Chapter 15
CALIGULA
As Damiano insinuated, I’d had visions of some guerrilla organization that was well-trained, disciplined, and most importantly, resourced. What I got was Strike and a handful of aging men who meet once a month in a bar.
But I also got something I hadn’t expected. I got a man who knelt for me.
I remember that day in Nonno Lou’s study.
I was thirteen, my grandfather insisting I was old enough to start learning about the business, and I could see, clear as day, that Strike couldn’t have been the rat.
The logic didn’t work. But Nonno Lou had already decided, so except for my father, no one said a word—and as always, Nonno Lou enjoyed ignoring my father.
Sometimes I think he hated my father as much as he hated me, and I have no idea why.
Anyway. I laid out the logic. And my grandfather, for once in his miserable life, listened.
After Dad and Strike left to take care of the real rat, I got the back of Nonno Lou’s hand across my face. Hard enough to stun me. Hard enough that Nonna Mellie pressed ice to my cheek afterward, smoothing my hair and murmuring endearments while the side of my face swelled up.
It was the ring that hurt the worst, catching on my cheekbone. The ouroboros ring that Nonno Lou wore as head of the Family.
I told my father I’d fallen down the stairs. If he’d found out what really happened, he would have done something that couldn’t be taken back.
He would have killed Nonno Lou.
And then my uncle Patrizio, the eldest son and heir, would have to kill my father. I knew how the Family worked.
I saved Strike, but I condemned another man. Bruno Nardelli had always been kind to me when he visited the house. He’d give me candy from his pocket and pat me on the head and tell me to grow up big and strong.
But even so, he was a rat.
“All clear,” Damiano calls from outside the house.
I turn back to Strike, who’s holding on to one of my hands with both of his, a look of reverence in his eyes.
“I’ll call on you soon,” I tell him. And then I drop into the conversation the other thing I’ve been mulling over.
“By the way, I need to speak to one of my cousins. Tiberius Vicario. Do you know where he’s living these days? ”
The blank look on Strike’s face tells me he doesn’t. “Vicario?” he repeats. “They’re all gone. They died out after Chicago.”
When I’d heard about that Chicago massacre, I’d been so happy for a few hours.
The reports said everyone was dead. But Nonno Lou came crawling back alive, the proverbial cockroach.
Alive and indebted to Luca D’Amato. I don’t think his pride ever recovered from that blow. It only made him more vicious.
So I have no doubt at all that what Finch D’Amato claimed was true, that my grandfather tried to kill Don Morelli at that dinner. Nor do I personally blame Finch for defending his husband.
But as a Clemenza, I can’t forgive it.
“My cousin is still around,” I tell Strike. “I just wondered if you’d heard from him. I know he was anxious to see me, too.”
Strike’s face clouds. “Don’t trust anyone,” he tells me. “Especially not that Giuliano. You should come and stay here—”
“Thank you, but no,” I say firmly. And then I try one more time. “About my father and Vincent Orsini—you really don’t know why Dad killed him?”
Strike gets that mulish look again, but then I see him waver. And I could swear he’s about to tell me something when a shadow appears in the doorway. “You fucking coming, or what?” Damiano grunts.
“I’ll be in touch,” I tell Strike through a grit-teeth smile, and I follow Dami out the door and back to the car. “Impeccable timing, as always, Orsini,” I sigh, as Vito opens the door for me.
“The hell is that supposed to mean?” he asks, getting in the other side. I just shake my head.
I’m still thinking about the ring.
The ouroboros ring. The sigil of the Family itself.
I need that ring if I’m ever going to be recognized. It’s part of our traditions. If I can’t find it…
I can’t be Don Clemenza.
And I have no clue where it is.
It wasn’t in the list of assets sold off as part of the estate. It wouldn’t have been buried with Nonno Lou, either. My cousin Louie might have had it? But even though I only saw his body for a few seconds before I ran, I’m sure I would have noticed the ring on his finger. It’s hard to miss. So—
“So, I guess now you see how fucking dumb it was to run out in the middle of the night looking for these Loyalists of yours,” Damiano says. “Happy to hear an apology any time.”
“They are my people,” I tell him. “No matter how low they might have fallen, they’re still my people.”
“Listen to you,” he scoffs. “Thinking you’re some fucking king in exile come to reclaim the crown. Your people are dead and gone. All the useful ones, anyway. You got nothing left and the only crown you’ll ever wear is a crown of thorns. I’ll make fucking sure of that before I crucify you myself.”
“Don’t you remember what happened at the end of that story?” is all I say in response.
“You Clemenzas won’t resurrect,” he says in a low hiss. “I’ll make sure of that.”
Nonno Lou was paranoid about certain things. He kept emergency cash where he could reach it, for example. The ring would have been the same: close, accessible, never entrusted to a bank or to his lawyer.
In his study. It could have been in his study.
And that study—every stick of furniture, every drawer, every hollow compartment—is beneath Damiano Orsini’s house, reassembled with obsessive precision by the man sitting next to me.
The ring could be down there right now. Hidden inside a desk leg, taped under a drawer, tucked into the lining of that wingback chair.
“Listen, I need to go to work,” Damiano snaps.
“Drop me home. Then you can go beat up half of New York, if you’re so eager to split your knuckles open.”
