Chapter 11
DAMIANO
He thinks he’s so fucking smart.
He thinks he can control me with his magical asshole.
He thinks the sex between us is the best I’ve ever had, instead of just the first he’s had.
The fucking arrogance of him.
I spent six minutes and fifty-three seconds pacing the foyer upstairs, watching him on the camera feed on my phone.
I knew he’d crumble as soon as I left, and it made me glad to see how much it affected him.
He’d never show me that amount of terror, not to my face, but in all his planning, he seemed to forget about the cameras.
Seemed to.
Or maybe he just didn’t plan on me turning out the light. I hope those minutes felt like an eternity. I hope he thought I’d leave him down there forever.
My mind kept pulling me back to dinner. The way he sat in my chair. Rosa’s glowing face. The whole damn lot of them orbiting Caligula Clemenza like he was the sun and I was just another cold dead rock in the rotation.
I only have myself to blame, though. Because when I picked up that knife, I didn’t slice it through his throat like I wanted to, did I? I obeyed him.
And I came back like a beaten dog to the basement, too, in the end. I’m obeying his every whim. Put the collar on, take it off. Come here. Sit. Roll over.
Beg.
He thinks offering himself is the greatest prize I could want. How dare he presume I’d still want to fuck him, the man who threatens those under my protection, the man whose father killed mine, the man who learned me and played me and left me.
But he’s not the only one who can play games. I’ve been learning him, just like he’s learned me. If I can’t kill him, then I can do the next best thing and torture him.
I rise from the seat abruptly, pleased to see him warily shrink back. I lean over and grab him by the shirt—one of the shirts I put on his back—and haul him off the bed. He weighs nothing. I can move him wherever I want with one hand.
I drag him toward his grandfather’s study. By the time he registers what I’m doing, it’s too late. All the seduction has fled from his face, so I can see the real man underneath. He’s a Clemenza through and through, that manipulative mind turning over even as his feet kick helplessly.
I throw him on his back on the desk, knocking the air out of him. His back arches, his head tips back, and for a second he’s just a sacrifice laid out across his dead grandfather’s altar, gold-bronze hair spilling over the edge, chest heaving.
This desk went for a song at auction. It was one of the few pieces at the Clemenza estate auction that wasn’t worth all that much in itself.
Sturdy and thick, too big to be practical in the smaller rooms of most New York apartments these days, it’s from the Old Country.
Well crafted, but not the work of a master.
Practical rather than beautiful. And it was the base of Lou Clemenza’s power, the place where he made decisions over life and death every day.
He must have felt like God sitting here at this desk.
I’ll enjoy wrecking his grandson over it.
I seize the tails of his shirt and rip it open, bottom to top, buttons bouncing across the wooden surface of the desk. “Dami—” he gasps out, and I put my hand over his mouth and nose and squeeze hard. I can’t stand to hear him mocking me with that nickname another second.
His eyes flutter shut like suffocating him is some kind of foreplay.
And for a moment I think about never letting him take another breath, letting the life leave him here over his grandfather’s desk.
He moans under my palm, and those golden eyes open again, pupils blown so wide they’ve nearly swallowed the amber. His hips shift on the desk.
Toward me, not away.
There are better ways to shut him up.
I take my hand away and he heaves in air, face flushed. I open his pants and yank them down, sneering at the evidence of his excitement. I’m not stupid enough to think his hard-on is for me. I know what it really is.
He gets off on manipulating people. Just like his grandfather.
His cheeks have returned to a healthier pink, but I can’t look at his face anymore; it’s too easy to get charmed by it. Take that pretty, lying face away from him and he’s just a body, like any other.
I walk around the desk and pull him backward over it so his head is hanging down, his neck elongated and elegant. That’s better. I don’t have to look at his face like this. Don’t have to see those eyes looking back at me with fear-edged excitement.
I shove down my jeans, line up with his lips, and feed my cock into his mouth.
He swallows me down with the same unpracticed eagerness he always does.
Not enough skill, but too much want. I wrap a hand around his throat, not squeezing, just feeling those muscles shifting and moving as he adjusts around my dick.
The length of his body flows out before me: the lean muscles, the golden skin, the bronze hairs that curl around his hard cock, which curves up toward his stomach.
I do still own him. He signed that fucking contract. He still needs my protection. And even though I know that ten million is in the wind now—the Bratva will probably use some of it to buy the weapons they hope to kill me with—I did pay out, fair and square.
I start to move. Slow, deliberate. Not deep enough to choke him. I want him to think he can handle this, want him comfortable and careless before I take that away. His jaw is stretched wide and I feel the strain of it through his throat, the way the tendons shift under my palm each time I push in.
