18. Lydia
LYDIA
Night
I drag the cloth down Nico’s spine again, wring it out over his good shoulder, and watch the pink thread away into the massive bath-tub that’s the size of a jacuzzi.
"This is going to scar," I say.
"Add it to the rest, piccola."
He leans back silently between my legs as I work, moving my hands along the familiar contours of muscles and ink before I brush against the ruin of his left shoulder where the bandage sits high and white.
The doctor came and went hours ago. What's left for me is the soft work of cleaning.
I dip the cloth again and press it flat between his shoulder blades, and a thought that I can’t shove away surfaces as soon as I do.
A week ago, I tore a bedsheet into a rope and threw myself out a second-story window in an attempt to escape this man. Now I'm sitting behind him with my legs in the water, washing his blood off him like it's the most natural thing in the world.
I keep waiting to hate it, but the hate never comes.
Maybe it’s the gratitude, I tell myself. It’s not every day that a Don takes a bullet for me. And any normal person would say thank you for that. Tending the wound he took for me is natural. That's all this is: me paying down a debt of life that I owe him.
But that’s not it, is it? The same small voice that’s been in the back of my mind from the moment our paths crossed more than three months ago asks.
The truth is far simpler.
I stood on the steps of a church’s furnace room and passed the judgement for my husband to take another man’s life.
I did it calmly and evenly, without a shiver in my voice or a drop of doubt in my heart.
The action alone should’ve horrified me. And in another time, it would have horrified me. But that part of me wasn’t there in the furnace room. Or if she was, she'd moved out of the way to make room for someone new.
You don’t get to sentence a man to death and still call yourself a prisoner.
And that’s the rub, isn’t it? The thing that nobody ever warned me about? There, in that furnace room, Lydia Palomino died. And in the din of gunfire with a spray of blood and bone, Lydia D’Ambrosio was born.
And now, I sit here as a Don’s wife, doing my duties for a man who’s proven time and time again that he’ll burn the world down and kill everyone in it for me.
Maybe this is what I’ve been waiting for this whole time.
Maybe, for seven years, I’ve waited for a door to open, so that someone can come down the stairs to tell me that it was finally safe to go back and fix what I left broken.
And it took Nico D’Ambrosio to show me that there’s no waiting for that door to open. I had to walk down those steps myself.
And if I'm going to live in this world as Lydia D’Ambrosio, then I have to accept my role in it.
I can’t be just a complication that he tied up neatly. And I’m certainly not just a pretty thing he took to piss off his enemies.
I am his wife. His equal.
Whatever that means and whatever the cost.
But perhaps most disturbing is how much I find myself truly liking it when he kills for me. Vindictiveness had thrummed down my spine watching Nico pull the trigger to end Stavros’ life. The tension that loosened in my shoulder had felt better than sex.
Which is why after the doctor left, I insisted on washing the blood from his body myself.
His body is warm underneath my fingers–far warmer than the water. And as I lay the cloth aside to let my fingers find the line of his shoulder, I press a soft and gentle kiss against his skin.
“That feels nice.” He closes his eyes, and I do it again.
I let my thumb drift higher, up the side of his throat and towards the silver line I've stared at without an answer.
"Will you finally tell me now?" I trace the puckered seam of the scar down his face from behind. "About where this one came from?"
He goes still beneath my hands, and for a moment I think he’ll refuse me again.
It won’t surprise me if he does. I’ve been told enough times not to pry about it. But just as I prepare for his refusal, he exhales through the steam curling up from the hot water and speaks.
"I was nine.”
My finger stops on the scar as I listen intently.
"My father had a temper he liked to spend on whoever was closest.” His voice is slow and his throat bobs with every word. “Most nights, that was my mother. He had the sense to never beat her in front of us, but not that night."
I keep my hand on his face as I let him talk, and it’s like I’m a teenager again, listening through the door at the sound of Mom crying while Frank and his friends laughed.
“That night,” Nico continues, “she reminded him about my birthday party. He’d been working on a new expansion plan that wasn’t going well, and he didn’t like that she was, in his words…”
He closes his eyes.
“... Reminding him of shit that doesn’t fucking matter.”
He takes one of my hands in his, brings it up to his lips, and kisses it softly on the back.
“He dragged her by her hair down the hall from the dining room, and I rushed after them both because I knew what was about to happen. Vinny tried to stop me, but I wasn’t going to let that monster hurt her that night.”
My fingers tighten in his hand, and he holds onto me like I’m a lifeline in a storm.
“I tried to get between them. Even at that age, I knew that a nine-year-old can’t stop a grown man.” A bitter laugh falls from his lips, and he blinks fiercely in the steam. “I think I just wanted him to hit something that would hit him back."
I know that feeling all too well. All those nights with my mother’s tears soaking through the front of my shirt, and feeling a familiar helplessness at the hurt.
But the difference between me and Nico was that Nico did something.
“He didn’t give me the courtesy of beating me behind a closed door,” he continues. “And he didn’t fucking hold back.”
“You were his son…”
“Not the son he wanted,” Nico says. “That honor goes to Vinny. Maybe he saw an opportunity that night to finally get rid of me. He would’ve killed me if Vinny and his caporegimes didn’t pull him off me.”
