5. Matteo
Matteo
Cool night air slices through my coat like a blade when I finally leave the basement of the Adami estate.
It’s refreshing after spending hours below ground, causing havoc.
A metal door slams shut behind us with an echoing finality that vibrates through my bones and settles in a place I don’t let anyone see.
A long torture scene in a basement reveals the ugliest truths about our world that seep into the bloodstream. Nothing can wash them away. They’re too dark and deprived, and they whir beneath my skin long after the lights go out.
Antonio Adami is still alive. He shouldn’t be. He would have been a memory by now—a stain on the concrete, a problem erased—if Azra hadn’t heeded my warning.
She didn’t say his name again. Not once.
Well, not vocally.
I heard her silent pleas when I taped her to the chair in the private jet.
For some fucked-up reason, she wanted to continue her arrangement with Antonio.
Fucked if I know why, but the thought made me furious.
I went harder on Antonio than I’d intended when I returned to the Adami compound to assist Nico and Elio with the retribution we’d arrived to exact.
He’s alive, but it’ll take him more than a few weeks to lick his wounds.
He may never get over hearing in explicit detail how well his once-fiancée gives head to a cut penis.
I told my story with so much truth that he hardly flinched as I carelessly removed his foreskin from the flabby bit of muscle I’ll remove completely if it ever gets within sniffing distance of Azra again.
His beatdown after his circumcision with a blunt knife should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.
Azra kept slipping into my thoughts like smoke under a door, impossible to block out and ignore.
I’m irritated as fuck by how quickly she unraveled me.
I spent years building walls higher than anyone could scale, but somehow, she climbed the summit without even breaking a sweat.
I’m not meant to care.
I don’t fucking care.
Caring is a luxury I burned out of myself a long time ago. It’s a weakness I carved out piece by piece until nothing soft remained.
Yet here I am, walking away from a punishment that should have satisfied every dark instinct I possess, and my sole focus is on the way Azra looked up at me while swallowing my dick like she was born to do it.
Her gaze was too unflinching and calm for someone who should have been terrified.
Satan had an angel in his sights, and he was about to drag her to the depths of hell with him.
Thank fuck she uttered the words she did, or I’d still have my head buried between her legs, eating her greedy, sweet-smelling cunt until it was raw and blistering like she didn’t suck me off purely to make Antonio jealous.
Dirt kicks up around me when my boot lands on a rock with force. It’s the only thing within punching distance, but too low to consider pummeling it with my fist.
As the dust settles on my boots, Nico falls into step beside me, carrying Don Adami’s severed hand in a cloth.
See? Even when my thoughts were at their darkest, she still slipped through the cracks.
Don Adami will think twice before striking a woman again, but that isn’t why I removed his hand.
I did it because Azra’s lipstick was smeared on his palm.
I have no intention of washing my dick anytime in the next century, but since I’m fond of it, I’ll place Don Adami’s hand instead of my cock in my trophy cabinet.
The lipstick stains on both objects are identical.
Nico thrusts Don Adami’s hand into my chest, his expression unreadable. “Are you positive you desire to keep this?” he asks. “Smells funky.”
“That’s because he pissed all over the rag you wrapped it in.”
With a gag, he drops the cloth along with the hand. It rolls over the gravel driveway, stopping just short of my motorcycle’s front tire.
I pick it up, unconcerned that it’s weeping blood.
Once the dust clears away enough not to hide the smear of pink near his pointer finger, I toss it into the back seat of an SUV one of our foot soldiers is manning.
Nico raises a brow. “You’re putting it on your trophy shelf?”
I lift my chin. “After it’s sterilized.” I turn my head in the direction of the Adami grounds that seem nowhere as ominous as it once did.
When I was a kid, I used to stare at this place in awe.
Now it’s an eyesore. “I’m not putting anything from that cesspit in my house without burning the germs off first.”
He snorts, amused. “Fair.”
Elio greets us with a chin jerk as we reach the long line of SUVs that follow our every move, engines rumbling low in the dark.
After dumping his bag of torture instruments into the lead SUV, Nico leans against the door and folds his arms over his chest. “Do you have any preference? I was thinking Room 31, but things seem quiet tonight, so I’ll follow your lead.”
I don’t take his bait. Elio and I know what he means when he says the night is quiet, but his fucked-up ideas on a budding relationship aren’t our stories to tell.
