Fallen Knight: A Dark Mafia Romance (Varasso Brothers Book 1) Read online

  Fallen Knight

  A Dark Mafia Romance

  Sophia Reed

  Contents

  Join The Tribe

  1. Molly

  2. Luca

  3. Molly

  4. Luca

  5. Molly

  6. Luca

  7. Molly

  8. Luca

  9. Molly

  10. Luca

  11. Molly

  12. Luca

  13. Molly

  14. Luca

  15. Molly

  16. Luca

  17. Molly

  18. Luca

  19. Roman

  20. Molly

  21. Luca

  22. Molly

  23. Luca

  24. Molly

  25. Luca

  26. Molly

  27. Luca

  28. Molly

  29. Roman

  30. Molly

  31. Luca

  32. Roman

  33. Luca

  34. Molly

  35. Luca

  36. Roman

  37. Molly

  38. Luca

  39. Molly

  Luca

  A Message To My Readers

  Other Books By The Author

  © Copyright 2019 - All rights reserved.

  It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental.

  Created with Vellum

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  Synopsis

  He kidnapped me.

  Locked me up in his mansion.

  Would it be too crazy to fall in love with this monster?

  Luca is the oldest son of a mafia boss.

  He’s the sanest one in his family, if you ask me.

  His little girl makes him human.

  But danger is still his middle name.

  I’m drawn to his power.

  His devilish gaze that wants every part of me.

  He has a dark soul that fills a void in mine.

  Reminding me of things that I’m capable of.

  After his father’s assassination, Luca is the new king.

  And he needs a partner in crime.

  A queen.

  I’m the woman in his bed. In his heart.

  So, what does that make me?

  1

  Molly

  Gritting my teeth, I shoved the blade of the butcher knife down with all my strength. The crunch might’ve been more satisfying if it’d been going through what I wanted it to—my boss’s daughter Candi’s head—but instead, I had to make do with the red onion on the cutting board. As if on cue, Candi’s whiny voice rose in volume, reaching me through the walls of the kitchen.

  “But these Louboutin’s are purple. Purple. I told you I wanted the blue ones. I hate purple!”

  “Darling, the clerk said they were royal blue,” Candi’s dad said, trying to placate the little bitch.

  “They’re purple! So ugly. I’ll never wear them!” Then the brat burst into tears. She threw a tantrum like a two-year-old, shouting and crying. All fake, of course. This was how she got her way.

  God, just kill me now.

  I’d been working for the Benton family for two weeks as their in-home chef, and it’d been the longest two weeks of my life. Well, okay, that wasn’t strictly true. I’d had a lot of long miserable weeks in my life, and I’d survived them all, too. But Candi’s over-the-top behavior stood like a sharp, heavy weight on my last nerve.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have been so irritating if the job paid better. As much money as these people had, they could afford more. But instead, I received twenty cents above minimum wage to cook three meals a day for them. Since I’d lost my job at a local diner when they’d gone out of business, I’d taken the position the Bentons offered.

  I’d thought working with one family would be easier than cooking for multiple customers in a restaurant environment.

  Boy, had I ever been wrong.

  They’d instructed me to prepare food ahead of time for breakfast and lunch, simple meals they could refrigerate then pop into the microwave if necessary. But they wanted all their dinners fresh and hot. Which meant I had to be right there in their house to prepare them every single night.

  Creating meals brought me solace. At least usually. For nine years I’d worked at the Intersection Diner, first as a server, then as a cook. Old Man Bertolli hired me then took me back to the kitchen as a sort of apprentice. He’d been such a sweet, kind gentleman. He’d been patient and generous as he showed me the secrets of the culinary arts.

  I’d been a high school dropout with no hope of a decent future. But he’d taken me in. Believed in me. He was like the grandpa I’d never had.

  Then, he died. He’d been sick for a long time and hadn’t told anyone, including me. He’d wasted away before my eyes. The big C. Cancer. And once he was gone, the diner began to circle the drain. Bertolli senior had bequeathed the place to his son who had no ambition and no talent with business. The son filed for chapter seven six months later.

  Which left me not only mourning the old man but jobless to boot.

  I looked around at my massive stainless-steel surroundings. Before working here, I’d never been in such a ritzy home. It was the type of residence I’d dreamed about growing up. High ceilings with exposed beams. Five bedrooms and four bathrooms. Chandeliers. Either travertine tile or plush carpet throughout. A multi-car garage. A gym with a sauna. Lavish and comfortable.

  I would’ve given nearly anything to live in such a place as a kid.

