Chapter 21 #2
He sets a brutal pace, making the bed creak with each impact.
The force of it pushes me into the pillow, muffling those noises I can’t hold back.
I’m torn between the overwhelming pleasure and the excruciating humiliation.
My ass is stretched wide around his thick cock, and each stroke drags against that bundle of nerves inside me, sending shocks of ecstasy through me.
He grabs my hair and pulls my head back.
“Please—” I gasp out.
“Please what? Please stop? You don’t want me to stop. We both know you don’t.” His mouth is close to my ear and his voice is almost gentle. “That’s your problem, little prince. You never want me to stop. You want to be right here on your belly for me. You were born to it, Clemenza.”
He lets go of my hair and pulls my hips up high.
His rhythm doesn’t falter. He just keeps pistoning into me, a relentless rhythm that’s dragging me closer to the edge, whether I want to go or not. And then he reaches under and wraps his fingers around my cock. I cry out, my hips bucking uncontrollably.
“I knew it,” he sneers. “Dripping all over the place like a bitch in heat. You can’t help it, can you?”
“Dami—please—”
I wish I was begging for him to stop.
“Come on,” he croons. “Show me how much you love this.”
My whole body tenses, my toes curling, my spine tingling. And I don’t even try to fight it. “Please,” I whimper. “Please, Dami. Please let me—”
“Still trying to give me orders?” he scoffs.
“You never learn, do you? What do you think those Loyalists of yours would say if they could see you now?” he asks.
“Begging. Pleading. Taking it up the ass from a Giuliano, a man who owns you.” He lays over me, one hand still working me, the other around my throat.
“You’d make a terrible Don. You know why? ”
I can’t speak. And what response could I possibly give, anyway?
“Because a Don takes what he wants.” He tightens his grip on my cock. And my throat. “All you want is to be taken.”
With that, he slams into me one final time and comes with a cry that sounds like it’s been ripped out of him by torture. I feel him pulsing inside me, his forehead dropping to the back of my neck, his breath hot against my sweat-soaked skin.
And I explode right along with him.
Days and days of denial break like a dam, and for one blinding second, relief and horror are the same thing, my body singing while my mind screams. I can’t tell them apart, can’t separate the pleasure from the devastation.
I don’t want it to stop.
“There,” he says quietly, when I’ve collapsed completely, the aftershocks still running through me. “Head nice and clear now?”
I can’t answer. I’m trying to find something inside myself to hold onto. The Clemenza name. My strategy. My pride.
It’s all gone. There’s nothing there. I’ve been hollowed out.
Damiano climbs off the bed. Wipes his hands on Nonna Mellie’s quilt. Then he walks to each surveillance camera I covered during my search and strips my clothes away, letting each item drift to the ground while I lie there and watch, naked and spent and unable to move.
“What—” I start.
“If you’re anywhere near as clever as you think you are,” he says, not looking at me, “you’ll keep your mouth shut.”
He comes back over, grabs my arm, and pulls me to my feet. I stumble, my legs too shaky to hold me. He doesn’t steady me, just pulls me over to the other bed.
The one with the collar and chain.
Only then does my brain kick in, and I start struggling. But it’s no use. He gets me on that bed face down, his heavy hand between my shoulder blades, and reaches for the collar.
“Please,” I beg. “Dami, don’t do this—the Morellis will still come for you—”
“And they’ll discover that you ran away again,” he tells me. “Ran away and broke my poor heart. Isn’t that the story you set up? That I was so crazy about you, I gave up on killing you? But you ran before. They’ll believe you ran again.”
I can see how he’ll twist it. And this is going to happen, no matter what I do or say.
The collar closes around my neck. Locks in place.
He walks off to pull on his clothes, then wanders back over to look at me. “Don’t worry, little Clemenza. You can pretend you’re still a Don, play at being a Mob Boss right here in your dollhouse.”
That’s what this has always been for him. A toy. He set up a dollhouse for me.
And I’m the doll.
“You can’t keep me down here,” I say, and my voice comes out thin and high and nothing like the man who was threatening Tony Stuccio only a few hours ago.
“You used Rosa and Vito and Sammy as bargaining chips,” he says quietly. He leans over me, close enough that I can smell him, the scent of our sex all over him. “What did you think was going to happen when I found out?”
I stare at him, searching for something in his face. Some glimmer of hope.
There’s nothing.
When he speaks again, he’s almost thoughtful.
“You know what’s funny? You really do remind me of him.
Your Nonno Lou.” He reaches down and brushes the hair off my forehead, and the gentleness of it is grotesque after everything he’s just done.
“You’ve got that way of talking sometimes, where everyone in the room shuts up and listens.
You’ve got his brain, too. The scheming, the long game, the way you use people without blinking.
” His thumb traces down the side of my face. “But there’s one difference.”
I don’t ask. I won’t give him the satisfaction.
“He wasn’t a needy little bitch.” He pulls his hand away.
“You’re all hunger, Caligula. That’s what makes you dangerous, and that’s what makes you useless.
Because anyone who figures out what you’re starving for can walk you right into a prison and take everything you’ve got. ” He straightens up. “Like I just did.”
He turns and walks toward the wall panel, calling down the elevator again.
“Please don’t leave me down here,” I call out wildly.
But he stands with his back to me, waiting for the elevator as though I don’t even exist. The doors open, but before he steps in, he reaches for the light switch.
“Don’t!” I cry out, but the lights go out just the same.
I see his silhouette step into the elevator. And just before the doors close, he pauses. Turns his face slightly.
Maybe he’ll stop. Maybe he’ll come back, let me out of this collar—
The doors close.
The dark is total.
Naked, terrified, and chained, I stare into blackness and reach for the Clemenza composure that has carried me through every terrible thing that has ever happened to me. I reach for my grandfather’s iron, my father’s steadiness, the cold presence of mind that talked me out of a Morelli kidnapping.
I reach, but I find nothing.