AUCTIONED TO HER DAD’S MAFIA ENEMIES: A MAFIA AGE-GAP REVERSE HAREM ROMANCE (AUCTIONED SERIES Book 4)

WHAT HE NEEDS

I’m watching television when Luca enters the room. My door is no longer locked, but when Alexis left, he closed it behind him, and I didn’t bother to test if they were truly comfortable with me wandering around the penthouse. Things have changed between us, but I’m not sure how much is real and how much is just a carefully maintained illusion.

Luca’s gaze flicks to the screen, where a romance movie plays—a temporary escape from the tension around me. Embarrassment prickles at my skin, and I grab the remote, switching it off as if caught in something forbidden.

Even after hours in the penthouse, Luca is still impeccably dressed, his crisp shirt unwrinkled, his slacks pristine. He carries himself with the kind of effortless power that makes lesser men bow their heads and women forget how to breathe. Without a word, he moves across the room, dragging the chair from the corner and positioning it close to the bed. Then he sits, legs spread, forearms resting on his thighs, his unwavering gaze locked onto me.

His eyes, laser blue and searing, send shivers of awareness down my spine, just as they did the night of the wedding. Spending time in his company, kissing him, and sleeping in his arms has done nothing to lessen the impact of his intensity on my body. If anything, it’s made it worse.

“I need to talk to you, Aemelia.”

“Okay.” My voice comes out smaller than it should, a risk where Luca is concerned. I don’t want him to think I’ve been weakened by his brothers’ attention or the gunman outside. Weakness is a magnet for men like Luca. It would make me another thing he could devour.

“Your uncle Enzo was the one who sent the gunman.”

My stomach tightens. “How do you know?”

His eyebrows rise slightly as if my question amuses him. I exhale and nod. Of course, he knows. He’s Luca Venturi.

“Why now?”

He shrugs one shoulder, a small movement that betrays his irritation. “He wanted to end this. End the shame on his family for good.”

The shame. I hang my head.

“Do you love your uncle?”

I hesitate, understanding the gravity of the question. This isn’t about my feelings; it’s about Luca’s intentions. “I don’t know him,” I whisper. “Not since I was a child. He was never kind to me. He always looked at me like I was something disgusting… the same way my father did.”

Luca’s jaw tightens, and he tuts, shaking his head. If I didn’t know better, I’d think my family’s treatment of me when I was younger bothers him. But this is Luca Venturi, the Boss of the Venturi family. His conscience is nothing but ash, his heart a lump of granite.

“You were innocent.” Luca closes his intense eyes, his dark lashes framing the sharp line of his cheekbones. Then after a breath, as if the words cost him something, he adds, “You are innocent.”

I force a small, bitter smile. “Not anymore.”

His eyes flick up, and the fire in them steals the breath from my lungs. There is nothing cold about him now. He is molten, simmering with emotions that are wild and consuming.

“We’re going to end Enzo’s life for what he did today. Do you understand?”

The cool determination in his tone should chill the blood in my veins, but it doesn’t. My uncle sent men with guns. I thought the past was bad enough when he saw my father beat me and did nothing. I could never forgive him for his apathy, worse, his complicity. And now?

“I do,” I whisper.

Luca reaches out, his fingers brushing over my cheek before cupping my face. His palm is warm and firm, grounding me. A slow burn starts in my chest, spreading outward as if he’s branding me with nothing but his touch.

“My father,” I say, barely able to form the words. “Have you found him?”

Luca shakes his head, studying me carefully. “Do you know something? Something you haven’t shared?”

“I think he was working with the feds,” I admit. It’s time to end this—all of it. To prioritize me for the first time before it’s too late. “I think that’s how he disappeared and why he didn’t take us with him. He got a clean start without his cheating wife and Mario’s so-called bastard children.”

Luca’s fingers tighten slightly at the back of my neck. “Why do you think this?”

