The Beast Who Bought Me (Clemenza Family #1)

Chapter 1

CALIGULA

I’m running so fast my lungs might burst, but if I slow down, I’m dead. And I’m not going to die like a rat in some dirty alley.

Not tonight.

I was track champion all through high school. Right now, those years of training are the only thing keeping me alive. All those line drills in the August heat…

Worth it now.

I eat up the sidewalk as I sprint toward a bar a block down where there’s enough life to offer safety. Or witnesses, anyway.

I’ve reached full velocity when a colossal figure steps out of a dark alcove directly into my path. I try to dodge, but there’s no chance. I clip him hard and head teeth-first toward concrete.

But before I hit, I’m swung around and upright, set back on my feet as though I weigh nothing at all. It’s like hitting a wall that decided to help me out instead of letting me face the consequences of physics.

“Careful, pretty boy. You’ll hurt yourself.”

His voice is warm honey spilled on gravel and broken glass.

Around my biceps, his hands are iron bands holding me effortlessly in place.

I look up—up—up to see a face that looks rough, unfinished.

As though the artist sculpting him wasn’t working with marble but clay, pummeling his face into place with fists, and forgot to smooth it all down before firing.

The black hair is cropped short and a shadow darkens his strong jaw.

He’s not…unattractive.

And when his dark eyes meet mine, they’re hungry. Like I’m his next meal and he’s debating which bite to take first.

His attention shifts, scanning over my shoulder, and something he sees makes his grip tighten, fingers digging into my arms hard enough to make me gasp.

I crane to look over my shoulder and see the hooded figure running toward us, the guy who’s been on my ass since I bolted from my grandfather’s townhouse.

Since I left my cousin’s body cooling on the floor.

The stranger angles himself to shield me. It’s such an instinctive, protective gesture that I almost forget to be terrified of him. Almost. The asshole chasing me pulls up short, reassessing. My rescuer—captor?—doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, just stands perfectly still, silently daring him.

The other guy backs up. Turns. Runs the other way.

Only when he’s out of sight does my companion’s attention return to me, and that ravenous focus is back, cranked up to eleven.

I pull myself the fuck together. “Let me go,” I tell him in my most imperious tone.

He tilts his head, considering. “Should I? Seems like you need someone to keep you safe.”

Every impulse I have is a conflicting signal. Run. Stay. Submit. Fight. Lick his neck…

What the hell?

“I can take care of myself,” I manage at last.

His lips pull back in not quite a smile—more like a wolf showing its teeth. No, not a wolf. A goddamn grizzly bear, looming over me. “Can you, though?”

With that, he pins me against the wall, one enormous hand flat on my chest, where he must be able to feel my hammering heart, and the other gripping the back of my neck. He leans down as though to kiss me, and I just stand there, speechless.

“You’re shaking like a rabbit,” he murmurs close to my ear. “Breathe.”

He’s right, I am shaking. And now I’m breathing only because he told me to, pulling air into my lungs with sharp, desperate pants. His thumb strokes across the nape of my neck, and my entire body lights up like a Christmas tree. Heat floods me, making me warm despite the cold, and—

“So,” he goes on conversationally. “What did a pretty thing like you do to get chased through my city?”

His city? This city belonged to my Family not so long ago. My grandfather ran half of Manhattan before this jerk could tie his shoes.

And I don’t appreciate the victim-blaming, either.

I shove forward, hard, and he lets me go. “Lets” being the operative word—I feel the exact moment he decided to release me, which pisses me off more than anything.

He steps back with his hands raised, that dangerous smile still in place.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” I demand.

He reaches up to adjust his jacket collar. Tattoos pepper his hands, disappearing into his sleeves. But one symbol in particular, just below the webbing of his thumb, makes my stomach drop. The stylized “G” that marks high-ranking members of the Giuliano Crime Family.

The Giulianos are former allies turned hyenas, gorging on my Family’s corpse. Opportunists who forgot generations of friendship the second my grandfather’s body hit the floor.

“You sure you’re alright, little Clemenza?” he asks.

He knows who I am. Alarm bells start ringing—and I hear it now, the enjoyment in his voice. He’s watching my reactions, relishing them. But then his tone shifts. “You’ve got blood on you.”

I look down. There’s blood on my hands, my sweater, soaked into the navy fabric where I couldn’t see it in the dark.

