Chapter 21 Dom
DOM
“You ready for a break?”
Annetta’s face is flushed, and her newly developed muscles glisten with a thin sheen of sweat. She drinks from her squirt bottle, the elegant line of her throat working to suck down the water. My arousal stirs.
She braces her elbows on her knees and stares up at me. “No.”
I had to catch her last curl attempt, and that’s the third save this session. She’s exhausted.
I’ve already pushed her further than I would anyone else—not that I needed to. She’s a fucking machine all by herself. She pushes herself like Matteo used to.
Thoughts of Turi’s little brother always catch me at the strangest times, like when I’m at the deli and I can practically hear him complaining about how disgusting cut meats are, or the few occasions when I drive with the windows down and laugh to myself, thinking about how I used to be the one who always told him to roll the windows up so he wouldn’t get a sore throat.
Then the Colombians cut him up into a hundred pieces, and Turi lost it. The shit he did on that rampage earned him the fear of every man in the city. His little brother, who had somehow become my little brother over the years, fueled us both to do unspeakable shit.
Violence and revenge were our way to grieve for Matteo’s death.
I cup Annetta’s cheek, and she closes her eyes and leans into my palm, her breathing slowing.
After that dinner at her parents’ house, she’s become relentless.
She pushes herself in our workouts until she can’t lift her arms anymore, and Eduardo tells me that when she’s not helping Valeria, she stands in the living room and shoots at targets all day long.
There’s only one thing on her mind when I come home—in the bed, along the stairs, against the kitchen counter.
A part of me knows I should be thrilled. She wants distraction, and I’m the perfect man to give it to her.
I’ve always been good at stealing attention.
When Dad would get that look in his eye—like factory work with five kids and a sullen wife at home wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be—that’s when I’d step in, bringing him beers and joking around louder than anyone else in the house.
Sometimes, that was enough for him to settle down for a few days, but usually it was a straight shot to getting the shit beat out of me, and Mom coming by to my room an hour later to silently offer me a plate of food for my troubles.
I tried following in his footsteps when I got older. I fought anyone who looked at me wrong and spent more than one night getting plastered at a bar with a stranger. That shit gets old as soon as you wake up and realize the road you’re headed down is a dead end.
Annetta isn’t me. She’s a hell of a lot smarter than I was at her age, and I know she’ll figure it out.
The real her is still there, buried deep under all the hurt she’s carrying around.
Sometimes, I’ll manage to fuck her so thoroughly that she’s too exhausted to hide herself, and I’ll catch a glimpse of that connection we were building before—the one that felt like our fucking souls were touching—until she shuts down again and the only thing she lets me do for her is hold her.
“Well, you need it,” I say, pushing myself to standing.
She captures my wrist with her hand, opening her eyes and zeroing in on me. “Do you want to know what I really need right now?” she asks in a suggestive tone.
“Oh, I already know.” I grin despite the cold, unsettling look in her eyes. “Coffee.”
When she comes downstairs after her shower—a quick, efficient rinse—I have her cup ready.
She won’t let herself cry anymore, either, and that’s the shit that worries me more than anything else.
She tips forward on her toes to kiss my cheek and takes her mug. “Did Don Salvatore say if I could leave yet?”
“Getting bored, angel?”
She looks into her cup. “A little.”
“He said they’re making progress. We just have to hang tight.”
The Chiarelli consigliere has been making regular trips to New York, painting a tragic picture of a family grieving the loss of Frederico to the rest of the Mob families, especially those who are part of the Commission.
Apparently, they’re all falling for it. Despite Turi’s spying, he can’t dig up anything damning enough to take the Chiarellis down, though I suspect getting Annetta out of my penthouse isn’t all that high on Turi’s list of priorities.
He practically sealed his wife in his home, and because she’s such a little freak, she likes it.
The problem is that my wife is nothing like his. Annetta is grasping for a purpose—something outside of making me dinner every night. If she doesn’t find it soon, she’s gonna turn reckless.
She takes another sip of her coffee, looking at me over the rim of the cup. “If the Chiarellis were going to try something else, don’t you think they would’ve already?”
“We’ve talked about this. There’s no set timeline for these things. You might be waiting years.”
I expect more of a fight, but she only smiles up at me and touches my arm. “I’m glad you’re here to help me through this, at least.”
I feel like I’m grabbing at a fish that’s wriggling out of my fingers.
