Chapter 17
CALIGULA
I’m naked and caged in the basement yet again, but at least this time I’m free to wander around. And it’s still warm down here, too.
The cameras had to be covered, and there was nothing down here to do it with except my own clothes.
My first instinct was Nonna Mellie’s serviettes from the credenza—she kept a set of hand-embroidered linen ones that she brought from Italy, wrapped in tissue paper.
But when I opened the credenza doors, it was empty.
And that’s one thing I’ve discovered about this version of my home: it’s as empty as a stage set. There’s no china in the cabinets. No silverware in drawers. No clothes in closets. And no serviettes in the credenza.
The more I searched, the more I realized this isn’t the old townhouse.
I mean, obviously. Because it’s in a claustrophobic, low-ceilinged basement with no windows.
But less obviously in the sense that it’s not a perfect recreation.
Damiano told me he set it out according to the pictures he saw in that magazine story, but either he forgot or didn’t know that those things are always staged.
He spent years obsessing over a magazine spread, but he never knew what really went on inside those walls.
So, with no other option, my clothes went over the cameras, and I spent the day naked except for the cage, methodically working through the furniture in the study “set.” Every drawer pulled out and checked for false bottoms. Every table leg knocked on for hollowness.
Everything tipped and turned and examined from beneath, tracing over joints and seams, looking for compartments, hidden catches, anything.
I find nothing. Certainly not the Clemenza ring, a thick band of gold with a ruby-set snake’s head eating its own tail, and diamonds for eyes. Does Tiberius have it? Was that why he bid on me at auction, too? Maybe he wanted both the ring and their heir.
Once I admitted there was nothing in the study, I had to start looking elsewhere. I started with Nonno Lou’s bedroom, but I’m beginning to lose hope.
Rosa sent meals down throughout the day, but frustration dulled my appetite.
By ten, I’m exhausted, and my fingertips are raw from running them along wood grain for hours.
By eleven, I can barely keep my eyes open.
I take a shower, hoping the warm water will revive me, but it just makes things worse.
I need to sleep. But I don’t want to turn off the lights, and the “punishment” bed Damiano put down here—no pillows, no covers—is not something I’d sleep on again in a million years.
My own bed looks so tempting. I’m sure it’s even the same mattress and pillows, and it’s definitely Nonna Mellie’s choice of quilted coverlet: ivory with pale blue stitching, the one she ordered from a linen house in Florence.
I remember her smoothing it over my bed when I was small. “There,” she’d say. “Fit for a prince.”
I lie down, and the sensation is so familiar it makes my chest ache—the cool cotton sheets, the silky weight of the quilt, the pillows at exactly the right firmness. For a moment, I’m nine years old again, safe in my room, Nonna Mellie downstairs making espresso, my father reading in his room.
Except the pillows don’t smell the same. They smell like…
Like Damiano.
I roll over onto my stomach and bury my face into the pillow, breathing in. Yep. It’s definitely him. I feel like a Reverse Goldilocks: Papa Bear has been sleeping in my bed.
I pull the covers right up over my head to block out the light, press my face into the pillow as much as I can without suffocating, and then I fall asleep so fast it’s more like passing out.
I dream about Dami.
His hands sliding up my calves, over the backs of my thighs, fingers trailing the crease where my legs meet my body. His lips pressing into the small of my back, warm and slow.
I wake with a moan, and then I realize it’s not a dream.
There are hands on me. Real hands, rough and massive, pulling at my ankles. I start to move, to twist, and those hands grab my hips and wrench them upward—my knees beneath me now, my chest still pressed to the mattress, the covers tangled around my shoulders.
My head clears the blankets and I blink into nothing.
Pitch dark. He’s turned the lights off.
Panic spikes through me, sharp and electric, my breath catching in my throat. But before the fear can take hold, his hands spread me open and his mouth—
Oh.
Oh.
His tongue is hot and wet and impossibly intimate, pressing flat against me and then curling, probing. The sensation is so overwhelming that I bury my face in the pillow and make a helpless sound.
He works me with patient, devastating thoroughness. His thumbs dig into the muscle of my ass, holding me open, and his tongue pushes inside me in slow, slick strokes that make my thighs shake and my hands fist in Nonna Mellie’s sheets. The darkness strips everything away. There’s no performance.
Just sensation.
And every time I think I’ve hit the ceiling of what this can feel like, his tongue provokes a new sensation.
His hand slides beneath me and finds the cage. His fingers trace the shape of it, and I feel a soft exhale against my wet skin that might be satisfaction. Then his other hand is reaching under too, and there’s a small click, a shift of metal, and the cage comes away.
The relief is so intense it’s almost painful. After a full day locked in that thing, the sudden freedom makes me gasp, every nerve ending screaming awake. His fingers brush my cock, barely a tease, and I jerk forward because the sensitivity is blinding.
Then his hands are on my shoulders, turning me, flipping me onto my back in the dark. I can’t see him, but I can feel him, the heat of his body, the shift of the mattress under his weight, his knees on either side of my hips.
The sound of his hand on himself is fast, an urgent rhythm that tells me he’s close. His breathing fractures. And then the warm spill hits my face—across my cheek, my mouth, the bridge of my nose—and I gasp at the shock of it, the degradation, the intimacy so raw it feels like being skinned alive.
I lie there, breathing hard. My cock is throbbing, untouched, desperate…
I reach for it.
His hand catches my wrist. “No,” he says. The first word either of us has spoken. His voice is utterly without mercy.
