Chapter 31 Caligula
CALIGULA
“I still don’t see why we need Benedetti,” Damiano says dubiously, once I’ve outlined my plan.
It’s simple, really, despite its genius.
There’s no way Uncle Tony is going to let me in to see him again.
So I’ll double down on that, create a scene in the foyer, and make enough of a diversion that Dami can slip right by into the hallway that leads to the offices.
“Because you need to be invisible,” I tell him. “So you need to look the part.”
“I’ve got suits. I don’t need another one from Benedetti.”
I sigh. “Dami, just trust me on this one. I looked through your wardrobe—”
“You what?”
I try not to glare at him. “You leave me here all day alone, what do you think I’m going to do? I explored.”
He glares back. “You mean you stuck your nose where it don’t belong.”
“What’s behind that door?” I ask, seeing an opening.
I point at the door across the room, the one with a fingerprint scanner like the one that lets Damiano down to the basement level of this creepy house.
His glare continues. “Okay, look. You do have a few suits, Dami.” He has several off-rack, ten-year-old suits with shiny elbows—but I don’t expand, since he’s got that stubborn look on his face.
“But you need something different to get into this legal firm. They’ll clock you from a mile away otherwise. ”
He throws his silverware into his bowl and puts it back on the tray, brooding. “I don’t like this plan.”
I’m pretty sure I know why, too. We might as well get it out in the open. “You think I’m going to run if I get a chance.”
His immediate scowl tells me I hit the bullseye. I did wonder how he’d react to the idea of me having the slightest bit of agency. He’ll need to trust me to do my part, and then trust that I’ll willingly go back into my prison afterward.
“I’m not going to run,” I tell him.
“And I’m just supposed to take the word of a Clemenza?”
“I have no reason to run,” I tell him coldly. “You’re currently my only protection, Orsini. Surely you haven’t forgotten that. You remind me of it often enough.”
He stands to prowl the room. Damiano is the kind of man who likes to be moving while he’s thinking. I’m the opposite. My brain is most active when my body is at rest. If he knew that, he’d probably mandate physical exercise all day, every day while I’m here.
“So I get into his office. Then what?” he asks at last.
I almost laugh at that, since it’s the simplest part of all. “You’re an Enforcer. Enforce.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I saw Dami smile. But still he paces.
“Well?” I ask at last. I’m getting tired again, and cranky like a toddler with it. But I’m feeling a hell of a lot better than I did down there in the basement, since those protein shakes—despite tasting like depression made liquid—are actually helping.
“I’ll think about it,” he says. “I need a shower.”
He locks the bathroom door. If he hadn’t, I wonder if I’d try to press the advantage I have right now and go in after him, stretch my fledgling seduction skills a little more.
I got sick at the right time. It wasn’t pleasant, no. But it was useful, since here I am, back in his bed again. I’d rather not be put back in that basement, so I’ll need to be more careful in the future.
But when he comes out and heads for the bedroom door to lock it, tucking the damn key into the briefs he’s put on, I immediately forget my resolution. There’s something about Damiano Orsini that just makes me enjoy needling him.
“Where are you sleeping tonight, Dami? Bed’s taken.”
He stands next to it, looking down at me. “Shut up and move over.”
I blink up at him, taken aback despite myself. The whole time I’ve been recovering here, I’ve been sleeping alone. I thought that one-off co-sleeping after the opera attack was unlikely to happen again. “Really?”
“You think I’m giving up my fucking bed for you?” he growls. “Move over.”
I suppose I should consider myself lucky he’s not chaining me to the headboard.
I shuffle over awkwardly until he’s satisfied, then snuggle down and turn my back on him, my heart beating hard.
The light goes out, leaving the room in total blackness, since the metal shutters are still down over the windows, and there are no electronics in the bedroom to give ambient light.
I hear him get into the bed, the mattress dipping under his considerable size so that I find myself rolling back into him despite myself.
His arm goes around me. “You’re not going anywhere tonight, little prince,” he says, gripping me tight.
I say nothing, just lie there tense and wide awake.
