Chapter Ten
Lindsay
THE NEXT MORNING, he brings me breakfast in bed. He spends the night with me after we make love again. I don’t quite know what to think about him. I don’t know what to think about this.
Everything was so fraught that night by the fire, and then it was like something shifted between us during the storm.
It feels less like a prison now, being here.
More like a vacation. I don’t know if he agrees.
I don’t want to ask him. But when he smiles at me, when we are out on the beach in the sun, when he takes my hand as we walk through the trees and when he sits next to me at dinner, I feel like it might be true.
I should be dying to get back to my life. To get back to my career. But it’s like being here is some kind of strange fantasy that I’ve fallen into, and now I’m not sure that I want to leave.
I’ve never had anybody pay so much attention to me. I can’t say that it’s some kind of sweet, selfless caring. No. We both get something out of the heat between us. He’s insatiable, and I am too.
But there’s more than just sex. He talks to me. Listens to me. He’s figured out my favorite foods, and serves them to me almost every night. It’s like a friendship, oddly. Even though it’s primarily spent naked, and technically, I’m still his captive. It’s complicated.
But then, my life has always been complicated. Nothing has ever been simple. Certainly nothing has ever been anything like easy. It’s been lonely. And I thought that loneliness was going to keep me safe. But until now, I hadn’t realized how much the loneliness could grind on you.
I had made friends with Vittoria, and it had been…
wonderful. Something that I hadn’t really known I needed.
But even that had been marked by all my strangeness, in that I don’t really know how to confide in people.
Even with her, I struggled. Or maybe we struggled because she was lying to me; there was that.
I’ve forgiven her, mostly. Because given what I know about her situation, complicated doesn’t even begin to cover it.
And it seems like her relationship with Ciro’s right-hand man is more than complicated.
Given that I’m in the middle of my own kind of complicated, I can see how maybe she was…
crashing out. Why she made a lot of selfish, strange decisions when it came to the two of us.
Some of it to save her life, maybe some of it to save his. And maybe she was desperate for him.
I’m starting to understand that kind of desperation.
The worst thing is that there’s nothing normal about this. I know that. For the first time, I’m starting to crave a normal life. The house, the children. Marriage.
That’s insane. Certifiable, even. It shouldn’t be a mafioso that brings that kind of feeling out in a person, I’m pretty sure. I might not be an expert on healthy relationships, but that seems to be kind of a given.
After dinner, almost every night, he and I go sit in the library together.
There are so many books about fashion, all thanks to his grandmother, and I’ve been devouring them.
Meanwhile, he reads history books, mainly the history of war and things like that.
Which feels very masculine to me, bordering on cliché.
I don’t say anything about it, though, because I like sharing the space and time with him.
And tonight, we have chocolate cake while we read, and this strange sort of companionship is the closest thing to real happiness I’ve ever felt.
I’ve felt triumph. I’ve felt passion. I’ve felt drive. But this is a strange sort of contentedness. Like we’re in a bubble, and no one can reach us.
It feels so good, I don’t want it to end.
“Do some people just feel happy when they’re children?
” I ask this because I’m so caught off guard by this feeling of happiness that I’ve never felt before, and it makes me wonder if this is something like that childlike joy people talk about.
Christmas and Santa, sugar plums and ice-skating, and all kinds of things that I just don’t relate to.
“I don’t know.”
“They must. So many people talk about childhood like it’s this wonderful thing. You know, like the way people talk about Christmas.”
“I wouldn’t know about that either.”
“That doesn’t really surprise me. I bet Mafia families don’t really have a lot of holiday traditions.”
“That isn’t true necessarily. If they can get together and have dinners and pontificate about power and family, then they seem to like it.”
“That doesn’t really sound like childlike wonder.”
He sets his book aside. “No. It doesn’t.”
“What’s one thing you wish you would’ve had. One really normal thing.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” he says.
“Like…the kids at my school used to all get together and go sledding. There was a hill that was in the neighborhood, and they used to go up there with sleds and bear spray and spend hours playing together. But I was never really welcomed into that. I was weird, and people knew it. Not that I was the only kid whose parents had drug problems. But, we were the weird kids. And then there were the kids that played together. I remember watching Saturday-morning cartoons, and so many of them had groups of friends. I wanted to be part of one. And then, I quit wanting it, because it hurt too badly. But if there’s one thing I wish I could’ve had, it’s a really normal day after school.
Where I just got to be one of the other kids.
Instead of being so unbearably conscious of the fact that my life was broken. ” I look up at him. “What about you?”
He looks up. “I wish my dad had taught me to ride a bike. You see that in movies all the time. They live in a neighborhood, not a compound. Not under security. And their dad holds them up on the bike, until they’re riding by themselves, and they don’t even realize it.
