Chapter 24
CALIGULA
I didn’t feel anything in the townhouse. Walking through those empty rooms, seeing the stripped walls and ruined floors, Louie’s bloodstain across the foyer marble. I should have felt something. Grief, anger, loss. Something.
I felt like a ghost haunting the wrong house.
My family’s bones have been ripped out and rearranged in someone else’s basement. Two versions of the same life, neither one real anymore.
I know how it feels to be stripped to the studs. To have someone go through every room in you and pull up the floorboards looking for what’s hidden underneath. Damiano Orsini found the things I’d been keeping locked away, even from myself. He cracked open that safe and stole what was inside.
Now I’m not sure what’s left of me.
I’ve been functioning since he brought me up from the basement, but functioning isn’t the same as being alive.
I ate food because it appeared. I showered because he told me to.
I performed in front of Nick Fontana because the alternative was letting Dami’s household go unprotected when the Morellis killed him for what he’d done.
I couldn’t do that to Rosa.
And maybe I couldn’t do it to Dami, either. Even after everything he’s done.
But underneath all that, there’s a silence in me I’ve never felt before. Like those empty and ransacked rooms in the townhouse, I’m the right shape, the right dimensions, but devoid of everything that used to make me, me.
Will those two realities ever come back together—the furniture and the townhouse, the man I was and whatever I am now—or are they both just…gone?
I’m standing on the steps of my family’s townhouse, thinking about that emptiness, when I see a gun aimed at my head.
I don’t move. It just doesn’t occur to me.
Two things happen at once. Damiano’s hand yanks me backward through the open door so hard that I skid across the foyer floor, landing two yards from where Louie bled out.
And a loud cracking shot goes off as Dami yells, “Run!”
I’m on the floor, staring at the dark stain beside me, and something shudders awake in me. An animal instinct.
I scramble to my feet, and I run. I do run. But I head back toward the front door, toward him, as though Damiano Orsini needs my help, or even deserves it.
But there’s something in me that won’t let him face it alone. Just like I wasn’t going to give him up to Nick Fontana.
From across the street, Vito is already sprinting over, gun drawn.
But Dami doesn’t need either of us. The gunman is dressed in a long, dirty coat and a knit cap, a rag tied across his face as a mask, and he looks like he weighs even less than I do.
Dami has him disarmed in seconds. The gun skitters across the pavement, and Vito grabs it.
And then Damiano does something that I will see behind my eyelids for the rest of my life.
He grabs the man by the back of the neck and drags him to the wrought iron fence at the front of the stoop.
He pushes his head inexorably down on one of the spikes, ignoring the screams, which are cut off into a silence that’s even worse to hear.
Damiano stands back, shaking blood off his hands with a look of irritation. He turns to me where I stand at the top of the steps. “You know him?” he asks, thumbing over his shoulder at the impaled head.
Casual. Like he’s asking if I recognize someone at a party.
Everything I was numb to for three days floods in at the same time, and my stomach turns itself inside out.
I turn and vomit bile over the stoop railing, into the narrow gap between the house and the sidewalk, where the bins are kept.
My whole body convulses with it, my hands gripping the iron railing, and all I can think is that the same kind of iron is currently lodged in a man’s skull eight feet away from me.
By the time I’m done, Damiano has jogged up the steps. He grabs me, not gently. He turns me this way and that, his bloody hands on my face, my shoulders, my ribs, patting me down, checking for injury. There’s blood on his fingers, and now it’s on my jaw, my cheek, the collar of my shirt.
I want to shove him away, but the look on his face keeps me compliant.
Damiano Orsini is furious. Not cold fury, not the purposeful rage I’ve seen him direct at me often enough. This is something far less controlled.
“What the hell have I been telling you all morning?” he demands. “Stay behind me!”
“Sorry,” I say blankly.
“Goddamn, that motherfucker. Are you hurt?”
I’m not physically hurt. But I’m shaking. My body has decided to feel everything it didn’t feel in the townhouse, in the basement, in the three days of dark and silence, all of it arriving now in one great ugly wave, and I can’t stop it.