“I’m fine,” I spit out, backing away. “I’m fine.” I hold his gaze until the last possible second, and then I turn and run.

“Run all you want,” he calls after me. “I like a chase.”

I run faster.

And I absolutely do not think about the way my body responded to his hands on me. It was adrenaline. It was fear.

It was nothing.

The hotel I end up in is a shithole. The guy at the desk doesn’t look up from his phone when I check in. Cash only, no questions asked.

My kind of place, these days.

I turn on the TV the second I get into the room for noise cover, and to give the illusion I’m awake and alert. Then I lock myself in the bathroom to survey the damage.

He was right, that giant Giuliano. There’s blood all over me. My hands, my sweater, dried rust-brown under my fingernails. Clemenza blood.

Not mine. I found my cousin, Louie, in a puddle of it three hours ago, shot in the back of the head.

Louie was the heir apparent. He’d texted me to meet, told me he’d figured out who was picking us off. I was desperate enough to go, even though there was no love lost between Louie and me. I found his corpse and the killer still lurking, waiting around for my dumb ass to show up.

I tripped over Louie when I turned to run, stumbled through a sticky pool of blood on my way to the door. I was still fast enough to get away with my life. And now I’m the only direct descendant left. The very last grandson of Don Louis Clemenza.

The last of my kind.

I wash my hands until the water runs clear. Rinse out my mouth to quell the nausea. Scrub at my sweater in the sink until the worst of the stains fade, and then hang it over the crooked chrome towel bar to dry.

In the dirty mirror, I take in the face that’s always thinner than I expect these days, the smudges under my eyes that make them look darker than their usual amber, the greasy cast darkening the roots of my hair, tarnishing the blond to bronze.

It’s longer than I’ve ever worn it, months since my last cut.

I look like shit, but at least I’m still standing. Still alive.

Still a Clemenza.

The eyes of that cold, implacable stranger in the mirror travel down to the marks on my arms. They’re new. Where—ah. The Giuliano. His fingers closed on me so hard…

I rub my bicep as the memory alone makes it twinge. Traditionally, the Giulianos don’t come to this part of town without an invitation. It’s not their turf. And they wouldn’t come solo, either, unless he was sent alone for a reason.

My attention is snagged by a familiar name coming from the TV in the other room.

…been identified as 26-year-old Louis John Clemenza the third, rumored heir to the Clemenza Crime Family who terrorized New York through much of the eighties, though their influence waned with the…

My cousin Louie’s face comes up on the screen in multiple photos from his social media accounts, followed by his mug shot.

Our grandfather and my cousin’s namesake, Lou Clemenza, had been furious about that mug shot.

Clemenzas don’t get arrested! Of course, that was before Nonno Lou got put away himself for a few months on some trumped-up charge.

They cut to the live reporter on the street outside the townhouse, but I look past her to a silhouette in the background. Massive. Unmistakable.

The Giuliano.

He turns quickly to avoid the camera, but a flash of blue from the police lights catches his face. It’s him. For sure.

Why was he there? Was he working with the guy who chased me out of the townhouse, the one I assume killed Louie? But if so, why the hell would he go back to the scene of the crime?

I sink onto the edge of the bed, legs unsteady as my adrenaline crashes. It’s not the memory of dark, voracious eyes, the phantom pressure of hands on my chest, at the back of my neck, the way I responded to being pinned down like a—

Maybe I need another shower. A cold one.

To shock some sense into me.

The bruises from the Giuliano develop during the night, so the next morning I’m greeted with indelible fingerprints on my arms that make me feel grubby even after I shower.

My clothes, which I washed last night as well as I could in the bathroom sink, are stiff but dry, and the blood doesn’t show on my sweater. Good enough.

Today I’ll approach one of the last potential allies I have left.

Tony Stuccio was my father’s oldest friend and the Family lawyer.

After the Clemenzas disintegrated, the Feds stuck to “Uncle Tony” like glue.

I couldn’t tell whether he was cooperating or not, and the cost of making a mistake was too great.

Now the cost of staying on the streets is much greater.

After Louie’s death, there’s no more pretending.

I’m next.

Louie was careful. Tough as hell. He made his bones at seventeen and he was deeply embedded in the business. If they got him, they can definitely get me.