Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DARIA
T he door to Papà’s office is swinging shut and I can see the new cook inside. I smash myself between the door and latch onto the handle.
“Move, Ria,” Papà barks right into my face.
“No!” I scream. “Per favore, don’t do this.”
His face contorts in rage, and he shoves me away, but my hold on the handle is too strong. I think. I still stumble and crash onto the floor when his ringed finger smacks me across the face.
My breath hitched, and I woke up with a gasp. Unfamiliarity hugged me from the dark. It was cold, and it was sharp, and it shot straight into my heart. I shook my head to rid myself of it.
I was hot, and my bladder called for a release. For the second time in a row, I woke up disoriented in a room that wasn’t mine, with a heavy weight on top of me. Green and red dots flickered in the room. A clock? A light switch? Time evaded me like a childhood memory as my bladder made me fight through the haze that bridged a bad dream and sleep. I pushed the weight on my body off and tried to crawl out of bed, only to be jerked back by something soft but firm.
“ Minchia! ” A hiss escaped me as I groped around in the near darkness. Warm skin, dusting of hair, rough scruff…
“ Minchia! ” Did he just suck on my finger? It burned like a heatwave, and a feeling I didn’t know rushed through my veins.
“Where do you think you’re off to?” A rasping voice cut through the dark.
“Where am I?”
“New York.”
That’s wasn’t what I had meant. But I needed to pee, and it was the middle of the night. I tugged my arm again, but it stayed fixed to what? I traced my arm to my wrist and found something smooth and silky wrapped around it. “Argghh.” I tugged harder.
“You planning to dislocate your arm?”
“Something’s around my wrist!” Panic caught on my throat. Rattlesnakes in our garden painted a chilling picture around my wrist, and I tugged harder.
“Woo…it’s just my tie, Principessa .”
Tie? “What’s your tie doing around my wrist?” My thoughts collided together, trying to catch up like a block of dominos. “Did you just… tie me… to a… bed… with your tie?”
“Yes.”
My eyes squinted and adjusted to the dark slowly. Outlines. Especially of him, lying on his back.
“Is this like a Martello thing?” A kink? Did his father tie his mother up?
“It’s a you sleep in my bed , kind of thing.”
He didn’t make sense. I had fallen asleep on my bed…
“Can you untie me now? I need to use the toilet.” I blushed. Thank God it was too dark for him to see. But it was weird to tell a stranger I needed to pee.
“If you promise to come back.” His lazy drawl wrapped around me.
“Yeah, yeah.” I was an excellent liar. As long as I didn’t have to look them in the eye.
A dim orange glow filtered into the room. I blinked. He looked more naked than the last time. Darkness, in combination with a naked man, was a first. The subtle light illuminated him and me and wrapped like an ozone layer around us.
“Tell me that again?”
Nerves crawled into the room on all fours and smacked me on my face. His eyes soft, warm, and hazel, were focused on mine. He almost looked soft. Kind even. I couldn’t keep up with this man’s moods, even if I wanted to. Good thing I didn’t.
“Please.” I yanked my arm and jiggled on my knees. “I really need to pee.”
His hand wrapped around my wrist, warm and light like the comfort of heat on a blistering night. “So, promise me.”
Medda! It was like the man wanted me to pee on his bed. The thought alone had me shifting on my knees again.
“I promise,” I muttered right before he untied me, and I dashed to his toilet to empty my bladder.
I washed my hands in his sink. Glossy marble, of course, with veins that matched perfectly and with taps that sparkled more than the glitz on a disco ball. It was all clean and organized. Small, neat white towels rolled up. Even the luxury soap was centered in the middle of the soap dish. If I took a ruler, I would find them to be the exact same number of inches on either side, I was sure of it. It was like he lived in a hotel rather than a home. So, of course, I left the soap on the sink and dropped the used towel on the floor, even though the bin underneath the vanity called out for it.
Disorientation loomed over me when I stepped out. The light next to his bed was still on, and he lay on his bed with his hands behind his head and one leg folded. His eyes touched my naked toes, trailed up to my shorts, halted at my chest, and sparked up to my face. I shuffled on my feet. I didn’t like the way he looked at me. He made me uncomfortable. Like I might have peed my pants or something. I looked longingly at the door leading to the hallway, but the gaze burning a hole in my face told me that was going to be a bad idea. So I reluctantly padded up to bed, got under the duvet, and lay down curled up into a ball and away from him.
The light flicked off. I gathered my courage in the dark.“Can’t we have one of those marriages where we have separate bedrooms?” I muttered.
