Chapter 13
CALIGULA
I feel awful.
Not for myself, although it’s not great to know that someone saw and heard me like that.
But I feel awful for Sammy. I know he has a thing for Damiano, sees me as a usurper, so it can’t have been much fun for him to see…well.
Of course, he could have respected our privacy and left as soon as he realized what was going on. But still—
Damiano moves toward the door and I grab his arm to stop him. And maybe also to touch him again.
“Get your fucking hand off me.”
“You can’t go to Sammy right now,” I say, but I do take my hand off him. “Let’s give him some time to collect himself, and then I’ll go down and see if—”
He seizes me by the arms, his fingers digging in hard and painfully, just like the first night I met him. “If you think I’m gonna let you humiliate Sammy along with me, you’re out of your mind.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” I protest.
But of course he would think the worst. I threatened Sammy’s life to save my own.
“You keep away from Sammy,” he growls, “and you keep your goddamn forked tongue to yourself.”
All I wanted to do was ask Rosa if she thought Sammy was okay. I’m the last person he’d want to see right now, but Damiano would be second-last, which this thick-headed Giuliano doesn’t seem to realize.
“Fine,” I say flatly. “Now let me go.” He does, but he still watches me warily as though I might suddenly bolt from the room. “If you care about Sammy, you’ll give him some time. Besides, I need you.”
“You need me?” he echoes scornfully. “Splattering all over my windows wasn’t enough?”
I’m not going to let him make me blush again. “You served your purpose well enough. But now I need information. I want to know about the Clemenza Loyalists.”
He really does hate me. I can see how much he’d love to pull my head clean off my body right now. But he sits when I point him to a chair, and I pour him out some more coffee.
“Now,” I begin. “You’re going to tell me everything you know about my Loyalists. Who they are. Where they are. And how to find them.”
It’s a brief conversation.
And the more he talks, the more my heart sinks.
They’re a small group, and they lack any power at all.
Steven “Strike” Ferraro, their purported leader, was friendly with my father back in the day, but I know he was badly injured on a job and has a permanent limp and loss of motion in one arm.
Big Mike Giordano and his son Mike Junior are also members, but Junior isn’t a made man.
The others I don’t know. And to hear Dami talk about them, they’re not the toughened crew I’d secretly hoped for.
But they are loyal to the Clemenza name, and that’s something money can’t buy. I’ll have to work with what I’ve got.
“Where are they?” I ask.
“They get together at a bar once a month to talk about old times and get drunk,” Damiano says with a sneer. “So if you were picturing some fiery group of gangsters just waiting to do your bidding, you’re outta luck.”
“You will take me to Strike’s house this morning, unannounced. No need to advertise where we are at any given time.”
“It’s pointless,” he mutters. “They’re not gonna know anything, and they’re all fucking useless.”
“If that’s the case, why were you so anxious to keep me away from them?”
He leans forward fast, intimidating, but I don’t blink. “Because I know the crazy things that golden tongue of yours can make people do,” he snarls. “And I know you’ll find a way to take advantage of them.”
“If they’re useful, then yes, I will.” I push away from the table. “Find Strike’s address. I’m going to shower and dress. Wait for me downstairs in an hour—and ask Vito to bring the car around to meet us.”
I can see how much my orders enrage him, but he has to swallow down what he’d like to say.
“And clean that up, would you?” I toss over my shoulder, waving at the window I just messed up. “Rosa has enough to do.”
I’d be completely mortified if Rosa came in and saw that. It’s bad enough knowing Sammy was watching. But I’m walking quickly enough out of the room that I don’t think Damiano saw my heated cheeks.
I take a shower that’s colder than I’d like, just to shock some sense back into my body.
It’s not working. I still feel him. The phantom grip of his arm around my chest. The wall of him behind me. The way my own voice sounded, cracked open and begging.
I press my forehead against the tile and close my eyes.
What is wrong with me?
I made my peace with wanting men years ago, even in defiance of everything my grandfather believed. I compromised by staying chaste. What I’m worried about isn’t that, it’s…
It’s my response to one man. The one man in the world who has every reason to kill me.
When he squeezed me so hard I couldn’t breathe, I got harder.
When he pinned me to the desk last night, I moaned.
When he left me in the dark in chains, my body remembered his mouth even while my brain screamed in fear.
