Chapter 10
CALIGULA
It’s almost as terrifying for me to step back into that basement as it was to be dangled into space five flights up. I didn’t realize how badly it affected me, being kept down here—both in the dark and in the light, so I could see the mockery of my heritage—until right now.
I knew I never wanted to come back down here again. But I also knew I’d have to, if I wanted to bring Damiano Orsini to heel. The dinner was a soft leash, seeing if I could make him sit, eat, play nice in front of the household.
Now it’s time to test how strong my hold is.
He’s staring at me after my announcement, surprise on his face, though he tries to hide it. “What did you say?”
“I want you,” I say slowly, “to put that collar around my neck and lock it shut.”
I cross to the bed, sheets still crumpled and stale from when I became feverish. I take a seat on the bed and wait with an air of patience.
This whole place is a curious juxtaposition to the man himself.
The intricacy of it—the stolen heritage, the photographs, the look-but-don’t-touch torture of being chained to a bed and unable to reach the set piece…
It all suggests a capacity for psychological cruelty that doesn’t match Damiano’s usual approach to pain.
He prefers action over thought. He’d rather hit something than lash it with his tongue.
But that’s where the longer-term cruelties lie; I learned that lesson from my grandfather.
He only ever hit me once. Much worse was the way he used to pour scorn and derision all over me in every conversation.
There was a day when I was eleven, and my father and Nonna Mellie were out, when he reduced me to tears with insults alone.
“Run away and cry,” he’d sneered at me.
I did. But it was the last time I cried until Nonna Mellie died, and even then, I did it in secret. At my father’s funeral I was too shellshocked to even feel anything.
“How did you come up with all this?” I ask as Dami finally arrives next to the bed.
He’s looking down at me. I have to tilt my head back to meet his eyes, which hold that unsettling hunger I’ve been seeing since the warehouse.
Hunger for me? Or for my death?
Either way, it’s something I can use.
“Come up with what?” he growls.
“This place.” I wave my hand around the room. “What made you think of doing it in the first place?”
I’m not really expecting an answer. But I get one.
“When I was seventeen, your grandfather sold off his watch collection.” He shifts his weight, and I’m keenly aware of the sheer mass of him: the width of his shoulders blocking the light, his shadow falling across me.
“I went to the auction even though I wasn’t a buyer.
I just wanted to know how much they’d go for.
If the Clemenza name would add any value. ”
“And how did that lead to this?” I nod around the room again.
“Showed me how much money I’d need to go after your father. Gave me a goal to work toward. And then one time, some architectural magazine did a piece on that townhouse of yours.”
He still hasn’t sat down. And he hasn’t talked this much since…maybe ever. But I suppose everyone likes to talk about their personal obsessions.
I remember the magazine he means. Nonna Mellie refused to participate, so one of my cousins was brought in to stand beside Nonno Lou and play the part of adoring granddaughter. Dad and Nonna Mellie took me to Coney Island, where I ate too much ice cream.
It was a good day. It always was when it was just the three of us.
“I saw all that money,” Damiano goes on in a low voice. “All that money built on betrayal and blood. And I thought—why should they have everything? Why shouldn’t I have it instead?” His hands, those massive, tattooed, dangerous hands, twitch like he wants to grab me.
“And now you do have everything we once had,” I say calmly. “But it wasn’t really about money, Dami. Was it?”
An ugly look passes over his face. I need to be careful here. Careful he doesn’t forget the stakes.
“Put the collar on me,” I tell him. He picks it up easily enough, but he doesn’t come any closer to me. The chain clinks and shifts on the floor. “Put it on me,” I repeat.
“Why? So you can tell the Morellis I been treating you bad?”
“This is not a trick. I want you to put that collar on me and lock it.”
He takes a step closer, watching me like I really am a snake, likely to strike at any moment.
He opens the collar and slips it around my neck, taking care not to touch me with his hands at all.
