Chapter 12 Caligula
CALIGULA
Damiano takes me back to the formal dining room, where the mouthwatering smells hit me again—roast chicken, herbs, garlic. My belly lets out a loud, embarrassing complaint.
“You sound hungry,” he says.
The understatement of the century. But I’m distracted by a recurring thought: this house definitely isn’t empty, because Damiano sure didn’t cook this spread himself, or set it out ready for our return so late at night.
And no Giuliano Enforcer would let casual hires roam around his house while he’s busy buying the last Clemenza heir at auction.
So he has staff. Trusted staff. Staff who know about me and who will, presumably, see me at some point.
See me naked and trussed up.
The thought should upset me more than it does. Maybe I’m already more broken than I realized, or maybe having a roomful of buyers appraising my naked body a few hours ago has lowered my standards for dignity.
I can even guess at who some of those staff members are. The chauffeur who drove us back here. And a cook, maybe doubling as a housekeeper.
I assume he’s going to humiliate me over dinner, make me kneel by his feet, eat off the floor, something degrading.
So when he pulls out a chair at the foot of the vast mahogany table and gestures for me to sit, I almost don’t trust it.
The chair is upholstered in burgundy velvet—expensive, but trying too hard.
The chandelier is too modern, too bright, the light too sharp through crystals that haven’t yet aged.
The silverware is too shiny to be mistaken for anything but brand new.
Damiano spreads a cloth napkin across my lap, the fabric mercifully hiding the gold cage. Then he takes my plate and starts serving me from the buffet spread to the side, heaping portions of everything onto the fine china.
“This enough?”
I can only nod. The plate he sets before me contains more food than I’ve seen in weeks—roast chicken with crispy skin, vegetables glistening with butter, pilaf studded with herbs and nuts. My mouth waters enough that I might make a different kind of puddle on this man’s floors.
“Make sure you leave room for dessert.” He gestures at the tower of profiteroles at the end of the buffet, their golden, spun-sugar cage reminding me of my current predicament.
“Thank you,” I manage after a pause. I don’t want to feel thankful. But it’s getting harder and harder not to feel that way.
He takes his own piled-high plate to the opposite end of the table, putting the maximum distance between us. “Dig in.”
I’m supposed to follow his orders, so I do what he says. The first bite nearly makes me moan with relief. The chicken is perfectly seasoned, the potatoes crisp and salty on the outside, fluffy and buttery on the inside. I have to force myself to eat slowly rather than wolf it down.
Damiano’s gaze stays on me with every bite. It’s like being examined under a microscope, clinical but intensely personal, the same way he watched me just before in the bathroom when he was doing…that to me. His own fork is mostly decorative. He barely touches his food, too absorbed in observing me.
“The chicken,” he says suddenly. “Do you like it?”
“It’s perfect.”
“Try the rice next.”
I take up a forkful of the pilaf, even though it feels like a test. It’s like he told me in the bathroom. He’s learning me.
As I eat, that gnawing emptiness inside me starts to fill. But with it comes something worse than hunger: a deceptive sense of gratitude. The food is delicious, I’m warm, I’m safe in this house with—
No. Hell no.
That’s a lie my brain is telling me to make this bearable. This new owner of mine wants me to lower my guard, to start depending on him. Dependency starts with small kindnesses, and I won’t let him mindfuck me that easily.
But God, the food is so good, and I’ve been so hungry for so long…
“Do you like it?” Damiano’s voice carries easily across the expanse of polished table, and his eyes never leave my face. “The rice.”
“It’s delicious,” I tell him honestly. “My compliments to the chef.”
“Glad you’re enjoying it.” He completely ignores my fishing expedition to find out who cooked this incredible meal. “I wanted your first meal here to be memorable.”
Something in the way he says that worries me. Is the food poisoned? Drugged? I set down my fork and ask as casually as I can, “Do you have other staff, aside from this talented chef?”
“You don’t need to worry about that, little prince. You just enjoy your meal.” He chuckles as I look down at my plate. “Suddenly realized it might be spiked? Don’t worry about it.” He picks up his fork and stuffs his mouth with the same pilaf I’m eating.