Perhaps my grandfather saw this weakness in me, the part that will bend, yield, open up to an enemy’s brutality and beg for more.
Run away and cry, Nonno Lou sneers in my memory.
This response to Damiano Orsini’s touch is a problem. I need him sexually interested; it’s one of the few leashes strong enough to hold a beast like him. But every time I pull that particular chain, it wraps tighter around my own throat, too.
I need to make sure my desire doesn’t become a new collar for myself.
I turn the water cold and stay under it as long as I can stand it.
When I get down to the foyer, Dami hasn’t come down yet, so I take a moment to turn on the phone the Morellis gave me and text Finch D’Amato again.
Yesterday, he sent a flood of turkey leg emojis and a question mark, to which I replied with a brief I am still alive and refrained from telling him to choke on his Thanksgiving dinner.
Today I see he’s sent back clapping hands, as though my survival is worthy of applause.
He’s not entirely wrong. I send back an acerbic, Once again, not dead. And then I turn off the phone and leave it on the side table near the fireplace. When I turn, my heart jolts when I see Dami has been watching me from the stairs.
“I didn’t hear you come down,” I say.
“Sending your dick pic to the Morellis, huh?” is all he says.
I don’t dignify that with a response.
Vito is waiting outside the car when we go out, not the large one that took me away from the Obelisk and into this new nightmare, but a more compact town car. Damiano hands Vito a slip of paper.
“This is where we’re going in Queens.” And then he steps forward out of habit to enter the car first.
But I only have to glance at him to make him pause.
I smile in thanks to Vito, who already has the door open, and slide into the back seat in Dami’s place.
Damiano jerks his head at Vito, who gets back into the driver’s seat, while Dami walks around the car to let himself in. “Did you talk to Sammy?” I ask as Vito pulls out from the curb.
His only reply is to hit the button that puts the privacy screen up.
“I told you to give it some time,” I sigh.
“Open your pants.”
I blink at him. “What?”
“You heard me.” He’s not looking at me. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the cock cage, that hateful little contraption the Obelisk sent me home with, and holds it up between two fingers. “Open your pants.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You said your body belongs to me. Contract, remember? So open up, or I’ll do it for you.”
Of all the petty, vindictive…
But even as the fury rises, a cooler part of my brain is already taking hold. Dami needs to feel like he has power over me. If this crude reassertion of ownership is what it takes to blunt his volatility, then it might actually work in my favor.
It doesn’t mean I’m going to enjoy it.
“Fine,” I say, and undo my belt.
He shifts closer, and there’s nothing clinical about the way his hands move.
He tugs my waistband down just enough to reach me, and I have to look away, fixing my gaze out the window as his fingers close around me.
He’s slow—too slow—fitting the ring first, adjusting it with a deliberateness that sends heat crawling up my spine.
“You’re getting hard.”
“I’m aware,” I say through my teeth.
“Better hurry up and think about something else, then. This goes on a lot easier when you’re soft.” He gives me a look of dark amusement, and I want to hit him.
Instead, I think about my grandfather’s study. The desk. The smell of cigar smoke and fear. My arousal dies fast. The cage clicks shut and the weight of it settles against me, a constant, maddening pressure that I’ll feel with every step.
Dami pockets the key, leaving me to button up my pants.
I’m starting to get nervous about his reaction to the man we’re going to meet. Hearing Strike speak fondly of my father might set him off. And speaking of fathers, that brings me to a delicate point.
“What was your father’s name?” I ask.
That jerks his attention back to me. “Why the fuck do you want to know?”
“Answer the question, please.”
He wants to tell me to go to hell; that much is clear. But after a second, he grunts it out. “Vincent.”
“Vincent Orsini,” I repeat.
He grabs my wrist, squeezing painfully hard. “Keep my father’s name out of your mouth.”
I put my other hand gently over his hard grip. “Let go of me.”
It’s a tense moment, his hold only getting stronger until I have to fight not to wince, but he lets me go at last.
“I’m going to ask Strike what he knows about your father,” I go on. “So you’d better get used to hearing his name in my mouth, unless you want me telling tales on you to the Morellis.”
He sneers at me. “And you’d do it, too, you fucking rat.”
“You keep forgetting what I told you, Dami. I will do whatever it takes to survive. I will suck your dick. I will use you for protection. I will offer your household as collateral. Whatever it takes.” I hold his gaze until I see he believes me.