Chapter 20 No More Shields #2
He didn’t even get the words out before her grip tightened, nails biting into his skin, and her orgasm crashed through her.
Fortunately, he’d put his good ear closest to her mouth, so the blissful sound of his name tearing from her lips didn’t kill his own release.
And he made sure to stay nice and deep inside when the pressure of her tightly clamped pussy finally did the trick, his orgasm ripping from him with an unrestrained moan.
The woman was fucking ecstasy. Or fucking the woman was ecstasy. Or both.
He’d figure it out after a few decades, maybe.
In the meantime, he held her tighter than he probably should have, kept their bodies glued together, and panted against her while he restabilized.
Her grip had gentled, her nails disappearing in exchange for soft fingertips that were equally appealing, if in a different way.
She wasn’t squirming or struggling or complaining.
She hadn’t tensed up. The silence was easy.
So much so, it would have been easy to fall back to sleep.
Falling asleep with his dick inside her held a damn lot of appeal, come to think of it.
Something chimed as soon as the idea took root. Something that sounded like an alarm.
Reiko made a sound of protest.
Santino blew out a frustrated breath and forced himself upright, finally spotting the offending phone—out of reach.
He muttered a curse, kissed her cheek, and extracted himself in order to shut the thing up.
But it was the reminder he needed. He’d set it deliberately, though not because he had thought he’d be balls deep and distracted with fuzzy thoughts, so he supposed the more frantic him of the previous night had been on to something.
“Was that important?” Reiko asked softly as she rolled to her side on the bed.
Santino returned the phone to the nightstand and scrubbed a hand through his hair.
He winced when he narrowly missed the stupid bandage over his damnable ear, then shoved the irritation down.
“Yeah. C’mon, beautiful. It’s time to clean you up and re-wrap those abrasions.
Then we need to get some food in us so we can take another dose of antibiotics. ”
Reiko’s gaze fell away, her brow furrowing. “Right. Okay.”
Santino clicked his tongue. “Uh-uh. No retreating from me. I’m the one you trust, remember?
The one you go to with your muddled, awkward, painful, shit just as much as your happy shit.
” He caught her knees and spun her to the side, hauling her across the mattress to the heartwarming sound of her startled squeal.
When she was close enough, he scooped her properly up and pressed her naked and sweat-sticky body against his, but he didn’t otherwise move.
“Talk to me, beautiful. Even if it’s just to release the energy of whatever thoughts are running rampant.
I’ll listen, I’ll soundboard, I’ll do whatever. ”
Her lips lifted and a sheen of tears threatened for a second, but they faded instead of falling.
“I just … I have a lot of thoughts, and I haven’t figured them all out yet, I don’t think.
” She tilted her head against his shoulder.
“I feel guilty for all the drama, all the chaos, of last night. Even though I know I shouldn’t.
I’m mad at Luca, and at myself for trusting him so easily. ”
Santino let the frown take over his expression as he turned them toward the bathroom. He could work on her wraps while she bared her vulnerable thoughts.
“I was so out of it last night, by the time you rescued me, that I couldn’t think straight,” she continued.
“Did anyone else at the house get hurt? Were they all in on it?” She drew a sharp breath and latched onto his arm as he moved to step away, having set her on the counter.
“There was a woman! I heard Danilo arguing with a woman, after I woke up on that tarp. I have no idea who she was, and they were arguing in Italian, so I couldn’t tell you what they were saying. But she sounded furious.”
Santino was already passing her one of the new toothbrushes when he processed her complete statement. “In Italian?”
Reiko nodded emphatically. “I’m pretty sure. Speak Italian to me.”
His lips twitched at her atypical command, but he didn’t deny her. “Il mio amore per te è infinito.” He made sure to deliver the confession he would once have called cringe-worthy with a straight face, all the while wondering if she would ask what he’d said or just assume he’d spouted nonsense.
She pursed her lips for half a second. “Definitely Italian,” she said, finally prepping the brush. “And definitely angrier. Yours was pretty.” She flashed him a smile before sticking the toothbrush in her mouth.
He grinned. “Coming from you, I’ll accept that description.
” He took a minute to also brush his teeth, then pressed a minty fresh kiss to her forehead and dropped to his haunches in order to deal with the wrappings on her ankles.
“Did you notice anything else about the woman? Anything in her tone, maybe?” The language barrier was complicated, not unmanageable. And he still wanted to be wrong.
“Her tone was angry,” Reiko repeated. She offered no resistance as he began unwinding the wrap on her first ankle, and her own tone showed no sign of hidden discomfort.
Santino filed that away as a good sign. “They were both yelling, and at best, I could say the woman’s voice seemed …
refined, maybe? She didn’t leave the impression of being rough around the edges, or a chain smoker, or anything like that.
Just exceedingly furious.” Reiko paused, her toes wiggled, and she slipped one more piece of disappointingly helpful information to him.
“I heard heels when she left. Not flats.”
Santino ground his teeth but kept his hands steady.
He’d known as soon as he’d learned there was a woman involved that the options were limited.
It was true Danilo had daughters, but none were old enough to drive, let alone be reasonable compatriots in the scheme Danilo had pulled.
For those reasons, Santino had never really considered them.
Similarly, Danilo’s exes were illogical options.
The women hated Danilo vastly more than any other member of Danilo’s bloodline.
It had always been one of three options.
Danilo’s current wife-turned-widow, Gisella.
Danilo’s elder sister, Adele. Or an unknown but never unlikely new mistress.
And while that third option had to remain on the board, Danilo’s historical tendency to look down on even his own partners kept it at the bottom of the pack.
A mistress was never more than a source of physical gratification.
Danilo had not once married a woman he’d cheated with, or even kept them around for longer than a season.