  Maybe that’s why my toleration for Candi was almost nonexistent. She had no idea how lucky she was. She’d never had to dig through dumpsters for food. She’d never slept in a gutter and been awakened by a sudden downfall of icy cold rain. She’d never sold her body to the first guy who’d offered her a fifty-dollar bill in order to feed her baby sister.

  Granted, I’d only done that last thing once.

  My sister Tara had been eleven and starving at the time. I’d been sixteen and desperate. I’d tried to pretend I was somewhere else as I let the man do what he wanted, but the whole experience had been painful and degrading. Horrifying even. So when I saw the Help Wanted sign in the window of the diner, I’d gone in. I’d been dirty and injured, sore and hungry.

  In more ways than one.

  Really, Bertolli should’ve shown me the door. Anyone else would have. But he didn’t. He’d taken one look at me and led me upstairs. At first, I wondered if he planned to hurt me, too. Instead, he’d shown me his shower, given me some of his granddaughter’s clothes, and offered me a clean, safe way to make a living.

  He’d allowed Tara and I to move into his granddaughter’s old room, so we’d be off the streets. His giving nature allowed us the opportunity to live without fear for the first time ever. My sister had even been able to stay in school and make something of herself.

  Before him, I hadn’t believed in miracles or even that good thin
gs could happen. For that reason and many others, Bertolli would always be an angel in my eyes. My own personal guardian angel.

  He’d been far nicer to us than either of my parents had. My father had been an angry man who’d done nothing but yell and physically abuse my mother. In fact, in one of his rages, he’d beaten a guy he worked with to death, landing him in prison right after Tara was born.

  My mom had divorced him shortly after, but instead of making something of herself, she grew weak. My mother drank frequently before this, but once my dad had been taken away, she began to stay drunk. All the time. At one point, she disappeared never to return. With no adult in our lives and no means of support, my sister and I ended up homeless.

  Yeah.

  So, as a teenager, I’d had to fend for both myself and Tara. There’d been no other choice. To this day, I didn’t know for sure if our mother was dead or alive.

  Then, Old Man Bertolli had essentially rescued us. He’d even left his home to us. It might not be much, but it kept a roof over our heads.

  With him gone, though, I’d been forced to find a new income stream. And I had. Unfortunately, that meant being stuck listening to spoiled rotten Candi Benton every night. It made me want to pull my hair out. Or better yet, hers.

  After my special sausage, onion and tomato sauce was ready, I poured it over the farfalle pasta, and brought it out to their long mahogany dinner table. I spooned the meal onto their china place settings, then went back to the kitchen to retrieve some parmesan cheese.

  As usual, pampered Candi sat in her cushioned dining room chair with a throw pillow on her lap, a pout prevalent on her face. I didn’t know if the pout was due to the shoe issue or something else, and honestly, I didn’t care. As soon as I finished serving them, I’d be allowed to leave, and tonight I was more anxious than usual to do so.

  Over the past two weeks, I’d been able to keep my lips buttoned shut by imagining fun and creative ways to punish Candi.

  I started with more innocent things like using food coloring to make her milk a weird color or putting a bouillon cube in her bathroom nozzle to turn her shower into a soupy broth. But lately, I’d been imagining more gruesome events like dumping boiling water in her lap or gouging her in the skull with the family’s butcher knife.

  Good times.

  “OMG,” Candi huffed out. “Are you seriously giving us pasta again?”

  I hadn’t made them pasta in the entire two weeks I’d been there. Not once. If I hadn’t needed the job, I would’ve told her what she could do with her pasta, in elaborate detail. But since her parents were my employers and were sitting right there, I remained silent. I had to bite my tongue to do it. Literally.

  “And onions?” she added, staring at me hard. “Onions are so gross!” I’d served onions in their meals at least three times for sure, and the teenager hadn’t said a word about not liking them until that second. Candi lifted her spoon and threw it on the plate, splashing some of the sauce onto the table. She pointed at her dinner and said, “Bring me some of that without onions.”

  “You want me to pick the onions out of the sauce?” I asked, incredulous. I’d minced those onions into teeny fragments the size of splinters. Was she out of her ever-lovin’ mind?

  I glanced over at Mr. and Mrs. Benton. Mr. Benton had put his fork down while the missus had hers halfway to her mouth, but both simply watched me as if wondering why I wasn’t doing what their daughter demanded.

  Wow.

  I turned back to Candi, who sneered and said, “I don’t care how you do your job as long as you do it.”

  Up to this point, I’d been attempting to push down my aggravation, but at those words, my vision flashed white with outrage. Acting on instinct, I stormed into the kitchen and filled a ladle with the sauce. I rushed back to the dining room and splattered its bright red contents onto Candi, her silk shirt, and the throw pillow she held.

