Total pages in book: 197
Estimated words: 199143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 996(@200wpm)___ 797(@250wpm)___ 664(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 199143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 996(@200wpm)___ 797(@250wpm)___ 664(@300wpm)
Jordyn laughed.
“What?” Lucian asked.
“So really, John gets his nonsense from you. You were just better at hiding it than Giovanni was.”
Lucian didn’t grace that with a response.
*
“Well, what’s the news?” Lucian asked his wife.
Jordyn tossed her purse to the bed, rolling her eyes. “Give me five minutes to settle in. I just got all the kids home from school, Lucian. No stress. This is relaxing time.”
“Jordyn, I’ve been dying all day.”
His wife made a face, her nose scrunching up. “If I was, would you be okay with it?”
“I thought we were done,” Lucian admitted. “We said we were done.”
“Apparently, we’re not.”
Not.
Because she was.
Pregnant, that was.
Lucian fell back on the bed. “Yeah?”
Jordyn nodded, smiling slightly. “Apparently. Just about nine weeks, according to the scan.”
“Shit.”
“You don’t sound happy.”
“I am,” Lucian assured.
Of course, he was.
His life was full of marks. The biggest ones, he’d made himself and Jordyn had cut a few of her own into him, too. The smallest ones, the tiny ones, had come from his children. There were far more marks on his life and soul from his children than from anyone else. He loved those marks. He wore them with pride.
He didn’t mind a few more.
“But?” Jordyn asked.
“I told you, I’m happy.”
“But?”
“But ... God isn’t going to give me anymore boys, Jordyn.”
“You don’t know that.”
Lucian knew.
He knew.
John was all he could handle.
“We’ll call her Lucia.”
Jordyn lifted a single brow high. “Oh?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Lucia it is.”
Waiting Game
Jordyn wouldn’t look at him.
She wouldn’t talk to him.
She blamed him.
Lucian didn’t need to have his wife say the words for him to know.
She blamed him for this ...
For Johnathan’s kidnapping.
Lucian was three seconds away from burning down New York to find his only child. He was barely keeping control of his emotions and he couldn’t fucking breathe. One of the reasons he did breathe was somewhere out in the city in the hands of people who cared nothing for his child, nothing except to use the boy to hurt his family.
Lucian’s fingernails bit into his palms the harder he squeezed. He could feel them break the skin and blood pool at the wounds.
He didn’t feel the pain.
He didn’t feel the sting.
He barely even blinked when a skinny red line dribbled down his life line on his hand.
Nothing.
Lucian needed Jordyn to talk to him. He needed the strong, forgiving, loving wife he married to show herself and reassure him. He needed her support to be his cornerstone in the hurricane that was his mind and heart in that moment.
She gave him nothing.
“Jordyn—”
His wife stood from the couch and left the room before Lucian could get another word in edgewise.
She didn’t realize it, but that only pissed him off.
Not at her, but the whole situation.
Lucian was raving mad and getting worse by the second.
“Jordyn!” Lucian shouted after her.
The slam of a door answered him back.
Wait for her, his mind whispered.
Lucian didn’t have the sense to listen.
*
He wanted to fucking kill her.
Wrap his hands around her throat and squeeze the very life out of her body.
Make her bleed.
Make it goddamn well hurt.
God ...
She deserved it.
The more Dante explained about Catrina and her involvement with Johnathan’s current predicament, the angrier Lucian got. Until his blood turned too hot to be inside his body and his thoughts were practically incoherent.
He wanted to kill his sister-in-law.
And when Catrina got home after being questioned by police ... when Lucian’s brother stepped between him and that woman to stop Lucian from doing what every inch of him begged to do ... Lucian wanted to scream.
He might have wanted to hurt his brother, too.
This was his son.
His son!
Dante kicked him out instead.
Lucian understood why.
*
“Where are you?” Lucian demanded.
“I’m not telling you that.”
Lucian rubbed at the throbbing headache beginning to form in his temples. It’d been like that, beating and pulsing, promising a hell of a lot of pain, from the very moment he had heard his son had been taken. Nothing made it go away.
“Gio, for Cristo’s sake—”
“Lucian, let me do my fucking job,” his brother interrupted sharply. “Let me talk to some people, let me see some friends, let me act normal. Do you think it’ll help any to get your crazy ass on these streets right now, demanding answers and threatening people when you get nothing?”
Lucian opened his mouth to speak.
Giovanni beat him to the punch. “No, asshole, it won’t. You’re not in the right frame of mind to do this kind of thing properly. People will react better to someone they won’t find threatening just by looking them in the eye. You’re not here right now, Lucian, you’re somewhere else entirely.”
Why did his family keep pushing him out of this, like they didn’t want him directly involved in this situation? Didn’t they realize there was no choice there? He had to be involved.
“My son—”
“Let me do my job.”
Giovanni hung up the phone.