Chapter Ten
LEAVING RUX IN his bed, alone, was the hardest thing Jovi had ever done.
She had drifted off to sleep but he hadn’t dozed off with her. He’d stayed awake, sprawled out beside her, the soft weight of her curled up at his side.
The kind of thing that had always horrified him to imagine, which was why he had never allowed it. But it was Rux.
Everything was different.
She had called him a protector. She had claimed he was good at it. He had wanted to tell her she could not possibly have been more wrong, but that would have involved talking about the very deepest memories inside him that he did his best to keep at bay.
Though it was harder now. Something about Rux made him wonder if he’d ever truly banished his memories. Because now it seemed patently obvious that he hadn’t. That they’d been waiting here for him all along.
He remembered trying to block the closet where his sisters had hidden, imagining that he could save them.
He remembered the screaming from somewhere else in the villa, and had spent most of his life choosing not to know who had been doing it.
Yet he could still hear it so clearly. He could still feel it inside him, if he allowed it.
It had been his own uncle who had clubbed him across the head. There had been two shots, then Antonio had stared down at him, pitiless.
Am I going to have to take care of you too, you little shit?
he’d asked. This man whose lap Jovi had napped in when he was smaller.
This man who usually ruffled his head and gave him extra dessert at the family table.
He had known it was Antonio, but that night, his uncle had looked like a monster.
Something out of the nightmares Jovi had thought he should have been too old to keep having. Or can I make you useful to me?
Jovi hadn’t said a word. He’d had blood in his mouth. His ears were ringing, but at least he couldn’t hear any more screaming. He’d wanted to cry.
He’d known better.
Smart kid, Antonio had said. Keep your mouth shut, unlike your stronzo father.
Then he’d kicked Jovi in the stomach, for good measure, before he’d had his men drag him out of the house.
They’d thrown him in the back of their car and had delivered him, unceremoniously, to his uncle’s house.
He’d been kept in a tiny room at the back, visited only by his angry aunt, and it hadn’t been until many years later that he’d realized his life had likely been in the balance that whole time.
It had only been after a few weeks of keeping Jovi locked away had his uncle decided that he would, in fact, create a secret weapon to unleash on his enemies. Before that, his nephew had been considered “missing”—and at any point, Antonio could have killed him, too.
That wasn’t a realization Jovi liked to revisit.
This was exactly why Jovi kept these things out of his head. This was why he had never let another human close to him, because closeness led to blood.
Though if he was entirely honest with himself, he doubted that there was any other person on earth who could have gotten to him like this, so far under his skin that he had no choice but to revisit…everything that had led him here. To her.
So he’d held Rux close in his bed, baffled that urge to do so seemed to be more a physical need than anything else.
He’d stared at the ceiling in this haunted place, and had been deeply pleased that he’d had the place stripped down.
He didn’t think he would have been able to handle the memories that poked at him if he hadn’t.
If his father’s books were still overflowing from their shelves.
If his mother’s paintings still graced the walls.
If his sisters’ toys were left as they had been, in and around the bin in their playroom—
Stop, he had ordered himself.
He had pushed the memories away—though he was aware, then, that they didn’t go anywhere. That he could no longer cut them off from himself. But instead of lingering on the implications of that, he had set about meticulously plotting out his next move.
And the one after that. And on and on, testing strategies in his head, throwing in different obstacles, and revising as he went.
But no matter how he’d approached the problem, he’d arrived at the same conclusion. There was only one way out of this. And he doubted very much that it would be anything but painful.
He hadn’t been surprised—maybe he was even proud—that Rux was worn out, so he’d let her keep sleeping. While she did, he’d slipped out of the bed, showered once again, and then tended to some business that he could not accomplish electronically.
It took the better part of the afternoon.
When he came back, he found her dressed in the clothes he’d torn off her in the garden. She was sitting out on the back steps, looking pensive.
“Where have you been?” she asked. She did not sound accusatory. Jovi almost wanted her to, so he could perhaps convince himself that she was just a woman like any other.
