Chapter 18
CALIGULA
We go back up to Damiano’s bedroom, where he dresses without a word and then leaves. He doesn’t attempt to lock me in the bedroom, or even threaten me to stay inside the house.
He probably wishes I’d leave on my own. It would solve a lot of his problems.
I shower and head downstairs ten minutes later, stopping in the foyer to grab the Morelli phone and text Still kicking to Finch D’Amato, who immediately responds with a thumbs-up.
I turn off the phone and head to the kitchen, hoping for breakfast…
and maybe some company. But the kitchen is empty.
Rosa’s been here recently, though, because something is simmering on the stovetop.
I’m reaching for the coffee pot when I feel it—the prickle of being watched.
I glance over my shoulder. Sammy is standing in the corridor that leads to the bedrooms, half in shadow, watching me with an expression that isn’t hostile, exactly.
Just watchful. Like an animal deciding whether something is a threat.
He’s wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves hacked off at the shoulder, the raw edges fraying over a long-sleeved thermal underneath.
His jeans are held together with safety pins at one knee, and his combat boots are covered in graffiti tags and tied with red paracord.
It’s not an outfit so much as a statement.
“Hi,” I say at last, to break the awkward silence.
He pulls back down the hall.
I follow, catching an image on the back of the jacket as he turns, a bird skeleton painted across the denim in white paint. He disappears into one of the rooms off the dark corridor, but he leaves the door ajar, and I see him in there through the gap.
He’s standing in the middle of his room, looking back at me. Waiting.
I knock softly on the open door and it swings wider. The room is half the size of Damiano’s but packed to the brim. Scraps of old metal, flattened food cans, broken glass sorted by color into cardboard boxes, street signs, shipping pallets, dismantled electronics, fabric remnants…
For a second, I wonder if he’s a hoarder. But then I lift my eyes from the floor to the walls.
There’s a piece directly across from me that makes my mouth drop.
It’s about three feet tall, assembled from flattened tin cans, shards of glass, twisted copper wire strung with sequins.
It’s a man, or the suggestion of one, hunched forward with his arms wrapped around himself.
The sequins catch the light and throw it back, so that the figure seems to be…
shaking. Shivering in fear. Behind it, dark fabric is stretched across a salvaged pallet frame, secured with bent, rusty nails.
Pieces of broken mirror are embedded in the cloth, reflecting the viewer.
I’m looking at a man in pain, and behind him, my own face looks back at me.
These scraps and salvages aren’t junk. They’re his materials. Sammy’s an artist—and he’s good. Really good. I know genuine talent when I see it; all those gallery openings with Nonna Mellie gave me that, at least.
“Wow,” I say. “That piece is amazing.”
Something flits across his face. Surprise. Pride, maybe. But gone in an instant. “What do you want?” he asks in a low voice.
“I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot,” I begin carefully. “I thought maybe—”
“The wrong foot?” He gives a dark chuckle. “Are you serious?”
“I wanted you to know how sorry I am about what happened to you.”
“It didn’t happen to me,” he counters. “You people did it to me.”
“You’re right. Yes. I’m sor—”
I break off as he takes a step forward, his hands fisted up by his sides, and I cautiously back up into the hallway.
“You think this shit is ‘amazing’?” he demands, mocking my voice.
He waves a hand around the room. “You think I got some artistic yearning? You motherfuckers beat me so bad I still can’t sleep most nights from the pain, and if I do, I have nightmares.
Damiano got me into some art therapy class to help, and this is the bullshit that came out of that.
So don’t pretend you think I’m some fucking Picasso. ”
I feel like I want to throw up. “I’m sorry,” I mutter. “Sammy, I—I’m so sorry my Family did that to you.”
“If you were really sorry, you’d get the fuck out of this house and leave us alone.” He steps forward and slams the door in my face.
I stay there for a moment, looking at it.
I knew there were good reasons for Sammy to hate the Clemenza name.
I just never connected those acts to me—never saw the thread tying together my grandfather’s cruelty, my own desperation, and this broken man who makes art from broken things because broken is all he knows.
And what did I do? I threatened his life. I used him as leverage against Dami, the one person who actually saved him. I used someone my Family had already destroyed, used him the way Nonno Lou would have used him. As a tool. A pressure point.
Disposable.
The Clemenza Family was diseased long before Luca D’Amato surgically cut us out. Maybe letting it die completely is the best option. Everyone else seems happy, and the violence they—we—brought to this City has stopped under the Morelli reign.
I walk back to the kitchen in a daze. Rosa has reappeared. She takes one look at me and points to the counter. “Sit.”
She makes me an espresso and starts cooking bacon, eggs, toast. I’m not hungry, but I don’t want to insult her. Not after what just happened with Sammy.
“You need to eat more,” she says, watching me push bacon around the plate. “You’re too skinny.”
“Yeah,” I agree. I look up with a weak smile. “What’s Sammy’s surname, Rosa?”
“Maitland.”
I always figured he wasn’t Italian, but that confirms it. “And Vito’s?”
“Santelli.”
“What about yours?”
“Borgia,” she says, and I laugh, until I see she’s not joking. “Oh.”
She leans over the counter toward me, pinning me with her eyes. “It’s good you’re here,” she says. “Good for him. But if you hurt him, or anyone else under this roof…” She pauses for effect. “Remember that I make your food.”
She hasn’t even blinked. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I say at last.
“Wanting and doing are two different things,” she says, and goes back to the stove.
I don’t have time to turn that over in my mind, because heavy footsteps on the few steps down to the kitchen announce Damiano’s return. I swivel on the barstool to see him stop at the bottom, brows drawn together as he takes in the picture before him.
