered. Luca stood at the window and watched it go and none of us said anything because the silence he was radiating was the kind that discouraged words. Then he turned around and said, very calmly, that we needed to go inside and that everything was fine, and I had now known him long enough to understand that when Luca Wolfe said everything was fine he meant that everything was under control, which was not the same thing and never had been. My mom had had enough. I watched it happen in real time, the moment her patience with being in a house she didn't understand, in a situation nobody had explained to her properly, with a man who answered direct questions with technically accurate non answers, finally ran out completely. She set her glass down on the counter and looked a

Chapter 9: Protected

I didn't come down for dinner. I told myself it was because I wasn't hungry, which was partially true. The rest of the truth was that I had spent the last two hours sitting on the edge of a bed that was becoming mine in the slow, reluctant way that things become yours when you don't have a choice, and I was not ready to sit across a table from Luca Wolfe and pretend that the conversation we'd just had in that hallway hadn't rearranged something inside me that I didn't know how to put back. I was not in love with him. I was standing at the edge of something that looked, from certain angles, in certain light, disturbingly like the beginning of it. And the difference between those two things was becoming harder to hold onto with every day I spent in this house. There was a knock at the door. One knock, because Luca only ever knocked once, and then it opened anyway. I did not look up from the window. "You need to eat," he said. "People keep telling me that today." He set somethin

Chapter 10: Bryan's Visit

Bryan called for eleven minutes. I know because my phone showed me afterward, when I was sitting in the dark holding it against my chest and trying to locate the part of myself that had always known exactly how she felt about Bryan Rollins and figure out why it was suddenly harder to find than it used to be. He had called to check in. That was what he said, right at the start, his voice doing that thing it did when he was being careful, steady and warm and not asking for anything directly because Bryan never asked for things directly, he just made himself available and waited and trusted that you would find your way to him eventually. He asked if I was okay. I said yes and meant it more than I had expected to. He asked if I was eating. I almost laughed, because Luca had asked me the same thing three hours ago and the fact that the two men in my life led with food when they were worried about me was either very funny or very telling and I had not decided which yet. He asked ab

1 2 3 4 5 6

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP