Chapter 41
CALIGULA
“Is Sammy okay?” is the first thing I ask when Dami comes into the bedroom.
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed with my hands between my knees, because they won’t stop shaking.
I killed a man.
I’ve been telling myself that over and over, and it still doesn’t feel real.
The weight of the gun in my hand felt real.
The sound was real: that flat crack, smaller than I expected, nothing like the movies.
The way the body collapsed instantly was real.
The blood, spreading across the table in a slow dark pool, was real.
My hands are shaking, and I can’t make them stop. But a Don’s hands don’t shake.
“No,” Dami says. “Sammy’s not okay.” He doesn’t sugarcoat it. He stands in the doorway, looking as troubled as I feel, and his eyes travel over me from head to foot and back again. “You ever even shot a gun before tonight?”
I shake my head, give a smile that feels like a grimace. “Good thing you already took the safety off, huh?”
He says nothing to that.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out. “I never would have allowed that man in here if I’d known he was connected to—well. That.”
“You and me both. I would’ve killed him back in that warehouse meeting with D’Amato.”
That startles a thin laugh out of me. “Killed a Morelli? In front of Luca D’Amato and your own Boss?”
He doesn’t have to think about it at all. “Yeah. In front of them.”
We look at each other. “You should go talk to Sammy,” I say at last.
“He’s locked himself in his room. Punk music so loud the walls are shaking. He needs some time before he’ll let anyone in.” He comes into the room and shuts the door behind him. “Besides, I had to check on you.”
I can’t stop the misery in my voice when I demand, “Why? Why the hell would you need to check on me? I’m the villain in all this. Sammy’s an innocent.”
He gets a small furrow between his brows and gives a shake of the head, trying to find an answer. “You’re not a…” He trails off, starts again. “You didn’t do that to him.”
“I didn’t kill your father, either. Didn’t make much difference when—”
“Don’t,” he says, and that furrow deepens. “Please. And I came to check on you because you just killed a guy for the first time.”
The first time. Will there be more?
Of course there will. I might not hold the gun personally, but I will kill again. It’s part of the job.
I said I would do anything to survive. Anything.
I guess I really meant it.
“Why?” I mutter. “Why would you be worried about me?”
“You know why.”
“Pretend I don’t.”
He makes a helpless gesture with his hands. Those huge, powerful hands that have killed more men than mine ever will. Those hands marked with a “G,” a mark that will always be there until he’s cold in the ground.
“I belong to you now,” he says. The words come out rough. He dragged them up from somewhere deep and they fought him the whole way.
“No you don’t.” I sound so bitter. “There’s a mark on your hand that says exactly who you belong to, and it’s not me.”
He looks down at the “G” tattoo. Black, immovable, embedded into his skin. Then he crosses the room to sit next to me on his bed. “I’m not a Gee anymore,” he says. “I knew what it would mean to keep you. And I’m not giving you up.”
“But why?” I ask again, pain choking up my throat so it actually hurts to get the words out. “Why would you risk all that—just to keep me? After everything that’s happened—everything we’ve done to each other—”
He grabs my face between his hands and kisses me. Hard. No tenderness in it, no sweetness. Just his mouth on mine and his hands holding my jaw and the heat of him cutting through the cold that’s been sitting in my bones since I pulled that trigger.
“For someone so fucking smart,” he says against my lips, “you sure ask a lot of dumb questions.”
The adrenaline that’s been coiled in me since I killed a man goes off like a grenade, turning from horror into hunger so fast it makes my head spin.
Dami pushes me back on the bed and I pull him down with me. There’s nothing slow about it. This is the two of us tearing at each other like the world is ending, and maybe it is. Maybe tomorrow morning will bring Big Gee’s men to the door, and that means there’s no time for anything but this.
I get his belt open. He yanks my trousers down. His mouth is on my stomach, my hip, the crease of my thigh, but I drag him back up because I need his full weight on me, the bulk and the heat and the proof of him.
“Turn over,” he says, scrabbling around for the lube.
I do.
He pins me face down with one hand between my shoulder blades while he slicks up his cock, and when he pushes into me, I make a sound that doesn’t belong to a Don.
It belongs to the virgin in the basement.
The one who wanted this even when he shouldn’t have, even when it was dangerous, even when the man doing it was the enemy.
Except he’s not the enemy anymore. And the way he moves—fast, yes, rough, yes, but angled precisely right, his breath hot against my ear, one hand sliding under me to hold my cock in a grip that knows exactly what I need—this isn’t about taking away my power. This isn’t about control.
He’s fucking me like I’m something he’s afraid to lose. Like this is the only way he knows how to keep me.
And I let him do it. He fucks me until I’m nothing but the feel of him inside me and the hot fizzing in my belly and the need for release that I can’t control. He shifts angles, hitting that spot that makes me see stars, and my whole body bows like a bowstring drawn too tight.
I come into his fist and he follows seconds later, his forehead pressed hard between my shoulder blades, his whole body shuddering against mine.
We lie there, breathing. He’s heavy and I don’t care.
“That was…” I start, muffled in the bed covers.
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“Different.” Not gentler. There was nothing gentle about it. But the roughness felt like shelter instead of siege. Like he was trying to hold me together instead of break me apart.
His mouth presses against my spine. “Yeah.”
And then he pulls out of me.
“We got a problem,” he says heavily as he pulls his pants up. “The Morellis ain’t gonna be happy you just iced their inside man.”
I actually laugh.
And then I pull out a slip of paper from the bedside stand. I wrote it out after I first came in here, before the shock had worn off and my hands started to shake. “Read it,” I tell Dami.
