Chapter 23 Kitty
TWENTY-THREE
KITTY
NINE DAYS LATER
Playlist recommendation:
Snooze - SZA
Associating safety with the man who’d put me in danger in the first place aggravated the hell out of me.
Talk about a riot.
Bodily autonomy got thrown out the window, alongside common sense and critical thinking skills, as I had no sway in the matter.
Sleeping without him was the biggest no-no.
Hence…
I let loose a scream, my body jerking into wakefulness at the same time, and I instinctively knew that he’d left the bed at some point.
It was why I screamed.
Of course, he came running a few seconds later, almost flying across the bed like goddamn Superman, and he immediately drew me into his embrace. And I didn’t complain. His touch was poison, but also the only antidote.
So, I tucked myself tighter into him. Getting into his skin wouldn’t be enough.
“It’s okay, Kitty. You’re safe!”
The shadows, the blood, the fear—the bad dream swept around me, churning me in its turbulent waters, until I felt as if I were drowning.
Until drowning seemed as if it’d provide the ultimate relief.
His words finally pierced the rushing in my ears. “I’m not safe!” I hissed at him around tears. “And it’s your fault!”
He tensed as he always did when I snapped at him after a nightmare, but he took it. Sat in my accusation. Absorbed it.
His lips brushed over my forehead. “I know.”
“How are you the reason I’m in danger but you’re the only one that makes me feel safe?” I sobbed.
The only thing that ever calmed me down was when he held me.
The only thing that staved off the nightmares was when we shared a mattress.
My frailty humiliated me.
It was also impractical because Stan, I’d come to learn, had insomnia. Worse than that, he slept in chunks. But my subconscious didn’t give a shit. It wanted him glued to me for eight solid hours a night.
I hated it even as I was grateful that he accommodated this hopefully temporary quirk.
“I’m sorry, duci. If I could…”
“Lucas never puts me in danger. Cade hasn’t. My dad didn’t. Why you? How are you doing this to me?”
“I don’t know.” Misery and guilt laced the words. “But I will always be here when you wake. I will always catch you when you fall. I swear.”
My hands fisted in the tee he’d worn to bed. I resented the cotton that separated us almost as fiercely as I resented him. My fingers burrowed underneath the hem until they touched bare flesh, and only then did I accuse, “You can’t swear that.”
“I can! And I do!” He tucked me impossibly closer. “Supra l'onori di mi matri, Kitty. On my mother’s honor.”
And because I didn’t believe in his honor, but Lauren’s, I trusted that. I broke down against his chest, hating that I needed him, hating that his words and his body took away my fear.
Then he started humming a song I’d never heard before, one that made me think crazy stuff.
Like, was that a Sicilian lullaby?
Would he sing that to his… our children?
He would, wouldn’t he?
Someone so proud to be Sicilian, not Italian, would sing those songs and teach his kids the dialect, imbuing as much of his heritage into his children as he could—wherever he lived.
And I shouldn’t be thinking about babies.
I. Should. Not.
Not when I needed him to co-sleep with me like I was a baby.
Not when he was the damn reason I needed a co-sleeper!
“I hate this.”
“You can’t help it, my dream girl.” He pressed a kiss to the crown of my head. “Was it the…”
Dante’s dick doing what it hadn’t done.
My chin trembled. “Yeah.”
That dick going where it hadn’t.
“Why am I more scared now than when it was happening? Why can I imagine it happening when it never did?! And it can’t happen anyway. The bastard’s dead!”
“I don’t have any answers, liunissa.”
“Don’t call me that!” I half-screeched, half-wept. “I’m not a lioness. Look at me. I’m crying like a baby. I can’t sleep undisturbed unless you’re next to me. I-I don’t feel like me.”
“That’s because you’re healing. Do you want to hear a story?”
“Like a fairy tale?” I muttered in disbelief. Saying that, he could probably read me the classified ads section in a newspaper and I’d be lulled into resting.
Cute jerk.
But he snorted. “No. I mean, I can if you want…”
I heard his teasing and, finally, humor bled through the terror from my dream. “What kind of story?”
“Less a story and more a truth.”
His fingers toyed with my hair and it was so relaxing that I hated it.
I hated this dependency.