But I must have fallen asleep, because I wake to his powerful grip tightening and tightening around me, crushing me hard enough that I fear asphyxiation. “Hey,” I wheeze, trying to wriggle my way out. It’s no use, and he’s talking, muttering—
He’s asleep. He’s asleep and dreaming, a bad dream. A terrible dream, based on the labored breathing and the plaintive note in his mumbling non-words.
“Dami,” I get out, but it’s no use. He’s deep in his nightmare. So I do the only thing I can, and kick him, hard.
He jerks awake, arm tightening one more excruciating fraction before it relaxes, and I suck in a deep lungful of oxygen. “Jesus Christ,” I pant. “It was just a dream, Dami. Just a dream.”
He seems to hear me, because he gives a long sigh of what sounds like relief, and rolls onto his back, leaving me feeling strangely cold and unmoored. I guess I got used to the hot iron band encircling me.
I turn over in the bed and curl up close again, wishing I could see his face. I can’t see anything at all, only hear his still-ragged breathing. “What were you dreaming?”
“Don’t remember,” he mutters.
Without getting distracted by trying to read his face, I hear the lie much more clearly in his voice.
We made a deal about that. But I’m not going to push.
I’m not sure I want to know what nightmares a Giuliano Enforcer might suffer.
He’s certainly willing enough to bring them into the waking world.
I reach out and slide a hand over his shoulder. He doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t tell me to fuck off. Just keeps breathing, trying to regulate.
I can’t see his face. Can’t read the warning signs I’ve learned to watch for. All I have is touch—the heat of his skin, the tension in his muscles, the way his breathing changes when my fingers trace along his collarbone.
His breath catches. Then his hand covers mine, pressing it flat against his chest. I feel his heartbeat, still too fast from whatever horror chased him through sleep.
Neither of us moves. Neither of us speaks.
And then his hand slides up my arm, finds my jaw, tilts my face toward his even though we can’t see each other. “This won’t mean anything,” he says roughly.
“I know.”
“I still hate you.”
“I know.”
I slide on top of him.
His arms go around me and he’s already hard against my thigh, but I don’t want to rush. I want to really get to know his body this time.
It’s different in the dark. More honest, somehow, as though our bodies can tell each other what we really want without all that messy stuff in the background like his father and my father and the auction and the basement…
If I wanted to, I could pretend I was with someone else.
But I don’t want to. I want to know that this is Damiano Orsini whose arms are around me, pulling my head to one side so he can suck at my neck.
He can’t help being controlling, even now, even when I’m stretched out on top of him. But I’ll let him.
Because I like it.
His lips move up to my ear, my cheek, getting closer to my mouth—but then he stops, pulls my head to the other side, and continues licking down the other side of my neck.
I take a gamble. I pull back and then force the issue, trying to angle my mouth toward his. He pushes my face aside.
He’s not going to kiss me.
Well, that’s fine. Not where I really want his mouth, anyway, is it? I rock against him, slow, languid, a tease of friction. I feel how hard he is, how hot, how much he wants this.
I want it, too. I start speeding up.
“You like that, don’t you?” he mutters against my neck. “You like grinding on my cock like a little bitch in heat.”
The words are ugly, but they make me harder. “Maybe,” I breathe back. “Or maybe I’m getting bored.”
His hands tighten on my hips. Then he rolls me right off him, onto my belly, and pins me beneath him.
I gasp at the sudden change in position, at the solid weight of him.
In the total blackness, all my other senses are heightened—the shift of our clothes, the smell of him, the hard press of his cock against the back of my thigh.
He shoves my pajama pants down, and I kick them off my ankles. The bed shudders and shakes as he moves about, ripping his own briefs off too, I guess. “Hands and knees,” he tells me.
I scramble to comply, my ass in the air. A wave of heat goes through me as I wait for him to move between my legs, slapping my thighs until I widen them, my asshole clenching with anticipation.
This is it. He’s going to fuck me. Finally.
His hands close around my hips and yank them higher and higher, until I’m almost balanced on my toes. He spreads my asscheeks open and I feel his breath just a moment before his tongue finds my hole.
