Brutal Devil (Andriani Brothers #1)

LUNA

Club Venere is a graveyard.

It's Saturday afternoon, and the place is dark, closed, and quiet.

This club isn't just my father's moneymaker. It's the window dressing for his crime empire. A front for money laundering, an underground sex club, and God knows what else.

I've never asked. When you grow up the way I did, you know when to keep your mouth shut. When to ask questions, when to look the other way.

When to run.

But here's the thing about Club Venere. It's never dead.

It's never without people—hundreds of twentysomethings crowded together, tanned, beautiful, elite, and horny.

A line around the block, a velvet rope, bouncers at the doors who turn almost everyone away.

It's been one of the city's most exclusive clubs for more years than I've been alive, open seven days a week for a pick-your-poison corruption fest.

Not today.

Today, there's no music thumping with so much bass you can feel it in your chest like a second heartbeat. There are no writhing bodies. There's no bar flowing with top-shelf cocktails. No rooftop parties. No strobing lights.

There are only a handful of people here now, and none of them are paying customers. But that's not what makes the blood in my veins freeze into ice or my stomach flip like I'm going to puke my guts out right here on the polished floor.

It's who they are—the top members of the Andriani crew, all brothers, all hot as hell, and all psychotic bastards.

It's the way they're looking at me, like bloodthirsty hunters who just watched an innocent doe wander in front of their scopes. Their trigger fingers are itching, waiting for the perfect moment to shoot.

To kill.

One of them in particular gets to me more than the others.

The tallest one, who's dressed head to toe in black except for a dazzling white shirt, his suit clinging to his well-muscled body in ways that should be illegal, hair as dark as his soul.

I haven't seen him in years, but there's no forgetting who he is.

Matteo Andriani, better known as Priest because of his role in the family.

No one's better than Priest Andriani at getting a man to confess his sins just before he dies a painful death.

"Luna, sweetheart." My father's voice is booming, his familiar accent more pronounced than usual. "I've missed you, bella ."

Too loud, just like his smile. It's fake, all for show. Bella is the nickname he gave me all through my charmed childhood, before I realized the life I was living was a complete lie, just like the mistaken belief that he loved me was.

He opens his arms like he wants a hug. I don't move, not bothering to initiate.

There's a line of demarcation between us, and he's standing on the side of the Andriani brothers.

This is one of those moments in my life when I wish I'd tried harder to be the daughter of a Mafia don.

When I wish I not only knew how to shoot a piece, but that I had one of my own.

Because if I did, I'd pull it now and aim between Priest's cerulean eyes.

I'd pull the trigger without a second's hesitation.

Those eyes are still on me. Studying me. Seeing me. That's what he does. He looks through you. Into you. And then he crushes you, in one way or another. He tortures. He kills. It's what his family did to my brother, and I hate him for it.

"Papa." I stare at my father, imploring.

What the hell is going on? I ask the question without words, using my eyes, and I know he understands from the way the corner of his mouth kicks up higher, with a slight tremor. Just one side—the right. It's always the same side, his tell. And it's always when he's hiding something.

He knows what I'm asking.

He begged me to come home, leaving the last year of my MFA, telling me he had cancer. That he needed to see me. He doesn't do video—strictly in person. But it's looking like he brought me home so that I could have a face-to-face with my brother's killers.

And fuck that.

Fuck this.

Fuck them .

A hurricane is brewing in me, ready to rage.

My father ignores my unspoken question. "Come and have a seat. We'll talk, bella ."

"No."

I shake my head, eyeing the sleek, strategically placed red velvet couch and chairs he's gesturing to like they're the maws of hell, because they may as well be.

I won't sit with my brother's murderers.

I'm not a part of this world anymore. I've been working my ass off in Iowa, throwing myself into my writing.

I shouldn't be here, and I wouldn't be if it weren't for the emergency call and my own stupidity, the tiny seed of loyalty that's been forcibly buried inside me so deep that it'll never again see the light of day.

"Sit with us, per favore ," my father says, using the chiding tone he reserves for his endless string of wives and dogs.

He's loyal to the dogs, at least.

"I'm not sitting," I tell my father calmly, flicking a glance over the towering wall of Andriani muscle.

My gaze catches on Priest's, and the cold eyes of a killer glitter back at me.

I'm a world away from the calm, leafy-green, perfectly manicured campus I'm accustomed to.

The workshops, the creative free rein. People whose life mission is creating, not destroying. "Not with them."

I won't say their names. And the way I say them leaves no question as to what I think of these bastards—it's all bitter and bite, fury and hatred.

