I didn’t sleep. I’m pretty sure I dozed, but I was too hyperaware of every movement Natalie made beside me to rest. Too focused on touching her and keeping her tempting body flush against mine. Still too aroused to think of anything but sinking inside her and making love to her all over again.

When she stirred beside me, I couldn’t help from curling against her beneath the thin sheet and running my hand up her flat belly to gently cup her breast.

She sighed, a sweet smile tugging her lips up in the lone candlelight I’d left burning. “You’re not sleeping.”

“That’s your fault, vita mia.” I sank my teeth into her shoulder, then licked the spot and gently kissed it as I palmed her breast. “This body is way too distracting.”

“Well, in that case...” She rolled to face me, pressed a hand against my shoulder to push me to my back, and climbed over me, straddling my hips. A wicked smile curled her lips as she gripped my forearms, slid my arms above my head, and pinned them to the mattress while she lowered her face to my throat. “I’d better do something to distract you.”

I groaned as her tantalizing lips suckled a spot on my throat. She sank onto my lap, and my already hardening cock slid through her wetness and pressed against her clit.

“Mm, angioletto.” I turned my head, searching for her lips. “I love your distractions.”

Her lips found mine. She opened at the first touch and sucked my tongue into her mouth while she rocked her steamy pussy against my cock. I’d already had her three times tonight, but I was like a randy teenager—I couldn’t get enough. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to get enough of her. Each time she touched me, I only wanted more. And when I thought of the way she’d trusted me earlier, when I remembered how angelic she’d looked in that gorgeous butterfly dress in the chapel, walking toward me in the candlelight, every fucking time she gazed into my eyes as she was doing now and I saw how much she loved me, I was humbled. Awed. So completely amazed that this incredible, strong, and vivacious woman had picked me.

That she’d come back to me.

“Luc,” a voice called from outside the tent.

We both jerked up. Wide-eyed, Natalie grasped the sheet and yanked it up to her chest. Hands on her hips, I looked toward the tent door, my heart racing, my mind unsure who had said my name and why.

“Luc,” the voice called a little louder. “Are you awake?”

“Merda. Marco,” I mumbled to Natalie, my racing pulse slowing just a touch as she climbed off me. “Yeah,” I called. “Hold on a minute.”

“What does he want?” Natalie whispered, sitting back in the pillows and fluffing her hair as she fixed the sheet around her.

“I don’t know.” I reached for my slacks from the floor and tugged them on, not at all thrilled with the interruption. But a whisper of worry in the back of my head told me Marco wouldn’t have bothered us if it wasn’t important.

I braced my hands on the bed and pressed my lips against hers. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

I grabbed my dress shirt and stuffed my arms in the sleeves, but I didn’t bother to button it. And I didn’t go looking for my shoes. Pulling one side of the tent door open, I stepped off the decking and spotted Marco pacing in the darkness no more than fifteen yards away.

Marco was dressed in jeans and a thin gray sweater, and the tense line of his shoulders told me whatever he’d come out here to relay was definitely not good.

“What’s going on?” I asked in a low voice as I approached.

He stopped and faced me in the darkness. “Dante’s out.”

“What? They let him go? Just like that?”

“Apparently.”

“How did you find out?”

“Some men dro—”

Shuffling sounded in the brush to my right. I looked that way to see Dante lurking near a tree in the shadows.

“Santo Dio.” My eyes grew wide, and I crossed quickly toward my brother and wrapped my hand around his nape, pulling him toward me. But he didn’t return my hug. Every muscle in his body was tense and rigid, and when I stepped back and looked at him in the waning moonlight, I saw that his eyes were wide and bloodshot, and there was a frantic look in their pale blue depths that hadn’t been there when I’d visited him in the Tomb.

“What’s wrong?” When Dante didn’t answer, I looked to Marco, who’d moved up on my side.

“Tell him,” Marco said.

Dante’s wild eyes jumped from face to face. “She called me.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Maricella,” he exhaled as if it were obvious. “They had her the whole time. They grabbed her in Rome after we moved in together. She was sobbing.”

My brow dropped. “How did she call you? When?”

“About an hour ago. In the van, just before they dropped me at Marco’s gate. They handed me a phone. She was on the other end crying.” He scrubbed both hands through his dirty hair and paced a few steps away and back again. “She said they cut it out of her so it couldn’t harm the family.” He stopped in front of me and grabbed my shoulders, his eyes wild, hair sticking out all over. “I have to find her, Luc. You have to help me find mia moglie before they kill her.”

His voice was agitated, growing more hysterical by the moment, but in his desperate eyes I saw truth. A truth that suddenly put everything into perspective about how and why my father had beaten and imprisoned his own son.

“I will.” Heart racing, I squeezed his arms. “Just give me a few minutes to get dressed.” I looked to Marco. “Natalie—”

“We’ll take her up to the main house. She’ll stay with Fee.”

I nodded and turned back toward the tent. My heart stuttered when I spotted Natalie standing in the doorway with the sheet wrapped around her, watching us with wide and frightened eyes.

