Chapter 21
CALIGULA
By the time we get home, I’m tired and irritated. I can’t decide what to do next. I could get in touch with my mother in Italy, if Stuccio screws me over, but there’s no guarantee she’ll have anything of use to tell me, either.
I’m distracted. I can’t think.
And it’s all Dami’s fault.
I’m still astonished at myself for hitting the bathroom floor so fast when he ordered me to my knees. And then I waited there like he ordered until someone walked in, an elderly man who blinked at me in surprise.
“Dropped something,” I’d muttered as I got to my feet.
I wish I could convince myself I let Dami treat me like that for strategic reasons. But there was no strategy involved.
As we come into the foyer, he stops me as I head for the stairs. “Did you text your brand new buddy today?”
Finch D’Amato. I’ve been diligently checking in with him each day, but today… “I forgot.”
“You might not give a fuck about my people,” Dami says, “but I do. I don’t want Rosa killed just because you forgot your own deal with the Morellis.”
I grab the phone from the sideboard where I always leave it, and turn it on. “I’m doing it now,” I tell him. And then I turn the phone off, as usual, because I don’t want those Morellis knowing my every move.
He’s still right beside me, looking down at me. “You’re useless like this. Your brain’s floating around in all that backed-up cum.”
My cheeks heat. Does he always have to be so—
But my dick perks up hopefully.
I know he’s punishing me. After he bought me, he spent weeks refusing to let me make him come. Now he’s doing the reverse, just to prove a point. It’s the only semblance of control he has left.
But maybe I can convince him to show me mercy.
Or maybe that’s crazy.
“You want it or not?” he asks. “I ain’t got much more time to waste on you tonight.”
“I want it,” I say, because I know as well as he does that jerking off is not going to be anywhere near as effective as having him do it for me.
I don’t know why that is. But it’s true.
It’s only when we’re in the elevator going down instead of up that it occurs to me he’s taking me to the basement.
Damiano is standing behind me, staring straight ahead but sightlessly at the reflective walls.
Maybe he’s thinking about the last time we were down there, when he woke me with his tongue in my ass.
I can’t suppress the surge of desire that floods me at that thought, clouding my mind even more.
I still hate the basement, but that fear is inextricably linked with sexual pleasure.
And he likes that reaction in me.
The elevator hits the bottom and the doors open. “Move,” he says.
I take a few hesitant steps into the dark, groping around for the lights, finding them with relief. But when I turn around, he’s still standing there in the elevator, looking at me. The dim lighting of the elevator means his eyes are shadowed.
He takes a step forward. And another. The elevator doors close behind him.
“I thought you didn’t have time to waste on me,” I say, mostly to provoke him.
It works. He reaches out and grabs me, slamming me up against the wall so all the breath leaves my lungs. His fingers dig into my biceps until I wince. “You’re hurting me.”
“But you like that.”
I wish I could deny it. But even as I squirm around in his grip, I’m just getting harder.
I still haven’t figured out what’s wrong with me, what makes me like it when he does these things. Maybe Nonno Lou saw this in me as well, these craven needs I despise in myself. Despise, but can’t stop indulging.
There’s something strange in Dami’s slow smile as he eases up on my arms and finally drops his hands from me. “You pretend to like ordering people around, little prince. But secretly, you just want someone to throw you down on the ground and fuck the arrogance out of you. Right?”
Is this one of his games? “Are we doing this or not?” I ask, rubbing at my upper arms to take away the sting.
He keeps smiling that smile as he waves a hand toward the mockery of my heritage, the alternate-reality townhouse. “Where would you like it to happen?” he asks. “Your choice.”
I don’t care. All I care about is getting this over and done with, because somewhere along the way this leash became a two-way noose, and Damiano Orsini and I are only getting more tangled up as time goes on.
Warily, I look around the basement. “The bed. My bed,” I amend.
“Over there.” I point to the simulacrum of my townhouse bedroom.
The last place I want is that cover-and-pillow-free bed where Damiano kept me when I was a prisoner.
The collar and chain are still lying on the mattress from when I tested him.
He grabs me by my arm again and half-drags me across the room to throw me onto the bed. And he’s on me almost before I can turn over, one hand closing in my hair and the other around my throat. “Shouldn’t I take off my clothes?” I croak out.