“What if we got you a dog for Christmas? And I’ve been thinking about converting the downstairs bedroom into a darkroom for your photography. You could keep busy. It wouldn’t be so bad.” I grin. “You might even like all this time to yourself.”
She smiles back, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Yeah. That sounds like a good idea.”
Annetta stirs under the blankets as I reach over her to grab my phone off the nightstand.
“What?” I snap, answering the call. They better have a good fucking reason to wake me up at five in the morning.
Annetta murmurs something in her sleep, and I run my hand along her shoulder blades while Riccardo blathers on about some sex workers he found in a shipping container.
“I don’t give a fuck,” I hiss in a low voice.
Annetta’s already waking up, blinking at me in the dim light. Returning to sleep is becoming an increasingly distant possibility with each passing second.
“Where’s Aceto?” I ask, stroking my beard.
Riccardo reports to Aceto, so he should be waking him up, not me.
“That’s what I’m saying, boss,” Riccardo says in his mopey voice. He drops to a whisper. “The women are saying they know him.”
Fuck me. I exhale and tug on my beard.
“I can bring them to Don Salvatore’s?”
“Fuck no.” Not that he could anyway. Turi’s on a honeymoon to Italy right now with his little hacker wife. “Bring them here. I want to talk to them.”
“On our way, boss.”
The moment I hang up, Annetta sits up in the darkness, the white sheet pooling around her waist and exposing her sweet little breasts. I want to so badly to touch her, but she’s got that look on her face like she’s got something to say first.
“Let’s hear it,” I say grumpily, leaning one arm against my knee.
“Who was that?”
“Just some guests. One of my guys found some women in a warehouse. Supposedly, they recognize Aceto. They’re gonna swing by, and I’m gonna talk to them.”
Her dark eyes glitter in the darkness. “Let me talk to them.”
“Fuck no.”
“Dom.”
“You ever talk to a sex worker? They’re not gonna take too kindly to some spoiled rich girl. They’ll be comfortable speaking to a man—more comfortable, even.”
“I’m not spoiled.” She pouts adorably. “And just because they can speak to men, doesn’t mean they want to. When are they going to be here?”
When she rises from the bed to pull on clothes, I’m truly fucked.
Annetta already has a few grilled cheese sandwiches sizzling in a pan by the time Riccardo brings up the two women—or the girls.
They must be no older than fifteen, and they must be sisters. They huddle close together, staring around my penthouse with wide eyes. Despite the snow outside, they’re both wearing flip-flops and loose-fitting dresses. No visible bruises, I note with a tiny measure of relief.
“They were naked when I found them,” Riccardo says in Italian.
I’m nearly vibrating with the desire to hide all of this from Annetta. I know her. This isn’t the type of shit she needs to find a purpose in.
Like she can read my fucking mind, she approaches the girls with two plates of the fresh grilled cheese sandwiches.
They accept the food nervously.
The younger-looking one whispers, “Gracias.”
Riccardo watches the steaming, cheesy sandwiches go to the girls with a droopy frown, then turns to me. “They’re from Cuba,” he says in Italian. “They said some guy just pulled them off the street on their way to school and took them here.”
I glance at Annetta, who looks like she’s following this conversation way too closely for someone who should only know a few words in Italian.
“How long have they been in the States?”
Riccardo glances at them. “They said they woke up, some guy came and inspected them, and they traveled in a truck to the warehouse I found them in. Another guy looked them over, and then I found them.”
“How’d you know they were talking about Aceto?”
“They said he had a mustache. Then I showed them his picture, and they freaked out. I don’t know if he touched them or what, but they basically wouldn’t talk after that.”
I stroke my beard. Guess I figured out why Aceto was being weird about his warehouses when we met for lunch ages ago.
This also explains why he was so supportive of Turi’s ascension to Don—he saw the way the tide was turning, and thought he’d ingratiate himself with the new boss so he could hide this shit in plain sight.
If he’s trafficking girls, he’s going to be enjoying a nice, long vacation in Turi’s basement.
Pretty much anything goes in the Family, except the skin trade.
It brings way too much heat on us. Aceto’s even dumber and greedier than I thought, which is saying something when he’d sell his daughter for two shiny quarters.
“What did the man who took them look like?” Annetta asks in English.
Riccardo blinks a few times before glancing toward me for permission.