Chapter 1 #2
“Just a few minutes till the car gets here, baby,” Marco murmurs to me as he snakes an arm around my waist, practically crooning the words into my ear.
I’m rigid with discomfort, but he doesn’t notice—or maybe he just doesn’t care.
It doesn’t seem to matter to him that I’m tense right now, and I wonder if there’s some part of him that likes this, maybe even enjoys how uncomfortable I am and wants to see how much further he can push it given the chance.
“I’ve wanted to get you out of that dress since the second I saw you in it,” he continues, dragging his mouth along my ear, and I cringe away from him.
Just a few more minutes. When Carlotta arrives, I can make my excuses and get away from here, and there’s nothing he can do to stop me. As long as I can keep myself together just a little longer, everything is going to be okay.
His hand slides down to my ass, and I spring away from him, unable to keep my disgust under wraps any longer. “What are you—”
“Don’t worry, baby,” he tells me. There it is, that word again, baby, like I’m some kind of fucking child.
Sure, I might be a little younger than him, but that doesn’t give him the right to talk to me like I’m barely out of the womb.
Does he even know my name? I almost want to challenge him on it, but I don’t know how.
“Nobody can see us,” he continues, backing me against the wall of an adjoining alleyway.
“I just can’t wait any longer to have you, you’re too damn gorgeous… ”
He leans in to kiss me and I twist my head away at the last second, leaving him to drop the kiss against my neck instead.
I can smell his aftershave, the scent filling my senses, choking me, and I feel like I’ve been rooted to the spot.
Frozen with no escape, no way out, nothing I can do, nobody I can call.
“Oh, damn, you’ve got me so hard,” he grunts against my ear, like he still can’t tell how little I want his hands on me.
I want to shove him off, scream out, tell him to fuck off and leave me alone, but the words seem to wither on my tongue.
I don’t know what to say. My entire body feels like it’s been filled with ice, my toes curling in my shoes, my eyes staring straight over his shoulder in a wide-eyed panic as I try to figure out a way past this.
I want to cry, but I’m not even sure, at this point, that would stop him.
“Please, don’t,” I whisper, finally managing to get something past my lips.
He pulls back, and for a moment, I think he’s understood. I think I’ve managed to get through to him, even if it feels halfway impossible to speak right now.
“What did you say?”
“Please, don’t,” I force myself to say once more, even though it goes against every fiber of my being to actually say it out loud.
With James, I always kept my mouth shut.
That was the best thing I could do to keep from landing in more trouble, so it’s been burned into my brain that it’s better to keep my mouth shut and just go along with whatever he wants than it is to stand up for myself.
“You don’t have to play coy with me,” Marco assures me. He grabs at my ass again, going in to kiss me once more.
I strain my face away from him, but he catches my chin in his hand, drawing my face around to his again.
I stare into his eyes, and I can’t find a thing in there that speaks to the kind of man I would want to be on a date with.
He seems to have entirely stripped his humanity away, whatever might have remained there gone just as soon as he has me right where he wants me.
“You can give yourself what you want,” he mutters, forcing his face close to mine.
I squeeze my eyes shut, silently willing Carlotta to come around that corner and end this before it can go any further, because I don’t know if I have it in me to—
“Get away from her.”
The voice cuts through the rush of blood in my skull, and Marco’s eyes narrow, gaze swiveling around to see who has called him out.
When he spots who’s standing there, he springs back from me as though his ass is on fire.
His eyes widen, his jaw tightens, and his shoulders hunch, as though he’s ready for a fight.
And when I lay eyes on the person who has come to my rescue, I can’t say I blame him.
Silvio Siffredi.
Signor Siffredi, as I’ve known him my whole life—ever since I became friends with Carlotta in elementary school. The few times I was allowed to visit their ridiculously fancy mansion on the edge of the city, that’s how she told me to address him.
I knew very little about him growing up, after my parents ruled that I would no longer be able to stay over at Carlotta’s place—they never told me why, or what had changed to cause them to view her father in such dim terms, and I never had the nerve to come out and ask them.
But, with the amount of money he must be making to afford a place like that, I’m pretty sure I can take a decent guess at it.
Carlotta always seemed kind of oblivious to it, how different her life was to the people around her, but I could never quite detach myself from that reality, no matter how hard I tried.
“Siffredi?” Marco mutters, moving further from me as though something has finally clicked into place. “What are you doing—”
“Get away from her,” Silvio replies evenly, his voice not wavering for a moment.
My head spins. Did Carlotta send him or something? Surely, she wouldn’t have borrowed her father to send him out on a mission like this, not without telling me, that would be insane. None of this makes sense.
And yet, as Silvio moves closer, I can see a blazing sureness in his eyes—that same crystalline clear blue that I remember from when I was a kid and I would sneak away from Carlotta’s room during a sleepover to explore the rest of the house, peeping around his office door to see his hand splayed against his temple as he looked over some papers or another.
He looked to me then like something out of a fairy tale. A dark monster locked away in a castle, his face scarred, his nose clearly broken a few times, some tattoos curling along his forearms that I could never quite make out.
