Chapter Nine #2
I bit my tongue, and I felt him shift—slightly—beneath me. “After the consequences for my family were carried out, I went to live in my uncle’s house.”
He said that with no inflection. As if the consequences that were carried out were practical and acceptable.
But if that was the case, there would have been no need for him to live with someone else.
It didn’t take any particular, deep insight to understand that what had happened here had been terrible. Brutal.
I suspected that when he said this was a graveyard, he meant it. But I still didn’t speak.
“This house stood unattended for a long time,” Jovi told me, quietly.
Almost as if he was talking aloud to himself.
“No one would dare loot it, given its connection to my uncle, but it became kind of ghost story in its own right. Come to the villa, see if you can spend the night, that sort of thing.”
“There are ghosts here,” I said softly. “That’s clear.”
“There are ghosts,” he agreed, and he sounded…not exactly happy about that. Resigned, maybe. “And I know all their names.”
“Jovi…” I whispered.
“They came in the night,” he said, his voice a low ribbon of sound, almost a ghost itself.
“They wanted it to be terrifying, like a nightmare, and it was.” I could feel some kind of tremor go through him.
“You know how these things go. There are prices for betrayal. My parents paid. My sisters paid.” I could have sworn I heard a catch in his voice then, but I couldn’t look back to see any evidence of it on his face. “I paid in a different way.”
“Are you still paying?” I whispered.
“I will pay until the day I die,” he told me, in that same resigned voice he used before.
It broke my heart.
But he still didn’t let me turn around. He held me against him and even put his chin on the top of my head. And I felt certain that I was not the only one basking in what felt like the only bit of tenderness I’d ever known. Something almost healing.
As long as I didn’t look him the eye, I thought that maybe it could last forever. Maybe this beautiful day would turn into always, like dreams always seemed to do.
I didn’t pinch myself, because I didn’t have to. I knew it was real.
I also knew better than to believe in always.
“The first two years at my uncle’s house were an adjustment,” Jovi continued after a while. “But adjusting was what was required of me, so I did it. And when I came of age, he gave me this house and all its contents. Everything my family had left behind. I sold it all off, as fast as I could.”
“Wasn’t it already yours?” I asked.
I could tell it was the wrong question. “That was a matter of debate,” he said.
And I could imagine how that went. This was a lovely house.
It was likely worth a lot of money, too.
I could see the sort of family Jovi had arguing over who got to profit from all those consequences.
I could also understand—having met so many men like him—why a man like Jovi’s uncle would hold on to it.
Better to use a tool as a weapon if your goal was to cause pain.
It seemed to have worked beautifully.
“Why did you sell everything?” I dared ask.
“I do not mind the ghosts,” Jovi told me darkly. “It’s the memories I can’t abide.”
I felt restless, or maybe—really—I was agitated on his behalf. I shifted myself around on his lap so I could look at him.
“What is your life here like?” I asked him. “What do you do in all your empty rooms? Wait for the garden to take you, too?”
He looked back at me, but he didn’t quite manage to get his impassive mask back into place. “You ask a lot of questions for someone who was gamely going into a marriage that would have crushed her. Into dust.”
I shook my head at him. “Not gamely,” I corrected him.
“Never gamely. I never once, in all of my dealings with my father, actually surrendered to him. I made nice. I bided my time. I accepted my unpleasant fate because there was nothing else to do. But that’s not the same thing as acquiescing.
Sooner or later, one of them—my father or whatever pig he married me off to—would underestimate me.
Forget about me. And then I would be free.
” He was frowning back at me, so I leaned in a little closer.
“I was only ever biding my time, Jovi. What have you been doing?”
He stood up then, taking me with him, and then set me on my feet. “Your situation is different from mine.”
“You live in a tomb,” I pointed out. “Very much as if you are already dead. Does that serve you in some way?”
“My uncle is my only master,” Jovi bit out, but there was something in his gaze when he said it. Something that suggested he chafed at his own words. “He gave me my life and I gave him my soul.”
I leaned in and poked a finger into his chest, which was a lot like jabbing it into granite. So I did it again, my gaze fierce on his. “Your soul wasn’t his to take.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Most men in my uncle’s position would never have offered me a chance.
