13. Dante
Chapter 13
Dante
“Y ou’re burning.”
“I’m not burning.”
“You are.” I can’t help but reach out to snap the strap of her bathing suit. “Right under there.”
“You just want to ogle me like a creep while you put sunscreen on my back.”
“I was trying to be gentlemanly, but apparently, your sexually deviant ways are rubbing off on me.”
“Say that again, Grasso, and I will rub you off the wrong way,” Carmen snaps, but she reaches for the sunscreen anyway.
The week of distance helped. It put things into perspective, like how much I really enjoy having my balls attached to my body. Remembering how much fucking this up with Carmen would screw over the war effort when Rocco’s reports keep getting bleaker.
It also had the unintended side effect of a tentative truce settling between us. Neither of us wants to deal with the consequences of overstepping again.
But neither of us is quite ready to leave the other alone entirely.
Hence why we’re both lounging by the pool on one of my rare afternoons off from meeting with the Grasso di Ferro or avoiding Rina’s invitations to dinner.
I'm not entirely sure why we’re both flirting so outrageously that I have to keep checking my mother isn’t in earshot. But it’s Carment’s fault.
I take up the sunscreen and slowly begin to rub it into her shoulders. Carmen’s tan skin is smooth to the touch, brighter now with a week’s near-constant sunlight.
Her hair is piled up on the top of her head so that she can read without it falling into her eyes. I’d gifted her a more traditional Italian phrase book earlier this week.
If I spend a little too long massaging her shoulders, it’s only because she started it. I almost dropped my coffee when she’d waltzed into the sun room in her little bathing suit and declared we would be swimming.
“Mmmm…” she groans sinfully under the pressure of my fingers.
“Does that feel good, princess?”
“ Fuck me .”
I pull away with a smirk. “I’d love to.”
“Careful, Dante. You’ll need another week to cool off if you keep riling yourself up like this.”
It’s a game of chicken that’s been going on for days now. And I’ve never been one to enjoy losing.
I drop my hands to her waist and hoist her bodily up into the air, earning me a shriek of indignation. Her body flails helplessly against mine as I maneuver us toward the edge of the pool.
“I think there are better ways to cool off, don’t you?”
“Dante! No. Wait, wait, wait. Don’t you DARE!”
But I’ve already taken that final step, damning us both to the fall.
Our bodies break through the cool water in synchronization, and for a moment, Carmen’s cries are wonderfully muted below the surface. But then a pair of arms wrap around my neck and pull me back up.
“I’m going to murder you.”
“You said that before, but I’m still waiting for you to follow through.”
Carmen wriggles through the water until she manages to wrap herself around my back. “Maybe I was just waiting for an opening.”
“I’ve given you plenty of?—”
But my words are cut off by her dunking me ferociously back under the water. Her hands pushing down hard on my head as I try to snatch her off me. We wrestle for a moment, half gasping for air, half laughing at the other’s attempts to get the upper hand.
Several minutes later finds us panting and wrapped up in each other—locked in a mutually destructive embrace.
“You son of a bitch,” she hisses, though the smile on her face softens the blow of her words. Water caresses her cheeks and accumulates in her long lashes. It’s all completely distracting.
My answering grin is interrupted by a curt voice.
“Signore Grasso.”
I look up to find Pierre standing at the edge of the pool, his face a mask of professional indifference.
“There is someone here for you,” he continues.
Reluctantly, I disentangle myself from Carmen and try to look collected as I pull myself out of the pool. A sinking feeling settles in as I realize that the only person who’s deigned to visit me personally so far has been Rina.
“Tell them to wait in the foyer,” I instruct as I reach for a towel. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Since when have you had the balls to tell me what to do?”
My head whips around to the new voice in shock. My mind is not quite able to comprehend what my eyes are seeing.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Rocco Moretti walks down the final few steps toward the pool, hands in his pockets, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Like he’s not supposed to be an ocean away, fighting a war.
“I thought I told you not to get a tan, you bastard.” Rocco drops into an easy smile as he approaches, peering over his sunglasses.
I catch his arm and greet him with a familiar shake. “The hell are you doing here?”
“Fancied a piece of paradise for myself.” He shrugs, careless with the lie as his eyes hone in on the other occupant of the pool. “It seems Miss Rubio is certainly taking advantage of it.”
“ Dickhead. ”
“Learning the language, too.” Rocco’s eyes flash dangerously to mine. “It seems imprisonment suits Miss Rubio a little too well, don’t you think, Dante?”
My jaw clenches. He’s right to call me out like this. I know how bad this looks. Had I more time to prepare, I would have made an effort to at least pretend I was keeping Carmen under some form of incarceration.
There was no real defense for this, and the accusation in Rocco’s eyes is entirely warranted. I am being lenient on her. I am taking advantage of my position to relax the rules. I am being influenced by my selfish desires.
“Nothing wrong with a little recreational exercise.” The smile on my face is a farce, and we all know it. “Carmen, why don’t you head back to your cell? Pierre, would you be so kind as to show Miss Rubio the way?”
“Excuse me?”
It was a mistake to break Rocco’s knowing glare to glance back at Carmen.
The water that now trickled from her curls did very little to quench the fire of her evident rage. Worse now is the fact that she’s exited the pool, and her generous curves are on full display, leaving so very little to the imagination.
Her hands go straight to her hips, jaw jutting out in glorious defiance. She’s radiant as the sun. God, the sun suits her so well. It is as if it was created entirely to show the world just how beautiful Carmen Rubio is.
And fuck it all. I would take her right here and now if I had a shred less self-respect.
Then Rocco clears his throat and everything comes crashing back to reality.
“I think you heard me,” I say before nodding at Pierre. “Be sure that Miss Rubio finds her clothes on the way down.”