He opens it up slowly and reads it in a cursory glance. “‘You’re welcome’?” he repeats incredulously. “You’re really picking a fight with the fuckin’ Morellis right now?”
“I just solved a problem for Don Morelli, and at his own invitation, I might add. D’Amato took in Scaglietti after my grandfather’s murder—was forced to, since Scags was the rat who sold Nonno Lou out among his bodyguards—but he wasn’t exactly working out.”
I’ve thought a lot about the arguments between the three Morellis who kidnapped me off the street. The hate in Scaglietti’s face as he looked at Sophia Vicente. Nick Fontana’s admission that the man tended to color outside the lines.
And Luca D’Amato telling me he planned to revisit Scaglietti’s position with the Morellis.
“D’Amato wanted Scaglietti dead, but he couldn’t do it himself.
It wouldn’t do for the head of the New York Commission to start killing his own.
So he used him. Got what information he could out of him—which is why I told everyone, explicitly, that I bear no ill will toward the Morellis at that first meeting.
I wanted Scaglietti to carry that message to D’Amato, and apparently he did.
But D’Amato sent him back, despite knowing he’d get no further information of use—basically sanctioning me to clean up his mess for once and for all. And now I have. So he owes me.”
Dami is staring at me. “You sure about all that?” he asks skeptically.
“I know how the mind of a Mob Boss works.”
“Yeah, you do,” Dami says at last. “You planned this, didn’t you? Before tonight. Before Sammy.”
“I planned to deal with Scaglietti, yes. Sammy—that part, I didn’t plan. But it made the timing right. And there was no way I was going to let Scaglietti leave this house alive after learning that.” The coldness in my voice surprises even me.
Dami’s expression is caught between admiration and wariness. “You know,” he says slowly, “you’re a lot fucking scarier than I thought you were.”
I smile. “Now get dressed, and go tell Strike to send the hand to D’Amato with that note. And try Sammy again.”
He smirks, just barely. “Those are your orders, Don Clemenza?”
“Those are my orders.”
He’s pulling on his shirt when Rosa’s voice comes up the stairs, urgent and loud, calling for Dami. Both of us are out in the hallway before she reaches the landing.
“Sammy is gone,” she says, breathlessly. Her face is tight with worry. “He packed a bag. He left through the back, I didn’t hear him go—” She stops herself, pressing a hand to her mouth.
Dami has already grabbed his gun from the bedroom and is pulling on a jacket. “When?”
“I don’t know. Twenty minutes? Maybe more. I went to check on him and the door was open at last, but his room was empty.”
“I need to go,” Dami says to me.
“I’ll come too—”
“No you fucking won’t,” he says at once. “What part of ‘price on your head’ did you forget about?”
A warmth floods me despite his snarl. Still protecting me. Still protecting all of us. “Okay,” I say. “You go. And Dami—” I rise on my toes to kiss him. “Promise you’ll find him.”
“I promise.”
And then he’s gone.
I shower, and then I get to work.
I’m pretty sure by now that the ring isn’t in the basement. Dami’s obsession means he would have searched every bit of furniture that came into this basement. I plan to go back to the townhouse once things quiet down, continue the search that intruder started.
But right now, all I can do is work with what I have. Because I need that ring, and if there’s any chance at all that it’s been hidden in something down here—tucked behind a painting between the frame and the wall, or dropped into the hollow end of a bedpost—I’m going to find it.
I’ve got nothing else to do, after all, and sitting around in the kitchen waiting for news will just make me anxious.
So I take my time, running my fingers along the underside of every chair, tapping at wardrobes and bureaus in the hopes of finding a hollow spot, even trying to unscrew all the bedposts.
None of them budge and nothing seems suspiciously hollow.
But I’m not going to let it deter me. I start all over again in Nonno Lou’s room, since that’s the next likeliest place.
There’s nothing in Nonno Lou’s room, either. But in one of the “guest rooms,” I’m struck by a small piece of furniture that I recognize immediately: Nonna Mellie’s nightstand.
Something I noticed about Dami’s “set” was that he assumed Nonno Lou’s bedroom was also Nonna Mellie’s.
He put her antique hairbrush set on the dresser in there.
But my grandparents kept separate rooms. I doubt anyone outside the house knew; Nonna Mellie said it was because she couldn’t stand my grandfather’s snoring.
This nightstand was hers, made for her by her grandfather. It must be at least a hundred years old by now. And when her grandfather crafted it, he made a secret drawer, the kind of thing to delight a little girl. She showed it to me once, when I was small.
I’d forgotten about it completely until this moment.
Damiano would have meticulously gone over anything he knew belonged to my immediate family. But a nightstand he didn’t know belonged to my grandmother? He might have given it no more than a cursory search.
I open the front doors of the stand and feel around to remove the loose nail at the back, which should allow me to pull out the ornate facade at the bottom, which hides a shallow drawer. It sticks a bit, as the wood has warped over the years, but it comes out.
There’s nothing in there.
The disappointment is acute. But as I’m trying to slide it back in, I hear a crinkling. I pull the drawer back out, removing it completely, and then turn it over.
There’s an envelope taped to the underside of the drawer.
An inexplicable feeling of dread comes over me. Nonna Mellie’s handwriting is on the front, the same writing on every birthday card I ever received from her. Like those cards, this envelope is addressed with a single word.
Cesario.
This letter was for my father. But it seems he never got it. And why did she feel the need to hide it? Not only in the secret drawer that Nonno Lou didn’t know about, but even more discreetly on the underside of it?
The dread increases.
But I force myself to take the letter out of the envelope.