Bloody City: Temptations

Chapter Seventeen

"That's going to be another part of the house," Alessio's gravelly sleep affected voice says from behind me, and I turn to find him dressed in trousers and his black button up tucked with a cigar in hand.

"You smoke?" I muse shocked to see him with it in hand.

Though the cigar made more sense now.

"Yes, every once in a while I take a cigar and stand out here at night and have one," Alessio says, "I also only buy pure tobacco cigars, instead of cigarettes with all those fucking chemicals, which taste awful," he adds with a laugh, that I couldn't help but join in on.

"What is that going to be?" I ask gesturing to the extension being built.

"A home addition, but also a garage, I own sixteen cars, and have four on the way. The front will be where guests come, this back section will be where I leave and enter each day, the problem is I'm trying to have it built in secret, the Italian media doesn't even know this is my home, its surrounded in juniper trees and all these beautiful gardens, I also had a guard house built, so our home will now be one hundred fifty thousand square feet," Alessio says blowing out the smoke he'd pulled into his mouth.

I watched him carefully as he seemed to be completely unaware of how he seemed standing here on the massive black basalt slab patio behind his villa with white stone that perfectly reflected a modern take on classic Roman and Greek architecture. To have his home be the staple piece to how powerful he had become.

Or Alessio simply didn't care what he was perceived as.

I probably wouldn't give a fuck what people thought of me if my home location was a secret, and I had the power to make anyone just vanish.

In the time I'd stood next to him lost in thought I found that he'd been giving me a perplexed look of uncertain curiosity.

"Why are you out here so late at night?" he asks his cigar nearly gone and nearly snuffed out.

"I was going to go swimming," I answer and he raised his eyebrows.

"Am I stopping you?" Alessio inquires as he discarded the cigar into a slot in the metal twist designed vases that must have been growing around the hollow space in it. Probably a special way of letting the cigar burn itself to ash and then be recycled.

"No, I just didn't expect you to be out here," I say walking around the large rectangular pool to one of the patio chairs and pulled off the robe. Dropping it onto the nearest chair I walked to the steps that were built to be in the side of the pool or at the front of it and stepped into the hot water that was lit up by ambient lights in the steps and along the edge and bottom of the parameter.

"You would make any man envious to have you, and every woman jealous of your beauty," Alessio remarks as he walked along the side of the pool as I moved towards one of the end where the hot tub was and stuck my hand in to find that it was several degrees warmer then the pool.

"I'm envious of how hot the jacuzzi is," I say looking back at him and watching him lick his bottom lip to part it.

"I think the jacuzzi would be envious of you Arianna," he says and I find that despite wanting to look away I can't.

Or won't.

Alessio then reaches up and unbuttons his shirt slowly before untucking it. He then undid his cuff links and set them on a chair before the shirt came off revealing all the scars across his back that shocked me more then the tattooed words on his back. He had dozens of them but none on the front of his body which made me wonder why it was only his back.

Had his father beaten him that badly as a young boy.

I knew of the Famila's wanting strong sons but the fact he had so many and that he'd always taken them for his siblings made me wonder just how deep his loyalty was if he had been willing to have his body damaged like that so badly.