14. Nicci
14
NICCI
M y thoughts feel so fragmented that it takes a moment for me to realize what’s happening. I turn as Savio runs from the room, startled out of my fog, and the noises from downstairs start to filter into my consciousness.
Shouts. The sound of boots against the wooden floor, heading for the stairs. Savio’s footsteps in the hall, heading to meet them. I know I should go out there, that I should help him. That I should defend us. I can shoot a gun now, fight back against someone trying to hurt me. But instead I stand there, frozen to the spot, fear flooding me until I can’t move or even really think.
Someone is attacking the house. Why, I don’t know—maybe it has to do with the Crows, or maybe it’s something else Savio has done, some other enemy that he didn’t tell me about. And why would he? I’m just a possession. Something he bought to use, to enjoy. I’m not a person to him.
A sudden sob clogs my throat, a shudder running through me. I haven’t had time to think about what happened behind the bar, in Savio’s car afterward. I haven’t had time to figure out why it’s making me feel this way, and now…
The crack of a gunshot tears through my racing thoughts. It spurs me into action, but not enough to rush out and try to help. I can’t make myself go further than the door, which Savio slammed closed behind him as he ran out into the hall. I can’t make myself open it. Instead, I flip the lock and retreat, shaking, tears starting to run down my face again as I ball myself up next to the far side of the bed, pulling my knees to my chest and wrapping my arms around them.
Make it stop. Just make it stop. The thought runs through my head, over and over. I hear another gunshot, another, and I press my forehead to my knees, shaking all over. I don’t know if I want Savio to survive this or not. If he’s dead, I might be free…but my father would find me. My brother might look for me. And who’s to say that whoever is downstairs wouldn’t take me for their own?
I want him dead, but I want to be the one to kill him.
I think, after what happened tonight, that we might just want to kill each other.
Pressing my hands over my ears, I try to push out the sounds of what’s happening downstairs. I hear another rattle of gunfire, a man’s hoarse cry, and what must be a body hitting the floor. More boots, slapping against wood, coming upstairs?—
Upstairs . I shrink against the bed, trying to make myself smaller, to hide away from what’s happening. From whoever is about to burst through that door?—
I hear the lock rattle. A man’s voice curses outside, rough and impatient. I hear the slam of his boot against the door, the wood cracking, and I hear a thin, high-pitched cry of fear. It takes me a moment to realize that it came from me.
The door crashes open, and I bolt up from where I’m sitting on instinct, looking for a place to run. The man coming through the door is tall and muscled, dressed in black fatigues, a gun in his hand. He comes straight for me, and I bolt to one side, trying to dart away from him, but he catches me easily with his arm around my waist.
“Gotcha,” he breathes into my ear. “The whore for both Valenti brothers now. Gotta say, I don’t usually fuck something so well used, but I think I’ll make an exception right now.”
That snaps me out of my terrified haze. I feel his other hand sliding down to the front of my jeans, and I twist in his grasp, one thought pounding through my head as all the training that I’ve gone through with Savio comes rushing back.
I will not let another man do this to me.
I’ll fucking kill him first. With my bare hands, if I need to, since I don’t have any other weapons. I drive an elbow back into his stomach, ramming it hard against the flat muscle there, and I throw my head back, slamming it against his face as I twist again in an effort to get free of him.
“You fucking cunt !” he screams it, and I see blood pouring from his nose as I wrench free. I close in on him again, slamming my knee into his groin as he tries to grapple me. I need to get to his gun. If I can get his gun out of his hand…
“Bitch,” he rasps, his arm wrapping around my neck, that same move that Savio used on me that I haven’t been able to figure out how to get out of yet. I try to slip out of it, but he’s bigger and stronger than I am, and he throws me down onto the bed, his arm tightening around my neck as his hand goes for the front of my jeans again.
I buck against him, bringing my leg up hard between his, and he grunts, shaking his head. “Stop fucking figh?—”
I never hear the rest of that sentence. A deafening crack sounds from the doorway, and suddenly there’s blood on me—on my face—and something thicker, too. I look up, horrified, and see part of the man’s jaw hanging free, blood and teeth and gore leaking from his face as he falls to one side, choking on his own blood.
“Nicci!” Savio’s voice comes from the doorway, and I clamber out from under the weight of the man’s body, flinging myself to the floor as nausea overwhelms me. I don’t have time to think about how Savio might feel about me throwing up in front of him. It rushes up, my heartbeat pounding in my ears. I double over, and I’m momentarily lost to the awful feeling rushing through me.
