Chapter 38 Caligula
CALIGULA
“Tiberius Vicario,” I echo. I nod at Dami, who lets King up. “And you didn’t think to mention him to me when I came to you desperate and ready to sell myself?”
King, who has been adjusting his jacket with an irritated air, looks wary once more. “Our members’ privacy is paramount.”
“You wanted the money you could get for me,” I say softly. “And you wanted to see the last Clemenza tortured and punished by your Bratva friends. Didn’t you?”
At last the mask falls from his face. There’s true hatred in his eyes. “Do you know how many of my friends your grandfather had murdered? Yes. We wanted payback. Just like this—this ignorant oaf here, who somehow seems to be doing your bidding.”
At that, Dami actually snarls, his lips pulling back from his teeth.
“On the contrary, Mr. King,” I say lightly. “This ignorant oaf is my legitimate owner. He doesn’t like the idea of having his property fondled by others, that’s all.”
King scoffs at that. “He doesn’t even understand your real worth. Do you have any idea what some people out there would pay to see a Clemenza—”
With a right hook worthy of the world heavyweight champion, Dami knocks him out. I watch Daniel King fall over his desk and to the floor and then I look up at Dami. “What was that for?”
“Tired of his bullshit.”
“Why, what did you think he was going to say?”
“Nothing useful. What they’d pay to watch you suffer. Watch you break. You’ve heard it all before.”
“So this time you were protecting my delicate sensibilities?” Dami shrugs. I step to the side, looking down at King on the carpet. “Is this one dead, too?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so.” He kneels to check the pulse. “He’s alive.”
I let out a little puff of relief. “Well, that’s one fewer problem at least.”
“Might be better if I did kill him,” Dami suggests.
It’s tempting. But I shake my head. “The Bratva will be angry enough about Grisha. Your Boss might be able to smooth that over, but not if you kill Daniel King as well.” Dami, who blinked a little at my mention of his Boss, looks worried.
“We better get moving,” he says after a moment. “That pet demon of his’ll be back any second to cause trouble.”
And speak of the devil, there’s a knock at the door just as Dami finishes, three hard taps and a three-second wait…
It flings open. “Daniel!” Jesse Foster cries. “Something terrible has—” He sees Dami and me standing over the desk, and then his eyes move to the floor, where King’s unconscious body is just visible to him behind the desk.
He clocks the situation fast. Jesse Foster is like me in some ways: he’s a survivor. He turns and bolts.
Dami charges after him at once, but I’m faster.
I take off like I’ve heard the starter pistol and chase him down the corridor.
With the cloak streaming behind me, I feel like a superhero, and I gain so fast on Jesse that I’m on him before he reaches the first corner.
I push him off balance into the wall, and we go down onto the floor in a tangle of legs and arms. He’s like a feral cat fighting to be free, and I get an elbow to the gut that winds me, but a moment later Dami leans down and picks him up, clapping a giant hand across his mouth.
“Get up,” Dami orders me. “We need to get out right fucking now.”
Jesse is struggling and kicking in his arms, and I’m worried for a nanosecond that Dami might kill him, too.
But I don’t have time to waste worrying about a false friend.
“That way,” I wheeze, pointing down the other way. “There’s a back door into an alley.”
“In my pocket,” Dami says. “Get my phone. Text Vito to meet us there.”
My hands are shaking as I slide a hand into his pocket, and then shaking again when Dami tells me the code to open the phone. But he’s patient and calm, even as we hurry down the hallway, even with Jesse Foster wriggling around like a wildcat in his arms.
Somehow I get the text done, and somehow the hallways feel more familiar here. Within a minute we’re at the black metal door that I remember closing behind me like the gates of hell when I first came here.
It’s locked, a keypad lock. Dami shoves Jesse close to it. “Open it.”
Jesse just keeps struggling.
“Jesse,” I snarl, and he stops struggling to glare at me. “Do you want to end up like Grisha?”
He stops yanking at Dami’s iron embrace, and stabs a few buttons on the keypad. I hold my breath for a second, hoping like hell there’s no alarm code, but the door simply makes a soft clunk as the lock releases. I pull it open, gasping at the cold air outside rushing in, and we hurry out.
Vito’s right there in the car, and the door to the back seat is already open and waiting for us.
Dami throws Jesse aside, who stumbles to the ground with a pitiful cry, and we pile into the car.
It pulls away with a screech, narrowly avoiding Jesse, who flattens himself against the wall, screaming empty threats after us.
I look at Dami. He looks at me. And I feel a grin starting to spread, just as reluctant but inevitable as the one on his face. He shakes his head, trying to get rid of it, and sits back in his seat. “Fuck,” he says, wincing as his shoulder blade contacts the leather.
“Let me see,” I say at once, pushing him forward and pulling off his jacket insistently. Shit. He’s bleeding again—though nowhere near as badly as last time. “Rosa will need to look at this,” I tell him.
He shrugs me off. “Let’s just worry about getting home first,” he mutters.
I sit back as well, content to let him brood. “Whatever you say, Dami. Whatever you say.” I’m riding high on adrenaline and satisfaction. We got away. And we got intel.
But as I think about that intel, my mood dims a little. My own cousin—trying to buy me. To what end? To save me?
Or to kill me off, so he could inherit my claim to the Family?
