Chapter 2 #2
Arms folded over her breasts, she followed him through the main reception room.
The gun in his back pocket reminded her of the weapon she’d stashed away in the foam of her mattress.
Everything she owned was in her apartment.
She’d had no opportunity to get the gun or anything else.
Tommaso had not let her bring any of her possessions.
No clothes. No keepsakes. No makeup. Nothing that was hers because now, nothing was hers.
Her life belonged to Tommaso, and the palatial home she remembered being filled with raucous noise was silent with Dario’s loathing.
“Where do I wait?” she asked.
Dario’s shrug suggested she could wait in a cupboard for all he cared. “Coffee?”
“Don’t you need to get to the wake?”
The stare he gave her was only marginally less frightening than the loathing that had blazed from Tommaso’s black eyes. “I’m to stay here until he gets back.”
She held the stare. “I’m sorry.” As an old friend of Tommaso’s and part of the Espositos’ inner circle, Dario should have been crowding into Valeria’s magnificent home with the other mourners to pay the final homage to Italy’s most powerful man.
His lips curved in a sneer. “Sure you are. Did you want that coffee or not?”
“Coffee would be good.” She hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since leaving for the funeral.
The kitchen was as masculinely modern as the rest of the villa but mercifully free of the erotic artwork that featured so prominently throughout the rest of the ground floor.
“Where are the staff?” All the Espositos had household staff to keep their homes running in perfect order.
“Done for the day.”
“They don’t live in?”
“Tommaso likes his privacy.”
A coil of ice slithered up her spine. She just bet he did.
“You have lost your fucking mind.” The expected furiously delivered words came from Tommaso’s sister. “You should have let Mattia take care of her. She’s a fucking rat.”
They were in their father’s study. Everything was exactly as it had been before they’d left for Accardiano except for the great man himself.
Their mother, the grieving widow who’d just been filled in on Gabriella’s betrayal, was looking at Tommaso with eyes so narrowed her forehead was fighting against its regular dose of Botox to form a groove.
As usual, it was Mattia, the oldest of the Esposito siblings, whose facial expressions gave the least away.
Tommaso folded his arms across his chest and pulled himself to his full intimidating height. “The price for being a rat is life, and that is what I’m taking from her.”
Siena might have inherited their father’s height, but she could stand tall too, and having been raised with three older brothers was a force all of her own.
Being jilted at the altar and witnessing the death of their father within minutes of each other had fed her core of steel.
“You’re thinking with your cock. You’ve had a thing for that bitch for years. ”
“That ‘bitch’ has been your best friend since you were babies.”
“Which makes her treachery even more despicable,” she snapped.
“Which makes her punishment more fitting. She belongs to me now – her life belongs to me.”
“Then take it if you own it!”
“What do you think will happen if she just disappears?” he demanded, holding onto his temper by a thread. It infuriated him to know Siena’s fury was justified, that his own justifications had come after he’d decided to let Gabriella choose whether she lived or died. “You think people won’t notice?”
“Who cares what people think?” she seethed.
“We do,” Mattia reminded her slowly. “Our father spent twenty years legitimising us. We keep below the authorities’ radar, remember?
The parts of the media we don’t control are already recycling the old stories and rumours about our past.” A past that had begun with their father as a low-life drug dealer.
Siena rounded on him. “Then we buy the outlets we don’t control and cut the fingers and tongues off those who slander us, and I don’t remember either of you showing this kind of concern about publicity when you put that million euro bounty on Niccolo’s head.”
“That was different,” Mattia said, his face tightening. “Niccolo dishonoured and humiliated us to the world.”
“And Tommaso’s traded his life in exchange for Gabriella’s, and she was working to betray us,” she spat. “I thought of that bitch as a sister. I trusted her. We all did. She was one of us, but all along she hated us and was working to bring us down.”
“And she will pay for that,” Tommaso cut in. “Gabriella will pay for what she’s done every day for the rest of her life.”
“You make sure she does,” their mother said icily, speaking for the first time. “Make her wish every day that she’d chosen death.”
“Believe me, I will.”
“How confident are you that she didn’t have an accomplice?”
“Niccolo said she was working alone – he knows the consequences if we discover he was lying to us. To give us certainty, I’ve got my team putting all her devices through a forensic examination.
Stefano’s searching her apartment. If she was working with anyone or in contact with anyone in authority, we will know by the morning. ”
“Give me five minutes with the bitch, and I’ll find out if she was working with anyone,” Siena spat.