He might have done something sneaky. Rubbed poison on the silverware, for example. But if he wanted me dead, he could have killed me as soon as he got me inside his house, could have snapped my neck right in front of the fireplace.
So I keep eating. And as my stomach fills, the knot in my chest loosens. The sheer relief of having food—real food, not stale convenience store sandwiches or whatever scraps I could find—makes the tension I’ve been carrying with me for so long start to bleed away.
After a while, Damiano stops watching me quite so intently and focuses on his own food. The silence isn’t comfortable, but it’s not threatening either. Just…empty.
Empty like everything else in this beautiful, hollow house.
When I finally push my empty plate away, I feel more human than I have in weeks. Damiano immediately puts down his fork even though he’s not done.
“You want dessert?”
“Please,” I say, even though my belly is full to bursting. Might as well get all the calories I can while they’re available to me.
He leaves his plate to fill a new one for me. But instead of placing the profiteroles in front of me, he stands over me, plate in hand. “Open your mouth.”
Something about the way he says it triggers a faint alarm at the back of my head. I keep my mouth shut.
“What’s rule number one?” he asks patiently.
“Do what you fucking tell me,” I parrot back at him.
He almost smiles. “Well?”
I open my mouth and he feeds me the profiterole, his fingertips brushing my lower lip as I take a bite.
“Slowly,” he instructs, watching my mouth work. “Taste it.”
The pastry is perfect—light as air, filled with creamy vanilla custard that’s rich and silky—but I can barely concentrate on the taste with his dark eyes locked on my lips.
“Messy,” he murmurs, swiping his thumb to collect a dab of cream at the side of my mouth. He holds out his thumb, waiting until I lick it clean.
And I’m furious to discover that the cage seems to have gotten a little smaller.
He feeds me two more pastries the same way, each bite a small surrender, each brush of his fingers against my mouth making the cage bite deeper into my flesh.
By the time I finish, I’m overfull and flushed with a languid heat that has nothing to do with the food and everything to do with how thoroughly this man has dismantled every boundary I have tonight. I’m comfortable. Satiated. Grateful.
Compliant.
I see what he’s doing. I see it clearly. And it’s still working.
Damiano puts the plate down and holds out his hand like we’re at a restaurant, and he’s helping his date up from the table. His hand engulfs mine, warm and firm. “There’s one more room I want to show you tonight, golden boy.”
The rich food in my stomach turns to lead.
“I told you this house was renovated with you in mind,” he continues, his voice taking on that dangerous quality that makes all the alerts in my brain light up, flashing and honking. “But I want to show you our own private space. The place where we’ll really get to know each other.”
This is it. He’s going to take me to his bedroom, hold me down, and fuck me. And I don’t know if I’m nervous or…
Eager to get it over with.
My legs feel numb, but I manage to walk with him as he leads me to the elevator, a feature he mentioned during the tour but didn’t show me. This time he not only shows me, he pulls me into it.
It’s a claustrophobic box, barely large enough to contain Damiano’s huge frame, and covered in bronze mirrors on the inside. I have to press my naked back against his chest for us both to fit, and I hate how solid and warm he feels, hate how I welcome his heat after so many cold nights.
There are numbered buttons for every floor of the house, but he reaches past me to press his forefinger against a special brass panel with a scanning square set into it. “This floor I’m about to show you can only be accessed by me,” he says. “We’ll have complete privacy.”
A chill runs over me despite his body heat. The elevator starts a slow downward descent.
“I wanted to make sure you enjoyed yourself when you first came into my house,” he continues. “I want you to hold on to the memory of tonight for the next year. Because I want you to remember exactly how I’ll be living up there—”
The elevator lurches to a stop, and the doors slide open to reveal complete darkness.
“—while you’re down here.”
Damiano shoves me forward. I stumble into a void, one horrible second of certainty that there’s nothing beneath me—but my feet hit solid concrete and I stagger, catching myself.
Dim lights begin to glow around the ceiling’s perimeter. Soft gold, rising slowly, a false dawn.
And reality buckles. I’m…home.
My grandfather’s mahogany desk faces me from across the room.
The leather Chesterfield sofa faces it, where generations of Clemenza men sat to discuss business.
The Persian rug beneath is the same one I used to play on while the grown-ups talked.
