MARRIED TO THE MAFIA DON WHO KILLED MY BROTHER

Serena's POV

"Stay inside. Lock the doors and don't come out for anything."

Luca's voice was shaking when he said it and the call dropped before I could even respond. I stood in the kitchen staring at my phone for a long moment, replaying his voice in my head, then grabbed my jacket and went outside anyway.

He would have been furious if he knew and honestly I didn't care. When your brother sounds like that over the phone, you don't just sit down and lock the door. 

I used the old burner phone he had given me months ago to track his location. He had shown me how once, laughing about it sometimes ago saying I should only ever use it in a real emergency. The signal pulled me toward the Manhattan Bridge and the closer I got, the louder the sirens got even with how heavily the rain was falling.

When I turned the corner, the whole street was already sealed off. Police barricades everywhere, officers pushing civilians back and there was a thick black smoke rising somewhere ahead. People had already gathered on both sides of the barricade with their phones out and reporters were pulling up in vans, stepping out with cameras while their drivers barely finished parking.

Then one of the officers said his name.

"...car registered to a Luca Moretti..."

I pushed through the crowd immediately and the officer at the barricade stepped directly in front of me, "Ma'am, you need to stay behind..." He said 

"That's my brother," I shouted, "His name is Luca Moretti, let me through right now."

"Ma'am, you cannot..." 

"I said that is my brother!" I pushed past him and two sets of hands grabbed me at once and I fought both of them, clawing and screaming Luca's name over and over while my feet slipped on the wet ground. Someone dragged me back hard and I went down, hip slamming into the concrete, rain soaking straight through my jeans.

The pain didn't even register.

Because ahead of me, firefighters were carrying something out and laying it down carefully and pulling a white sheet over it

For a moment I wasn't there anymore.

I was back in our Brooklyn apartment. My mom was usually very sick so she'd be in the hospital most times and it started after my father disappeared after drowning himself in gambling debts leaving us all alone.

Luca was seventeen, usually standing at the stove making scrambled eggs at midnight.

We had almost nothing in the fridge and he just stood there cooking quietly and set the plate in front of me as he'll watch me eat every single bit of it before he touched anything himself. He did that every time and for years I thought it was just a big brother thing until I got older and understood there hadn't always been enough for both of us. He just made sure I never found out.

He dropped out of school quietly the year I turned fourteen. Found construction work and came home every night with dust on his boots and said nothing about it until it was already done and there was nothing left for me to argue about. When I finally found out and cried for a long time, he just sat on the floor beside me and let me finish. Then he said, 

"When you're a doctor and you're handling everything yourself, you can cry about me all you want. Until then eat your food."

A few years later he got into underground fighting because it paid faster than anything else he could find and he would come home with split knuckles and bruised ribs and would immediately start smiling the moment he saw my face.

I would stare at his hands and he would say, "Don't look at me like that." And I would say, "Then stop doing this." And he would say,

 "When you finish school, I'll stop." He always made it sound like a simple exchange, like it was nothing and that he wasn't quietly destroying himself one fight at a time just to keep the lights on.

He never once complained, not even at the end.

I don't know how long I sat on the ground. I just stayed there in the rain while everything continued around me like normal. 

My phone was still in my hand and his last voice note was still on the screen. I had just seen the voicemail he sent to me and I pressed play without really deciding to as I just needed to hear him one more time.

"If anything happens to me… stay away from Caspian Vale." I heard him say and the tears just started flowing down my eyes.

I had never heard that name before, but I played it one more time just to be sure.

"Caspian Vale."?

I didn't know who that was. But Luca had used his last message to warn me away from him and that alone told me enough.

I stood up slowly, legs unsteady, and started walking with nowhere in mind. I definitely was not going to go back home because that place held too many memories with my brother. The rain was coming down harder now and I wasn't paying attention to where my feet were taking me, I was just moving.

I didn't notice I had walked into the road until I heard headlights coming toward me and then the screech of brakes when I turned toward it, a car was coming straight at me.

All I remembered was shouting really loud before ever went blank.