“Home, did you say?” he asks, a dangerous edge to his voice.
“Your house,” I amend. God, he’s so particular about that.
“You liked that, didn’t you?”
“Liked what?” I ask distractedly. I’m wondering where to start in the study.
“The old man on his knees, kissing your hand. You liked seeing him bow down to you.”
I don’t answer. I just keep staring out the window, wishing he’d shut up so I can think.
Damiano shifts beside me. His thigh is inches from mine. I can smell his cologne and underneath it, the clean heat of his skin.
“I think that’s what gets you off,” he goes on, conversational, almost lazy. “People on their knees for you. Isn’t that right, golden boy?”
“I’m not having this conversation.”
“No?” I hear the clink of his belt buckle. The rasp of a zipper. “Then how about you put that mouth to better use?”
I turn my head.
He’s taken himself out. Hard, thick, resting against the dark denim of his jeans with the casual obscenity of a man who is used to getting what he wants. He doesn’t look at me. He’s staring straight ahead, one arm draped across the back of the seat, the other resting on his thigh.
His hand drops to the back of my neck and squeezes a warning. “It’s not going to suck itself, Clemenza.”
The shame hits first. A hot flood of it, from my chest to my hairline. Because the infuriating, mortifying truth is that my mouth is already watering.
This is the pattern. Every time I pull ahead, every time I command him, outmaneuver him, make him obey, Damiano Orsini tries to drag me back down with sex.
It’s his reset button. His way of reminding me that whatever titles I claim, whatever old men kneel for me, I’m still the virgin he bought for ten million dollars.
And I’m going to do it. I’m going to suck him off. Partly because keeping him sexually invested is a leash I can’t afford to drop, but mostly because, God help me, I want to.
I lean over. His fingers thread through my hair, gripping hard enough that my scalp burns. I take him in my mouth and his thigh tenses under my hand, a sharp exhale escaping him that he tries to swallow back.
The taste of him is immediate and overwhelming—salt and musk and the dark tang of desire. My jaw aches from the stretch of him almost instantly. And between my legs, the cage bites as my body tries to respond and can’t—a dull, maddening pressure that turns arousal into something closer to pain.
His hand tightens in my hair. “That’s it,” he murmurs, and his voice has dropped into that low, rough register that makes reality fall away, so that the only thing that exists is the two of us. “There’s the little prince in his proper place.”
There’s nothing but the throb of him on my tongue and the sound of his breathing and my inexcusable, consuming desire to drown in him.
I take him deeper, and the sound he makes sends a surge of satisfaction through me. He may be the one twisting up his fingers in my hair, but I can still affect him. I feel his thigh shaking, the tension building in his body, his hips shifting restlessly on the seat.
“Fuck,” he breathes. His grip shifts, still tight in my hair, but his thumb has moved, stroking along my temple in a rhythm that has nothing to do with control. I don’t think he knows he’s doing it. I close my eyes and let myself feel it, that tiny, involuntary gentleness from a man who has none.
The cage throbs. My eyes sting. I hollow my cheeks and suck harder, and his whole body jerks.
He comes with a grunt, his hand fisted so tight in my hair that my eyes are watering. I swallow because there’s nowhere else for it to go, and when I sit up, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, he’s already tucking himself away. Staring out the window as if nothing happened.
We ride the rest of the way in silence.
Vito pulls up to the curb at the house and comes around to open my door for me. But I turn to Damiano. “You’ll come in with me,” I tell him. He opens his mouth to protest, and I add, “Just for a moment. Vito can wait for you out here.”
He trudges down under the portico to let me into the front door, raising the metal security door with his fingerprint access, then waving me in with a mocking smile. By now, I know where I’m going. I beckon him around the corner to the elevator. “I want you to take me down to the basement.”
He stares at me. “I’m not kidding, I got shit to do. I don’t have time to fuck you into being smart again.”
Crude as always. “I’ll stay down there while you’re out. Ask Rosa to send down some lunch in the dumbwaiter like she used to.”
He tilts his head to the side and smiles an unpleasant smile. “You got a taste for it, huh? Getting chained up down there? If that’s what you want, I’m more than happy to oblige, golden boy.”
“That’s not why I’m—” I break off. “Just do what I say. And I swear to God, Dami, if you don’t come back and get me later—”
“What are you gonna do? Your lifeline to Finch D’Amato doesn’t get reception down there.”
So he’s noticed that, too. “That doesn’t help you, either. If he doesn’t hear from me…” I trail off, letting the sentence finish itself in his brain.
The smirk turns into a snarl. “Let’s get you down there,” he says.
We step in and he presses his finger to the panel, taking us down to the basement level.
I have thought, of course, about making him add my fingerprint to the scanner.
But for now, it’s better to make him control it.
To remind him of the consequences otherwise.
Before I step out into the basement, I reach over and hit the lights. The grotesque layout of my family’s home appears before me—but I’m transfixed by my grandfather’s desk.
I’ll start there, but the ring could be anywhere. In any drawer, any compartment, any hidden space in any piece of furniture that Damiano so carefully preserved. He thought he was building a monument to his hatred. He may have been guarding my crown.
“When you return, you’ll come down and get me,” I say over my shoulder. “Clear?”
“Clear.”
I step out.
“I’ll be working late tonight, though,” he adds, just as the doors close.