I choke down a groan, but he keeps licking all over me, his stubble scraping as he rubs his face into me.
I push back shamelessly, wanting more, deeper, harder.
I’ve been wanting this again since that night of the opera, to feel his tongue there again, to have him work me open with his fingers, too, get me desperate for him.
I’ll even beg for it again, if that’s what he wants. As long as he gives it to me. This virginity of mine, no matter how technical it might be, has become a burden. Something he can weaponize against me. I want to get rid of it, remove at least one of those pain points he likes to press into.
And maybe I just want to know how it feels. If having this man’s monster cock inside me will finally quiet down all my Family’s ghosts. Exorcise the ones haunting him.
And, hell, maybe I just want to fuck. To know what it’s like to have someone else’s body filling up my own.
All I know is, I’m in a fever of need. Whatever he does to me, I crave it, need it like oxygen. So I press back against his face, begging silently with my body. His spit runs down between my legs, trickling over my balls and making me moan as much as the sensation of his tongue—
He eases me back down, letting me get my balance on hands and knees again before pulling my back flush against his chest. His muscular thighs bracket mine, keeping my legs locked tight, and this has to be it, right? He’s finally going to do it.
I hear him spitting into his palm to slick himself up, and panic zips through me. I assumed there’d be lube, not just—
But then I feel his thick head pressing not between my cheeks, but lower, pushing between my clenched thighs, gliding over the sensitive flesh of my perineum and nudging up against my balls.
His cock is a hot, hard bar of flesh sliding back and forth, the friction against my skin maddening.
“Stay still,” he hisses when I wriggle around, trying to help him find what he must be looking for, because surely—
He reaches up to grab a handful of my hair. Not hard, just a warning. “Stay. Still.”
And he keeps doing exactly what he was doing, fucking into the spit-soaked junction of my ass and thighs. I feel every ridge, every bump, as he slides back and forth, his cockhead even teasing my hole now and then, but never more than that.
His fist loosens in my hair, trails down my chest, my stomach, and finds my dick, just as hard as his, and jacks me in the same rhythm as he thrusts. My hips jerk, seeking more of both sensations. His hand. His cock.
“That’s better,” he pants, and the pride in his voice soothes my disappointment. Because I know, now. He’s not going to kiss me. He’s not going to fuck me. He’s not going to give me a single ounce of power that he doesn’t have to.
As if to prove my theory, he murmurs in my ear, “You like being treated like some fucktoy, huh?”
I can only moan in response, pushing back into him, clamping tighter around his shaft. He smacks his hand down hard on my left cheek, the sting sharp and immediate. It brings back the memory of being bent over his lap, coming all over his pants while he spanked me like a naughty child.
And he’s thinking of that, too. “Remember how you shot your load all over me,” he breathes. “Got off on learning your place?”
I wish I could be angry. Wish I could snipe back at him, but my whole attention is on my dick and the grip he has on it. My body is alight with a raw need as he drives into the tight, wet space between my thighs. His thumb presses into my slit, smearing pre-cum everywhere.
“Yeah, you remember,” he chuckles darkly, his rhythm getting faster. “And you’re gonna come for me again. But you shoot that mess into your hand, you hear me? Not all over these sheets that I sleep in.”
The dirty talk, the feel of him, the denial, and the sheer reality of being used like this—it all coalesces into a storm of sensation that detonates almost before I’m aware.
I come with a loud, protracted cry, spilling into my own palm obediently, my whole body trembling, my asshole clenching and unclenching on nothing.
He pulls me close with an arm around my body, his cockhead nestling into my balls, and tugs my overflowing hand up to my mouth.
“Come on, golden boy. You need your protein.” His grip tightens around my wrist until I have no choice but to open my lips and taste the mess from my own fingers.
My face is burning, but a deeper, darker heat swims through me as I lick at it.
He throws me down onto my back and straddles me, his heavy cock resting on my belly.
There’s a thump beside my head as he falls forward onto one hand.
He leans in so close I feel the warmth of his breath on my sweat-soaked face, and I think maybe he’s going to finally do it, maybe he’ll lean in and kiss me—