12. Cassandra
12
CASSANDRA
“ C assy, I was so worried!”
My mom’s familiar voice washes over me like a soft blanket, so far removed from everything else I’ve had to deal with this evening. It’s almost jarring to hear it bouncing around the guest room.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur into my newly-charged phone.
It had taken a while to convince Donatella to bring me the power cord, and even longer to scroll through the hundreds of messages Mia had left me. But finally, curled up in the safety of my bed, I’d hit the call button to talk to my mom.
“Mia said you just disappeared, and Claudio won’t pick up the phone!”
I cringe a little at the sound of his name. “It’s…we broke up, Mom. I’m staying with a friend for a bit.”
The lie isn’t an easy one, but there is no other logical way to explain myself. I suppose we had broken up; it wasn’t as if our relationship could ever recover from him selling me to the mafia and me calling him out for being a coward.
Even if the words hadn’t technically been said out loud.
“Which friend?”
Describing Rocco Moretti as a “friend” felt completely ridiculous. “Captor” might have been better, but I suppose after what I agreed to at dinner, “colleague” might be more appropriate.
Although aligning myself with the Italian Mafia was a surefire way to get my mother on the next plane to Brooklyn.
“I don’t think you know them,” I scramble for a name. “Donatella?”
“Is she looking after you?”
My mind flashes back to the near-screaming match we had over the dress I’d had to wear for dinner. “In her own way.”
“I never liked that man. I told you that from the very start.” Mom sighs. “You should come home. I can send you the money for the flight.”
How different my life might have been if I’d only listened to her adVitale back then, instead of acting like a lovesick fool. “It’s okay, honestly. Work is going well. I’m finally starting to get noticed.”
By the Italian don wanting revenge on my boyfriend. I don’t add that part.
“Cassy…”
It’s the pitying note to her voice that gets to me. My eyes prickle with tears. I know what she’s going to say next, even if I don’t want to hear it.
“I know how much you wanted to meet your father.”
I blink hard. “He doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Cas.”
It had been the world’s cruelest prank. I’d boarded that plane to Brooklyn after seventeen years of wondering if I would ever know my father, only to arrive in his city, days away from meeting him again, and then to receive the news.
Carmine Bellini, died by suicide.
I couldn’t mourn a man I didn’t know. And yet, the news had been heavier than I had expected it to be. Perhaps that was because I’d been so close to finding out everything I had ever wondered.
Why had he let my mother go? Why had he never tried to contact me? Did he care about us? Did he think about us at all?
Was it his guilt that had killed him?
Was it somehow my fault?
It was part of why I’d been so quick to agree to Claudio’s offer to come out here. But even that had backfired in my face.
“It sucked,” I admit quietly to the only woman who could possibly understand the kind of grief I’m dealing with, “but he’s just the man who gave me a bit of genetic material. You’re my mom. That’s all I need.”
My memories of Carmine are spliced with photos my mom kept lying around. There’s nothing solid or concrete to them at all. It’s all just a haze of ideas and projections that I can barely grasp onto.
“I know, baby.” My mother sighs again. “I’m just sorry that nothing is how you expected it to be.”
She could say that again. “Listen, it’s getting late. I just wanted you to know that I’m okay. I’ll call you again in a few days, all right?”
“You just say the word, baby, and I’ll fly out there.”
“I know.” I smile fondly at my phone. It’s nice that some things haven’t changed. “I love you.”
“Love you too, Cassy.”
An eerie silence falls over the room when I hang up. No sirens, no drunken revelers walking the streets, no tourists squealing outside my window. We may as well be a thousand miles away from Brooklyn.
Where the hell is this house?
I lie back in bed and try to settle into the quiet, desperate to ignore the demanding thoughts coursing through my brain.
I’d flirted with him. He’d asked for my help, and I’d offered to suck his cock.
What the hell was I thinking? I’d meant it as a joke…but…
Lying low to help out a criminal organization was one thing, but to make those demands had been a moment of sheer insanity.
Yes, I’d been worried about money. Yes, I’d been sick of everyone lying to me all the time. But all rational thought had apparently evaporated the moment he looked at me like…
Like I was something too precious for him to touch. As if my situation made me vulnerable and scared. As if he was somehow too honorable to besmirch my dignity.
The man who’d come home with another man’s blood on his shirt. And made a joke about it.
The hypocrisy is almost baffling.
Every time I think about it, I come back to the question: where the hell does Rocco Moretti’s morality lie? Because he simply can’t be both the savior of broken women and the breaker of men.
Can he?
I groan as I toss over to my other side. Maybe I’m just overcomplicating everything. Maybe he just wants me to play along with his little schemes without a fuss. Would he have really let me leave if I’d said no?
Where would I even go?
He had said Ohio. My mother wants me to go home. But do I want that? I’ve been here for two weeks, and it’s already been two weeks full of more chaos than I’ve ever endured. Is it worth sticking around in the hope that one day I’ll sing on that stage again?
That one day, I might know what happened to my father?
I shake the the thought from my mind and toss over again.
I got dealt a shitty hand, that’s what Rocco had said. I played my cards, and this is the result. I got myself here, and now I won’t be able to leave for the foreseeable future. That was my choice.
Maybe that could be a good thing. Maybe I should start trying to live with that.
Maybe I could stop pretending that Rocco isn’t sleeping three doors down from me.
I’m not sure he has any idea what he does to me. I’m not sure I feel anything more for him than pure, carnal attraction. To my dismay, none of those feelings had changed as I watched him at dinner, despite everything I know now.
But if I have to sleep just down the hall from him for the next three months, it’s going to take everything within me not to kick down his door impulsively and demand he make good on his threats to fuck me.
