Chapter 28
DAMIANO
I can still feel him.
Not just the way I usually carry him around in my head, which is bad enough. This is worse.
Vito takes a corner and I bump against the door, but it barely registers. I’m lost in the specific memory of his delicate spine under my forehead, the warmth of his skin, that one second where I brushed my lips down his vertebrae.
I shouldn’t have done that.
The rest of it, I don’t regret. I don’t regret scaring him. He earned that, acting like he has a hope in hell of protecting himself when the predators come for him. I still wanted to see if his survival instinct had resurfaced. But the forehead thing…
And then my lips on his skin.
I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t know why I did.
Caligula sits beside me, stinking of cum and olive oil. He’s silent. And that silence is all wrong. It’s the quiet that he gets when he’s thinking, and I don’t want him thinking. Not about what just happened, anyway.
His head is turned toward the window, but I don’t think he’s seeing any of it. Streetlights slide over his face. His mouth looks swollen. His hair is a mess. His shirt’s hanging open because I ripped it apart and most of the buttons flew off.
I drag in a breath. “You cold?”
He doesn’t answer at first. Then, after a beat: “No.”
His voice is flat. Not angry. Not shaky. Flat.
We sit in silence for another block. Vito takes a right, and the headlights of oncoming traffic wash across the back seat, turning everything white for half a second. Caligula doesn’t blink.
Then he says, still looking out the window, “Do you think people can be born wrong?”
“What?”
“Wrong,” he repeats. “Corrupt. Defective. Whatever word you like.”
I stare out at the city because I can’t look at him. “What are you talking about?”
“I liked it.”
For a second, I think I’ve heard him wrong. Or I hope I have.
He keeps staring out the window. “What you did back there.” He swallows. “What we did back there. I liked it.” Another pause. “And even…what happened in the basement. It wasn’t…”
He trails off, and something twists in my gut.
“So I think there has to be something wrong with me,” he goes on at last. “You humiliate me. You use me. You treat me like I’m nothing, and I…” He lets out an exhalation, soft and bewildered. “I want it.”
I can’t breathe right.
“I know what you are,” he says. “I know what you plan to do to me one day. I know you hate me. And still—” His hand curls once, hard, in his lap.
“Still, if you touched me right now, I’d let you.
Worse than that. I’d want it.” He gives a short laugh that isn’t laughter at all.
“What kind of Don lets himself get fucked and used and spoken to that way?”
“Plenty of powerful people like it rough in bed,” I mutter. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just…just wired that way.”
He doesn’t seem to have heard me. He keeps looking out the window.
And why would he look at me? I’m the asshole who uses that very wiring against him. Every single time. It’s the only fragile spot I’ve found in him, and I’ve been relentless at stomping down on it until it cracked.
“I think my grandfather saw it in me,” he says, more to himself than to me. “That weakness. I think that’s why he hated me so much.”
Something hot and ugly surges up through my ribs. “Your grandfather was a motherfucker who hated the whole world. He was a vicious old bastard, and how you like to fuck has nothing to do with whether you can lead.”
The words are out before I can stop them, and they’re too warm, too close to something that could be mistaken for—
Something else.
So I do what I always do. I scramble to bury it.
“It’s not what gets you off that’s the problem.
You’ll make a bad Boss because you’re a Clemenza.
” I hear the cruelty in my voice, but I don’t stop.
I can’t have him thinking I— “You people lie like you breathe,” I go on quickly.
“Sell out your own blood, then cry about loyalty while the body’s still warm.
Your Family’s a nest of vipers, always has been, and you’ve got the same poison in you whether you wanna admit it or not. ”
The silence that follows is worse than anything he could have said back.
A fire truck wails by in the opposite direction, red and white strobing across my eyes.
Then, so quiet I almost miss it, he says, “I don’t understand why you keep protecting me.”
I look over. He’s turned from the window, finally. “You plan to kill me eventually,” he goes on. “You’ve said so. More than once. And yet you step in front of guns for me. You kill men who come for me. You won’t let anyone else touch me.” He tilts his head, studying me. “Why?”
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
I try again. “Because I—” I stop. “Because you’re—”
And the worst part is, he can see me floundering. I don’t have a sane answer, and I keep remembering exactly what I just did to him up there in that unsafe house, what I did to him in the basement, and…
“Because you’re mine,” I tell him. “You’re still mine. Nothing about that has changed.”