I know it’s the same because I remember that worn patch—it’s where I used to drive my toy dump truck over and over until the threads wore down.
Even the oil painting of a medieval village hangs on the wall.
Dad once told me our Family originated there.
But it’s all wrong. The ceiling is too low.
The walls are concrete, covered in some areas with what looks like professional soundproofing.
The golden light isn’t sunshine; it comes from recessed fixtures, casting everything in a soft glow that feels like being sealed inside a beautiful, candlelit tomb.
And Nonno Lou’s study is just one area of this enormous basement.
In another, there’s a replica of the living room, where Nonna Mellie used to have her friends over to share tea and gossip. And in another, my grandparents’ four-poster bed scrapes the low ceiling.
Beyond that is my father’s bedroom…
And mine, too.
Every familiar room from the Park Avenue townhouse is represented here. It’s like someone dismantled it room by room and laid it out on one level. It’s dizzying and upsetting and strange, an autopsy of my Family’s legacy, a museum curated by my captor.
What kind of hatred burns cold and long enough to fuel such obsession?
I turn away from the uncanny replica, but things only get worse. To the right, against the nearby wall, stands a king-sized bed with pristine white sheets, no pillows and no blankets, a heavy chain snaking from the wall above it, ending in a thick metal collar.
And there are darker things, things that make my bladder clench with apprehension. Shackles mounted to the wall. A metal fucking toilet like the kind I always imagined in jail cells. A glass-walled shower right there next to it.
“Do you like what I’ve done with the place?” Damiano asks.
“How…” I croak.
“I bought everything at your grandfather’s estate sale.
Every piece of furniture, every painting, every fucking teacup.
And I kept buying up everything you Clemenzas were selling, as you started to circle the drain.
Amazing the depths people will sink to when they’re desperate.
But I guess you’ve discovered that yourself. Right, Caligula?”
I bolt.
Pure animal panic overrides every rational thought as I sprint for the elevator, feet slipping on polished concrete, slamming my palm against the panel over and over while Damiano laughs behind me.
“I told you, golden boy. It only responds to me.” His arm comes around my waist, lifting me off my feet like I weigh nothing at all.
“Did you really think you could run from me?” He’s genuinely amused.
Delighted. He carries me away from the doors as easily as a child, my feet kicking uselessly at his legs.
He takes me to the bed and throws me down on it. I scramble away, but he grabs a handful of my hair to yank me back, while in his other hand he lifts the heavy metal collar.
It doesn’t matter how much I fight. He’s stronger than I am. The metal is heavy as it closes around my neck, the weight dragging my head down. But the psychological impact is much worse than the physical. As the lock clicks shut, reality crashes down.
I am this man’s prisoner.
And he’s been planning this for a very long time.
Damiano walks to a leather armchair positioned to face the bed. It’s the one from my grandparents’ bedroom. Now it’s Damiano’s throne. He takes the silver flask out of his back pocket before settling into the seat.
“Look around,” he says after a swallow. “This is your whole world now, golden boy.”
I try to slow my breathing, quell the panic. Take in what I can. The chain will allow me maybe ten feet of movement—enough to reach the toilet, the shower.
I can’t reach the dissected house. I can only look at it from afar.
I force myself to take in every detail of my surroundings: the chains, the bare concrete floor, the cameras mounted in the corners.
The mini-fridge that Damiano reaches out with a lazy leg to kick open, showing me that all it contains are water bottles and vitamins.
The dumbwaiter he points out, which is close enough for me to reach for meals sent down from above.
He’s thought of everything. Access to food. Vitamins. Hygiene. The soundproofing—I could scream until my voice cracked and no one would hear me. It’s the methodical, painstaking approach I’d expect from a serial killer.
“Well?” Damiano asks. “What do you think of your new home?”
I’m finally beginning to understand.
He plans to keep me here in this grotesque facsimile of my Family’s history. Keep me down here for the whole year.
Maybe forever.
The idea is unbearable.
I meet his dead eyes and give him the truth. “I think you’re fucking insane.”
His smile is sharp. “Maybe. But you’ll join me there over the next year, little prince.” He raises his flask to me. “Welcome home, Caligula Clemenza.”