Chapter 16
GIA
Ikept Dominic’s gun. I laid it beneath the pillow beside me and slept.
I wasn’t sure if Dominic slept that night. I don’t even remember getting upstairs and into bed after what happened in the dining room.
The scent of sex permeated my room. It was the first thing I smelled, his smell, my own, when I opened my eyes. I sat up in bed, rubbed my face, and picked up the loaded weapon.
I’d kill Victor Scava with this gun.
Then I’d kill Dominic with it.
He wanted me to. He’d asked me to. I finally understood him last night. I finally saw him. Really saw him. He’d been at odds all along, at once my cruel captor, then ally, then lover. I knew why now.
I got out of bed and walked through the door that connected our bedrooms. I didn’t care what I looked like, that I was naked, unwashed. That his cum had dried and crusted between my legs. I didn’t care.
I only cared about the gun in my hand.
Dominic walked out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped low around his waist, another in his hands, drying his hair.
“How long have you been hiding?” I asked.
He stopped and looked at me.
“You need a shower, Gia.”
He resumed walking, tossing the towel he used to dry his hair on the bed.
“How long?”
He stopped and turned to me, paused, then walked right up to me and cocked his head to the side.
“Get your facts straight before you walk around demanding answers with a gun in your hand.”
He easily wrapped his hand around the wrist that held the gun.
“You need a shower,” he said again.
“Can’t stand your own smell?”
His eyes narrowed, and he forced the weapon out of my hand.
“It’s mine!” I followed him to the dresser, trying to reach around him to get it when he opened a drawer and set it inside.
He caught my wrists and walked me backward a few steps.
“You need to keep your shit together, and you need to have a fucking shower.”
“It’s mine,” I said again, looking up into his eyes, blue-gray pools so deep, I could lose myself inside them if I wasn’t careful.
“I’m not taking it away. It’s yours. Come on.”
His voice was quiet, as if talking down a child throwing a tantrum.
He walked me into the bathroom and ran water into the tub. The first time he’d bathed me came rushing back, and I pulled away. But he kept hold of my wrist and held me there.
“Relax. Do you want me to give you something to relax?”
“Your little pills? No, thank you.”
“Then be a good girl and get in the tub.”
I glanced at the tub filling up with water, saw him check the temperature and adjust it.
“In.”
“I want this off too.” I pointed to the collar.
“And I told you once before, it will come off when I’m ready to take it off.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I need you to keep your shit together if we’re going to get the bastards who killed Mateo and branded you.”
I took in his words, studying him, his face, his eyes. He gestured once more to the tub and released my wrist when I climbed in. And I remembered something.
“You have a daughter.”
He stopped, as if that were the last thing he expected me to say. Then he nodded once and brought over a bottle of body wash and a washcloth. He sat on the edge of the tub, dipped the cloth inside, and rung it out before squeezing body wash onto it. He began to lather my neck and back.
“Effie. She’s eleven now.”
His face looked so sad right then. It was like the man I’d glimpsed last night, the one who hurt. The broken one.
“I haven’t seen her in a long time. Almost seven years.”
“Why?”
He looked at me, and for a moment, I thought he was going to say something other than what he said, but then, as if he’d just given himself over to it, the truth came out.
“Because I’m a coward.”
He dropped my gaze, dipped the washcloth into the water, and brought it back to me.
“She’s better off anyway.”
“What happened that night?”
He knew the night I meant. There was no other night.
“I shot my brother,” he said flatly. “I almost killed him.”
He refused to look at me. I reached for his hand the next time he dipped the cloth into the water and held it, then reached up to cup his face, seeing the scratches I’d left yesterday, thinking I should have bandaged them for him.
Dominic met my gaze, the look in his eyes strange, dark…empty. As if he’d used the last seven years to create a gap so wide, a hole so big, he’d never be able to cross the chasm.
He shook my hand off and resumed washing me, his attention wholly on that as he spoke.
“Don’t misunderstand, Gia. I’m not good. Being a father doesn’t make me good. Missing my daughter doesn’t make me good. When I say she’s better off, I mean it. I know myself. I know what I’ve done, what I am. I know what I’m capable of.”
He hated himself. I’d accused him of that very thing in the beginning, and it was more true than I’d realized then. And some part of me, hell, not some part, not any part. My heart…it broke for him.
“Tell me about that night,” I said after a while, once he’d started shampooing my hair.
“Salvatore finally figured out what was going on. Roman—hell, Roman had been looking for shit all along, I have no doubt of that. Anything to discredit me. Although, it’s not like I needed much help with that.”
“From the beginning. Please.”
“Salvatore and Roman figured out I was the father of Isabella DeMarco’s little girl, Effie. The DeMarcos were our biggest rival then.”
He paused, giving me a minute to absorb.
“We’d met when we were both young—well, she was young, and I was stupid.
Didn’t know who she was at first, and she didn’t know who I was.
She got pregnant, and the night we’d agreed to tell our families, I chickened out.