I’m jerked back to awareness when I feel Savio lifting me up from the floor. He puts an arm around me, and I realize he’s helping me toward the bathroom. I want to fight back, to tell him not to touch me, but it feels like all of the fight has drained out of me, along with the vomit on the floor.
“I’m going to get you cleaned up.” He pushes open the bathroom door and reaches for the snaps on my tank top, but there’s no lust in it the way there was earlier, in the car. He undoes my shirt carefully instead, strips off my jeans and my underwear, and tosses them to the floor. “Sit,” he instructs, moving me to the side of the tub, and goes to turn on the shower.
I wrap my arms around my waist, feeling myself start to tremble. I can’t stop thinking about all those nights at the Gilded Lily, all the men who got to speak to me, touch me, the way that man did. No one ever stopped them. I couldn’t stop them. But Savio stopped him—Savio saved me, and I both hate him for it and think I might…
I squeeze my eyes shut, stopping the thought before I can finish it. He saved me because that man was about to touch something that wasn’t his. Because Savio didn’t want his possession dirtied by another man. Not because he cares. But when Savio finishes adjusting the hot water and turns back to me, the look in his eyes is something that almost seems like caring.
It’s more intense. More frantic. He walks back to me quickly, dropping his gun on the counter as he looks down at me. “Are you hurt?” His hand touches my chin, lifts my face, his gaze raking over every inch of my naked body. “Are you hurt , principessa ?” he repeats it more urgently, the second time.
I jerk my hand away from his face. “If I am, it’s because you hurt me, back there.” It’s not entirely true. I’m sore from how roughly Savio fucked me, and I will be for a couple days, probably—but he didn’t really hurt me. I expect him to say something back, to reprimand me and remind me of how I’m owned , but he just frowns, looking me over again.
“He didn’t hurt you?”
Letting out a sigh, I shake my head. I’m too tired to keep talking about this. “No,” I say flatly, and Savio lets out a breath that sounds like relief.
He straightens, walking over to the linen closet to take out a towel, before looking at the hook next to the shower—seemingly realizing that there’s one there already. He holds the towel in his hands briefly before setting it down, and for that moment, he almost looks lost—like he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
I stare at him, running over the events of the night in my mind again. I’m struggling to come to terms with the fact that all of this happened in one night. It feels like it should have been three.
“What happened?” I manage. “Who was that man?”
“There were four of them.” Savio runs a hand over his face, and it’s only then that I see the blood speckled on his skin, that I realize there’s more of it on his clothes, too. “I killed three of them downstairs. The other one managed to get up here, to you.”
I shudder. “Because of the Crows?”
Savio shakes his head, reaching out to test the water again. “I don’t think any of them have the connections for something like this. This was different. I think it was…” He hesitates. “I have a feeling that it had something to do with Gallo’s mafia.”
I frown, confused. “Antony Gallo? What?—”
It comes back to me then, what I knew about Barca and his family. Barca’s father was a capo for Antony Gallo, I know that. He tried to lead a coup and failed. Barca survived and started his own gang, the Crows, trying to undermine Gallo and the other families. My father used that desire to make Barca believe he could make a play against Gallo with my father’s help—if he killed Evelyn and forced the marriage between Dimitri and me.
Of course, none of that worked out. Barca is dead now. I’m his brother’s prisoner. And now it seems that Savio is walking his brother’s former path in more ways than one.
“You can’t get mixed up with Gallo’s affairs,” I whisper. “He’s not—you can’t win that fight.”
All the tenderness flees from Savio’s expression, his face going cold and hard again, the face of the captor that I recognize. “Let me worry about what fights I can win, principessa ,” he growls. “Get cleaned up. I’ll come back to check on you when you’re done.”
I swallow hard, feeling suddenly, oddly bereft at his renewed iciness. I still haven’t come to terms with what happened between us earlier, which feels like a fever dream now, after everything else that’s happened. I was angry with him. Hurt. Angry with myself for wanting him so much, for being so utterly, completely willing while it was happening. Disgusted with myself, even, because for that brief span of time between when he kissed me and when he left me in the car afterwards, I wanted all of it.
Savio pauses at the door, looking back at me. “Whatever is happening,” he says slowly, “I won’t let anyone hurt you, Nicci. I’ll keep you safe.”
I stare at the door as he closes it, my pulse beating in my ears. He might be able to keep me safe from others, but he can’t keep me safe from himself.
And eventually, he won’t be safe from me, either.
—
I stay in the shower until it runs cold and my skin is pruned at the edges. When I come out, the room is clean, as if nothing ever happened. The bedding is changed. My clothes are gone. And the door is once again locked.