But right now, as he stands before me, he looks more like my savior, and I’ll take whatever help I can get.
“Jesus,” Marco curses under his breath, but he doesn’t move away.
I look over at Signor Siffredi, but he doesn’t make eye contact with me, seemingly unwilling to yield until he’s sure Marco is nowhere close to me.
“Get your hands off of her,” Silvio orders him, taking a step forward.
Marco looks freaked, but he doesn’t move, feet rooted to the spot like he doesn’t want to sacrifice the ground. “What the hell are you doing here—”
“I said, get your fucking hands off of her,” Silvio tells him again. And this time, he gives Marco a beat to pull back—before he closes the distance, grabs him by the collar, and yanks him away.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Marco exclaims. He tries to swipe Silvio’s hands away from his collar, but he’s held tight.
My hand clamps over my mouth in shock, the threat of violence already crackling in the air.
But Silvio just shoves his face close enough that Marco must be able to see the violent glint in his eye.
Silvio’s hand rests briefly on something beneath his jacket, and Marco’s eyes dart downward in a panic.
Is that a gun…?
“Get the fuck away from me!” Marco yells, and he shoves Silvio back. Silvio takes a couple of steps to steady himself before he plants his feet, and Marco’s gaze blackens as he rushes at him. “You don’t just get to come in here and—”
He throws himself in Silvio’s direction, fist swinging, but Silvio catches his hand without breaking his gaze, twisting his arm up behind his back and shoving him away.
Marco lets out a cry of pain, but his ego is clearly too stung to let it go.
He stumbles and spins around, his hand flailing in the air to try and make contact, and Silvio ducks back, moving with precision, a sharp contrast to Marco’s useless attempts at keeping himself in control.
Silvio draws his fists back and lands two blows on Marco—one on his chest, the other at his throat, sending Marco staggering backward, clutching at his neck as he gasps for air.
Each blow is considered, deliberate; it’s clear he knows what he’s doing, each blow measured for maximum impact.
The tattoos on his knuckles flex as he shakes his hand out, taking a step toward Marco and glaring him down.
“Go,” he snarls.
And with that, Marco, still unable to speak, takes off.
A car pulls up before him that he practically throws himself into, pulling the door shut and gesturing for the driver to take off before Silvio can say another word.
I can still feel his hands on my skin, the grasping demand of his touch, but something begins to uncoil inside me now that he’s gone, a sigh of relief parting my lips that I didn’t even realize I was waiting for.
Silvio turns to me, eyes searching mine as he closes the distance between us. He’s wearing a dark blue suit, and at a glance, he looks the consummate businessman, but I can see the edge of one of his tattoos poking out from beneath the sleeve, a reminder of what lies beneath.
It’s been the better part of fifteen years since I last laid eyes on him, but not much has changed. There are a few deeper wrinkles around his eyes, perhaps. More gray streaks in his dark brown hair. Other than that, he’s just the man I knew before.
“What are you—”
“Are you okay?” he asks bluntly.
I glance down, as though checking myself for signs of injury. “Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think so—”
“Did he hurt you?”
I bite down hard on my lip. For a moment, I feel a rush of emotion threaten to overtake me, all the memories of everything that happened with James almost getting the better of me, but I manage to tamp them down before they can get a grip.
Silvio catches my chin in his hand, guiding it toward him, examining me closely, his thumb skimming over my skin. His touch grounds me, dumping me back in reality.
I shake my head. “I’m fine,” I breathe, leaning back against the wall, crossing my arms over my chest. “Thank—thank you, Signor Siffredi—”
“Silvio,” he corrects me gruffly.
“Silvio,” I repeat, the newness of it almost shocking on my tongue.
I’ve never met him when we’ve both been adults, and despite it all, there’s still something of that dynamic there between us—the memory of how it felt to be a little girl in his huge house, knowing that he had all the power in the world to do anything he wanted. Or so it seemed back then.
Judging by the way Marco just took off, maybe I wasn’t far off from the truth back in those days either…
“He won’t bother you again,” he tells me. “And if he does…” His eyes darken. “He’ll lose every finger he lays on you.”
His voice is suddenly laced with genuine fury that catches me off guard. Why is he so protective of me? It must be because he sees something of his daughter in me, what with us being the same age and everything.
That’s all it can be, right?
And yet, as he stands there, hand on my face, it’s hard to imagine anything familial about the way he’s gazing at me.
“I’ll call a cab,” I blurt out swiftly, pulling back, realizing that I’m just standing in silence and staring at him. “I should get home, I—”
“I’ll drive you.”
“You don’t have to do that—”
“I know I don’t. I’m offering.”
He nods to his car, parked a few yards away down the street.
I didn’t even notice him arriving, must have been so caught up in the fear of what Marco was going to do to me that it didn’t cross my mind to pay attention to anything else.
It’s sleek and black, the kind that looks expensive beneath the slick glow of the streetlights above.
Honestly, I should probably call Carlotta, figure out what happened in the grand scheme of miscommunication to land her father in front of me like this, but the only thing I can think about right now is getting as far away from here as I can.
And if that happens to be with my best friend’s father?
I’ll take it.