5. ~Nico~
5
~Nico~
“This isn’t her.”
“Did you really think there wouldn’t be a massive emotional toll to enduring all that shit at your wedding? Or even all the shit before then? Santino and Angelo’s abuse? Getting stabbed? Being pulled back into this world she worked so hard to escape from? Having to now go to war?”
When I’d expressed my concerns about Caterina’s state of mind and the toll everything of late had taken on her, I hadn’t wanted things to go this way, with her going to the extreme that she had tonight.
Sure, in a way she was back on track, no longer reeling like she had been, but in the most dangerous way imaginable.
Not to mention, a highly unpredictable way with the complete loss of control that letting the monstrous side of her loose involved.
I had enough unpredictable elements to deal with as it was without this becoming another.
Hell, she couldn’t afford to be that way with what we were up against.
Carlo’s words to me kept playing on my mind.
“You need to take power over the Marchetti Syndicate, Nico. And Caterina needs to do the same where the Leones are concerned.”
I knew a great deal about Caterina, but even I couldn’t predict how she was going to react to his intention there.
I watched the last of the dirt and blood swirling away down the drain as a whole lot of special soap and the warm water cleansed it from her skin, while I held her tightly against me in the shower of her ensuite at the Manor as I cleaned her up.
“Nico.”
I pulled from my thoughts at the soft sound of Caterina uttering my name.
It was the first time she’d said anything since she’d woken up on the drive back to when we’d been six minutes out. She’d just looked at me, a mixture of guilt and shame flitting across her features before she’d then held up her hand to me in order to discourage me from getting into what had happened, and she’d spent the rest of the drive just staring aimlessly out of the window while slumped in the passenger seat exhaustedly.
I’d had to carry her into the house and also help her out of her soiled clothes when we’d reached her bedroom, because she’d been shaking so much, barely able to walk straight. From my own familiarity with entering my feral states, I recognized it as a mixture of high-level adrenaline and a massive expulsion of energy, as well as the struggle of her regular, rational mindset trying to reconcile what that monstrous mindset had done.
With her not all there in the moment, I hadn’t left her alone for even one nano second. Not even to shower. Especially not to shower.
“Yeah?” I responded carefully, trying to keep my voice soft. Well, as soft as a brutal bastard like me could actually manage to pull off.
It seemed to be good enough because she didn’t flinch or react negatively to my one-word response.
In fact, she raised her head and met my eye line, even loosening her death grip on my biceps, wherein she’d been clinging to me in a very uncharacteristic way since I’d brought her in here to wash up. Like I was her lifeline.
While, sure, it did feel good on the one hand to be needed that way, especially by her, the woman I’d spent years being immersed in deep obsession with and who I’d developed a whole lot more than mere obsession with in the recent weeks, it also didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like us. It wasn’t our usual dynamic. And I also didn’t like the shift in the power dynamic either. I didn’t like it with her when things weren’t even between us, when she was more… submissive like this. Her being strong and domineering in her own right and being able to match me on every fucking level was the woman I knew, the woman I respected, the woman I… cared for a great deal.
Anything else just felt… wrong.
Unsettling.
And, yeah, fucking upsetting at seeing her like that.
Not herself.
Fucking lost to me.
I hated that all this shit was doing this to her, hurting her so much.
And I felt like it was doing more than that—as if that wasn’t already bad enough—that it was taking her from me, pulling her away.
It had taken so long for me to bring her close and to earn her trust, to be with her in a way that wasn’t just my one-sided fixation on display for her to see, beyond our war, that the idea of anything impacting that, risking that… it made me sick to my stomach. Hell, it threatened to make me rage in a way that the world and I, myself, had never seen the likes of before.
“How long have I been… out? Spacing out, I guess?”
“Almost an hour.”
She frowned, looked down at herself standing there naked, pressed up against me while I was clad in my pants and white shirt, the latter now see through from being utterly soaked. The only things I’d taken off were my socks and shoes, and my leather jacket. Well, and also my holsters.
“You’re in here fully clothed?” she questioned.
“I figured you might need that barrier right now.” After what happened to you tonight, after those fucking rapists set upon you while I wasn’t there to stop them, while you were taken under my fucking watch, while I was failing all over the place to safeguard the people I love.
“Thank you. But I’m fine.” She grimaced as she looked me over, her eyes darting all over the scratches she’d inflicted when she’d lost control on me earlier. “I’m so sorry, Nico. I wasn’t in my right mind, but that’s not even an excuse. I hurt you.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Of course it is and—”
“Come on, we both know you were holding back when you came at me. Majorly. In that state, the damage you could have really done is far beyond these mere slight grazes.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out and stroking her face carefully. “Because you’re actually hurt,” I said, gesturing at the nasty scrapes along both of her arms, a red-raw handprint around her throat, bruising along her jawline, and nail marks… between her thighs.
“It’s not a big deal,” she insisted, even as she winced when she shifted her weight.