My phone buzzes, and I’m grateful for the interruption. I pull it out and check it. It’s a text from Tony Stuccio. Just an address.
The Vicario.
“Uncle Tony came through,” I say, holding up the screen so Caligula can read it. “Your cousin’s address.”
Caligula’s eyebrows go up. “Gramercy Park,” he reads out. “Nice neighborhood.”
“We’ll go tomorrow,” I say. “First thing.”
“Tomorrow.” He nods, and then shifts in his seat. The wince is small, barely there, but I catch it. “I need a shower.”
“Yeah,” I say after a second.
Brilliant contribution, Orsini. Fucking poetic.
“Listen, Dami,” he says. “I’ve been thinking. What if whoever is after me doesn’t want me dead?”
I stare at him, wondering what the punch line will be. “Pretty sure they want you dead, Clemenza. I have the scars to prove it.”
“No, I mean, what if they want to kill me because they think I have something? Something they want?”
“Like a ring?”
His mouth opens. Closes fast.
“That’s what you were searching for in the basement,” I say. “The Clemenza ring. You told those Loyalists you had it. You don’t.”
He says nothing, and his silence is its own answer.
“Look, if you think your grandfather hid that ring in the freezer or his sock drawer, you’re gonna be disappointed,” I say, and for the first time in a long fucking time, I try to be gentle.
“If it was in anything your family owned, I would’ve found it.
I went through all that shit when I bought it.
There was no ring. Maybe they buried it with him. ”
“They wouldn’t do that,” he insists. “And you know it.”
He has a real trust in all those Clemenza Family taboos and traditions. “Then maybe someone pinched it off his corpse. Anyone could have taken it. The cops. The Feds. Hell, the mortuary workers.”
He just scowls at me. But it’s better than that blank nothingness he wore for too many days. My phone buzzes once more, and I check it.
“Is that Stuccio again?” Caligula asks.
“Got a meeting for the Gees tomorrow afternoon,” I say briefly, reading the text.
“Oh,” he says, and he sounds strange, but when I glance up, he’s back to looking out the window.
“We’ll go see this cousin of yours in the morning,” I tell him, “and then I’ll drop you home after.”
Home. Why did I say it like that? My house is not his home.
It’s barely a home for the people living in it.
The house is dark when we get back. We go upstairs, avoiding the elevator. My steps are heavy on the treads and I watch him as he climbs ahead of me, thinking again about what he said when he apologized for using my people as pawns.
I was ready to kill him that day I retrieved him from the Morellis. Dangling all those stories above the floor, he fought back with the only weapon he could find.
That much is true, I guess.
We reach the landing where the hallway splits. Left to my bedroom. Right to the guest room. We stop. “I’ll sleep in the guest room,” I say.
He doesn’t object.
I should say something else. Good night, or see you in the morning, or any of the normal things that normal people say to each other after a normal evening that definitely did not involve fucking on a broken-down sofa with the door wide open.
He’s standing there in his wrinkled, open shirt. There’s a mark on his cheekbone that I think I put there during our “fight,” and in the low light of the hallway it looks almost black.
“Goodnight, Dami,” he says at last. Soft. No edge.
I nod. That’s it. That’s all I can manage. He turns left and goes into my bedroom, closing the door behind him.
And I follow.
I stand in front of that closed door for a few minutes and then at last I open it. He’s in the bathroom; I can hear the water running. He’s in the shower, washing me off his skin. The olive oil, the sweat, the cum…everything. Afterward there won’t be a trace of what we did.
But I’ll know.
I still feel the way he pushed back, met me, matched me.
Told me to give him more. Is that all you’ve got?
No one has ever talked to me like that. Not in bed.
Not anywhere. This stupid, scrawny, bronze-haired Clemenza prince pushes my buttons like he’s got something to prove, and the sick thing is, I like it.
I like it so much it scares me.
I should be in there right now. I should be washing him down and checking for bruises and telling him he did good, he was so good, he’s perfect and I’m sorry and I don’t know what I’m doing but I can’t seem to stop it.
The shower cuts off, and I back out of the room, closing the door silently behind me. I go back to being a guest in my own house, because I’m a coward.
I’ve known it since I was thirteen.
I’m a coward.