I force myself to turn away from her, gesturing for Rocco to join me out in the courtyard, dutifully ignoring the curses that tumble out of Carmen’s mouth in a sacrilegious mixture of Spanish and Italian.
Rocco stares after her as he takes a seat, eyebrow raised, mouth pressed into a thin line. We wait in a moment of tense silence until the doors close behind Carmen and Pierre.
“Please tell me you’re not…”
“I’m not.”
“Forgive me for being skeptical, but I know you, Dante. There’s a beautiful woman in your house and you’ve been stuck in here for over a month.”
“I resent that,” I snap back. “But if you’re implying what I think you’re implying, then you can rest assured that it’s entirely impossible. Even if I did, hypothetically speaking, have any inclination, which I don’t …”
“She hates your guts,” Rocco thankfully concludes for me, visibly relaxing back into the seat. “This is messy. I’m not going to sit here and pretend you’re not playing with fire.”
“You shouldn’t be sitting here at all, actually. Why the hell are you here and not in Brooklyn?”
Rocco sighs then, running a hand through his hair. “They’ve got Mia.”
Despite the heat of the afternoon, my blood immediately begins to run cold.
“What do you mean? Mia is one of the best of us. They wouldn’t have just caught her on a whim. I didn’t think Leon was even letting her out in the field.”
But the fiery redhead was as stubborn as her husband. If she’d found a way she could have made a difference in the outcome of the war, she would have taken it with or without his permission.
Rocco’s expression only confirms my suspicion. “She was undercover for a while. The intel she got us was invaluable. Not even Leon could justify keeping her on the sidelines. We don’t know exactly when or how she was compromised, but…”
“You need Carmen back to negotiate with,” I realize with a pang of something closer to fear. Strange as it was, it hadn’t taken me long to get used to the idea that we would be here for months. To have that time suddenly cut short…
But Rocco is shaking his head. “I just need evidence that Carmen is still alive.”
My brain short circuits. “That…that doesn’t make any sense. Surely Amos is desperate to get his daughter back? Why else would he take his rival’s wife captive unless to make the trade?”
“Unless Mia is more valuable to him off the board,” Rocco counters with a grimace. “It’s Leon that’s doing the negotiating here. I need evidence that Carmen is alive so that Amos has an incentive to keep Mia alive. He’s not interested in getting his daughter back yet.”
Objectively speaking, I can see that Amos has gained the upper hand here. No doubt Mia was making things difficult for him, and it wasn’t like Carmen could do anything for the Cartel beyond her betrothal to his closest ally.
But Carmen was his daughter.
Why wasn’t he moving heaven and hell to get her back?
* * *
Carmen didn’t acknowledge me as Rocco took the photos and collected the hair samples—entirely overkill, but Leon wasn’t messing around when it came to Mia.
In fact, beyond monotonously reading out the script for the video, she didn’t say a word to either of us, silently doing as she was told and returning to the dungeon when we were done.
At least Rocco seemed content in the knowledge that her obvious loathing of me had no means of escalating into something romantic. He said as much as he departed the castle the next day.
“It suits you, you know?” Rocco says as an afterthought, already one foot in the car he’s supposed to be leaving in. “This place.”
I follow his gaze up to the architectural wonder that is the face of the Iron Castle and can’t help but marvel a little at it, too.
“I’m not sure I’d ever be able to leave,” Rocco muses before throwing one last wave over his shoulder.
I stand and watch as his car drives through the front gates and linger a moment longer, something stirring deep within me that I’m not sure how to confront.
It takes a nearby songbird to pull me from my reverie, and I force myself to relax again. Rocco has gone. There’s nothing to suggest Leon needs us back so soon. Everything can go back to normal now.
Normal? Since when has staying here felt like the norm?
I shake the thought away as I beeline for the dungeons. An odd sense of excitement haunts my every step despite knowing, logically, that I’m about to pay dearly for my disrespect in front of Rocco.
When I arrive, Carmen is sitting motionlessly on the bed, pointedly ignoring my existence even as I unlock the cell door.
“He’s gone.”
She says nothing.
“Carmen. He’s gone.” I wait a moment to see if she’ll look at me. She doesn’t. “You know I couldn’t be seen being lenient on you. They would get the wrong idea.”
“And what idea is that, exactly?”
Her sharp words make me bristle with irritation. “You and I both know that this will not end well. We can’t be anything to each other.”
“Okay, fine.” Her caramel eyes are blazing. “I just didn’t expect that I would be nothing to you either.”
“You forget your place, Carmen. I care for you, but you are still my ward. You are my prisoner. ”
The word rings out between us, deafening, despite the fact I never raised my voice.
Finally, she lets out a huff. “I don’t think I ever realized just how selfish you were.”
“Let's go back to your room.” I refuse to let her get under my skin and open the door to the cell wider.
She doesn’t move.
“You have no idea, do you?” her voice oozes with condescending ire. “How lucky you are? That you have friends like Moretti, a family that will welcome back its prodigal son with open arms.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You’re right, I don’t. Because your mother dreams only of your happiness and how she might help you prosper. Whereas my father demands my hair instead of my presence, too concerned with a war I was never supposed to be a part of.”
I stare at her blankly. She knows. Of course, she does.
“Your mother loves you. Yet all you do is throw it back in her face like it’s some kind of inconvenient joke,” Carmen laughs humorlessly. “What I wouldn’t give for someone to care for me like that.”
Finally, she stalks forward, unwavering as she presses close enough for our chests to touch. She examines me for a moment, and I refuse to back down from her scrutiny.
“You’re an ungrateful, selfish little man, Dante Grasso,” she whispers like a curse before pulling back sharply. “I can find my own room.”
All I can do is catch my breath as she leaves me alone to my own self-loathing.