Chapter 12
DAMIANO
I wake early and shower in the facilities I so kindly provided for the Clemenza during his stay down here. And then I wrap a towel around my waist and use the elevator to go up to my room.
Caligula is still lazing around in bed when I walk in, and jumps like he got caught doing something.
I bet I know what it was, too, because he’s very quick to pull both hands out from under the covers.
His eyes drop to the towel around my hips, and stay there a beat too long before snapping back up.
“Do I need to put the cage back on you?” I ask him, leaning against the door after closing it.
He goes pink. All the way down to his collarbones, visible above the sheets. “You will not use that thing on me again,” he says imperiously, as though he has any say in the matter.
“Why wouldn’t I? You said you’d honor the contract you signed. That means your body belongs to me. If I want to cage you, I’ll fucking cage you.”
I let him think about that as I walk through to the closet. I know he’s watching me go. I feel those eyes on my back, tracking the tattoos across my shoulders and that nasty slice I got working on one of his crazy schemes.
“What are you doing in here anyway?” His voice carries through. “I didn’t call for you.”
“Clothes.” I bring them out to the bed, where I pull off my towel and throw it aside. His eyes go wide. I ignore him and start dressing, taking my time about it. “I gotta go to work,” I tell him. “See if you can refrain from getting my staff killed while I’m gone, will you?”
His eyes snap up from my crotch back to my face. “You can’t go out. We have things to discuss.”
“Talk, talk, talk. That’s all you ever want to do.” I pull on a shirt, button it without hurrying. “I have actual work to do. If I want to keep the Boss off my back, I need to keep doing the job.”
“It’s precisely your Boss that we need to talk about.”
The truth is, I don’t actually have anything pressing today. But I want to see how far the Clemenza is willing to go in ordering me around.
“You want to talk so bad, get dressed and come to the sunroom. We can gossip over breakfast.”
“Don’t you understand how much danger you’re in?” he asks coldly.
“Yeah, yeah. If it’s not the Bratva, it’s the Feds. If it’s not them, it’s the Morellis. And now I’ve got a fucking Clemenza on my back, too. That’s just life, far as I’m concerned.”
“When I said that nothing had changed last night, Dami, I meant it,” he goes on. “We still need to figure out who’s trying to kill me—and we need to find a way to keep Daniel King and the Bratva under control, as long as possible.”
“You might as well try to hold back the Hudson,” I snort. “And anyway, like I told you, Big Gee’s taking care of that.”
I’ve provoked him, because he throws off the covers and slides out of bed. His dick is dying down, but I’m willing to bet he was playing with it just before I came into the room. Something about that image—the Clemenza heir in my bed, stroking himself—sends a throb of vicious heat through me.
I hate him down to his bones, but it’s like the hate gets all twisted up inside me and comes out as lust instead. As much as I hate him, I want to fuck him.
It’s like…if I can’t slide a knife into him, my dick is the next best thing.
He grabs my robe, the one he keeps wearing. “Let’s have breakfast,” he says. “And we can talk things over.”
I tell Rosa to send up the food in the dumbwaiter so we won’t be interrupted, and I crash the Clemenza’s down in front of him when it arrives. “There,” I tell him.
“There’s no silverware,” he says calmly. He’s taken my seat again at the head of the table, so he’s already pissing me off.
I grab a knife and a fork from the credenza and slam them down. “Anything else?”
“You can pour out the coffee. Black, no sugar.”
I’m about ready to stab the fork through his hand, but I do what he wants and then I sit down next to him, instead of at the other end of the table.
He blinks at me.
“Figured I’d stay nice and close,” I tell him, “in case you need anything else.”
The truth is, I want him on edge. I want him thinking that any second I might grab him, throw him over the nearest surface, and fuck him.
Or put a butter knife through his eyeball.
He starts eating, using both knife and fork like some aristocrat. I stab into my eggs with a fork and wait for him to start.
“So,” he begins. “We need to discuss the investigation.”
“What investigation?”
“Who’s after me, Dami.” He sets his fork down. “Your Underboss tasked you with finding out.”
“Yeah. I’ve been a little busy.”
“Busy doing what? What was so vital that ignoring your orders—”
“I was looking for you,” I hiss at him. “So I could pull your spine out through your fucking mouth.”
He swallows, and not because he has a mouthful of food. He pokes at his eggs.
“The trail’s cold,” I go on. “Stuccio gave us a name, but this Tiberius is a ghost. The Obelisk is burned after what happened with Grisha. There are no more leads.”