I hated how much I needed him when I barely knew him and what I’d come to learn terrified me. Never mind what he’d made me learn about myself.
But no matter how stupid I knew I was behaving, somewhere deep in my goddamn soul, I recognized him.
He might accept it as easily as eating chips—which he did, like they were going to stop importing Ricetta Campagnola tomorrow—but I refused to think about soul mates.
While this killer, this torturer, this mad genius, this creator of heinous drugs, did believe in the concept, I wasn’t as far down the road to loony town as he was.
Yet.
Fuck.
“Enemies kidnapped me once.” When I stiffened, he rubbed my back. “I’m fine. Aren’t I? Lying here with you—”
“You’re the opposite of fine, Custanzu. You don’t sleep and you test drugs on yourself and, until recently, you weren’t eating.”
He snickered. “You sound like Matri.”
“You’re the one who helicoptered his dick in the ER—”
“You mentioned that before,” he butted in.
“I guess that was you trialing more drugs, hmm?”
“Probably. I don’t remember.”
God help me.
“No? I do. Vividly. My best friend saw it and he was incurably jealous—”
“He did?! What best friend?”
“George. I have three, but the assholes all moved away from the city. Something to do with it being the most expensive place on earth.” I sniffed. “Go on with the story.”
“Yes, duci.” His amusement at my imperious tone rang through his drawl. “Anyway, I was taken captive on our jet—”
“The jet we flew in?” I shrieked, jerking out of his arms only to snuggle back in once I’d seen his nod.
“That one. I genuinely thought I wouldn’t survive, but it was worse thinking that Rory and Luc would die too—”
“Explain.”
“We had a civil war of sorts going down.” He toyed with the hem of my sleep shorts.
Not to entice, just to fidget. “The Sicilians used to run with five families. One that headed the faction, that’s our house, but the others were a checks and balance system.
Two of them decided they didn’t like how Rory worked, didn’t like that she was a woman, didn’t like her practices, period. ”
“So they kidnapped you?”
Stan chortled. “Make that make sense, huh?”
“Sheesh, yeah. Although, I’m glad they didn’t… I …”
He kissed my head again. “I know what you mean, duci. Anyway, if I’d died, that was one thing. If I’d lived and they’d been killed while I was indisposed—”
“Indisposed? Imprisoned, Stan.”
“My fear was for my siblings.” Because nutcase or no, that loyalty summed him up to a T.
“But as much as I can understand what you’re going through when a woman has…
well, you know, other fears, I can understand the fear of dying.
Of being taken from somewhere you believed was safe and being held against your will.
Of not knowing if someone would rescue you.
Hell, when the proof-of-life call came through, I told Rory not to rescue me. I fully expected to die and—”
“What kind of bedtime story is this?” I wept, but for the man that I’d almost not met.
“I’m sorry, duci. I thought it might help.”
“I don’t want you to be in danger either!” At that moment, I stopped caring that I clung to him. “I want you to be safe. Why can’t we be safe?”
“I’ll make sure that we are. I won’t stop until we are.” He confided, “God, you feel good in my arms. I’ll do anything to protect this. Us. Please, never stop letting me hold you like this, Kitty.”
“I won’t,” I whispered, eyes drenched again because I heard the longing in his voice as it sank into my very bones. And even though I felt like the broken one here, I knew that wasn’t fair. His past… God. It had damaged him too. “W-Would you do something for me?”
“Anything,” he said immediately.
“Turn around?”
He hesitated but gradually relinquished his hold on me. When he rolled over, I slid my arm around his waist and tucked my legs against him, slotting into the nook his knees made. He released a surprised shudder but then sank into the covers as I pressed my face into his back.
It was the first night where he didn’t hug and cosset and croon to me, the first night I sheltered him.
And, in the depths of dawn, no matter what I flung at him, the accusations and the fear and the hurt, I knew that my life would have been a darker, sadder, emptier place without this bewildering man in it.
I accepted that this was worth fighting for.
I embraced that I'd have to overcome our beginnings because what we could have together held so much promise I could never let go of it.
Hours later, when I woke up, our bodies still plastered together, my arm a rigid band over his waist, I realized two things.
One: Stan, the chronic insomniac, was fast asleep.
Two: Dante Graziola hadn't revisited me in my dreams…