I should go out. I always go out. Nico owns half of Sicily’s nightlife, and the women there are always eager, willing, and uncomplicated. Falling into bed with a busty unnamed woman is the perfect way to drown out the noises in my head before they grow teeth, but tonight I’m wrecked.
I won’t mention the thought of someone else’s hands on me feels wrong in a way I’d prefer not to examine, or I’ll remove my gun from my hip and blow my brains out as I threatened to do to Antonio over a dozen times in the last hour alone.
“Not tonight,” I say, scratching at my cropped beard.
Nico’s head snaps up. “What?”
His shock is understandable, but I’m not in the mood to play games.
“I said not tonight.”
Elio stares at me like I confessed to murder. It’s the exact look he gives me anytime I do precisely that. “You never turn down a night out.”
“I’m taking my bike home,” I say, walking toward it. “Need to burn off some adrenaline.”
“Matteo—”
“Goodnight, Nico.”
I don’t wait for his reply. I bob my chin in farewell to Elio, then straddle my bike. The engine roars to life beneath me; the vibration running up my spine, and finally, the fucked-up world I live in makes sense again.
I take off down the road, pushing the speed higher than I should. The wind tears at my jacket, and the world becomes a smear of shadows and streetlights.
The faster I go, the quieter my mind becomes. Azra is still there, but more a figment of my imagination than a real-life breathing person.
I tell myself I’m not thinking about her, that I only check the rearview mirror for flashing lights and not a glimpse of white chiffon, but without meaning to, I take a turn I shouldn’t.
In seconds, I pass a familiar road and race through a familiar manned gate.
Lombardo is the private airstrip that my family owns. It doesn’t matter the time or the day. If a Caruso family member needs to move fast, we head to Lombardo. We always keep a jet fueled up and idling, ready to move at a second’s notice.
It seemed like the right place to take Azra when a kiss bombarded me with reckless thoughts.
I slow as I approach the end of the tarmac. The floodlights highlighting the empty hangar cast long shadows across the equally empty tarmac. The jet I put Azra on is gone, leaving only the faint smell of jet fuel behind.
I could check the GPS or call the pilot to find out where she went, but I don’t.
The stupidity needs to stop. She was interesting. That’s it. I don’t want commitment. I never have.
Besides, she doesn’t want you.
She wants Antonio.
Irritated with myself, I rev the engine and skid out of the airport, heading home.
By the time I pull into the driveway, the adrenaline I want to disperse on Antonio’s face has burned off. But instead of leaving me exhausted, it leaves me hollow and irritated.
I need some molly, and maybe a line or two of coke.
They’ll take care of the niggle I can’t shake.
The house is quiet, the lights dimmed with an eerie calm that usually settles me.
Not tonight.
It just pisses me off more.
I increase my speed, eager to lose myself in the finest drugs in the country.
When Giovanni steps out of the shadows near the staircase, I startle like a bitch. With his arms crossed and his expression tight, he gestures with his head toward the study he’s been using as an office ever since he turned his office into a nursery for his unborn son.
“I need to speak with you.”
“In the morning,” I say, brushing past him. “I’m tired.”
“Now, Matteo!”
I stop midstride. Giovanni hasn’t barked at me like that in months—not since Valentina softened him, and not since he learned how to breathe through the anger my taunts forever inspire instead of retaliating with violence.
I love Valentina like a sister, but man, she needs to step the fuck back.
When you’ve had pussy on tap for years and have grown somewhat bored with the selection, you take snippets of excitement any way you can get them.
Riling my brothers will never replicate the high I got finishing down Azra’s throat, but since I shipped her off, it may be the only entertainment I’ll achieve without a mammoth amount of effort in the next six months.
A man can only fake it so much before he’s called out as a fraud.
“What’s got your panties in a twist?” I mutter, turning back toward Giovanni.
He doesn’t answer. He just jerks his head toward his office again.
When he walks in the direction he nudged, I follow like a good, obedient puppy.
It isn’t like I have anything better to do.
Breaking through the door, I expect paperwork, a crisis, or perhaps even a lecture about the Adami mess.
What I don’t expect is her.
Azra.
She’s sitting on Giovanni’s chair like she owns the space. Her bare feet rest on his desk, and her expression is as composed as a queen holding court in a room of paupers.
My heart stops, and my breath catches like a soft cock.
Maybe I should cut off my cock and store it in my trophy cabinet.
I clearly have no use for it anymore.