I pull away and retch again, reduced to dry heaves.
Dami waits, scanning the street, which is alive now with twitching curtains. In the distance, I hear sirens. “We need to go,” he says.
He half-drags me down the steps, past the fence where I don’t look, won’t look, down to the street where Vito already has the car running. Dami opens the back door and shoves me in, climbing in after me.
Vito pulls away hard from the curb. The force of it throws me into Damiano, and his hand comes up to steady me, gripping my shoulder.
When I see the blood on his fingers again, I try to pull free, but he holds on.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” he demands.
“When I told you to run back there, I meant the other fucking way.”
“You killed him,” I say in a hoarse voice.
“You’re goddamn right I did. You prefer I let him kill you? Jesus—are you gonna puke again?”
I feel like I am, but I shake my head quickly, though I don’t trust myself to speak.
He gives a hollow laugh. “You want to be the big bad Boss? Then you need to get a stomach for this kinda thing. You think D’Amato or Big Gee ever get queasy after a kill?”
Only a few days ago he said essentially the same thing with his hand around my throat and his cock buried inside me: You’d make a terrible Don.
And he’s right.
A Don doesn’t vomit at the sight of violence. Or shake. Or shy away from the realities of the work.
But it’s not just what Dami did that made me sick.
The sight of it brought in a flood of memories I’ve done my best to forget over the years. My father did his best to protect me, but you can’t live in the house of a Mob Boss and never see anything.
I’m still shaking. Damiano still has his hands on my arms.
“Are you sick again?” he asks cautiously. “Like...like that time I had to get the nurse in for you? Is that the problem?”
“No,” I say. “I just…I thought maybe it was over, since I had the Morelli protection on me.”
His hands close harder on my arms. “Well, it wasn’t Luca fucking D’Amato standing between you and a gun back there, was it?”
“No,” I agree. “It was you.” I look him straight in the eye, see surprise register on his face.
“Whatever else has happened,” he says after a moment, “you’re still mine. I told you before, the only person who gets to hurt you is me.”
I just nod, because what else is there to say? He owns me. He hurts me. He puts himself in front of knives and bullets for me. The math of Damiano Orsini doesn’t add up, and I’ve stopped trying to make it.
My brain is trying to do what it used to do. Make patterns. It takes longer than it should, like thinking through water. “That guy,” I say. “He wasn’t a professional.”
“Hell, he was barely an amateur,” Dami agrees. “What’s your point?”
“None of the men who’ve come after me has been a pro. So that means...”
“What does it mean?” he asks, frustrated.
My brain offers nothing more, and the blankness where strategy used to live is frightening.
I used to be able to do this. Turn over the pieces, see the pattern, find the edge.
Now I’m just staring at scattered fragments.
“I don’t know,” I say helplessly. “Perhaps whoever is behind this doesn’t have the money to hire a professional. ”
The amateur quality of these attempts doesn’t fit someone like Daniel King. This feels…smaller. More personal.
More desperate.
“I hate to break it to you,” Dami says, “but it doesn’t take all that much these days to hire someone for a killing. There’s a guy who sleeps rough around the house—he told me someone approached him with a couple of hundred to do the job. And some out there would do it for a five-buck fix.”
“How unpleasant to think that my life might be worth so little,” I say coolly. “Especially when you paid ten million for it.”
The words come out before I can think about them, and they sound…almost like me.
Like the version of me that existed before the basement.
“And we’re back with the snark,” Dami mutters.
But before he looks away, I think I see something like relief in his eyes.
“Put your damn seatbelt on,” he adds, as Vito takes another turn that shoves me into him.
But he doesn’t even let me do that myself, strapping me in like I’m a child who can’t manage it.
When he pulls back, his knuckles brush my hand, and I don’t know if it’s accidental.
I look out the window. The adrenaline drains out slowly over the next few blocks, replaced by something cold and certain: nobody can protect me from this indefinitely. Not my Loyalists. Not the Morellis. Not even Damiano Orsini, who just drove a man’s head onto a spike for me.