The heavy metal closes around my throat, and I bend my head forward so that he can lock it—and also so he can’t see my face.
Because I have to squeeze my eyes shut tight for a moment to fend off the rising fear in me. Fear…and something even more shameful. A pulsing need. I have no idea why.
Just like I have no idea why getting dangled over the stairs turned me on as much as terrified me.
Dami made a very special effort with the tortures he thought up for me in this basement, hoping to break my mind before my body. He showed a much more psychologically sophisticated approach to his revenge than he does to his work.
The Giuliano Boss is a man who favors bullying and violence over diplomacy and strategy. The Morelli Boss is the opposite.
If Dami actually had a chance to grow…
But he won’t ever, will he? He’s obsessed with his vengeance. It’s the only thing that matters to him.
That’s why this moment is so important.
He takes a step back and looks me over. “Do you think it suits me?” I ask sweetly. He doesn’t reply. “You will go back upstairs and wait for exactly five minutes. At the end of that time, you will come back down here. Any questions?”
“Yeah. How the fuck are you going to know it’s exactly five minutes?”
I pull out the phone Finch gave me, and set the timer. “Take this with you. Hit start just before you enter the elevator, and leave it on the floor. When it goes off, I’ll know. And if you’re not back…”
“You think you can train me like a dog?” he asks with a curl of his lip, showing teeth. “This is bullshit.”
“You will do as I say, or the people under your protection will pay the consequences.”
There it is again, slipping out of me with no hesitation. My grandfather’s methods. The hatred in Damiano’s eyes almost makes me flinch. Almost.
“I shoulda listened when you told me exactly what you are,” he spits out. “A venomous fucking viper.”
He snatches the phone and stalks to the elevator, stabbing a finger at the phone and setting it down just before he gets into the only exit out of here. And then, just before the elevator doors close, he reaches out and snaps off the light. “Enjoy yourself,” he says.
The darkness floods in as the elevator doors close, and the anxiety is immediate. But I have to control it—I have to, if I’m going to have any hope of controlling him.
I focus on the faint light of the phone near the elevator. But soon enough it dims, then goes out. I close my eyes, even though it’s already pitch black, but the illusion of choosing to shut out the world is marginally better than having it forced on me. I try to slow my accelerating breathing.
It’s not working. Nothing’s working.
I’m starting to panic, a scream rising up in my throat that I have to choke down.
When I can’t stand it any longer, I curl into a ball and put my arms over my head, chanting silently that everything will be fine. It will be alright. Dami will return, and he will be controllable.
He’ll come back.
I just need to think about something else.
But the thoughts that come to me are torturous in a different way. The scrape of his jaw followed by the soft soothing of his lips down my throat. His hands gripping my ass and pulling it open. The nudge of his cock—
The timer starts its tinkling song and I blow out a long breath of relief, sitting up. Any second now.
Any second.
The alarm goes on, repeating itself. And again.
And a third time.
I still can’t hear the faint whirr of machinery that presages the elevator’s arrival. I can’t hear anything except that damn alarm, falsely cheerful, mocking me where it lies. And in the faint light it lets out, I can see dark, hulking furniture, the dissected rooms of the townhouse.
I breathe in and out slowly, trying to quell the rising terror.
From the corner of my eye, I think I see something in my grandfather’s study—a shadow moving.
I turn my head so fast I get a crick, and scramble away on the bed until the chain, caught around the far corner of the mattress, yanks me back.
Just as I’m sucking in the air to scream, I hear it.
A familiar click and whirr. The sound of the machinery engaging. The elevator descending.
It used to scare me. In this moment, it’s the sweetest sound of all.
I only have seconds to get myself under control. I reach up to wipe my eyes, horrified to find them damp, and rub my face lightly while I tell myself to get a fucking grip.
The elevator hits the landing. The doors slide open. Damiano strolls out, hits the lights, and looks at me. A slow smile lifts his lips. “You got anything else you wanna prove to me, golden boy?”
