19. Sebastian
Sebastian
“Care to explain to me what you’re doing down here?”
“Shit.”
I push off from the wall, my hands fisted tight in my sweat pockets. I don’t even have a fucking shirt on I came down here so fast. “Yeah. Shit is right. What the fuck, Joe?”
Joe closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. And when she opens them, I’m even more pissed off because I don’t see a single ounce of regret. “Sebastian… listen. I just—”
I hold my hand up in her direction. I’m fully aware how much the gesture will piss her off, but I just—I need a fucking second. “Upstairs. Now.”
“Seb—”
“Now!”
Joe’s eyes widen in shock, but they quickly morph from shock to anger, and I immediately know I fucked up.
But instead of fighting back, she simply walks past me and into the elevator.
Turning on the balls of her feet, she pops a hip, crosses her arms over her chest, raises her brow, purses her lips, and glares me down.
Now she’s just not unapologetic, she’s pissed.
Good.
Because, so am I.
The moment the elevator door opens she storms out. Not even giving me a second thought. “Josephine,” I snap, and she doesn’t so much as look over her shoulder.
Catching up to her, I wrap my hand around her forearm, stopping her in her tracks, and spin her around to look at me. Slowly, her eyes move from my face, to my tattooed hand around her arm, and back up. “Sebastian. Let. Go.”
“Don’t walk away when I’m trying to talk to you,” I snarl.
Red blooms across her face, and I know she’s on the verge of it. But I can’t get myself to stop. “You have three seconds to let go of my arm. One…”
“Not until you tell me what the hell you were doing down there. Alone!”
“Lower your voice,” she hisses. “Two…”
“What? You thought you could just sneak out of my bed and I wouldn’t notice?
What if he had put his hands on you Josephine?
What if the situation would have gotten out of control and no one would have been there to help you?
” My frustration is mounting. My anger feels like it’s about to boil over.
So much so that I feel tears sting at the back of my eyes.
Tightening my grip I pull her a fraction of an inch closer.
“He’s hurt you before, he’d do it again! ”
“Sebastian…” she warns, and I know it’s my final one.
“I mean, goddamnit, Joe!”
I see the moment she snaps all over her face.
I see it before anything even happens. And then her face is gone from my view when she grabs my arm, spins me around, and knocks me flat on the table.
She wraps one delicate hand around my neck and places her other forearm in the center of my chest. Using all of her weight to keep me pinned in place.
Leaning down, she brings her face closer to mine.
“When I tell you to let go of me, I fucking mean it, Sebastian.”
Everything in my vision goes red.
What if he had hurt her again?
What if something had happened to her when I was supposed to be taking care of her?
What if I lose her?
I can’t. She needs to understand.
Despite her hand still being around my throat, I grab her by the waist. Because no matter how much she tries, she can’t keep me pinned to the table using her body weight alone.
In one quick motion, I sit up forcefully, lift her in the air, and spin us around so she’s now lying flat against the table.
She thrashes beneath me, but not hard enough where I know she’s truly afraid.
I would never, and I mean never do anything to make her afraid of me. But she is livid.
“Josephine…” I grab both her hands and pin them to the table on either side of her head.
The rest of her body doesn’t stop moving.
Climbing up on the table, I straddle her waist, trying to get her to stay still long enough to hear me.
I lean forward so my face is directly above hers.
“You weren’t supposed to go in there by yourself.
” My voice is still laced with anger. “You promised me.”
“I know I did. But I just thought—”
“You didn’t think,” I shout in her face. The tears are no longer stinging the backs of my eyes. Instead, they’re pooling in the corners, clouding my vision of her beautiful face.
She finally stops moving. “Watch how you speak to me, Sebastian.”
I don’t care.
She needs to understand.
“He could have fucking killed you!” I watch as a tear falls from my eye and land on her flushed cheek. And as she registers that I’m now crying, her entire demeanor softens in an instant.
“Sebastian…”
But just as I open my mouth to respond, a pair of hands grab my shirtless torso and throws me across the table.
The chair on the end shatters as I crash into it and land amongst its pieces on the floor.
I lay there for a split second, trying to make sense of what the fuck just happened when a fuzzy figure reaches down and grabs me again.
This time he lifts me from the floor and slams me against the floor-to-ceiling window looking out over the city.
“Dante!” Josephine hisses, likely trying to be quiet enough to not wake Luca and Enzo and cause an even bigger scene.
Dante pins his giant arm across my neck as my vision clears, and I’m finally able to make out his face. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he growls at me.
“D, get the fuck off of me,” I warn as best as I can despite not being able to breathe.
He leans in so his face is almost touching mine. “Make. Me.”
“Tell him.” My eyes don’t stray from Dante’s but I’m talking to Joe. “Tell him what you were doing, Joe.” Dante and I remain frozen. Our chests rising and falling in perfect rhythm. Each breath laced with anger. Joe doesn’t say anything. “Tell him where you were.”
Dante breaks eye contact with me and looks over his shoulder. His arm remains tight against my throat. “Where were you, Joe?”
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. And when she opens them, she says, “I was downstairs talking to my dad. Alone.”
Dante pauses for a moment before he asks her while pointing at me with his other hand, “Did he hurt you?”
Joe and I answer at the same time.
“I would never.”
“No. He would never.”
Slowly, Dante looks back at me and removes his arm from my throat. “I’m sorry.”