I saw her look down and realize what had caused the discomfort. She caught my eye and started shaking her head vehemently. “It’s not what you think. It was just a brutal grab.”
Just?
A growl escaped me before I could swallow it down.
“I mean, they didn’t get any further than that.” Her eyes darkened briefly as she uttered, “I made sure of it.”
“It shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” I gritted out. “I’m sorry that—”
She pressed her fingers to my lips. “Shh. It did happen, and the fault is Angelo’s. But I handled it. I stopped them from doing what they’d planned.”
“You most definitely did.”
She flinched and pulled her fingers away. “You think I went too far, don’t you?”
I turned the shower water off and stepped out, grabbing a towel, then handing it to her.
I went to take her hand to help her out, but she batted it away and got out on her own, much steadier on her feet now. “Don’t avoid the question,” she said, taking the towel and securing it around her.
Normally, I’d be hard-pressed to keep my hands off her with her just being right in front of me, let alone wet and naked. But with her like this, not fully herself, even though I could see her getting there bit by bit, and after what she’d been through tonight, all I could see was the clinical side of things.
“I’m the last person to judge any of that,” I told her. “You know what I’ve done. Well, some of the things. You’ve even borne witness to some particularly brutal instances.” I shrugged my soaking wet shirt off, then opened my pants. “Furthermore, I wasn’t the one bound to that chair and facing off with four sexual predators intent on breaking me in for when I was shipped off to some sick sex slave buyer.”
She gasped at my words and stilled. “How did you know that part?”
“The guys were ID’d by a source of ours and Milo put the pieces together from there.”
“Source? What source?”
I shoved my pants and boxers down, then kicked them off, thankful to be free from the uncomfortable feeling of wet clothes sticking to me. I snatched another towel off a rail, then wrapped it across my hips. “We’ll get into that later. When you’re… better.”
“Better? I’m fine now.”
I scrubbed my hand over my face. “Caterina, stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Acting like this can just roll off your back.”
“Isn’t that what you want from me?”
“What?”
“You think I didn’t hear you talking to the guys when you sent me upstairs to get dressed for our sparring session that never actually ended up happening because of other dire circumstances? You thought I’d gone soft, lost my edge, that I was reeling from everything. Weak.”
“That’s not—I was airing my worries out loud in a burst. They weren’t all perfectly—”
“You need me this way. I need me this way. Able to take the hits and keep on moving. Not absorbing the trauma, not letting it touch me.”
“Not processing it is really what’s happening with you. And it’s an issue. You bury it down deep, hit after hit, but it can’t all be contained, and then it threatens to break you apart. You need to process it, acknowledge it. What happened in that garage is proof enough of that, of what can happen if you don’t.”
“I destroyed them, Nico.”
“There’s a difference between putting down an enemy and what you did.”
“So you do condemn it? After wanting to see that side of me, to bring it out in me, this is how you respond when I actually do unleash it? Is it because it wasn’t sexually? Is that why you’re condemning it? Because you didn’t get anything out of it? Because you and your dick didn’t benefit?”
Well, she’d certainly come fully out of her withdrawn state now.
But there was a whole lot of lashing out going on.
“You feel guilty.”
“What?” she bit at me.
“This is remorse kicking in. It’s why you’re lashing out, getting angry. It’s creeping up, and it feels like shit.” Or, so I’d heard from Milo and Julian whenever they’d crossed lines like this before over the years.
“No, this is about you con—”
“Condemning you, right. Except I’m not and I never actually said that.”
“Then what? What exactly is your point?” She smashed her fist into the wall, making a dent in the process. “Just fucking say it!”
Yeah, this was guilt, for sure. And the rage that came along with trying not to feel it and shove it back down quickly to avoid the hurt of it. Again, as I’d heard from Milo and Julian when it came to this sort of thing.
I strode to her and grasped her wrist, eyeing her now bloodied knuckles. “Stop. You’re already hurt. No more. No fucking more tonight.” She went to pull free, but I held fast. “ Listen. Just fucking listen.”
She stopped resisting and blew out a breath. “Fine.”
“I don’t condemn what you did. I’m just concerned. You unleashing and being your true self is absolutely magnificent. There’s nothing else like seeing you free and uninhibited, not bound by yourself, anyone, or anything. And I love every moment of it.” I glared at her. “Even the parts not related to servicing my dick, for the record.” I sucked in a breath to calm myself after the sting of that insulting accusation, and went on, “ But what you did earlier to those guys wasn’t that. It was pain .”
“Wh-what?”
“Not pain from their intentions, because that would have been dealt with by simply putting them down, hurting them enough to nullify the threat. But you went much further than that. Because of everything else that’s been building up.” Still holding her wrist, I pushed into her so she could feel me against her, and hopefully use it to ground herself to the moment with me, and for some comfort at the same time. “What I hate, what I condemn , is you getting to the point of needing to unload that much fucking agony.”
“It is what it is right now.”