He picks up his fork. Puts it down again. His eyes keep drifting, unfocused, toward my hands, and there’s that flush climbing his throat again. “I’ll think of something,” he says.
“Yeah. You always do, don’t you?” I put my fork down and glare at him. “Like kissing me in front of Big Gee and D’Amato and the rest of the peanut gallery. What the hell was that, anyway?”
“That was me shoring up your reputation with D’Amato. You’re welcome.”
“And fucking me over with my actual Boss, so thanks for nothing.”
“Are you telling me the fearsome Giuliano Enforcer is too scared to be openly out?”
“That’s not it,” I growl.
But he’s pushing on a sore spot, even though I deny it. Big Gee has generally been cool with me, cool with Seb, in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell kind of way. The Clemenza throwing himself at me yesterday morning is the kind of in-your-face thing that I’ve always been careful to avoid around my Family.
No one’s ever said anything to me. But I’m not stupid enough to believe it’s because no one’s thinking anything. It’s different these days—different since D’Amato took over the place, even though I don’t like to admit that—but all that hate being hidden away doesn’t make it vanish.
It just makes it fester.
And what Nick Fontana said on that car ride back from the warehouse stuck in my mind, which pisses me off.
So I turn all that anger on the Clemenza, who’s the one who really deserves it.
“You want to talk about being scared to be out in the Family? You need to look in a fucking mirror. Your grandfather—”
“Alright,” he says sharply. “This is pointless. We need to strategize. Find a new lead.”
“Fine. Name it.”
“I don’t know.” Frustrated, he pushes back from the table and starts wandering around the back of the room.
“Look, you’re the one who wanted to talk. If you got nothing to talk about, I’ll get to work.”
He glares at me. “I can’t…think.”
It takes me a second to get what he means, and then I laugh. “Can’t get the blood flowing to the brain, you mean?”
His cheeks stain pink, and so does his chest, where my robe is opening slightly across his throat. “That’s not—not everything is about—”
“Sure it is. You told me that yourself just the other night. Everything is about sex.”
“God, you’re so crass,” he snaps, bright red now.
And he’s hard, too.
“Yeah? Well I’m not the one wagging my dick around the breakfast room.” I stand and take a step toward him. He steps back. “Come here, and I’ll get your brain working again.”
“That’s not what the problem is. I’m just…tired.”
I scoff. “You’re useless like this. You can barely string a sentence together.
So either go deal with it yourself like you were doing when I walked in this morning—and that clearly wasn’t cutting it—or let me handle it so we can have this conversation you wanted.
I don’t have time to waste on you, so tell me what it’s going to be. ”
“Funny, you didn’t seem all that concerned about my functionality last night,” he snaps back, red as a stop sign now.
“You wanna clear that brain fog or not? Stop being so damn prissy about it.”
My heart is beating harder at the idea of touching him again, that same fog clouding my judgment, too. But I want him to see that he doesn’t hold all the cards here.
“Fine,” he mutters, and starts to walk back past me. “Come on.”
I catch him. “No. Not in the bedroom. Here.”
“No,” he squeaks. “Rosa might—”
“Rosa stays where she’s damn well told to, unlike you,” I say, pulling him along with me. He doesn’t resist. “But I don’t want you spilling all over the fucking carpet. So we’ll go over here—”
I flick the switch that raises the security shutters over the French doors. It’s still dark and gray outside, the river flat gunmetal, the bridge just a sketch of lights. His face stares back at me from the glass, wide-eyed, but he’s too close to the window to see his own reflection.
I strip the robe off him and he sucks in a breath. Goosebumps race up his arms, his nipples tightening. I press up behind him, one arm banded around his chest, and he wriggles against me, testing, until I close my hand over his nutsack in a warning. “Stay still and let’s get this over with.”
But my words are opposite to my actions. I take him in my hand, feel the weight and heat of him in my palm. I drop him again and hold my hand up to his mouth. “Spit.”
He does. I add my own to it, too, and he makes a sound low in his throat, his head dropping back against my shoulder.
And then I start working him. I keep the strokes long and unhurried.
Each time my thumb drags over the head, his breath catches and his hips stutter forward, trying to fuck into my fist. I don’t let him.
I set the pace: slow on the upstroke, a twist at the crown, then back down.
His hand comes up and grabs my forearm, holding on.
“Dami,” he breathes, and for once it doesn’t sound like mockery. It sounds like he doesn’t have any air left in his lungs.