Tommaso rounded on his sister with a stare that had been known to make grown men wet themselves. “You will never touch her. Gabriella belongs to me now, and you all know I’m possessive about what’s mine. No one touches her but me.” He eyed all the Espositos surrounding him in turn. “Understood?”
His brother and mother both looked at him a long time before nodding their consent.
Siena, though, looked even longer before shaking her head in disbelief.
“I can see I’m outvoted even if I get Rico in here to cast a vote, so I will go along with the majority decision, but I want it on the record that I think your judgment’s screwed, which I will remember when we decide who steps into our father’s shoes.
” Her pretty face twisted into a smile. “Understood?”
Gabriella’s heart jumped to see the glare of headlights cut through the window.
She glanced at Dario. Without looking at her, he muted the old game of football they were watching and left the living room.
Hugging herself tightly, she tried her hardest to keep breathing, to keep her features neutral and not betray a hint of the fear that had been building during the long hours of Tommaso’s absence.
It was almost one in the morning.
A door opened and closed. Muffled male voices in conversation.
She hugged herself even tighter. One of those voices was Tommaso’s unmistakable deep gravel.
A door closed. A beat later, Tommaso’s huge frame came through the living room door.
His hateful, wild black eyes locked straight onto her.
It wasn’t just his eyes that were wild. The thick black hair he wore ear-length and swept back looked as if hands had been pulling through it, strands falling over his forehead and cheeks, the thick beard somehow even bushier.
The black suit jacket and tie had been discarded.
His black shirt was rumpled, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows revealing muscular arms covered in more thick dark hair; the top three buttons undone, giving a glimpse of a deeply tanned, muscular chest with a smattering of finer dark hair.
It was like being stared at by a giant, grizzly bear, the eyes fixed on her telling her unequivocally that she was to be the meal he would take chunks out of.
It took all her strength to keep her voice steady enough to ask, “Where’s Dario?”
“Gone.”
She tried not to flinch. All the hours Dario had babysat her had been spent in cold silence watching old football games, breaking only to eat a delivered pizza.
Gabriella’s tight, knotted stomach had managed only one slice.
For all his loathing, though, she’d not felt any sort of threat from him, not like she was feeling now.
Even when Tommaso turned away and strode to the bar in the corner of the vast room, she felt the menace oozing from him.
She heard the sound of glasses clinking and liquid splashing, and then he was walking back towards her with two crystal glasses of what she assumed was his preferred drink of whiskey.
She hated that she knew whiskey was his preferred drink. She could use the excuse that she’d known him her whole life, but she’d also known Rico and Mattia her whole life and didn’t have a clue what their drinks of choice were.
It was only when he thrust the glass with ice in it at her and she caught the aroma that she realised he’d poured her a dark rum.
Her own drink of choice.
Feeling her neck flush that he’d paid such close attention to her, she looked away in embarrassment at her own reaction and shook her head. “I don’t want anything.”
“Remember the ground rule about compliance? You do what I say, when I say, and I say you drink, so take the glass and drink.”
She could do nothing to stop her hand from shaking as she obeyed. Do nothing to stop the shiver of electricity that danced through her skin when her finger brushed against his.
“To us.”
She darted her stare back up to him.
He was looking down at her, a mocking smile on his lips. “It is customary to repeat a toast when one is made.”
“You want me to say it?”
His smile widened. “I want you to say it.”
She had to dredge the words out. “To us.”
He tapped his glass to hers and, without taking his eyes from her, took a large drink of his whisky.
She suspected it followed many other whiskies that night and felt another pang of emotion at the pain she knew he was enduring to have said his final goodbye to his father.
Lorenzo Esposito had been the biggest monster of them all, but he’d been Tommaso’s father, and his death had devastated him.
Saying goodbye to her mother had been the hardest day of Gabriella’s life, and remembering it smothered the pang.
The Espositos hadn’t killed her mother directly like they had her father, but she held them just as responsible for it.
Tommaso might have been a child himself when her father had been killed, but he was built of the same deadly mould as the rest of them and didn’t deserve an ounce of her compassion.
Followed his lead, her mouth filled with a spicy, caramel flavour that was the smoothest rum she’d ever tasted.
“Well done,” he mocked. Turning again, he headed to a deep, plush leather armchair and lowered his huge frame into it. The wild, black eyes fixed back onto hers. His strong nostrils flared. “On your feet. Clothes off.”
This time, she was unable to hide her flinch.
He took another drink of his whisky. The hardness of his stare was all the proof she needed that he meant business.
Tommaso was laying down his marker. His dominance and degradation of her was to start immediately, with her stripping naked for him right there under the living room’s bright lights as if she were nothing but a common whore.