It hurts to hear him call me that. He did it on purpose, just like I’ve been calling him “Dami” on purpose.
But he came back. The beast returned as commanded.
“Come over here,” I say, and my voice is steady. A minor miracle.
He ambles over, taking in my disheveled state with visible enjoyment. “What now?” He drops into the chair at the foot of the bed, the throne he liked to sit in while watching me. Spreads his knees wide, arms on the rests. “You want to crawl over and suck my dick for me?”
He’s crude and violent and filled with hatred. But his suggestion triggers a taste at the back of my tongue, salt and musk. His hand fisted in my hair. My jaw stretched wide and aching.
“Take off the collar,” I order him.
He laughs. “Oh, I musta left the key upstairs.”
“Take it off,” I repeat. “Now.”
“Jesus. You need to learn to take a joke.” He stands to fish in his pocket, and I wait with what I hope looks like impatience rather than the desperate need to have this collar off of me.
Was this whole endeavor pointless? He picked up on my discomfort so easily. He’s disdainful about my orders unless I threaten Rosa and the others.
And I don’t want to threaten them every time I need something from him.
I need more than one chain around this beast’s neck if I’m going to compete with his Boss’s prior claim. More than the threat of the Morellis.
I need a carrot as well as a stick.
He steps forward, and I bend my neck forward to allow him access to the lock. His fingers graze the nape of my neck this time, and a shudder goes through me that I can’t suppress.
He pauses. His thumb traces a slow half-circle against my skin, just below the collar’s edge—deliberate, proprietary, nothing to do with the lock.
Then the lock clicks open, the collar falls away, and I can breathe again.
When I look up, his eyes are still filled with that odd hunger, the look of a man who doesn’t know if he wants to kill me or fuck me.
It’s exactly the kind of weakness that I’m looking for.
“Thank you,” I say. “Now sit down again.”
His eyebrows twitch, but he sits back in his throne.
“You understand what all this was about,” I begin. “To show you not only that you must obey me, Dami, but that you will. No matter how much you want me dead, no matter how tempting it might be. You will keep me alive and safe, and in return, I’ll continue helping you.”
“Helping me?” he snarls incredulously.
“Helping you.”
He scoffs. “Big Gee said he’s handling the Obelisk thing. I don’t need you for anything.”
“Yes, you do. Luca D’Amato is not going to be thrilled that you gave the Bratva a legitimate grievance against the Families.
” I’m glad I met the man, got a sense of him.
He’s a more dangerous enemy than I anticipated—and I had no idea how lethal that husband of his was.
“And you’re still supposed to be finding out who’s killing off my people,” I go on.
“Your Underboss tasked you with that, and I assume you’ve still made zero progress on that. ”
“So?”
“So your Boss saw me kiss you. The Morellis heard you give your word. I have been publicly claimed, Dami. If I disappear, or turn up dead, every eye will be on you. Which means you need me alive, you need me cooperative, and you need me telling a consistent story. Especially now that everyone knows we’re fucking. ”
“The hell we are,” he says at once, hard and cold.
“We were. Just the other night, in fact. And…there’s no reason we have to stop.”
He gives a sour laugh. “I leave you down here in the dark for five goddamn minutes, and you lose your mind.”
“It was longer than five minutes.”
“Elevator took a while, I guess. And as for fucking you—I’d rather stick my dick in a damn beehive.”
I crawl toward him across the bed. Slowly. “We both know that’s not true, Dami.” I stop at the edge of the mattress, close enough that I could reach out and touch him. Or he could reach out and touch me. “And besides...”
“Besides what?”
“You paid ten million dollars for me. I’m sure you want to get good use out of your property.”
His breath stutters. He covers it fast. “You really have lost your fucking mind.”
I hold his gaze, the last heir of a dead Family looking at the man who wants to bury him. Slowly, I tilt my head to bare my throat where the collar sat moments ago. “You can’t break me, Dami. But imagine all the fun you could have trying.”