His nipples are tight, and his dick is starting to bead up at the end of it. I reach out for one of those tempting little nubs on his chest and give it a hard tweak, just to feel his throat contract around my cock. He moans again, the reverberation humming down my shaft, buzzing through my balls.
I do it again. Harder. His whole body jolts and he reaches for his cock.
I grab his wrist and slam it back against the desk, hard. My fingers easily wrap all the way around, his bones narrow under my grip. Something about that—how breakable he actually is, how easily I could—makes me ease up a little.
He’s scrabbling around with his free hand, trying to find purchase. Then he reaches up for me, grabbing onto my hip. For a second I think he’s going to try to push me away, but he just holds on, hard and desperate, like I’m an anchor for him.
I push deeper. His throat opens for me, and the sound he makes isn’t a moan—it’s closer to a sob, wet and gurgling around my cock. His body is shaking. Not fighting me. Just shaking.
I pull right back out to let him breathe for a second, a string of saliva joining my dick to his swollen lips. He gasps for air. His face is a mess: cheeks flushed pink, eyelashes wet and clumped together.
I shove back in, deeper this time, and his whole body convulses as I hit the back of his throat.
That’s it. That’s what I want. I set a ruthless pace, using his mouth, watching his throat strain with every thrust. His hand on my hip is clinging so tight it’s almost painful, but I don’t make him let go.
I want the mark there tomorrow. I want to see it when I’m showering and remember this.
Remember I fucked him over this desk. The son of the man who murdered my father. The last Clemenza.
“Look at you,” I grit out, my hips snapping forward.
“Last of a great fucking dynasty, and you’re choking on my dick in your dead grandfather’s office.
” He whines around my cock, a pained, desperate sound, and that’s what does it.
I come hard and stupid, spilling down his throat with a groan I can’t swallow back.
My hand goes slack on his neck, my thumb stroking over his pulse point before I register what I’m doing.
I pull out of his mouth and he coughs, rolling over and up into himself like a seashell, delicate and pink. His cock is still hard, flushed and leaking against his stomach. When he gets his breath back, he looks over at me.
I’m pulling my shirt back down over already-buttoned jeans.
There’s confusion in the scrunch of his eyebrows. “You’re…done?”
“You were the one choking on it. You tell me.”
“No, I know, but I meant—”
“I know what you meant.”
He meant I didn’t finish him off. And why should I? A golfer doesn’t worry about his clubs. I don’t wonder if my gun’s feelings get hurt when I use it.
Why should I care any more about the Clemenza?
“You told me to use you,” I point out. “I did. You got any other training tricks for me today, or are we done here?”
His face changes, morphs from understanding into glacial neutrality, and he slides off the desk to grab his pants and pull them back on. “There’s one more thing. What’s your status?”
“My what?”
“Your STI status.” He buttons his pants, not looking at me. “Have you even been tested recently?”
The question stings. Not because it’s unreasonable, but because it’s completely normal. The kind of thing anyone should ask before—
Before.
“I’m negative for everything,” I tell him.
“And you know this because?”
“Because I ain’t stupid. I get checked.”
“How reassuring to finally know.” He smooths his hair back with one hand.
We never had that conversation. There was a contract and an auction and him pushing and pushing me until I fucked him bare…
I want to remind him that he sold himself. Signed a contract, agreed to his treatment, which would’ve been a hell of a lot worse if that now-dead Russian had bought him—
But I keep my mouth shut.
He steps into the elevator and turns to face me, and even hoarse-voiced and flushed and wearing a shirt with no buttons, he looks like he’s the one dismissing me. “We’re done for tonight. But I think it would do you good to spend the night down here, Dami. You can send me up to your bedroom.”
He signed that contract at the Obelisk. So what I did to him was—
“Fine,” I say.
I thought for sure he’d demand that I give him bio-access to the elevator, but he doesn’t. So I send him back up and then turn to look around the basement.
Caligula Clemenza really hates it down here. So he figured I must hate it, too. Joke’s on him. I spent all the free time I could down here before I had him, thinking about what I’d do when I did have him.
So I wander over to the layout of his old bedroom.
It’s getting a little dusty down here; I used to clean it out once a month while I fantasized about which “room” I’d eventually kill the Clemenza in.
I shake out the bedspread, and then I slide into his bed, just like he’s doing to mine upstairs.
I put my arms behind my head and think of him up there, all those floors above me.
He might think he has me where he wants me, but I just need to wait him out.
And I’m very good at waiting.