He clenches his jaw, and the scar wriggles like a snake.
"Vinny got right up in his face, and told him that he still needed me alive. Said that the Family needed a spare in case something happens to the heir."
His eyes close again.
"Fucking Vinny," he says quietly. "He was right. He just happened to be nine years too early."
I think about the boy in the silver frame on my nightstand, standing in front of a stone-faced woman with his little fist balled at his side and his chin set, daring the world to hurt her.
"You did nothing wrong that night," I tell him.
“I nearly got myself killed."
"I don't care." My hand slides flat against his cheek and turns his face so that he’s looking at me. "You were a child, and you stood to protect your mother because you knew that it was the right thing to do."
He looks at me for a long time, nods, and then looks away. "I meant it when I told you that I'm going to help you and your mother.”
My heart skips a beat.
"I've had a man watching that house ever since you told me about it." His thumb moves over my knuckles. "And if you tell me to, I’ll have them get her out of there and brought here where he'll never reach."
"You can't bring her here." The words leave me before I can soften them.
His thumb stops moving over my knuckles. "Why not?"
I look down at his fingers wrapped around mine, and I think of the small bump under my mother's skin.
"Frank put a tracking chip in her." My voice stays level, even as my stomach turns over on itself. "He always knows where she is. The moment your men move her, he'll be able to track her here."
"He chipped her like a dog?"
"Yes."
For a long while he says nothing. When he speaks again, his voice has dropped low and even.
"Then we cut it out," he says.
"I don’t know what else he’s put on her to track her over the years since I was away. If he can find her, then he’ll be able to claim that you kidnapped her."
"There's a way," Nico says. "There's always a way, and I swear I'll find it."
I want to believe him. God help me, I want to. But I've spent seven years turning this problem in my head from every angle in the dark.
And every one of them ends at the same locked door.
"There's only one way to get her out." Sadness drags the words down out of me. "Frank has to give her up himself. He has to want to hand her over. And he'll never want that. There's nothing you can offer him and nothing you can do to him that would ever change it."
"Why not?"
I stare at this beautiful, dangerous man as I continue holding his face. The only thing I can hear is the sound of our breaths and the pounding of my own heart. His warm, masculine scent mixes in the hot wet air.
The answer to his question rattles in my head.
Because the only reason he’ll ever let her go is for me.
But some truths can't be unsaid once they're loose in a room. And this is a truth that I can never confess to Nico.
“Another time.”
Slowly, I dip my head, slide my hands along his jaw to pull him close to me, and jump the gap between us to touch my lips to his.
A fiery shudder moves through my body, settling into an unmistakable heaviness between my legs as his lips press against mine. He hesitates for a moment, as if recognizing that I’m using his body to keep myself from answering. But the moment passes, and his lips part to deepen the kiss.
His breath tickles my cheek, and I feel my hair dipping into the water as I run my tongue over the top of his lips and the roof of his mouth.
He matches me, stroke for stroke, and then suddenly I feel myself falling as he rises up from the tub. Water drips down from his body onto mine, blooming into tiny flowers bursting with wet fire.
His hand fists in my hair, and then I’m falling into the water, my back pressing against the porcelain while my front opens to greet the familiar weight of his body that I’ve been craving for three months in the water.
The kiss deepens, and he steals my breath and the moan bubbling up in my throat, leaving my head dizzy.
“Lydia,” he rasps as he breaks the kiss.
His hands are shaking as he pulls back. There’s a glassy look in his eyes, and I see that his wound has opened again. Red blood is soaking through the white.
“We need to get you out of here before you drown.” I run my fingers along his lips.
“I’ll be alright,” he replies.
“No.” I shake my head and step out, offering him my hand. “Come to bed, Nico. You need your rest.”
Slowly, he places his hand in mine, and steps out of the tub. My eyes dart down to see his hard and thick cock throbbing in the air. Silently, I lead him back to his bed and sit him down, water still running in rivulets down his muscular torso.
He leans back and looks at me, looking every inch like a king. Without a word, I kneel down between his legs, push his thighs open and wrap my fingers around the thick smooth shaft. He continues to look at me as I kiss him from balls to tip.
The muscles of his stomach tense each time my tongue laps up at the drops of pearl beading at the head. He groans quietly. Hot satisfaction hums up my throat before I give him one final lick around the head and take him down my throat.
His head falls back, and he breathes. “Fuck, Lydia, that feels so fucking good.”
I respond by bobbing my head up and down, running my hand up his thighs and pressing myself closer to his warmth until he envelops me in it. The buds of my nipples brush against him as I hug him closer and closer. Little sparks of pleasure burst throughout my body.
His hands move through my hair, and I bat them away. I suck him harder and faster, feeling him touching the back of my throat to make me gag. Tears leak from my eyes, but I refuse to let him go.
“Lydia,” he strains above me. “If you don’t stop… I’m going to come.”
I release him and pump his shaft with both hands, whispering in a husky voice. “Then come for me, my Don. Come down your wife’s throat. I don’t want to miss a drop.”
Those are the last words I say to him before I bury his cock down my throat again. This time, I let him take my hair into his hands, let his eyes drill into mine, and don’t stop until I feel him come apart against my lips, tongue, and throat.