Mafiosa Bonus POVs

The Doughnut (Luca POV)

Growing up in the underbelly of Chicago, I was used to danger. As the grandson of the most revered mob boss in history, I was born into the possibility of it. By sixteen, I had seen it all – the guns, the drugs, the violence. Kill counts and vendettas, and a world turning on the axis of revenge.

I thought I had seen it all.

The day Sophie Gracewell called me a snowflake was the day I realized I was in a different kind of danger. The kind you stumble into accidentally – the kind you're not sure you want to get away from, even though you know you should.

We were outside the prison, pretending that the world wasn't falling down, that the cloud of grief above our heads didn't belong to us. I told her she was a bright spark and she told me I was a snowflake.

Right after she said it, she pulled her hair around her cheeks, as though the streaks of blonde could hide the pink hue beneath them. 'Shut up.'

'I think you were trying to tell me I was special,' I needled her. There was something exquisite about it – the comparison, the ensuing embarrassment. She loved to make me suffer and I loved to watch her squirm.

'Icy,' she said. 'I meant you were icy. And unique, in that you're uniquely annoying,' she added. 'God, you're annoying. That's what I meant.'

'If I'm annoying, then they haven't yet invented a word to describe you,' I told her.

'Shut up. I'm perfect.' She stuck her tongue out, and the giddiness of the moment made me remember myself. Who I was. Who we were together, on that bench.

'I suppose you're not the worst.' I pulled away from her, fixed my attention on the sky. My arms were spread out behind me, and I was trying to ignore the way my fingers were brushing against her shoulder, but I could feel every single solitary cell in the hand that was touching her skin.

We fell easily into the pattern that had become as much a part of me in recent weeks as Cedar Hill had. Me, scolding Sophie Gracewell. Sophie Gracewell dodging my criticisms like an acrobat, insulting me all the while.

And I tried to pretend it didn't bother me – her recklessness. I tried to pretend I hadn't thought about the warehouse every day since it happened, that I couldn't still remember the way her hair fell around me as she shielded me, the smell of her strawberry shampoo, how her hand trembled as she covered my heart. How she had fought for me when no one else had. How she had protected me when I was too weak to open my eyes.

In the lingering silence, I watched her watch me.

'What?'

'You realize you've been staring at me for the past five minutes?'

'No, I haven't,' she said, aghast. 'I was staring into space. I was thinking about stuff.'

'If I didn't know better I'd say you were getting lost in my eyes.'

She sprang to her feet, like I had lit a fire right under her. 'Oh my God, I was not. You are so full of yourself.'

In the distance the bus was rolling to a stop. This was how she got here – hours inside this cube of desolation just to sit across a plastic table from her father and pretend like her life wasn't falling to pieces around her. We weren't so different, she and I. We were propelled by the same things – family, loyalty, hope.

'Do you want a ride back to Cedar Hill?' I didn't realize how badly I wanted her to say yes until the invitation was out of my mouth.

She waved at me over her shoulder. 'No thank you, Zoolander. I'll leave you to your vanity.'