My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 140

Chapter 140

Raphael

Vincenzo sat in the high-backed chair, the light from the fireplace casting long shadows across his face.

To my left, Luca was mindlessly stripping down his Glock, the clicking of metal parts.

Across from him, Dante was leaning back, his eyes fixed on a stack of legal briefs, his brain already finding the holes in the state laws we were about to break.

Adriano had the map of the tri-state area stretched out over the table. His finger traced the border of Indiana, moving toward the heart of the next territory we were going to bleed dry.

“We take the docks first,” Vincenzo stated, “Then we squeeze the unions, and their warehouses. We start at the bottom. We choke their supply until they beg us to take over.”

I leaned back on the couch, my laptop resting on my thighs. My fingers danced over the keys, setting up the encrypted servers we’d need to ghost their local police frequencies. To my brothers, I was the one who built the invisible fences that kept us safe. I was the logic.

But my logic was currently screaming.

Underneath the glow of the screen, my mind wasn’t on signal towers or street crews. It was on the shape of Gianna’s waist in my hands. I could still feel the way her pulse had thrashed against my palm when I squeezed her throat. I could still taste the copper of her blood on my tongue where I’d bitten her lip.

“Raphael,” Vincenzo’s voice snapped through my thoughts, “The surveillance on their port authority. How long?”

“Six hours,” I said, my voice flat and bored. I didn’t even look up from the screen. “I’ll have their internal comms mirrored by sunrise.”

“Hm,” Vincenzo nodded, pouring himself another drink.

“We move on the streets first,” Adriano said, “I say, we hunt the ones at the top of their food chain.”

I leaned my head back against the sofa, my eyes closing for a brief second. I would wait. I would watch the way her eyes skipped over mine at the dinner table tomorrow. I would listen for the sound of her breathing when I passed her in the hall.

I’d wait until she was so starved for the “attention” that she’d crawl back to the only person who gave it to her.

Every time she looked at me, she was going to remember the way my teeth felt on her lip. She was going to remember the way it felt to have the air stolen from her lungs. She was the most difficult prey I had ever tracked, and I wasn’t going to stop until she realized that every time she ran, she was just leading me exactly where I wanted to go until I got what I wanted.

“Raph?” Vincenzo’s voice broke through the dark hum of my thoughts, “What happened with Ciro? Why is he scrubbing filth at the docks? He called me whimpering like a beaten dog, saying you threw him out there.”