“My aunt. I don’t think she knew for sure, but she always said his disappearance was too clean. He took almost nothing. Left only empty bank accounts and his IDs behind. Wherever he was going, it was as a new man.”

Luca nods, but his face is unreadable, his thoughts a storm I can’t decipher. His breathing turns choppy, his control slipping for the first time since I met him. The air between us shifts, charged, volatile.

And then suddenly, he moves.

His hands frame my face, his grip firm, unyielding before his mouth crashes against mine. The kiss is fierce, searing, stealing the air from my lungs and replacing it with something wilder. I freeze for only a second before I open to him, letting him take what he wants. His tongue sweeps against mine, demanding, punishing, desperate.

There is no careful seduction, no patience. He kisses me like he’s trying to drown in me, to forget something too dark to face. His fingers tangle in my hair, his grip on me possessive, claiming.

I should pull away.

I should fight.

But all my control is lost.

For the first time in my life, I have men who will defend me, protect my life with theirs, and avenge all the wrongs that have happened to me.

Luca growls low in his throat, his hands sliding down my sides, branding me with his touch. He lifts me effortlessly, settling me onto his lap, his fingers gripping my thighs as if he can’t stand the distance between us. Heat coils in my stomach, spreading lower, igniting a deep desire inside me.

“Aemelia,” he murmurs against my lips, his voice rough.

I swallow hard, my pulse hammering in my ears. “Luca.”

His breath shudders at the sound of his name whispered huskily against his cheek. He holds me against him, cupping my head so my face is pressed into the crook of his neck. The past unravels behind me, dissolving into the dark as his warmth engulfs me. I’m back in the Venturi garden, cradled in his arms, inhaling the same clean, sharp scent of his cologne and his skin, safe.

It doesn’t make sense that I should feel that way about a man who just promised to stain his hands with my uncle’s blood, but not much in my life has ever made sense. I was forced to grow up too soon, a child who became a parent, a girl brutalized by the man who should have defended her. I was a stranger in my own home, out of place in my own life. And yet, here, in the hands of my father’s enemies, I feel safer than I ever did in the world I was meant to belong to.

He whispers words in Italian, too fast and low for me to understand, but the cadence is hypnotic. It doesn’t feel like words at all but a spell, a confession, a story revealing the secrets of his heart. I close my eyes and let his husky, melodic voice wash over me, losing myself in its dark melody.

“I’d do anything to keep you safe,” he says gruffly, his voice rough with emotion like the words cost him something to admit to himself and to me.

His arms tighten around me, powerful and unyielding, as if daring the world to try and take me from him. The steady, controlled Luca Venturi—the man who commands with a look, who kills without hesitation—is shaking.Just barely, almost imperceptibly, but we’re too close for me to miss it.

His breath stirs against my hair, warm and uneven. “I’ve taken lives without a second thought. Moved mountains for my family. Built an empire with blood and fire. But it’s been empty, I’ve been empty, until now.”

I swallow hard, my heart slamming against my ribs. “Luca…”

He lifts my chin, forcing me to meet his gaze. His eyes are scorching, filled with raw, terrifyingly real emotions that steal my breath.

“I don’t just want to protect you, Aemelia. I want to destroy every fear that’s ever haunted you; bury your past so deep that it never dares to touch you again.”

A shiver rolls through me—not of fear, but of the kind of devotion that doesn’t end in happily ever afters but in blood oaths and sacrifices.

His thumb strokes along my cheek, reverent and possessive. “Tell me you understand.”

I nod, my lips parting, but no words come out. I don’t need to say it.

He sees it in my eyes.

His confessions make me whimper. Beneath my thigh, his cock stirs thick and hard, and my body primes in response before my mind can catch up. Heat unfurls inside me, slow and insidious, a craving I have no business feeling. I trace the lines at the corners of his eyes, the rough stubble at his jaw flecked with silver along his jaw, the deep scar that cuts into his flesh—marks of a man who’s lived, survived, conquered, so much a part of him that I can’t imagine his handsome face before time and violence had marked him. He closes his eyes against the gentleness in my fingers as if tenderness is harder for him to accept than a knife in the gut.