He holds my wrist until I stop fighting. Then he releases me, and I hear fabric rustling—his t-shirt, pulled over his head. A moment later the cotton drags gently across my face, wiping me clean with a care that contradicts everything that came before it. I keep still and let him do it.
And then he lies down.
Right here. In my childhood bed, in the basement he built to destroy me, in the dark that sometimes terrifies me. He lies down beside me and the mattress dips under his weight, his shoulder touching mine, his body radiating warmth.
I should move to the far edge. Turn my back. But I just lie there with my body aching and the taste of him still on my lips, and I listen to his breathing slow and deepen.
I’m still hard. Still furious. Still confused by the tenderness of that shirt on my face after the debasement of what came before it.
He unlocked the cage. He set me free. But he won’t let me use that freedom.
He’s so warm. And I’m covered in the smell of him, and I like it. And in the dark, with Nonna Mellie’s coverlet pulled up to my chin and the bulk of him solid and present beside me, I feel something I haven’t felt for a very long time.
Safe.
I think I hate him for that most of all.
I curl toward the warmth, and I sleep.
I wake pressed against him: my face against his shoulder, my arm draped across his chest, my cock hard against his thigh. At some point in the night I attached myself to him like a barnacle, and he let me. Or he was asleep and didn’t notice. Either way, I’m mortified.
And I don’t move.
The basement is still dark. But I can feel him breathing, the steady rise and fall beneath my arm, and I know from a subtle shift in his body that he’s awake, too.
I press my lips to his shoulder. A test. A question.
He shrugs me off. “What were you doing down here all day yesterday?”
So that’s how this morning is going to go. I don’t answer, because I can hardly tell him I was searching his basement for my Family’s ring. Instead I slide my hand up his side, feeling the ridged landscape of muscle and scar tissue.
He throws off the covers and sits up on the edge of the bed.
“Don’t go yet,” I say, and I hate how it sounds. Not commanding. Not strategic. Just…needy.
“Is that an order?” he scoffs. “You’ll have Rosa killed if I don’t stay here and let you snuggle?” He turns on the lights with the controls on his phone. I’m left blinking at his back—the broad expanse of it, the tattoos, the cut on his shoulder blade still healing.
I should let him go. Instead, I move with him, wrapping my arms around his waist from behind, pressing my face between his shoulder blades. I feel his heartbeat through his back, steady and slow. Mine is hammering.
“Get off me,” he says. “I need a shower.”
Slowly, I unwind my arms and let him go. He stands and heads for the shower.
And I follow, incapable of dignity this morning. “You need someone to wash your back,” I say. “That cut’s still healing.”
He turns on me, and for the first time I see his face. It’s closed and hard. “No,” he says. Flat. Final.
The rejection shouldn’t sting. I’m the one who’s supposed to be in control of this dynamic. I’m the one using sex as a leash. But standing there naked and being told no by the man who’s supposed to be obsessed with me—
It stings.
He showers alone. I go back to make my bed and listen to the water run and try to reassemble myself. By the time he’s finished, towel around his waist, I’ve found something close to composure.
“Did you sleep in my bed?” I ask. “Before. When I wasn’t here.”
He pauses, mid-step. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
The smile he gives me is ugly and slow. “Because I used to lie there and think about where you were sleeping that night. Under a bush in Central Park? Behind a pillar in some subway station?” He tilts his head. “Tucked up in a doorway somewhere, hoping nobody found you?”
I did sleep in all those places. And the whole time, Damiano Orsini was snuggled up in my bed, smiling about it.
I swallow it. Move on. “We need to find my cousin,” I say. “Tiberius Vicario.”
“Given up on the Clemenza Loyalists?” He gives a sour smile. “Still waiting on an apology about them.”
“I’m not going to apologize for discovering you’re a liar. If I’d known I had any other option than the Obelisk—”
“You already sold your ass at the Obelisk before you heard about them. You don’t know what resources your own Family has?
That’s on you. And besides…” He grabs my face, squeezing hard into my cheeks.
“You’re the runt of the Clemenza litter.
Even if you had power, you wouldn’t know what to do with it. ”
I grab at his wrist, trying to break his hold, but he shoves me away before I can even try.
“You want to find your cousin, it’s not that hard,” he says. “Go to the last lead you had.”
I frown, rubbing at my sore face. I can’t think as fast as I usually do this morning. “Meaning?”
“Meaning, go talk to your Uncle Tony.”
“Somehow, I don’t think he’d see me.”
“Jesus Christ.” He actually laughs. “You think that would’ve stopped your Nonno Lou? This is exactly what I mean. Power doesn’t wait for things to happen. It makes them happen.”
“And how would you make it happen?” I ask icily. “Since you seem so well acquainted with power and its use?”
“I’d find out next time he’s gonna be in public and I’d go there and get him alone. It’s not fucking rocket science. Most men will do whatever you want if they think it’ll stop you punching out their teeth.”
“Alright, Dami. Let’s play it your way. Find out next time Uncle Tony will be in public. That’s your task for today.”
He stalks toward me again and I back up until my legs hit the bed, making me sit abruptly. He looms over me, blocking the light, and for a moment we’re right back where we started—the beast and the prince, the size difference absurd and terrifying and, God help me, arousing.
“You’re not my Boss,” he says softly. “I’ve got other shit I need to do today.”
“Then you’ll have to find the time,” I say. “Head out early—now—and do it before work.”
We stare at each other until he shakes his head and walks away, heading for the elevator. And I have to jog after him, still naked, worried that he’ll leave me down here again for another full day.
I’m over this damn basement. And I don’t want the reminder of last night in my face all day: my bed, and the stink of sex that still lingers in its sheets.