And he’s proud. And he doesn’t try to make a man out of you by making you endure physical pain. ”
His eyes meet mine. There’s something fractured there. Broken. And I want to fix it.
I want to promise him that we can do that. But I don’t know if we can. But maybe, in this bubble, we can talk about it. Pretend.
This feeling of…need. Love swells inside of me as I think about our baby and I want to cry, because I didn’t want to feel this, and right now I’m feeling everything.
“Maybe we can get a basketball hoop and put it in the driveway,” I say, my throat tight.
He laughs. I walk toward him, and sit down slowly on his lap.
“Get a bike. Teach them to ride it around the neighborhood. If there’s snow in this hypothetical neighborhood, we can sled.
We can take all the neighborhood kids.” I laugh.
“And then they can all come over to our house afterward and drink hot chocolate. And apple cider. And…and it’ll be all the childhood wonder we never had.
” I’m trying not to cry, and he’s not saying anything.
He doesn’t. Instead, he grabs hold of my face, and kisses me.
There’s something desperate in it. And I want to answer it. I want to give it to him.
I want this. And it’s so impossible. Because both of us are so broken in so many ways, how could we ever have that normal life? These things that other people take for granted are as impossible for us as going to the moon.
Especially now. Especially now that I’m being hunted, and he’s a wanted man.
So we kiss, because there’s nothing else to say. Because this is a fantasy, and our bodies, us, this, that’s real.
He strips my clothes off, and I welcome it.
I have been so aware of all the things that clothes can do for you. The way that they can make people perceive you, but with him, I’m very aware of my body. How much I can do with it. How much I can make him want me. How much power I have within it.
And it isn’t manipulation; it’s shared. And I love it.
He moves his hands up my body, cups my breasts, I gasp. I tear his clothes off of him. I’ll never get tired of this. Of the ink on his skin, his muscles, all that hard, hot skin. Mine. He’s mine.
Maybe it’s okay that we can’t have those normal, happy things. Maybe they’re not meant for us. But we have this, and maybe a whole bunch of other people have never experienced passion like this. Maybe that’s the thing that we get. This thing with sharp claws and teeth that drives us both insane.
That makes me forget who I’m supposed to be. Except part of me wants it all. And I don’t know what to do with that.
Greedy girl.
I want him, in my arms, in my bed, I want my baby, I want sledding and snowmen and apple cider, and a fashion career, and nobody gets to have all of those things.
Especially not a girl from Nowhere, Alaska, who couldn’t even make friends in her class.
But it doesn’t stop me from wanting it all the same.
I shift, and take him inside my body, and I ride him, until we’re both breathless. Until he calls out my name. Until I feel like I’m going to die from the pleasure of it. And then my nails dig into his skin and I reach the peak, collapsing against him.
I can barely breathe. And I’m okay with that.
His phone rings, and shatters the moment. He takes it, even though he’s still half dressed, and I’m naked on top of him.
“What?”
His eyes go blank. “Good. It’s done, then. Yes. Just give me a moment to make a phone call.”
He hangs the phone up.
“What is it?”
“A deal has been brokered with five of the nine families that I need to make bargains with. Agreements set in place. But the last four… One of them is Renzo’s family. And the remaining three…they have the closest alliance with him.”
“You need to call Renzo,” I say.
“I do not need advice from you for how to manipulate a crime empire, I thank you.”
“I didn’t say that you needed me, but I’m right here with great advice, so withholding it would be a little bit selfish of me.”
He stands there for a moment, a muscle twitching in his jaw.
Then he picks up his phone and punches a spot on the screen.
“Renzo. You have my solemn promise that I will leave you and Vittoria alone, never pursue you, never attempt to split you apart, as long as you fulfill this one thing for me. We need the Suzuki, Pavlov and Reddy families to agree to a cease-fire. And a treaty. I know that you have the connections to make that happen.”
I can’t hear what is said, but I do hear the timbre of another man’s voice on the phone.
“Call me when it’s done.”
“So just like that, you’re going to get a bunch of crime families to agree to lay down their weapons?”
He looks at me, a bleak sort of expression on his face. “There were active members who needed to be neutralized in order to bring us to this point.”
“Your men had… They killed people.”
“Very bad men. Who needed to be put down.”
“And you kept your hands clean this time.”
“If you give the order to pull the trigger you might as well have done it yourself. And I have no attachment to having clean hands. It is simply not a concern of mine. Now. If we are able to pull this off, you will be free.”
My body is still humming with the effects of what just happened. I can hardly process what he’s saying. “What do you mean I’ll be free?”
“It means that your life is no longer in danger, and you don’t have to stay on the island.”
I notice he doesn’t say I’ll be free of him.
I feel relieved by that, which is wrong in so many ways. I should want to go back to my life. But he has become so much of my life; this baby has become so much of my life.
I’m not sure who I am or what I want anymore.