away to help our family in Sicily in their fight against the other mob famiglias. I was gone for a little over a year and when I saw Stella for the first time after all that time, I did a double take. She rushed toward me with a huge smile and flung herself into my arms. I hugged her back after a moment, suddenly feeling her curves, her breasts pressing against my chest. When I pulled back, I actually checked her out. Something I’d never done. She was Stella, my stepsister, not a girl I checked out. And yet my eyes lingered on all the right places, and fuck, they were spectacular. Stella shared her mother’s breathtaking beauty, but luckily not her self-centered vanity or air-headedness.
Had I just never noticed her curves or had Stella developed them all in only a year?
It seemed impossible. I must have been oblivious, and it was a state I needed to reach quickly again. Stella was completely off-limits. Fuck, we shared a last name. We were family.
After that day, I made an extra effort to not look at her body, focusing only on her face. Yet, even that didn’t help matters. Because Stella’s blue eyes and teasing smile haunted my nights, and sometimes even popped up when I fucked another woman. It was maddening.
Stella had become a fucking star, shining so brightly that she’d burned herself into my mind. No matter what I did, the image of her smile, of her curves, flashed up, even when I closed my eyes. It was like closing your eyes after you’d looked directly at the sun for too long: speckles of light kept dancing against the dark of your eyelids, reminding you of the enticing brightness you’d closed off.
I cleaned my hands of the blood. The cleaners took care of the body and the cut off parts. Torturing Bratva assholes for information was one of the perks of my job, which currently was jack-of-all-trades because at twenty-three, my father wanted to show me the ins and outs of every area of the business in our city before I’d take over from him in a few years.
My phone rang and I dried my hands before I took the call.
“Mauro, I need you to come over right away to watch Stella.”
I paused. “I thought you were leaving for Vermont today?” At every family dinner, I’d been forced to attend in the last few weeks, Felicitas hadn’t shut up about their upcoming ski trip to one of those uptight luxury resorts.
“We are,” Father said impatiently. “But Stella’s not coming with us.”
“What about the midgets?” That’s what I called my three little half-siblings.
“Of course, they are coming with us. Felicitas would go crazy if she had to be separated from her children for a week.”
“Stella is her kid too, she knows that, right?”
“I don’t have time to talk about this. Come over. You need to stay here the days we are gone and protect Stella.” He hung up, not waiting for my reply. Naturally, he expected obedience. His soldiers always followed his command after all, and as his son, I was little more than that in his eyes.
I grabbed my car keys, left the torture room and hurried toward my car, a new Aston Martin model that Father had given me on my last birthday. What he lacked in praise and affection, he made up with money and pricy gifts tenfold. I wasn’t a little kid anymore who craved his love or approval, so I was fine with our arrangement. I froze with my pointer finger against the start engine button when I realized what Father’s newest task of babysitting meant for me. I’d have to spend an entire week under a roof with Stella, my off-limits stepsister who visited my dreams almost every night.
Fuck. I was so screwed. Something I couldn’t do with Stella—never.
Stella
Mother didn’t deign me with a single glance as she ushered my three half-siblings into the lobby where their luggage waited for the bodyguards to pick them up. She’d never been this motherly to me, not even when I had been younger. Maybe it was because she’d been only nineteen when she had me, or maybe she just didn’t like me very much because half of me was Dad. She’d never looked in love with him while she seemed infatuated like a teenager with Alfredo.
“Where is he?” Mother asked, annoyed, as she peered at her Rolex, matching the Rolex around Alfredo’s wrist.
Alfredo knew that tone, and he