“Santino?”
Santino blew out a breath and lowered Reiko’s second unbandaged, gently wiped down leg back to a neutral position.
They needed to be re-wrapped, but there was no sense in that before both of them bathed.
So, he stood and reached for one of her arms. The abrasions on her wrists had been worse than the ones on her ankles—her ankles were effectively bruised, but her wrists had begun to scrape and bleed—so he made sure to keep his touch gentle.
There was little he could do about the agitation in his voice. “There are only two women Danilo might have trusted, or felt obligated, enough to include in his scheme.” His jaw locked for a moment at the sight of the angrily red flesh that revealed itself to him.
It didn’t suit her. Danilo was lucky he was already dead.
Santino moved on. “I had hoped his partner of choice would be Gisella, his wife. They don’t get along, but she hates all of us on principle so I could see her not batting an eye.
The bigger issue is that her hatred is based on fear—she’s petrified of what she thinks we’d do to her if she left his ass and took his only son with her.
” Nonno probably would have had a stronger, more violent reaction to that than Santino, too. To be fair.
None of that mattered anymore. Although letting go of Danilo’s boy would be a hard sell to Nonno, regardless, there was no doubt Gisella was already packing. And as far as Santino was concerned, the Segreti line was done. Danilo had sealed their fate.
Reiko’s brow dipped in a thoughtful frown. “You don’t think it’s her, though?”
Santino gently rolled her other arm, examining the worst of the wounds, and told himself to be grateful it looked like it had stayed closed up.
This was the only one Ivers had stuck a couple of butterfly stitches on and requested they keep dry, so he set about carefully wiping the surrounding skin clean.
He’d still leave off the wrap until after the bath, to avoid the bandage possibly catching a splash and absorbing the water.
“No,” he said while he worked, in answer to her question.
“Unfortunately. Gisella is third-generation Italian-American, supposedly named for a relative she doesn’t know.
She doesn’t actually speak more than a few words of it.
Danilo often complained that he could talk shit about her in front of her in her own ‘native tongue’ and she would never know, calling her ignorant for what she hadn’t been taught. ”
Reiko’s visible disapproval was far from surprising. “That’s horrible. How were they married if he treated her like that?”
Santino smiled. “Danilo married for pomp, beautiful. He would only marry women of Italian descent, he didn’t know how to be faithful to any of them, and he only ever cared to fight for his son—the boy Gisella gave him.
Which means his other three daughters were paid off with material things and expected not to miss him.
” In Santino’s mind, they were better off for it.
But he saw easily how Reiko would have a different opinion.
“That’s repulsive.” Reiko sighed, dropping her gaze. “Is it bad if I admit I’m not sad to not be stuck being related to a man who’d do that, again?”
Santino tipped her chin up. “No, beautiful. It’s not bad at all.
Yes, he was my cousin, but I’ll curse his name for the rest of my days after what he did to you.
So don’t be shy with how you feel. You never knew him before he abducted you and treated you like trash.
You’re entitled to remember him appropriately. ”
Her lips lifted and the light danced in her eyes. “You already got laid this morning; you don’t have to be so charming.”
Santino let out a laugh, pressed a quick, wet kiss to her lips, and stepped away to start the bath. “I fail to see your point. Are you implying you think I’m a one-off?”
“I would never.”
He raked his gaze over her as he returned to her, the water pouring into the tub behind him. She looked the perfect combination of cute and sexy, perched naked on the bathroom counter the way she was. It wouldn’t be difficult at all to bend down and fill his mouth with one of those perky tits.
“Hey. Stop that. You never told me about the other woman.”
Santino blinked and lifted his gaze to meet hers again. “What other woman?”
Her eyes revealed the laughter she tried to keep off her face. “You said there were two choices, and you only told me about his widow.”
Shit. She was right, and for as much as he’d prefer to lose himself in pleasures, there was still work to be done. Work that wouldn’t start until they were cleaned up and pulled together for whatever was left of the day.
Santino leaned in and cupped her face between his hands, brushed his lips from one cheek to the other, and rested his forehead against hers for a long second.
Because she had also reminded him of the unavoidable, ugly truth.
If Danilo’s accomplice—and Reiko’s literal kidnapper—hadn’t been Gisella, then there was only one answer.
And he was going to have to be firm when he delivered the news, because no one would believe him.
“If it wasn’t Gisella,” he said, speaking quietly as he echoed his own thoughts out loud, “then it was Danilo’s older sister, Adele. ”
Reiko lifted her hands to his chest in a comforting touch. “Another of your cousins.”
“My only other cousin, probably.”
“Probably?”
Santino exhaled. “Their youngest sister, Noemi, disappeared years ago. She’s either better at hiding than fucking Waldo or she’s long dead.
” He couldn’t deny the voice that had begun to whisper a concern as to whether or not Noemi’s disappearance hadn’t also been an internal plot, but he had no way to know. Too many years had passed.
He straightened and caught Reiko’s hands, lifting them to press soft kisses to her knuckles.
“If I’m right,” he said, “no one in the family will believe me. Adele’s a fucking church mouse.
She never speaks up out of turn at family functions, I’ve heard her angry maybe once in my life, and she’s basically devoted herself to playing caretaker for my aunt.
So far as my mother and grandfather are concerned, she’s a saint. ”
Reiko scowled. “Sounds to me more like she’s been walked over and felt brow-beaten into surrendering her life in favor of other people’s comfort. And someone like that is bound to snap eventually.”
Santino scooped Reiko off the counter to carry her toward the tub. “You’re catching on, beautiful.” He kissed her head. “But we’ll worry about that after we’re ready to face the day. Let’s clean up first.”