  “There’s your goddamn sauce!” I shouted at her, feeling instantly better.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Her father flew to his feet, while her mother’s mouth gaped open like a fish, her hands wringing in the air. “This is the most unprofessional behavior I’ve ever seen. Get out. You’re fired!”

  “Fuck that,” I told him, my voice still raised. “I quit!”

  I marched from the room, went back to the kitchen for long enough to grab my purse, then flew out the door. I hauled ass down the steps along their front walk, my movements tight with anger. I caught a cab back to my place, ignoring the sights and sounds of Philadelphia in the fall, fuming throughout the twenty-minute trip.

  Glad to find myself alone—Tara must be spending the night with her boyfriend—I hurried up to my bedroom.

  As a kid, I’d learned to say a mantra to help get me through the toughest of times. Sometimes I said it aloud and sometimes under my breath, but either way, it kept me going. I muttered it to myself now as I began to prepare. “Stand tall. Stand strong.”

  Other than cooking, my only other hobby involved shooting video. I had my own YouTube channel, and though I didn’t have many followers, I enjoyed letting loose on an open forum. I liked to express myself and have commenters agree with me. I’d become known for my rants; those brought me the most views, so I specialized in them.

  And tonight, I had a doozy of one.

  One thing I did to maintain my anonymity was wear a mask. The Venetian Masquerade mask covered the top of my face and had the added benefit of making me feel beautiful. It was gold and fuchsia and covered in glitter. I’d gotten it during the Mummers Mardi Gras Parade Philadelphia held the previous February, and I loved it. It made for a lovely disguise.

  I opened the aging laptop Tara had used for school to my most recent comments, attached my phone to a tripod, and started, going off like a rocket. While I liked to have interactions with commenters who liked me, there were always some who simply came to troll my channel. I enjoyed going off on those, on raking them over the coals.

  Their nastiness gave me more fodder to fill my video with, too. After addressing the trolls, I griped about rich people who knew nothing about what it was like to live in the real world. I next went on and on about spoiled teenagers—Candi, in particular—and I complained about the lack of entry level positions in the job market.

  Finally, I did something else that got views, I chose some random local news image at the side of my feed and used it to make up a story.

  Sometimes, my stories would be silly, sometimes sad, and sometimes even a little mean. It was all just made-up and imaginary, though. Expressing myself in that way helped me get things off my chest, to release whatever was upsetting me. And better, my stories tended to bring the most positive interactions.

  I’d even had a few people say I should write my stories down and share them. It made me feel good, even if I considered such an idea completely ridiculous. While I liked the attention and hearing good things, my stories were more about letting stuff go so it wouldn’t fester, nothing more.

  The image that caught my eye today was an older guy with a salt and pepper mustache looking serious and sullen as he shook hands with another dude in a law enforcement uniform. Since that sort of facial hair was mostly passé nowadays, I happily targeted Mustache Man to make fun of.

  The caption under the picture said “Angelo Varasso, billionaire businessman, is seen with the Chief of Police.” I’d never heard of this businessman, billionaire or not. But anyone rolling in that much dough should be able to take some criticism.

  I spent the next few minutes comparing him to everyone from Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I.—I used to watch reruns with Old Man Bertolli—to Dr. Phil.

  I did an impersonation of the police chief as Dr. Phil, speaking to Mustache Man in the psychologists’ distinct accent, “That’s a really limp handshake you got there. Makes me wonder if other things about you are limp. How that’s working for you?”

  Why would a man worth billions wear such a somber expression anyway? Making that kind of bank, he
could pay people just to amuse him.

  By the time I finished recording and uploaded my video, it was late. Drained from my rant and knowing I’d have to deal with my fresh case of unemployment tomorrow, I removed my mask, showered and got ready for bed. Too exhausted to worry about the clusterfuck my life tended to be, I laid my head on my pillow.

  I pictured all the wonderful things that would happen if I ever became a billionaire and drifted off, a smile on my face.

  2

  Luca

  Anna made adorable cooing sounds as she pulled her small body up into a standing position using my hideaway sofa for leverage. Twelve months old now, she’d begun to grow strong and I knew she would take her first steps soon. I regarded the perfection of her dark curls and tiny cherubic cheeks, feeling a beam of pride burn through the blackness of my heart.

  My daughter was the only thing in my life that kept me even partway human.

  I crouched beside her a few feet away, encouraging her to walk towards me. But when she looked at me with those giant baby blue eyes of hers—the exact same shade as Alana’s—my heart sent a stabbing pain through my chest. The woman I’d loved had died giving birth to my daughter, and since that moment, my life had become an obsidian chasm I couldn’t escape from.