His response was instant. Like he hadn’t even thought of words before it left his mouth. “No.”
It was the not-open-to-discussion voice that Papà used when that was all the explanation I was going to get.
But he wasn’t Papà. “Why not?”
“Because that’s not how marriages work.”
“Well, you already cheated on me.”
I felt the wrath of his anger coagulating on my back. It scraped my spine like a hot needle on silk.
“I slept with that fucking woman before I met you.”
“Let’s see how long it takes for you to fuck the next one then.”
The moment my words fell on the room, I knew they were too much. Too soon. It was all wrong. These were the types of words that got a woman slapped. Shoved into a corner. Kicked. My malicious words hung tight, like a foul smell without a ventilator. No amount of opening windows was going to get this out.
“ Jesus, ” he hissed, and the word almost whizzed out of his lips in a growl.
I waited for more, but only silence followed. He didn’t contradict me. He didn’t whip me around and slap me. He didn’t yell or shove me off the bed. He did none of that. His actions were abrupt and bizarre. He wrapped his palm around my crotch, pulled me towards him, and tucked himself around me. Shock froze me. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. Awkward. His hand burned where it was. His heart beat against my spine. Not mad, but like the calm sound of a one-beat drum. My breath, his. My breath, his. There was no way I could sleep like this. The stillness of the room drove me crazy. I’d do anything to hear the blast of a siren somewhere, but all I heard was my breath, his. My breath, his.
I must have fallen asleep. When my eyes opened, light streamed in through the windows, and there was no heat around me. I flopped on my back to an empty room. A glance at the clock told me it was six o’clock. That meant it was noon at home.
I did a slow bed angel as I imagined Mamma going about the house, Vitale going in and out of meetings, Lia having lunch, Orietta well… she didn’t live with us anymore, so I had no idea what she was up to. Was she happy with her husband? She had looked like it, even though she said she barely tolerated him. But when she thought no one was looking, she got this glazed look in her eyes and it looked suspiciously like how Divya looked when she talked of Antonio. I didn’t really know how Orietta went from hating every man to that. Maybe it was an idea to call her up and ask. Maybe I should try? To do what? To have him smash my heart like it was glass when he fucked the very next woman? I wasn’t going to be Mamma.
I froze mid-angel when awareness burned me. He was framed in the doorway. My family was always neatly dressed up in suits and ties. This man, if he wore one, it looked more like he was on the way to removing it than donning it. Today, he hadn’t bothered at all. No suit or tie were in the picture. A black T-shirt and black jeans. Heat rushed to my face when my eyes followed to where they wrapped around him, bulging and marking everything out. I forced my eyes to climb up to his face and found something soft painted across it.
His eyes trailed my open legs to my crotch and touched me with memories of his hand there before gliding up slowly, inch by inch, to my face. Is this what they mean by the seduction of the eye? No fucking way was he seducing me.
I sat up and wrapped my hands around my legs. I didn’t like it, and there was no way he was getting inside me.
“I’m going to be away the whole day,” he muttered darkly as he strode over to the nightstand, took his wristwatch, and slapped it around his thick wrist.
Disappointment grazed my chest. It wasn’t that I wanted him around, but the thought of being alone the whole day in this metal chest was disheartening.
His face softened at my sigh. “What?”
“I want to call my family,” I muttered.
I must have imagined that softness, because it vanished off his face like the gray smoke he puffed out. “So?”
I rocked on my heels. Cosa Nostra put women down constantly. They made us rely on our men, so we were trapped. We didn’t have jobs, we didn’t have independence. Everything we wanted we had to get from the men to whom we were tied, with a silk tie on our wrist or cold clasp of metal on our throat.
“I don’t have an international connection to call, do I?” Mamma must have been going mad with worry and driving Vitale up the wall.
“Fuck! I’m so sorry, Principessa. You can use Ciro’s one. I’ll get you a number today.”
“Thanks.” I guess. The asshole should have realized that I might want to talk to my family, or was he going to keep me locked up here the whole time?
My eyes followed him suspiciously as he walked around his side of the bed to mine. I jerked back when he stopped beside me. Too close. The thick fabric of his jeans brushed my shoulder. A rough thumb on my cheek, like velvet stroked the wrong way, sent ripples through my skin. “I’ve arranged for Stefano to take you out today. Do some sightseeing, s ì ?”
And he said this wasn’t marriage. It sounded like marriage to me when he handed over his burden to another man so he could go and do whatever he wanted to do. I let my eyes slide tightly shut. I wasn’t going to take that path.