Rubbing at my neck, I shake my head. “Don’t apologize. I don’t blame you.”
Dante turns to look at Joe and points in her direction. “You. Here. Now.”
As expected, she rolls her eyes. “Look, Sebastian already—”
“Josephine, I swear to fucking god,” he snarls.
Joe huffs out a breath and stomps over to the two of us. She’s about to speak again when Dante gently takes her face in his hands. “Why did you go down there by yourself?”
“I just wanted to see if I could get him to talk without the four of you around.”
“Talk about what?” he asks.
Honestly, there really isn’t much we need him for at this point.
I would bet any amount of money on the fact that he knows nothing about the inner workings of the Novikov empire or their plans for revenge.
He was just a pawn. And a shitty one at that.
But it’s clear Joe wants something more out of him.
So until she says otherwise, here is where he will stay.
Despite how much the four of us want to go down there and put a bullet in his brain every minute of the day.
“I just…” she hesitates.
“You what? You can tell us.”
“I just want to understand. I want to understand why after all these years, he can’t just let me be.
” I step up next to Dante and reach for her hand.
She doesn’t waste a second interlocking her fingers with mine.
“He can’t even give that to me. After everything he’s already done, he still tries to haunt me. ”
“Did he give you any answers?” Dante asks.
She shakes her head in his hands. “No. He just sits there with this smug-ass expression on his face, because he knows. He knows that I’ll keep him down there. He knows that as soon as I don’t need anything from him anymore it’s him against the four of you or him against the Bratva.”
“Do you want us to talk to him?”
“Ha,” she says humorlessly. “Like you would actually talk to him.”
“None of us are going to do anything with him until you say so. I think we’ve proven that by now, haven’t we?” Dante tips her head up slightly.
“Yes.”
“But, one thing I can promise you with absolute certainty is that man will never lay another hand on you again,” Dante assures her. “If he so much as causes you one more second of pain, I will walk down there and rip his head clean off his shoulders.”
Josephine huffs a half-hearted laugh. “We know you can protect yourself, Love, but you shouldn’t have to. Let us keep you safe. Let us take care of you. You don’t have to do everything on your own.”
The corners of her lips turn up ever so slightly as she looks over at me. “I know.”
“We promise to do everything we can to protect you, and we will never break that promise.”
“But, you have to keep your promises to us, Amore Mia,” Dante finishes for me.
“I know,” she repeats. And it’s then that I know she understands.
The three of us crashed in Dante’s room after he carried her upstairs.
I thought for sure he was going to not-so-subtly suggest I go back into my own room, but he quickly went into my room, grabbed a pillow off my bed, and put it beside the two he already had.
The three of us fell asleep with Joe in the middle, her head resting on Dante’s chest, and with me pressed against her back.
Considering he’s usually up before the sun is, Dante doesn’t have much in the way of window treatments, and the sun is just starting to peek through his window.
Somehow though, he’s still asleep. Could have something to do with the fact that he tried to get in a fistfight with me in the middle of the night.
It isn’t lost on me the lengths he was about to go to protect her.
And I don’t blame him. Had I heard what was going on and walked in on the scene he did, I probably would have assumed the worst too.
But I would never do anything to hurt her, and I know he knows that too.
But his instincts kicked in and he acted on them.
His ability to protect the ones he loves most is one of the things I love most about Dante.
Even if protecting that person comes at a great cost.
He would die for any of us today if he had to.
And while he and I don’t have a romantic relationship with one another, I do share something special with him.
Them.
He’s my brother.
He’s part of my family.
And he loves the people that I love as fiercely and deeply as I do.
And that’s something very few people are lucky enough to share with another.
“Hmmm…” Joe moans softly as she wiggles against me.
Smiling, I press a gentle kiss against the back of her head.
Her hair smells of jasmine and vanilla. And when I let my face linger a moment longer, I smell my favorite cologne on her, too.
The notes of sandalwood mix perfectly with both of their scents.
It smells perfect.
Like us.
She wiggles again. Her ass pressing perfectly against me. And despite Dante being on the other side of the bed, I can’t help but want her to do it again. Gently, I run my hand along her bare thigh. “Good morning, Love.”
“Hmmm… morning, Baby,” her sleepy voice rasps out.
Well, fuck if that didn’t just kill me.
“Baby, huh?”
Slowly, she rolls over to face me. She scrunches her face up in the cutest way imaginable. “Sorry, it just slipped out.”
“That’s what I call Luca.”
“I know. I won’t do it aga—”
“No. I liked it.” And I really fucking did. “There’s room for more than one.” I slant my mouth over hers and kiss her deeply, morning breath be damned.
Working my hand up her thigh, I let my fingers play along the seam of her cotton panties, and after a second or two, I slide my hand beneath the waistband.
She smiles against my lips. “Dante is still sleeping.”
“So we wake him up.” This may actually be a good idea.
Dante hasn’t been with Joe with one of us.
He’s not going to do it with Luca first, he has a hard enough time separating the fact that Luca is technically his boss.
Even though he’s all of our bosses. And his feelings are clearly too mixed up with Enzo to cross that line yet. So, I guess I’ll be his test run.
Joe giggles. “Okay.”
Grabbing her by the waist, I roll her so she’s straddling me. Effectively pulling the covers off of all three of us.
Rise and shine, Big Daddy.