When it becomes too much for him, he grasps my wrists, encircling them with one vicious hand, his grip like an iron shackle around my bones.

“I shouldn’t want you,” he says, his voice gravelly. “You understand that, don’t you?”

His fingers tighten, not enough to hurt, but enough to make me feel small, powerless. My pulse pounds. Not in fear. Never in fear with Luca.

“I look at you, and I see a woman who turns my body and mind into an inferno. Your beauty, your strength, your fire, it consumes me. But then I remember carrying you in my arms when you were nothing but a little girl with too big eyes and tiny hands. And now…” He exhales sharply. “Now, all I want is to do what my brothers did—to bury myself in you until I’ve marked every inch of you, inside and out. To claim you. To own you.”

His voice turns hoarse, and something like regret flickers behind his blue fire. “But I’m the Boss of this family. And—”

His voice seems to die at the end, turning into nothing but breath.

“And you should resist?” I finish for him.

His jaw clenches. “I should know better. A thirty-eight-year-old man, losing his fucking head over a twenty-year-old girl.”

“Woman,” I correct.

His nostrils flare. His grip on my wrists tightens. “At the wedding, Antonio said that my dick doesn’t have to feel guilty for wanting you.” He lets out a low, humorless chuckle. “Even then…”

“You wanted me?”

“Yes. Like the first hit of a drug. And you wanted me, too. Every time our eyes met…”

“I want you,” I whisper. “I want…”

“To forget?” His tone is knowing, like he can see through me, through every broken, needy part of me, to the aching heart at the center who never believed that love could find her.

“Yes…”

“To hand over your power, your will, your sense of self?” He studies me like he’s reading the pages of a book only he can understand. “I feel it, Aemelia. How much you hate to be weak, but how much you crave it.”

His thumb drags over my lower lip, slow and possessive. He hooks it inside my mouth, pressing against my bottom teeth, forcing my lips apart. Everything with Luca feels like a test, a challenge, a boundary crossed, a line eviscerated.

A battle between resistance and surrender.

I touch his thumb with the tip of my tongue, tasting the salt of his skin, and sense the tensing of his body. Still, he holds me tightly by the wrists, anchoring me to him while he fights a war with himself.

“The things I want,” he murmurs, staring transfixed at my mouth. “The things I need… I shouldn’t take them from you.”

I wrap my lips around his thumb, hollowing my cheeks, and his eyes blaze. I can’t voice what I want, but I can show him. His breath hitches, his pupils blowing wide, undone by something so small.

“Sweet Aemelia,” he rasps. “So precious. So eager to please. Such a good girl.”

A shiver runs through me at his praise, burning through my skin, settling deep in the hollow place inside me that has always ached to be filled. I hate how good it feels—how much I need his praise and compliments. I should have enough backbone to stand on my own, to know my worth without a man‘s approval. But I was stripped of so much by my father’s hatred, left with so little when he abandoned me.

Now, I press myself against Luca Venturi, one of the most feared men in the city, like he’s my savior. I take the scraps of his kindness and feast on them. I crave to crumble under the weight of his dominance, to let him tear me apart and piece me back together.

I can’t resist the pull of him—the promise of something darker, something deeper, something that feels like belonging.

When he withdraws his thumb, I whimper.

“Please,” I whisper, keeping my eyes lowered, my lips parted, ready. Alexis demanded my plea, but Luca didn’t need to.

He turns so his face is buried in my hair, his mouth so close to my ear I can feel the dampness of his breath.

“Say it properly.”

My pulse pounds. Shame and desire war in my chest, but in the end, only one wins.

“How?”noveldrama

He touches my ear with his lips, and a shudder wracks my body. “Please, Daddy,” he says firmly, and I finally understand.