I go straight to the bed, sliding under the blankets and trying not to think of the weight of that man on top of me here, trying to erase it from my mind as I close my eyes. Thankfully, I’m so exhausted that sleep comes more easily than I expected. Before long, I’m completely insensible to everything, even my own dreams.
When I wake up, I can tell that it’s late in the morning. My breakfast is cold, but I eat it anyway. I both want Savio to make an appearance and take me to do something, and don’t want to see him, all at the same time. I have a feeling that he’s going to ignore what happened between us last night, and I don’t know if I can.
At the very least, I need something to throw myself into, instead. I need something else to focus on—because I don’t want to think about how it felt to have him inside of me. How—for those several minutes—I was his. I wasn’t fighting him.
When I hear the lock click open on the door, I feel a wave of mingled dread and relief. Savio walks in with my workout clothes, and it’s all relief then, knowing that I’m going to have an outlet for how I feel right now—even if it involves him.
He doesn’t say anything about how I cried last night, or how I defied him. Or how things nearly came to a breaking point for us before the penthouse was attacked. He doesn’t say anything about the attack itself. He just puts the clothes on the bed, silently, and leaves.
That silence stretches out between us all the way through practice at the range and the workout session. It’s punctuated only by Savio’s flat, insistent orders to repeat the routine he puts me through over and over again. And then he takes me back to the penthouse.
It’s like that for three days. He barely says a word to me, and the ones he does say all have something to do with training. There’s no mention of what happened that night at all, and no mention of what comes next. But clearly, since my training regimen hasn’t let up, our deal isn’t off.
I throw myself into it fully. Everything else that happened that night aside, I’m ashamed of myself for faltering, for being so terrified that I crumpled and hid. It feels as if all the training Savio gave me before went to waste, that I was barely able to defend myself against the one man who barged into my room, that I couldn’t fight back the way I wanted to. I panicked, and I’m determined not to let that happen again.
I want to be strong enough to fight back, no matter what, no matter who it is. Whether it’s a Crow, or my family, or Gallo’s men, or Savio himself…I don’t want to fail a second time. So I practice, over and over again, pushing myself beyond what feels possible for me to do. Even when I’m drenched in sweat and my muscles are screaming, I keep going, and it feels like an outlet. Like something to lose myself in, so I can block out everything else.
This, and my revenge. Two men down. That’s what I try to focus on. After the workout on the third day, Savio finally speaks to me for more than just instructions, showing me a list of names.
Francis Novak. Martin Torres. Vince Rivera. These are the three remaining men that Savio’s aware of who both worked for Barca and are here in Manhattan.
“I remember Francis and Martin,” I tell him, my throat tight. I try to keep space between us as I look at the names; after what happened a few nights ago, I don’t want to be too close. He sparred with me yesterday during our workout, and every brush of his body against mine reminded me of his hand on my neck, his hand between my legs, his body thrusting into mine. It made me ache and made me angry all at once, and I almost managed to win our sparring session—for once. “They were friends. If they still are, we might find them at the same time.”
“And Vince?” Savio taps the name, and I swallow hard.
“He was one of Barca’s enforcers. He’s dangerous. We should go after him next, in case word starts getting out that the former Crows are starting to disappear.”
Savio looks at me keenly. “That’s smart,” he says after a moment, and the compliment startles me. Even more so because he doesn’t follow it up immediately with a command or a remark meant to remind me of my place.
Back at the penthouse a little while later, in the shower, it all comes rushing back—just like it has every time I’m alone for the last three days—which is most of the time. I can’t stop thinking of the look in Savio’s eyes when I said his name after he shot Marco, the desperate, hungry need there, that moment when I saw the taut thread of his self-control snap. I can’t stop thinking about how it felt when he kissed me, most of all.
No one has ever kissed me like that—devouring, needy, like he needed to kiss me in order to breathe. It’s the kind of kiss that I used to fantasize about, and it makes me angry that it was him who finally kissed me that way…and it makes me ache to feel it again. Every time he comes into the room, I feel myself tense, wondering if he’ll come to me like that again. If he’ll grab me, devour me, fuck me until it’s all I can feel or think about.
But he’s barely spoken to me since then, let alone touched me, not even to punish instead of pleasure. And every time I think about it—I’m torn. Between arousal at the memory of how good it felt and an inexplicable, ridiculous feeling of hurt that he was so rough with me. That makes me angry, every time I feel it, because that’s worse than me wanting him. Being shocked that he would be that rough with me, hurt by it, even, is stupid.
And I thought I stopped being stupid over men a long time ago.