His hand tightens around my throat. He must be able to feel my pulse smacking into his palm. He must know how nervous I am.
Nervous, but excited.
He still has that unnerving smile. “Sure,” he says, after a long pause. “Take off your clothes.”
He sits up to watch. It takes me longer than it should to undress, because my hands are shaking. Not from fear. From need. He watches each piece fall away, and I hate that I’m searching his face for approval like it matters.
It does matter. That’s what I hate the most.
He stays fully clothed. “Get on the bed,” he says. “Face down.”
I do it. I lie down on Nonna Mellie’s quilt with my face in a pillow that smells like Dami, and I feel him climb onto the bed behind me, the fabric of his dinner pants brushing my thighs as he spreads my legs apart with his.
“Lucky for you I put this down here,” he says, and reaches for the nightstand. I hear the soft snick of a cap opening, and the squelch of lube as he squeezes it out.
He’s efficient rather than erotic, those thick fingers slicked up and pushing in without ceremony. But I’m just as impatient. I bury my face in the pillow and my hips push back before I stop them.
“There it is,” he murmurs. “Every time. You just open right up.”
I want to tell him to shut up. But all that comes out is a sound that proves his point.
“You like that?” he mocks. He’s got three fingers in me already, working me with deep pumps that make me shudder, my cock starting to smear over Nonna Mellie’s quilt.
And my body is begging for more.
He pulls his fingers out, leaving me empty and aching.
I hear the rustle as he finally undresses, the thud of his shoes hitting the floor, the soft whisper of his zipper.
And then he’s back on the bed, the heat of his body a brand against my skin.
I feel the fat, heavy weight of his cock resting in the slick cleft of my ass.
“You’ve been thinking about this all night, haven’t you?” he says. “Thinking about me stuffing your hole full.”
“Yes,” I grit out.
He presses his cockhead to my asshole but doesn’t breach me. “You wanted it so bad you forgot to protect my house, my people. You really think you deserve it?”
“I’m sorry,” I pant, trying to push back and take him in.
“You will be.” He grabs my hips, stilling me.
“You don’t get to make the decisions here.
You don’t get to set the pace. You’re just a hole for me to use.
A tool for me to get off with. Right?” He punctuates the question with a slow push that gets his head past my ring, and the noise I make sounds like agreement.
The stretch burns, but it’s a good burn. It’s what I’ve been desperate for all day and night.
“You wanted to clear your head,” he says. “So let’s do that. Let’s clear it of everything but my dick in your ass.”
He shoves the rest of the way in, one smooth, inexorable push that knocks me forward, and stays there, letting me adjust. Letting me feel every fat inch of him inside me, the weight of him over my back, the warmth of him.
And then he reaches for his phone from the nightstand, sets it down on the pillow next to my head. “No signal down here,” he says conversationally. “But I don’t need a signal to let you listen to a message I got from Seb Conti.”
A voice fills the room, tinny and casual through the speaker.
The Morellis never threatened your people. I sat down with Nick Fontana over a beer tonight, and he hasn’t heard anything about it. The Clemenza kid is under their protection. But this threat against your people—you must have got your wires crossed.
The voicemail ends.
The silence around us is broken only by the sound of his steady breathing, and my own ragged gasps as the understanding floods through me, turning me cold from the inside out.
He knows.
He knows I lied about the Morelli threat against his household.
And he was careful to make sure I texted Finch, to give him at least twenty-four hours clear, and then took me down here and he...
I think he’s going to kill me.
I can’t even save myself, because I’m pinned beneath him, his cock inside me, his hand pressing down between my shoulder blades…and my body arching so hard for him I think my back might snap.
The horror of that is what hits hardest. Not that he found out, not that I might die here, but that my body doesn’t care. My body keeps wanting. Keeps responding. Keeps pushing back against him, asking for more, even now.
“Dami—”
“Shut up.” He pushes my face into the pillow. “You’re a lying snake,” he says, devoid of any emotion.
He thrusts into me again, hard. Punishing. And the shame of the noise I make, the hot, burning shame, makes me want to crawl out of my own skin.
But I can’t. I’m trapped. Trapped between my childhood mattress and the monster I created.