“Surely you’re hungry,” he said, instead of answering her question.
She looked up at him as if she was trying to read him and his instant response to that was to make himself impassive, a wall of blank stone, to keep her out. The way he kept everyone out.
It took a significant effort to stop doing that, and it made him…not exactly angry. He didn’t allow himself anger. But he didn’t wish to discover what else it could have been. He just knew he didn’t like it.
“You don’t always have to feed me, you know,” Rux told him with great seriousness, her gaze dark gray and deeply grave. “You don’t always have to tend to me like I can’t take care of myself.”
Jovi studied her. He liked the way the breeze played with her hair. He liked the way she curled around herself as she sat. “But I want to.”
He watched her melt in real time, and so it was a little longer, then, before he took her into the kitchen and satisfied himself by serving her the pasta he made and then insisted she eat until she was full.
First he had needed to taste her all over again, to be sure.
This was a pattern that repeated itself as the days passed, one into the next, like something from a dream. The sun was so bright. The sea beckoned from afar. The mountain rose strong and tall, and the birds sang them arias to while away their days.
It was almost like a holiday, if Jovi ignored the many things he was putting in place.
If he ignored the storm that drew closer to them by the moment, and was likely to eat them whole.
“How long do you think we have?” Rux asked one night, tucked up against him in bed.
Jovi had just taken her with a ferocity that should have shocked him, but this was his Rux. Whatever he brought to her, she met it and gave it back. She had teased him, and it had taken him a moment to understand both that she was teasing him—actually teasing him—and that he’d liked it.
But he had punished her all the same. He’d turned her over his lap, spanking her lightly to make her laugh. Then harder, to make her moan, before he’d thrown her over the side of the bed and taken her roughly from behind.
His reward for that had been the way she’d clenched all around him, trembling wildly and crying out her pleasure. And then again, when he’d flipped her over onto her sore ass and taken her again.
That was where they’d both discovered something he’d suspected all along. That what she really liked was discipline. That second time she’d started coming and hadn’t stopped, bright red everywhere with his name in her mouth while he’d pounded into her.
His beautiful Rux.
That ache in his chest hurt all the time now. He’d stopped concerning himself with it. If it was a mortal wound, he imagined it would have killed him by now. Like everything else that had tried, he intended to best it.
He didn’t pretend not to understand her question. How long do we have?
Both of them knew that whatever they were doing here, it was all on borrowed time. That fact—the truth of who he was and who she was and what that meant to people and organizations that extended far beyond a haunted old villa in Sicily—was inescapable.
And the longer they were not discovered, the more likely it was that when they were, the price they would pay for breaking all the rules would be that much higher.
He should have known that Rux was as keenly aware of this as he was.
“Your father is searching for you and he becomes more unhinged the longer it takes without any sign of you, as it reflects badly on his ability to control his little empire,” he told her, baldly.
“He has enlisted a number of unsavory individuals to aid him in his search, but while he first suspected that you ran off with one of your guards—”
“I hope I am never that much of a cliché,” Rux sniffed.
“—he has now come to think that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to your disappearance.”
He felt the pattern she was tracing across his chest, found her hand, and held it fast.
“This is because you didn’t do what you said you would do, isn’t it?” When he didn’t respond, she looked up at him. “Wasn’t I meant to beg and plead? Throw myself on his mercy? Make it all very clear what was happening?”
Things she had not done because she had cast her spell on him instead.
“Perhaps because he has been left to come up with his own theories, your father is starting to make wild accusations.” Jovi shrugged, though he was not nearly as unbothered as he wanted her to think. “This alone will cause him trouble.”
Her gaze seemed to pin him in place, as if she knew precisely how bothered they both were by the reality of their situation, no matter what they chose not to say to each other during their sleepy, sunny days. “He always thinks the Russians are after him. They never are.”
“More worrying is the inevitability that his search will make its way to Sicily,” he told her quietly. “And when.”
“Surely your uncle—”
But Jovi did not want to talk about his uncle. Not yet.
So he kissed her instead. He built up that heat.