I crossed toward her, stepped into the tent with her so the door flaps fell closed behind me, and pulled her into my arms.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

“I know.” I held her close as she trembled against me, hoping to alleviate her worry, desperate to calm my own. But I couldn’t get Dante’s words out of my head, and I was scared to death about what it all meant.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” I said into her hair, telling myself if I believed it, it would be. “But I have to go help Dante right now.”

“Of course.” With her hands pressed to my chest, she drew back and looked up at me in the candlelight. “What can I do to help?”

“Let me take you up to the main house. I don’t want you staying out here alone. You’re safe on the property, but—”

“I don’t want to be here without you.”

I breathed a little easier, knowing she wasn’t going to argue about this. Pressing a kiss to her forehead, I said, “I’m sorry our night just got hijacked.”

“It’s okay.” She leaned into me. “We have lots of nights ahead. And you can make it up to me in the morning.”

I lifted my hands to her face, lowered my mouth to hers, and kissed her sweet lips. “I will, angioletto. I promise I will.”

I just hoped that we found Maricella by morning. And that what we found didn’t shatter the happiness Natalie and I had finally discovered in each other.

We’d been searching for hours with no sign of Maricella’s car.

Dante swore Maricella had told him she was driving south, away from our parents’ villa when she’d called him in the middle of the night. Marco and I had both called her cell, but she hadn’t answered, so Marco had contacted a friend who’d been able to pinpoint a triangular location based on her cell phone pings. It had given us a thirty-mile radius to check south of the estate, but we’d been over nearly every road and highway in the last few hours and still had come up empty.

“Maybe her cell phone died,” I said from the passenger seat of Marco’s Mercedes, trying to stay optimistic. “Dante, try calling the flat again in Rome to see if she showed up there.”

He used my phone to dial from the backseat, then seconds later in a panicked voice said, “Still nothing. Where the fuck is she? She has to be somewhere close. What if her car broke down, or worse, if she was in some kind of accident? We have to find her. We have to find her soon...”

He was on the edge of hysteria again. I glanced toward Marco, worry threading through me about what Dante would do if we didn’t find Maricella. He’d already gone after my father once. If he tried it again, I had no doubt my father’s men would kill him on the spot.

“Breathe, fratello.” I turned in my seat and patted Dante’s shoulder as he dropped his head into his hands where he sat in the middle of the backseat. He mumbled frenzied words I couldn’t make out, something he’d been doing the whole time we’d been searching for Maricella, something I hoped was linked to the drugs still in his system and not a sign he was seriously losing it.

“We could sedate him,” Marco said quietly from the front as he drove.

“You brought something?”

“Just in case.”

I didn’t want to think about that just yet. I didn’t want there to be a reason we might need sedatives. I ran my hand down Dante’s arm, searching for something to say to keep his hope alive.

“Luc,” Marco said softly several minutes later.

Realizing Marco had slowed the vehicle, I let go of Dante and turned to look out the windshield, spotting what had caught Marco’s attention. A car—what looked to be a silver sedan twenty yards ahead—on its side in the ditch.

“Merda,” I muttered under my breath, already reaching for the door handle. “Stop here. And keep him distracted while I check it out.”

Marco pulled the car to the shoulder and shifted into Park. Dante’s head came up, and he asked what was going on, but I didn’t wait around to hear what Marco told him. I climbed out and jogged toward the wreck, illuminated by Marco’s headlights and dawn barely rising in the distance.

Voices echoed from the road, back near Marco’s car. I knew he and Dante were out of the vehicle. I could hear Dante frantically arguing for Marco to let him go. Picking my way down the embankment, I moved around the car, which was banged up on all sides, and made my way toward the driver’s side.

The windshield was busted out. The side window shattered. Kneeling down to get a good look, I glanced into the car and spotted a woman with bloodstained clothing and matted blonde hair twisted at an odd angle in the driver’s seat.

“Merda. Maricella,” I called, reaching into the car as carefully as I could so as not to startle her. Gently, I pushed the hair out of her eyes. “It’s Luc. I’m here to he—”

I froze when I realized her eyes were wide and lifeless and staring straight at me. My hand immediately dropped to her neck, and I felt everywhere for a pulse, only there was nothing. Nothing but cold skin and an emptiness that sent bile sliding straight up my throat.

“Porca puttana.” Resting my elbow on my knee, I breathed deep and swallowed back the sickness as my mind spun.

I hadn’t seen skid marks on the road. It didn’t look like someone had been following her, but I couldn’t know for sure. It was possible she’d been hysterical trying to get away from my House, that she’d lost control of the car on these windy back roads, but—

Every thought came to a screeching halt when I spotted the marking on her inner forearm where it lay against her thigh. To anyone else, it would look like a peace tattoo—a new peace tattoo judging by the red marks around the ink—but I knew it for what it was.

A marking aimed specifically at me, so I would know without a doubt that she’d been targeted.

Because Dante had dared to fall in love with a woman who wasn’t of the right bloodline, who hadn’t been approved by the Knights, and whom he’d chosen above our House.

A woman who, in my House’s eyes, was no different from Natalie.