Chapter 2: The Devil’s Bargain
POV: Serena
His words fell on me not like a slap or even a threat, but like the slow, echoing clank of a prison door swinging shut, deliberate and final, reverberating through every hollow place inside me I’d convinced myself was safe.
"Now you belong to me."
I should have screamed. Should have hurled the bourbon glass still slick in my hand against the wall or his skull or the ghosts that had haunted me into law school and beyond. I should have done anything except stand there, spine rigid, air trembling in my lungs like it didn't belong to me anymore.
But who would come if I screamed? Who would answer a call for help from a woman like me, a defense attorney who had spent the last six years getting criminals like him released into the wild? The police wouldn’t protect me from Adrian De Luca. They wouldn’t even return my call.
He wasn’t a man you were saved from. He was a man the system shielded, because he fed it. Because he built it. His name wasn’t spoken in full hallways. It was whispered in courthouse bathrooms, in parking garages, in the spaces between rulings. A myth dressed in bespoke suits. A devil with Italian leather shoes and eyes like winter.
The room shrank around me, not just with fear, but with gravity, like his presence warped the very dimensions of my space, my sanity. He didn't wear cologne. He didn’t need to. His presence had its own scent, like rain hitting cold iron and something older, something that warned of blood.
He stepped closer, not with rage, not with heat, but with chilling intent and the way a lion walks toward something it already knows belongs to its belly.
“You’re not afraid anymore,” he said, his gaze raking across my body, not lewdly, but clinically. Like a butcher assessing quality. Like a surgeon choosing where to cut.
“You should be.”
I didn’t flinch. Didn’t step back. If there was one thing years of courtroom warfare had taught me, it was posture.
“I’m not yours,” I said, my voice sharp as glass, my chin lifted like a dare. “You don’t get to make declarations like that.”
He smiled then. That slow, cruel, deliberate curve of lips that didn’t mean warmth, didn’t mean amusement—it meant certainty.
“Declarations,” he murmured, stepping closer so that the heat of his breath brushed mine, “are for men who ask permission.”
“I’m not asking, Serena. I’m informing you.”
He said my name the way some men said prayers—low, reverent and edged with obsession.
“Why?” I asked, barely able to swallow around the knot in my throat.
He didn’t answer with words at first. Instead, he moved past me, unhurried, like he already knew I wouldn't run. His fingers trailed across the spines of my law books—texts I’d memorized, lived by and killed parts of myself to honor.
“My space,” I muttered, more to myself than to him.
“You handled Gallo’s case like a surgeon,” he said finally. “I watched the footage. Twice.”
I blinked. “Footage?”
“You didn’t flinch when they described the crime scene. Didn’t sweat when the media crucified you. You blinked, though,” he said, turning his eyes on me like twin blades. “When I pulled the trigger in that chapel.”
A cold sweat broke along my spine.
“And that’s why you think you own me?”
“No,” he said, as if I were missing the obvious. “That’s why I want to marry you.”
He pulled something thick from his coat. Tossed it on the glass table with a whisper of finality.
Marriage license, I already knew before I touched it. Our two names were written boldly side by side, like gravestones.
“You’re insane,” I whispered.
“No,” he replied calmly. “I’m strategic. I’m building something. And you, Serena, are going to be part of it.”
“You think I’ll say yes because you scare me?”
He moved in again, so close I could taste the rain still clinging to his skin. “Not fear,” he said softly. “Survival.”
My throat and my fists tightened, but my feet stayed rooted.
“I’m not your whore,” I spat.
His laugh was low and clean, not mocking, but somehow indulgent.
“No,” he said, tilting his head slightly. “You’re far more valuable than that.”
“I’m a defense attorney,” I snapped, a tremble in my voice I hated. “I know my rights. You don’t get to hold a gun to my head and call it a proposal.”
His eyes darkened, but not with fury, with something worse, which is hunger.
“You think the law applies here?” he asked. “I own your courthouse, judges, the men who sign your checks. And you…”
His eyes swept down my body with unnerving precision.
“You’re always in control, except this…”
He reached up to me, one finger traced the line of my jaw—barely a touch, but I felt it everywhere.
“You smell like control and fear, and it turns me on,” he murmured. My breath hitched, unbidden. I hated that I reacted. Hated that some deep, fractured place inside me stirred like it recognized him.
“You’re sick,” I whispered.
“Probably,” he agreed, with a calm smile. “But so are you.”
He stepped back just slightly. The illusion of space. The illusion of choice.
Then he tapped the papers on the table with two fingers.
“Marry me. Or die.”
I stared at him, willing myself not to break.
“No court will enforce that.”
“I don’t need a court,” he said simply.
I looked down at the document: Serena Ricci next to Adrian De Luca. Like a signature carved into bone.
“Why me?” I asked, more desperate now.
For the first time, his tone shifted without menace or seduction. It was just cool, quiet certainty.
“Because you’re clean, untouchable, flawless on paper, but under that polished armor, under those courtroom victories and perfect poise…”
His eyes were pinned on me. “You’re mine. You just haven’t admitted it yet.”
He paused and said softly, “They’ll believe you love me.”
I shook my head. “Bullshit.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But it’s more than just the optics.”
His voice dropped. “You intrigue me.”
Something in my stomach twisted, recognition or maybe dread.
He was everything I had fought against: power unchecked and control weaponized.
And some awful, buried part of me wanted to let go. To see what it would be like to unravel.
“No,” I said.
I was startled by a knock at the door, but he didn’t move; instead, he raised his two fingers, giving a signal to three men in black suits to enter in silence.
One of them was holding a pen and the other one, a velvet box, which he opened.
The ring inside gleamed, silver, engraved, elegant and heavy with meaning I didn’t understand yet.
He took my hand and slid it on my finger, which felt like a brand.
“I’ll burn this place to the ground before I ever belong to you,” I said, my voice shaking.
He smiled.
“Then you’ll burn,” he whispered, “in my arms.”
The pen hovered before me and my hand was shaking when I signed the paper.
Not because I surrendered.
But because I needed time.
Because the first rule of surviving predators was to stop bleeding until you could reach a weapon.
This is Serena Ricci, soon to be Serena De Luca.
The SUV is already waiting. Even before we stepped outside, when we got to the car, I heard the locks click and the doors opened.
His men—no, his shadows, stood silent and composed.
The interior swallowed me whole. Black leather. Bulletproof glass. No scent. No comfort.
Adrian slid in beside me, not even a word or a look. The car moved and Naples blurred past the tinted windows.
Two storms are contained in steel and glass. I stared at his hands that had ended lives and didn’t flinch.
He noticed my gaze on him and said, “You’re quiet.”
“You took my choices,” I replied to him.
“No,” he said. “I gave you the one that keeps you breathing.”
I turned toward the window and the city passed, drenched in the light of a dying night.
“You can’t own me,” I murmured.
His voice, low and soft, just a breath above the engine:
“Tomorrow, Serena... you become Mrs. De Luca.”