Most would have killed me with the rest of my family.
Instead, he gave me this gift. And what I give him in return is my undying, unquestioning loyalty, until the day I die. It is as simple as that.”
Though the way he said it sounded less like a list of unassailable facts than I suspected he knew. “You’re the one they send out to the impossible things, aren’t you?” I asked.
“They do, because I am the one who is good at them. They require finesse. Patience. Precision.” He glared at me. “In a sea of hammers, I am a very sharp knife.”
My hands had somehow found my hips. “Or you’re the one who doesn’t care if he dies, since you’ve had no reason to live since you were a poor, traumatized boy. No soul. No future. Nothing. Is that really what you’re made of, Jovi?”
He blinked. Once. Then his dark eyes blazed. “Please point me in the direction of your agency, Rux. You are a prisoner. I kidnapped you to make you a victim to your father’s idiocy, but instead, you offered yourself as a sacrifice. What does that make you?”
But I knew the answer to that. “Yours,” I said.
I watched that crash into him. It looked…catastrophic.
“I’m yours, Jovi,” I told him, to make sure he heard me. “And if you need me to die for you, I will. If you think your uncle deserves that, too. If you think that’s a worthy offering to a man who spared you simply because he could use you, then do it.”
And before my eyes, though I could barely credit what I was seeing, I watched this man who never stumbled…stagger back. I watched him put his hands on his head, then tilt back to the blue sky high above.
Then, as I watched, Giovanbattista D’Amato, an impermeable weapon forged of stone and ice, howled.
There was no other word for he how he roared. He tipped his head back and what came out was pure anguish.
It went on and on and when he was done, he tipped his head back down. Then he locked eyes with me and everything was fire.
“Run,” he ordered me, a light in that dark gaze of his that made me breathless.
I didn’t think. I could feel that glorious fire burst to life inside me, starting deep between my legs and exploding outward, setting me alight. I turned and threw myself into the overgrown wildness of the garden.
Then I ran. I ran and I ran and it felt mythic. Epic.
I felt like Persephone, running to escape the inevitable while filled with dark excitement I wasn’t sure I could admit, even to myself.
I ran as fast and as hard as I could, but he was on me.
He was on me and then we were on the ground, cushioned in a bit of meadow and surrounded on all sides by the wild overgrowth.
Out of sight of that ruined old house and all those ghosts who knew him, too.
Jovi twisted at the last moment so I landed on top of him, his arms were around me, and I was digging my fingers into his skin as our mouths clashed together. It was all anguish and longing, fire and need.
I could feel his hands skimming down my back and then he was grabbing my ass and moving me against him, making sure I could feel the gloriously hard ridge of his cock between my legs.
I remembered the taste of him. I remembered the way he’d gripped my head, held me fast, and plunged deep.
I shuddered at that memory alone, and he muttered something. Then he was busy pulling off the T-shirt I wore so he could haul me up higher against his chest, forcing me onto my hands and knees so he could lavish attention on my breasts.
My hair hung down around us, smelling like a stranger’s, and all I could do was make a strange, keening sound I would have told you I wasn’t capable of making. It was too raw. Too real.
I could feel myself tightening and gleaming bright.
Everything he did to me seemed compounded everywhere else, but before I could crawl my way back down the length of him, he turned me over so that he was on top and it was my turn to move his shirt impatiently out of my way, tearing it over his head and tossing it aside.
Then it was something like awkward, and rushed, as we each clawed at our own trousers, kicking them off and getting them out of our way without losing contact with each other for even a moment.
It was important. It was necessary. It was everything.
And my hands were not the only ones shaking.
He moved over me and, once again, it felt holy. Like we were literally on sacred ground, and I knew, deep down, that there would be no coming back from this.
That the moment I’d seen him, it had always been leading here. That there was no way back.
My old life was as over as if I’d burned it to the ground.
And if I was honest, given gasoline and a match, I might have considered it.
When we were both naked, Jovi settled himself between my thighs. I could feel him against me, the exquisite pressure of his lower body flush against mine, and that gorgeous cock even harder and bigger than I remembered.