We get home without further incident. Vito makes sure to slow down as soon as we’re a few blocks away, I assume so we won’t attract attention. He drives straight into the underground garage I’ve never seen, but now realize must be set above the creepy basement where Dami kept me.
Might keep me again.
But not tonight. Tonight, Dami doesn’t even bother to hide the code from me when he punches it in to bring down the garage door, and then the security shields after it.
We troop up a small staircase that opens into a short corridor with several doors coming off it—those must be the bedrooms for Rosa, Vito, and Sammy—and into the kitchen. Rosa is already there, first aid kit at the ready, her lips a thin white line.
I pull the cloak around me, shivering. Rosa leaves the room and comes back with a white terry robe to put around me over the cloak, which I gratefully snuggle into. And then she sets about tending to Dami’s back.
“It’s not so bad,” she allows begrudgingly at last. Vito has made some hot chocolate in the meantime, and I curl my hands around its warmth gratefully. “I’ll dress it again. And you—” She stabs a finger into the middle of Dami’s back. “No more heroics!”
He winces. “Got none planned.” I catch his eye, and we both smirk.
Sammy chooses that moment to wander through to the kitchen, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He stops dead when he sees me, as usual. Then he points at me. “That’s mine!” he complains.
I look down at the robe I’m wearing. The fact that it’s Sammy’s explains why it fits so much better than Dami’s. Still, I don’t want a fight about it.
“Here,” I say, shrugging it off. I hold it out to him, and he grabs it from me as though I’ve stolen his most precious possession. I pull the cloak around me again, ignoring Sammy’s expression as he takes it in.
“What’s going on?” he demands, looking back to Dami.
“Nothing,” Dami replies heavily, and stands, pulling his shirt back on. “Go to bed, all of you. You—” he glances at me “—come with me.”
We don’t go up to the bedroom, even though I can see Dami’s exhausted. I am too, but I’m still humming with adrenaline from the Obelisk. So when Dami leads me into the great room and turns on the gas fire, I’m glad we’ll have the chance to decompress.
“I can’t believe we actually got out of there alive,” I say as he shuts the door behind us.
“Yeah, well, we’re still two dead guys walking,” he says wearily. “Come here. Let me get that thing off of you.” I stand still long enough to let him unlock and remove the cage, but then I go right back to pacing.
“Sit down, would you?” he says.
“I can’t,” I snap back. “I have a hunk of metal up my ass, and it’s really uncomfortable.”
He gives a soft snort. “Then come here, like I’m telling you, and I’ll take it out for you.”
“In a minute,” I tell him. I want to calm down a little first. I pull off the stupid gold cloak and throw it down on the sofa.
Dami sinks into his armchair next to the fire while I pace around in front of him.
It feels completely normal now to be naked in his presence.
Naked, even plugged still. None of it bothers me right now, because we have a bigger problem.
“We need to think about what you tell your Boss. Killing Grisha was a really dumb move.”
Dami is looking at me with an expression I can’t read. “You don’t need to worry about what my Boss will think. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“It does, actually. When we left this house, you were protecting me from one person killing my Family. Now we’ll have the entire New York Bratva after us, too. Don’t you realize you started a war tonight?”
He leans forward on his knees with an irritated sigh. “I don’t need you to be telling me about this business. I’m the fucking Giuliano Enforcer. I know how the politics work.”
But something keeps pushing me on. I’m not going to let it rest. “If you knew, then why the hell did you kill Grisha? My reputation is hardly worth a mob war, surely—”
“Because you belong to me,” he barks. He catches me as my pacing brings me closer to him, and stands to hold me hard by both arms, even shaking me slightly.
“You belong to me, and no one else gets to touch you, look at you, fucking think about you without my permission. What don’t you get about that? ”
My euphoria dissolves into frustration. Daniel King was right; this man is an ignorant oaf. “Belong to you? If that’s the case, shouldn’t you prove it? At least Grisha wanted to fuck me! All you do is tease me.”
There’s a fire in his eyes and I worry that I might have started an inferno I can’t put out. “This has never been about sex,” he tells me in a low, dangerous voice.
“Everything is about sex!” I shout. “Everything in the goddamn world. Money. Power. Cars. Guns. They’re all about sex, one way or another. Getting it. Having it. Wanting it. Dying for it. The only thing that’s not about sex is sex!”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“I know why you won’t fuck me,” I hiss at him. “It’s because you think it would actually mean something. And you’re a coward.”
Dami stares down into my face for a long moment, long enough to make me wish I hadn’t said what I just did. Then he spins me around and pushes me over the back of the sofa in front of the fireplace.
In one steady pull, he removes the butt plug and throws it onto the seat of the sofa, pushing my head down far enough that I resist, worried he’s going to rub my nose in it.
I hear the rasp of a zipper as he opens his pants.
“Is that what it will take to shut you up?” he snarls. “My cock in your ass?”
I look back over my shoulder at him. “Like I said, Dami, I just don’t think you have the balls.”
He grabs my arms, locking one of his forearms under my elbows so they’re bent back, my chest rising up. I feel the nudge of his cock at my asshole, and in one stroke, he’s deep into me. Balls deep, the warmth of them nestling into my taint.
Well. I guess I’m not a virgin anymore.