As if I don’t have enough to deal with, trying to curb my rampant arousal whenever he’s around is quickly turning into a full-time occupation. It’s infuriating and so fucking frustrating.
My thighs squeeze together in the hopes of that pounding lust subsiding. But it feels so impossible.
Because he’s right there. Right outside my door, down the corridor fourteen paces, the first door on the left.
Maybe I could just go and see if he’s still awake.
Maybe I could just…
Fuck it.
I get out of bed and fly toward the door.
It’s late, he’s asleep. Nothing will happen. I just want to see if…
I stop dead.
There, standing in the hall, staring at my door, is Rocco.
The darkness masks his face, but I can see by the way his shoulders rise and fall that he’s breathing deeply.
“Cas,” his voice is low, almost gravely. “Get back in your room.”
“Why?”
The tension between us thickens. That unspoken thing between us lashes out, hungry, predatory.
He steps closer, and a strip of moonlight illuminates his face. I almost gasp.
“Because I’m about three seconds away from pushing you through those doors and fucking you until you scream.”
That look, that darkness in his eyes, spells only one thing. Everything seems to click in place. It’s not just me. He feels it, too, is being driven mad by it.
It would take nothing at all, and the release that had been building within me for days would finally subside. I could finally think straight. I could finally…
“Then why are your clothes still on?”
The invitation is out of my mouth before I can talk myself out of it.
Rocco wastes no time. He stalks forward, arms encapsulating me as he picks me straight off the floor.
I gasp, not at the firmness of his touch or the electricity that seems to bounce off his skin, but at how hard his crotch is as it presses into mine. It feels so fucking good. My legs instantly wrap around his waist, pulling him in closer.
He hisses in my ear as he carries us back into my room, back onto the bed. He throws me down carelessly, and I whimper at the lack of contact with his body.
In the darkness of the room, I can barely make out his silhouette.
“You think you could just sit there in that fucking dress,” his voice vibrates across my skin as his hands spread open my legs, “and torment me like that?”
I can’t answer as his deft hands hoist up the skirt of my dress and begin to massage my inner thighs. I squirm under his touch, nudging him further toward the place I want him to be.
“Were you trying to lure me here, Angioletta? Is this at your discretion?”
His hands disappear, and I look for him frantically. A dark shadow looms over me as if he is contemplating exactly how he wants to take me.
I’d been too brash at dinner, antagonizing him like that. Now he’s making me wait as some kind of cruel revenge.
“Please, Rocco,” I beg the shadow before me. “Don’t you want to feel how wet I am?”
I begin to rub at the thin material of my panties to prove my point, gasping at the delightful friction I can create with little effort.
Rocco slaps my hand away. It’s a sharp movement that I barely have time to register before he’s lying between my legs.
“Were you this wet at dinner?”
I can’t think as his breath tickles along my thigh.
“If I’d dipped below the table, would you have welcomed me then and there?”
He nips at my upper thigh, and I yelp in pleasure.
“Would you have spread your legs like this for me?”
His teeth nip along my skin, closer and closer to…
“Fuck!” I gasp as he reaches my panties.
I shamelessly push myself into his face, quivering as his nose presses into me, as his hands reach around me to firmly grasp my ass, keeping me there.
I feel more than see his jaw move as he licks all the way up the soaked panties.
Nothing has ever tormented me like this before.
“Take them off,” I gasp out once the stars have subsided from my vision.
“As you wish.”
It’s a fluid, well-practiced movement. I hear a tearing sound, and then suddenly, I’m lying before him entirely exposed.
“Your dress.” his voice is low and smooth as honey as a hand reaches out to pull at the measly tie at my waist. It instantly falls off my shoulders and pools at my waist.
Revealing my bare chest.
I don’t know if he pauses to admire me, because the next thing I feel is his mouth enclosing my hardened nipple. Never could I have imagined something like that feeling so good.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he hisses between tugging at the sensitive peak with his teeth. I cry out at the delightful twinge of pain, and in response, he soothes it over with a careless lash of his tongue.
It’s almost enough to make me come undone right then and there.
But the draw of my exposed sex proves too irresistible. I’ve barely recovered before he ducks further down, planting lurid kisses on every piece of skin he encounters. It’s all teeth and tongue and sucking and fuck!
He reaches my clit with unceremonious enthusiasm. Like a man starved of food, he relentlessly lathers me in his spit before sucking greedily at my core. As if I wasn’t wet enough.
The sensation courses through me like a freight train. Every molecule in my body feels like it’s on fire, and he licks and licks and sucks and sucks.
The pleasure within me builds and builds with every filthy lap of his tongue. It’s almost too much, but then it’s suddenly not. I squirm in desperation as my pleasure begins to plateau.
“More,” I cry out as I try to chase my pleasure. “I need you.”
“You mean here?”
That cruel, spiteful tongue licks the entire length of my sex before plunging into me.
I must scream because a hand clasps around my mouth. I take his fingers between my lips without thinking as I rock up and down his tongue, riding the newfound wave of pleasure coursing through me.
“Yes, yes!”
Suddenly, his hand disappears from my mouth. His two spit-soaked fingers encircle my entrance, and within seconds, he buries them inside me.
The pressure building within me finds its release, my orgasm bursting from my lips as his fingers work me harder and harder. That cruel, cruel tongue never gives my clit a moment of respite as he coaxes my pleasure on and on until I’m completely and utterly spent.
By the time I come to my senses again, I can barely breathe. With shaking hands, I prop myself up on the bed to survey the damage.
Just as the bedroom door closes behind Rocco’s retreating figure.