Andrianis are dead to me. I'd kill them myself if I could.

But the greatest revenge of all would be to send them to prison where they belong.

And I would if I had enough evidence against them.

I'd find a cop who isn't on their payroll, a district attorney who isn't corrupt, and I'd dump all the dirt I could find on their heads.

"I think what Mr. Revello means is that you should sit the fuck down," Priest tells me, enunciating every syllable, his voice as cutting as the lash of a whip.

"Before I make you." He cocks his head at me, his stare burning me alive, and slides his left hand inside his coat, flipping it back to reveal the gun holstered within. "Unless you'd like that, bella ."

He emphasizes my childhood nickname like it's something dirty and hateful.

And his insinuation that I'd want to be made to sit down—like he's going to spank me into submission—pisses me off, even if it ignites a tiny fire inside me.

The kind I need to snuff out before it gets out of hand and I do something stupid.

"Don't call me that," I snap before I can stop myself.

I'm seething with so much rage that I'm trembling. My jaw feels numb. I don't care if he's armed and dangerous. If all his asshole brothers are. I won't be intimidated by them.

This is the hill I die on.

"Luna," my father says, all the artifice suddenly stripped from his voice and his expression both. "Sit. Please. And show some respect."

He's begging. Tomasso Revello never begs.

That's when realization sinks in, like a boulder flattening me to the spot.

This isn't just a talk. My father didn't summon me home by telling me he had cancer, then ghost me at his house and demand to meet me here at his closed club on a whim.

No, he did it because he's been forced to, left without a choice.

And I'm here for a reason far more ominous than I ever could have expected.

Is my father actually sick?

What the hell is happening?

All I know is that I don't want to sit. I don't want to talk to the Andrianis.

I don't even want to be here in this city, surrounded by the dark world I've done everything I can to distance myself from.

God, I thought I'd escaped this hell, and all it took was one phone call to drag me back. I even came of my own free will.

It's official: I'm a fucking idiot.

"Princess Revello doesn't want to sit," says another of the Andriani crew.

This one isn't a brother, but he's as close to them as one.

He wouldn't be here otherwise. I may have been out of the life for the last few years, but I was born and raised in this world.

I cut my teeth on turf battles, hits, and firefights.

And the Andrianis have been Enemy Number One since I was in diapers.

It all started when their father made a move to take out the don who preceded my father when he was in prison back in the early nineties.

What had been one huge family splintered into two halves.

And from that moment on, it's been the Andrianis against the Revellos.

Never mind that later my dad clipped that same don himself.

We've been battling for as long as I can remember.

But Leo's murder changed that. The battle turned into a full-scale war.

And in the midst of it all, I walked away.

Because it was either that, or lose myself as surely as I'd lost my brother.

Five years later, I'm every bit as in danger of losing myself as I was then.

It's a bitter realization, one I'm not ready to accept.

The status quo is for those who are too afraid to challenge it.

I've never lived in fear, and I won't start now.

"That's right," I tell the asshole who dared to mock me, holding his gaze like I'm just as tough, like I also have a Glock hidden in my waistband that I'm not afraid to use. "I don't want to fucking sit. You got a problem with that?"

"Luna," my father bites out. " Gesù Cristo, bambina . When I tell you to sit down, you sit the fuck down."

My gaze flits to my father. This isn't my world any longer. I don't belong here, and I never did. I'm not going to play their dangerous games. I don't have to.

"I won't sit with Andriani scum," I say, equally determined, every bit as hard.

I'm not the biddable girl I was raised to be, the one who puts the family and the business first, who believes in omertà like it's a religion.

The one who shuts her mouth and does what she's told.

The one who smiles when she's treated like she's worth less than her brother because she wasn't born to carry on the Revello name.

"No?" The voice is silky and smooth. Deep and low and menacing.

It's him again. Priest. And his hand is resting on the butt of his gun, his long fingers caressing it like he's touching a woman instead of an inanimate object crafted for death and destruction.

I watch those fingers for a moment longer than necessary, mesmerized by their haunting beauty, the jarring juxtaposition of it—the elegant hands and the monster they belong to, the tracery of tattoos marking him for who he really is. And then I jerk my gaze back up to his, undaunted.

"No," I repeat, succinct and final.

And then despite everything I've been taught, despite my inner instinct to stay alive, despite common sense and reason and everything that tells me never to turn my back on the enemy, I spin around and make my exit, my low-key, heeled sandals slapping on the floor as I go.

Because fuck them all. That's why.