Chapter 36
CALIGULA
“If you’re waiting for me to beg for my life, you’ll be disappointed,” I say.
Damiano doesn’t answer at once.
He’s standing a few feet away from the bed now, though I don’t remember him moving. One moment he was beside me, my hand in his, his confession about Daniel King sliding out of his mouth. The next he was on his feet, enormous and silent in the dim bedroom, his shoulders hunched.
“I know,” he says.
So he fucking should. This man has spent enough time trying to break me to understand my pride. He knows I would rather bite through my own tongue than offer him the sound of me begging for my life.
“Then what?” I ask. “You want absolution before you kill me?”
“No,” he says.
“You don’t want absolution?”
The tendons in his neck are taut, and he looks, for the first time since I’ve known him, defeated. “I’m not going to kill you.”
I don’t understand him at first. But once I do, there’s still no relief. There’s only anger. “But you thought about it.” His face changes. Barely. “How were you going to do it?”
“Caligula. Don’t.”
I’m not the old me, the one who could verbally flay this man with a sentence.
That version of me has been gone since the basement.
Since I curled on my side in the dark and let my mind go quiet for three days.
But something else stirs now, and my voice drops lower.
“I asked you a question. How were you going to do it?”
He looks at me for a long moment. His throat works once. “Fast,” he says.
“Fast,” I repeat.
“That was the point.”
“The point?”
“I wasn’t going to let King have you. He wouldn’t do it…fast.”
“I see. How noble of you.”
His mouth tightens. He doesn’t defend himself. That, more than anything, makes me want to hurt him. I spent three days in the darkness he made for me with no voice at all, and I thought I’d lost this. The precision. The cruelty. The ability to find the exact word that cuts deep.
I want the old me back. And I want the old Damiano, too.
The brutish one who growls and threatens and reaches for my throat.
I want him to give me something to rail against besides this awful, silent acceptance.
But he just stands there. Twice my size and half as armed, because at least I still have words.
He’s not going to apologize. Some part of me knows that much. Damiano Orsini doesn’t ever say he’s sorry. He just makes decisions that he lives with, and if living with it kills him, so be it.
He’s not going to apologize or make excuses. So I keep cutting.
“Were you going to fuck me first?”
His face goes white beneath the olive of his skin. There. I drew blood. “Don’t do this,” he says.
“Oh, I think I will.” I swing my legs over the edge of the bed. The floor is warm, like it always is in this house. Even in that hellscape of a basement. “Were you going to touch me first, Dami? Kiss me? Make me come? Was that part of your mercy, too?”
His hands curl into fists now. Not at me, I think. At himself. “I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
“Liar.”
His eyes snap to mine.
There he is. The beast under the guilt. The man who does not like being accused, even when he has earned every word of it.
But he still says nothing in his own defense.
I stand, because I am not having this conversation from his bed like some trembling captive waiting for a verdict. I have been hunted, bought, chained, humiliated, fucked, and lied to. I have been broken down and reassembled into something I don’t entirely recognize.
But I am still a Clemenza.
I smile. “Were you going to do it while you were inside me?”
“No.” Damiano looks like I’ve struck him across the face. That, at least, I believe.
But belief is not forgiveness. Something dreadful opens between us. A pit with every terrible thing he has done to me at the bottom of it, and every terrible thing I wanted from him in there, too.
“After, then? When I fell asleep in your arms last night? Or this morning, perhaps, before I woke?” The anger is cracking my voice now, and I swallow hard, forcing the tremor down.
He just takes it. Every word. He lets me carve him open because there is no answer that will make any of it better, and for one nauseating second, I want to cross the three feet between us and press my face into his chest and breathe him in and pretend none of this is happening.
That urge is worse than the anger. It means the damage is already done.
That’s the part I can’t forgive. Not the murder he planned, but the fact that I still want him. The fact that even now, knowing he lay beside me thinking about how to kill me gently, some ruined and craven part of me still aches for his hands.
“Did you tell yourself it was mercy? My grandfather used to say the same thing before he put a bullet in someone who’d outlived their usefulness.”
His eyes are dark and pained. “Please stop,” he says at last.
“Did you think I’d give you a fucking cookie for deciding not to murder me?” For one mad second, I think I might laugh. Not because anything about this is funny, but because it’s unbearable.
“I don’t expect anything from you,” he says tiredly, and my urge to laugh, along with the urge to needle him, die out together. “Look, none of this should come as a surprise to you. Just…that I decided not to.”
He knows exactly why I’m so angry. He just doesn’t want to take responsibility for it.
My gaze drops to his hand. The black “G” tattooed into his skin.
A mark I have hated since the first time I saw it, and hated more as time went by.
A brand of loyalty. Of belonging. Of everything that made him my enemy.
But for the first time, the tattoo doesn’t look like power. It looks like a bullseye.
“The Giulianos will kill you,” I say, “if you don’t give me to King.”
Damiano’s face does not change. Which means he’s already thought about it. Already accepted it. He’s standing there with the flat certainty of a man who has written himself off.
“That tattoo won’t protect you,” I continue. “Refusing to obey will cost you your life. Daniel King said as much at the Obelisk. He was right.”
“I know.”
“You know,” I repeat. “You know, and your plan was—what? To stand there looking tragic until they put a bullet in your head?”
His mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. “Hadn’t got that far.”
“Clearly. Because it means Rosa and Sammy and Vito are all in the firing line, too.”
The almost-smile vanishes. “I could talk to Seb,” he says after a moment. “See if he’s managed to cool Big Gee down. He’s always been able to do it before.”
Cool Big Gee down. As though the Giuliano Boss is a temperamental stove. “Yes,” I say. “Talk to him. You should.”
He takes his phone from the nightstand. The movement is so ordinary, it almost hurts. This enormous man, half-dressed in the low light, typing a message into his phone like any other man in any other bedroom.
The glow from the screen cuts hard lines across his face as I watch his thumbs move and think about what those hands have done to me. For me. Around my throat. Stroking my temple. Working me open.
He sends the message and puts the phone back on the nightstand.
We both look at the screen.
It stays dark.
Damiano exhales through his nose. I sit back down on the edge of the bed because my legs aren’t as trustworthy as they were a minute ago.
Conti may be asleep. He may be occupied.
He may be sitting somewhere with a drink, trying to decide whether answering Damiano Orsini’s text is a move he can afford to make.
Damiano looks toward the door. “Take the bed,” he says.
“Where are you going?”
I know before I ask. I know how his mind works, and there is only one place in this house where a man like Damiano Orsini would go to sit with what he’s done.
“Basement,” he says.
You don’t have to punish yourself for wanting me alive instead of dead. The words press against my teeth, but I clench them shut and don’t let them out. Because I’m still pissed at him.
He grabs his phone, then turns toward the door. “Lock it behind me,” he says, over his shoulder. A few weeks ago, that command would have sounded different. A man ordering his property to stay put. Now it sounds like protection, and I resent that too.
“Damiano.”
He stops.
“If Conti answers, wake me.”
“Yeah.”
He leaves, and I get up and lock the door behind him.
I lie back down on his bed. It feels too big.
It’s built for a man Damiano’s size, a man who sprawls, who fills every space he enters.
I’ve slept beside him for enough nights now that my body knows where his should be, and it feels odd without him.
I turn onto my side, facing the door, and pull the covers up.
I survived the death of my father, of my Nonna, the collapse of my Family, the murder of my kin, living on the streets, Daniel King’s auction block, Damiano Orsini’s basement.
I can survive this.