She didn’t. She told. And then, she disappeared.
It was either that or old man DeMarco wanted her to get rid of the baby. ”
“I remember the war between your families.” It came back vaguely. I’d been too young to really pay attention all those years ago. “Lucia was given to Salvatore like she was restitution or something.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“It would have been her older sister if you hadn’t gotten her pregnant?”
He nodded.
“Well, they figured it out,” he continued.
“Luke, her cousin, an imbecile if you ask me, managed to get himself shot by another imbecile. It’s what triggered everything.
Roman, my fucking uncle,” he spat the words, “tried to pin it on me, but Salvatore, my brother who can do no wrong, just wanted peace. Well, fuck peace. This is the fucking mob. You don’t get to choose peace. ”
He stopped shampooing for a minute and looked off into the distance. I was glad for it. In his growing anger at his family, the massage had turned a little rough.
“You know what you get if you’re the last-born son in a mafia family, Gia?”
I waited, eyes on his when he turned back to me.
“Nothing. You get nothing.”
He picked up shampooing again, and I bit my tongue to keep quiet and let him tell his story.
“And if you’re a bastard—”
“Bastard?”
“I was pissed that night. Salvatore, he could never be boss. Never. Hell, he didn’t even want it.
But he was getting it. He called a meeting at his house, and my uncle dragged me to it.
I admit, I was half drunk when I walked into the dining room with a loaded gun.
” He shook his head. “Then my father called Isabella a whore. Called my mother a whore. I couldn’t take it. ”
He swallowed. I watched his throat work.
“It was always about Sergio. About Sergio’s kid. Well, he had another grandchild. It was time he acknowledged that.” He shook his head. “But he had another card up his sleeve.”
Dominic grimaced, his eyes distant as if he saw it all again.
“Always did have the last word, Franco Benedetti.”
“What—”
“Turned out I wasn’t his.” He met my gaze. “I was the bastard son of a foot soldier and Franco Benedetti’s wife.”
Oh. My. God.
My mouth fell open. Nobody knew this. They only knew Dominic had tried to kill his brother.
He shifted his gaze to mine. “You see, I wasn’t actually trying to kill Salvatore.”
Dominic shook his head again, eyes glistening, at least for a moment.
“He just got between me and Franco and almost died for it.”
Dominic dropped the washcloth he’d picked up into the bathtub. Water splashed, and he stood. He turned his back to me and ran a hand through his hair.
“Dominic,” I started, climbing out, dripping wet, soap suds and shampoo clinging to me. I went to him, laid a hand on his shoulder, and forced him to turn around.
“I almost killed the only person in that family who is worthy of living, Gia.”
He had a crazed smile, one I knew kept a surge of emotion at bay.
“You didn’t, though. You didn’t.”
He pushed me away when I put my hands on his shoulders, but I refused to budge. I took his face in my hands and made him look at me, made him see me. See the present moment. See what was right there in front of his eyes.
“He was wrong to tell you like that.”
“Leave it alone, Gia. Leave me alone.”
“No.” I kissed him even as he tried to walk past me. I just kissed him, trying to hold on to him.
His hands came to my waist, still trying to push me away, trying to make his way out of the bathroom.
“Gia—”
“You need to keep your shit together if you’re going to get the bastards,” I said, kissing him harder when he stopped, when he heard the words he’d used on me just a little bit ago. “Kiss me, Dominic.”
He looked down at me, then turned his face to the side, his hands still on my waist, but no longer pushing me away.
“I said fucking kiss me.”
This time, he didn’t turn away and he didn’t pull back.
He kissed me, walking me backward out of the bathroom, his arms wrapping around me as his kiss became hungry, ravenous even.
When the backs of my knees hit the bed, he pushed me onto it and stood back to drop his towel, his erection hard against his belly, eyes hungry as I lay back and spread my legs for him.
“Dominic,” I managed as he knelt between them, then lowered himself onto me.
“I came inside you yesterday,” he said between kisses.
“I’m protected.” I kissed him back, our hunger matched. “And clean.”
“Me too.”
He thrust inside me then, and for the first time since we’d been together, we didn’t fuck.
We made love. Dominic moved slowly deep inside me and held me so close, there was never an inch between us.
Our eyes were open the entire time, locked on each other.
And when it was over and we lay spent, we still clung to each other, unable to let go, knowing, in a way, that we would be each other’s savior.
Knowing that as our enemies collected outside of this sanctuary, we had each other, only each other.
I wondered if we would die together, knowing I couldn’t do what I’d said yesterday, not now, not anymore after knowing what I knew.
I understood his self-loathing. His hate.
His loss. I felt it from him. I felt it for him.
It didn’t make him good. It didn’t clean the slate; didn’t wash his hands of the blood he’d spilled.
Nothing could ever do that. But it made him different. It made him human.
Ever since that night, he’d been trying to kill himself. And now, he had an end in sight. And after that end, he wanted me to kill him.
Well, I knew I wouldn’t.
I couldn’t.