“Caterina—”
“No. Why do you think I left the family, cut all those connections, even basically to my mom, too? Why do you think I was so intent on going out into the world alone with nothing to my name, starting from scratch, clawing my way up from the fucking dirt all alone? To escape that. To escape what they made me feel, what they did to me, what all that misogyny and control and abuse that zapped my power did to me.” She pushed me away, and I let her, because at least she was talking about it and not just trying to shut it all down again right away.
At least she was letting me in.
“Tonight, Angelo tried to take my power in one of the most heinous ways imaginable. I’ve put up with a lot of their shit since I was pulled back into all of this. Their verbal abuse, the threats, being hurt by my own father, having to stand back and not respond with a massive show of force when my mom was under threat and having to send her away instead, having to be demeaned as a forced mafia princess bride, being kept from what actually gives me purpose and a sense of control and power in my work, then having to move in here under the guise that I’m being trained by you to be a submissive, broken wife with no agency of her own. But tonight… that went beyond all of that. Even just putting those assholes down wasn’t enough. I needed to rage, I needed to take back the power that’s been stolen from me, that I essentially even had to fucking give up to carry out this mission with the three of you.”
“I hear you. I hear every fucking word. And I’m glad you’re admitting that it has impacted you.”
“It’s more than that. And I guess I was trying to pretend it wasn’t true, to shove it down. But it is true. There’s no more denying it now.”
“What’s that?”
“This is who I am when I’m embroiled in this, when I’m immersed in my family again.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head vehemently. “You’re wrong.”
“Nico—”
“You accept that and you’re letting them win. This is what they want, remember? To break you? To make you inconsequential?”
“Even so—”
“Santino isn’t afraid of what you might know, what you might do, he’s afraid of you.”
She stilled. “What?”
“Your mom told me everything. He’s afraid you’ll oust him. He knows what you’re worth, and it scares the living shit out of him. Short of killing his own daughter, he’s trying to wipe you off the board in this way. And that fear, Caterina, that’s everything to us, something we can absolutely use to our advantage.” I went to her and took her hands in mine. “More to the point of our conversation, it demonstrates that he’s actually well aware of your true worth, your capabilities, and skills. And you’re such a force to be reckoned with that he’s going to these insane lengths as a result.”
It took her several moments to take in the heaviness of my revelations.
Then she stared up at me. “You’re in a similar situation with them trying to leash you.”
I nodded. “And all this leads to something else that we need to discuss. But not yet. First, there’s Julian. It’s why I wanted us to talk this out, to make sure you were—”
“Mentally stable after what I just did?”
“Stable confidence-wise too, that your rationality had returned as well, yes. And that you still had hope, that all this shit that’s happened hasn’t undercut that. Because when it comes to finding someone who’s being hidden by the likes of Angelo, it can take nothing short of a fucking miracle and a whole lot of steadfast determination.”
“Not a miracle, just some impressive ingenuity.” Her lip curled. “Fortunately, thinking outside the box is kind of my thing.”
With that, she stalked to the bathroom door, threw it open, then strode on out back into the bedroom.
I followed her as she headed for her chest of drawers and started pulling some clothes out and tossing them on the bed. “I need coffee and lots of it. I can still feel that fucking sedative in my system. I’ll meet you in the living room—the main one—in ten minutes, and we’ll get started.”
Relief rolled through me at seeing her like this and I smiled at her issuing orders.
“What?” she asked distractedly as she shoved on her panties and a pair of black yoga pants beneath her towel, jumping on the spot to pull them on quickly.
“Nothing. I’ll get that coffee going.”
“When will Milo be back? And come to think of it, how the hell is he going to clean up the mess I made all by himself?”
“I’ll answer the first question. The second we’ll get to once we find Julian. Milo texted me before we headed into the shower. Another twenty minutes and he’ll be here.”
I could see her urge to ask more about the second part. Fortunately, she obviously recognized the need to prioritize right now, and she merely nodded and said, “Okay, good.”
“I’ll need to dress your injuries while you’re doing your thing.”
“I’m fine.”
“Your arms are scraped up to shit. From the crash, no doubt.”
It was fucking lucky that it hadn’t been worse than that.
Julian had protected her with that special riding gear he’d acquired for her.
Of course he had. He was always going above and beyond for those he loved.
And I’d make damn sure we did the same for him now.
“Then there’s the fact that you had open wounds while covered in other people’s blood. Infection is a very real concern. We’ll get you on a course of antibiotics right away.”
“Twice in a few weeks. That’s not the best.”
No, it really wasn’t.
Her getting hurt again wasn’t something easy for me to digest. Hell, I couldn’t swallow it. I never would. I just had to hold off my true feelings concerning it until we located Julian.
Just until then.
I walked to her and kissed the top of her head. “It will all be okay. You’re back here, safe with us now.” I breathed her in. “Where you belong.”
Her eyes widened at my words. My confession, in a sense.
It had just… come out.
The words had slipped out so easily.
And they’d felt so fucking right when I’d voiced them.
I smirked and walked out, leaving her to absorb it.