I know what he’s thinking about, because I’m thinking about it too: the first time I met Rosa, I snuck out of his room to the kitchen, ostensibly to find him some help for his wounded arm. He found me like this, drinking her coffee.
And I ended up chained in the basement again.
“I have news,” he says, and then turns and stalks off.
“Thank you for breakfast,” I tell Rosa as I slide off the stool. “And for the advice.”
Damiano is waiting in the great room. The second I walk in, he grabs me and shoves me against the wall, hands on my shoulders, fingers digging in, the full weight of him pressing me flat.
My body floods with heat, hips canting forward before I can stop them, and the shame of that involuntary response is worse than the bruises his fingers are leaving.
“You stay the hell away from my people,” he hisses. “You hear me? You don’t use them like you’re using me.”
He shakes me. My head knocks slightly against the wall.
“Let go of me,” I say, “and tell me what you found out.”
His hands drop from me but he stays standing over me, glaring down. “Stuccio’s got reservations at Maison Lumière on Friday night.”
Maison Lumière? I know it well. “Good. Then that’s where we’ll catch up with him.”
He’s still staring down at me. “You really are a cold-blooded snake,” he says contemptuously. “So what happens when we find this cousin of yours? You gonna off him, make your bones that way?” He grins. “Course not. You’re gonna get me to do it. Can’t stain those lily-white hands.”
I push past him. “I’m going upstairs,” I say. “Why don’t you go take out some of that aggression on those useless Giulianos?”
“Stay away from Rosa and Sammy,” he says in a low voice. “I mean it. I don’t want you fucking with their heads.”
I don’t want them hurt any more than he does, and my being here is dangerous for them. I have few options, though. Strike meant well—I think—but I can hardly stay at his place. The front door would collapse under a hard knock.
At least here, inside Damiano Orsini’s fortress, I stand a chance. Nothing can get in.
And nothing can get out.
I spend the rest of the morning wandering the house, trying to think, and getting nowhere.
I end up in the music room, where I wonder if I’m the first person ever to sit down on the velvet stool at the piano and touch the keys.
It’s been a long time since I’ve played, but of course I was taught.
I was raised to be exactly like all those other elite children who came from wealthy families.
New money. Old money. Blood money. It’s all the same thing. Somewhere along the line, someone did something bad to get it. So I never considered myself beneath any of them. And a few reminders now and then of their own ancestors’ bad deeds convinced them that I was their equal.
Rosa comes in with a sandwich at lunchtime, unasked. “Don’t tell me you’re not hungry,” she says. “Eat.”
She puts the plate down on the top of the piano, forcing me to pick it up with a wince, and leaves the room before I can send it back. I carry it with me to the dining room and sit there to eat.
It’s a lonely existence. Even lonelier, somehow, than it felt being imprisoned down in the basement. Having more space and false freedom up here just makes things worse.
Especially because my mind drifts inevitably back to Damiano Orsini. To his mouth in the dark. To his back turned to me in the bed.
To his compassion, which he tries so desperately to hide.
That night, I retire early to Damiano’s bedroom with a book from the library. I don’t want another face-off when he gets home.
I wish I could say I took his room to teach him a lesson. The truth is simpler: I feel safe in here. It smells like him, and against all reason, I associate that scent with safety.
But all my good intentions are blown to smithereens when the man himself walks into the room without even knocking.
He looks at me sitting there in his bed—and I really wish I’d moved to the middle of it instead of habitually taking one side—and sneers.
“What are you doing?” I demand, trying to hide my fluster by slamming the book shut. “I told you—”
He ignores me completely, heading to his walk-in, where he begins to push through hangers.
“Dami,” I say. He ignores me. “Dami. Come here.”
He can’t ignore a direct command. He stomps back into the bedroom and glares at me. “What?”
His hands have Band-Aids on them. Rosa must have patched him up when he got home.
“I’ve reconsidered. The bed is big enough for both of us,” I say. “And I feel safer knowing that protection is close at hand.”
He says nothing for a moment. Then: “Is that an order?”
“It’s an offer.”
“I got no desire to sleep beside a snake.”
That urge to needle him just won’t die. “Then consider it an order. And hurry up so I can turn the light out.”
He doesn’t hurry, but he does undress, all the way down, and I try to watch without reaction, but it’s impossible. The tattoos shifting across his muscles. The brutal build of his body. The dark hair trailing down his stomach…
He gets into bed and turns his back to me. I reach over and turn off the lamp.
The darkness settles around us. I hear him breathing, slow, controlled, the breath of a man who is very much awake. The sheets rustle when either of us shifts. His body heat radiates across the space between us, close enough to feel but not close enough to touch.
I lie there listening to him not sleep and I think about Sammy’s art. The shimmering figure wrapped around itself, my own face reflected in the broken mirrors behind it. I think about Rosa saying that wanting and doing are two different things.
And I think about the lie I told. A leash built from smoke to control the man lying next to me, who came down to the basement last night and put his mouth on me with a tenderness that contradicted everything he’s ever said.
I reach out. My fingers find his shoulder blade, and he spins over in bed—a sudden whirl of anger that makes me flinch away.
“Is this supposed to be revenge?” he snarls. “Is this supposed to show me how it felt to be treated like a whore?”
“Like I said, this is just an offer.”
His hand closes around my throat, just holding. It’s a question.
I answer it by arching into him.
“This won’t change anything,” he says roughly, rolling onto me.
“No,” I agree, already wrapping around him. “Nothing at all.”