I glance at Dami’s hands. The blood is darkening in the lines of his knuckles. For a moment, I thought he was going to rip that man apart limb from limb, he was so angry.
That fact sits next to everything else he’s done to me. All those things don’t cancel each other out, the good and the bad. They just coexist, the way violence and tenderness coexist in him, and I’m not sure how to reconcile them.
I need to think about something else. Anything else. “Did you hear from Stuccio?” I ask. “While I was in the—”
“No.” He goes on quickly, “So you think your cousin’s behind this? Wants to take over? I don’t see how he could. I don’t even get why he’s in the will after you.”
“Tiberius Vicario was Nonno Lou’s nephew by marriage. As for adding him to the will, it was probably another way for Nonno Lou to flatter Carmine Vicario, Tiberius’s great-grandfather. But I doubt he ever expected…”
The truth is, although I don’t share it with Dami, Nonno Lou was always trying to suck up to the Capo dei Capi of his day. So Tiberius being included as a last resort in the will makes sense to me.
What if it was Tiberius searching the townhouse? What if he was looking for the ring? What if he found it? If Tiberius has the ring and I’m out of the way, then…
“But he’s a Vicario,” Dami says, interrupting my thoughts again. “He doesn’t have the name.”
To the Giulianos, the name is everything. The Clemenzas have a similar interest in bloodlines; arranged marriages are common. My own parents had one.
“Luca D’Amato didn’t have the name,” I say at last. “And look at him now. Besides, Tiberius is in my grandfather’s will. To some, that would be enough.”
“Then maybe you should finally get the message,” Dami says.
“Which is?”
“It’d be better to let your Family stay dead.” He’s not looking at me when he says it. He’s looking out the window.
I turn away to look out of mine.
The truth is, I have wondered about that. I’ve wondered many times over the past few days, while I was left in the dark, chained to a bed, staring at nothing. When you strip everything away from me—the name, the legacy, the strategy, the pride—what’s left?
Damiano called me all hunger. A needy little bitch reaching for a crown I’m not built to wear.
“What kind of man are you?” Luca D’Amato asked me in that warehouse. I didn’t have much of an answer for him at the time.
If he asked me again today, I’d have nothing to say at all.
By the time we get back to the house, it’s early evening. Dami hustles me upstairs to the bedroom and washes his hands at the bathroom sink while I stand there watching him. The water runs pink, then clear.
“Shower,” he tells me, drying his hands. “I’m gonna make some calls. Get you some food. See what the fallout is from back there.”
He turns to go, and the words leave my mouth before I can stop them: “Please don’t leave me alone.”
He pauses. Looks back at me. “You’re safe in my house,” he says flatly. “Only a fool would try to break into this place. It’s Fort fucking Knox.”
“Please.” I’m starting to hyperventilate, and I can’t make it stop. “I know you hate me. I know I deserve it. But you’re the only person in this city who protected me, and I just don’t feel safe when you’re not—”
His hands come up to my face.
He’s holding me, his thumbs sliding over my jaw, threading into my hair, and his forehead drops against mine. We’re breathing the same air. His eyes are closed and his hands are cradling my head and I can feel every inch of the space between our mouths.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
“I can’t,” he says, barely audible. He pushes me away, gentle but firm. “Have a shower. Then get into bed and sleep. You hear me?”
“Okay,” I say. My voice sounds far away. “But you’ll be there? When I come out?”
He gives a small, almost silent sigh. “Just do what you’re told for once, will you?”
He leaves, pulling the door shut behind him. I stand there staring at that door for a long time, listening for footsteps that might mean he’s walking away, and hearing nothing.
I take a long shower. Longer than I need to. The water is almost too hot, and I stand under it until my skin turns red.
When I finally turn it off and step out, the bathroom mirror is completely fogged. I wipe a streak through the condensation and look at myself.
I don’t recognize the man I see. I’m not the Park Avenue prince anymore. But I’m not the desperate prey running for his life, either. I’m something else.
Something new.