25. Marisol
25
MARISOL
Something’s off with this strip club.
I freeze the video and peer closer at the redhead on Junior’s lap. Thud, thud.
I recognize her nails. Lime-green acrylics designed to look like cute little kiwi fruit. The video clip from the night before shows a woman with blue hair sitting on Junior’s lap. Thud, thud, thud. Same acrylics.
I lean back in my chair, searching for any video footage with those green nails and splitting them off to different monitors. It’s the same woman. Different wigs and wildly different outfits… even different tattoos. What could this mean?
Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud.
I swivel in my chair. “Like I said the first twenty times, I can’t work while you’re pacing around like that.”
Dom doesn’t look up from his book, and he doesn’t stop from treading a furrow into the carpet. “Like I said. Not gonna happen.”
I rub my face into my palms and exhale hard. It’s been over a month since the dinner with Grant, and whenever Salvatore and I aren’t working, we’ve been fucking or sleeping. It’s been bliss. He left early this evening to have dinner with Senator Balast, and I stayed back to scroll through a mountain of footage of Junior without Salvatore standing over my shoulder. He needs to stay focused on Rekhson. If he knew how many of my nightmares and shadowed corners I see Junior in… well, I don’t want him to get distracted.
Just like how Dom’s distracting me. He’s been pacing through the room, flicking pens against Salvatore’s desk, or launching Buck’s toys against the walls for hours, and it’s driving me nuts. Compared to my calm, motionless husband, Dom’s a tornado of movement and sound. And apparently, he’s not allowed to leave me alone. Which is fucking great.
“Why don’t you help me with this?” I say in a kindergarten-teacher tone.
“Why don’t you get fucked?” Dom asks. He slows to a halt and looks up at me. “Uh… sorry.”
I’ve been playing video games for years and some of those twelve-year-olds can be wildly creative. At this point, “getting fucked” barely registers as a curse.
I raise an eyebrow. “Are you gonna take a look at this or not?”
Dom chucks his book onto Salvatore’s desk, earning a death glare from Buck who was napping in the nearby chair.
“Your cat’s an asshole.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Dom comes to stand behind me, tucking his hands into his pockets. Now that he’s finally still, I can focus long enough to scrub through the strip club footage for more shots of Kiwi Nails.
“What do you notice?” I ask, as I drop more images of Kiwi into my spare monitors.
“Is that a trick question?”
I freeze, my mouse on Kiwi shoving her bare ass into some guy’s face. “What else do you notice?”
Dom laughs.
Once I’ve collected enough shots of Kiwi and her different clients—and she must be popular because there are a lot—I start grouping the clients together as best I can.
“Do you recognize any of these guys?”
Dom leans forward, squinting at the monitor. Whereas Salvatore’s built like a panther, all lean muscle and quiet confidence, Dom’s a bear. Tall, massive, and hairy. Probably has an industrial-sized shower drain.
“Him,” Dom says, pointing to a man with a full-sleeve tattoo of a snarling dog. “That’s Mad Dog Colin. Crazy bastard. Turi’s caught him sniffing around Barbara’s warehouses recently. I bet they’re using that stripper to communicate. Nice work.”
I roll my eyes. “Gee, thanks.”
“Can you find all the men this woman’s talked to for the past month?”
“I could…” I point to Salvatore’s chair. “If you can sit still for more than a few minutes.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Several hours later, he’s asleep in Salvatore’s chair, and I have my data.
I swipe a stack of sticky notes off my desk and lob them at Dom, expecting them to bounce off his belly, but at the last minute, he jerks up and catches them with more speed and grace than I’d expect from such a big man. He groans as he stretches long, dropping the notes onto Salvatore’s desk.
“What the hell was that for?” he mutters.
“I’m done.”
Scratching at his beard, Dom lumbers over to inspect my findings.
“So these are the woman’s top five clients for the past month. Junior, Mad Dog, and these three guys. Do you recognize them?”
Dom leans in and squints. “All but one. See what Worm says about him. The other two are part of the Irish mob. I’d bet my left nu—kidney… that they’re planning something. I’ll have a talk with Gavin. He’s Mad Dog’s brother and the only sane one in the whole damn lot.”
“I was thinking…” I say slowly. Dom crosses his arms and gives me a bemused look. “What if we sent someone to talk to the woman? See what she says.”
“Junior’ll sniff out we’re tracking him. You willing to risk her life and the man we send?”
I hesitate, glancing back at the monitors. Dom bellows a laugh. “You’re fucking ruthless, you know that? Sal’s got a weird taste in women.”
“Meaning what? Grown adults?”
For a beat, we stare at each other.
Then Dom smiles, and it’s a cruel-looking thing. “I don’t know what you think you know, but I’m not looking for judgment from the woman who’ll let anyone get slaughtered if it means she gets to keep her pet capo.”
What I think I know is that Salvatore told me Dom’s always been especially protective of Annetta, Serafina’s twin, who was sent off to be married at eighteen to a capo in Florida a few years ago. Whatever Dom’s relationship to her, I can’t imagine loving someone and letting them go like that.
“I wouldn’t let anyone hurt Sal if I had a say in it. And if we don’t take Junior down, Annetta’s sister is gonna be his new stepmom. Fifth time’s the try, I guess.”
Dom laughs, low and dark as he leans down to face me. “Serafina’s still got a few months before the wedding. A lot can happen between now and then. But since you know everything, why don’t I send Davide over to that strip club? Let’s see what happens.”
“Deal.”
A few days later, I make the final adjustments on my website as Buck supervises me from the end of my desk.
Dom’s been sweet-talking Caruso, an unsmiling, traditional capo, for weeks, warming him to the possibilities of Salvatore’s resources at his fingertips. Caruso agreed, in the vaguest terms, to throw his weight behind Salvatore if we could cut off the head of “that Russian bastard’s second-rate gambling operation”, so I’ve spent every waking moment designing a fake website for the Golden Apple Casino, the business baby of Caruso’s oldest enemy, as our first act of good faith. The moment this goes live, I’ll redirect the flow of virtual traffic from the real casino to my imposter site, taking down the Golden Apple for a couple of days and harvesting all their sweet, sweet customer data while they go on a wild goose chase to recover their stolen domain name. Once Caruso’s onboard, Dom thinks the other old-guard capos will be easier to sway.
I’m crossing my fingers that they won’t all need a massive cyber-sabotage operation to convince—I don’t know how many I can pull off on my own, and the rest of Worm’s team is stretched thin. For weeks, Worm and Genghis Con have been sifting through mountains of data for anything they can use on Salvatores’s dad Ottavio while dropTable does the same with District Attorney Rekhson.
In strip clubs and cigar shops, Dom and the rest of his men are bribing and threatening the other capos to join Salvatore’s cause.
No one’s said it out loud, but we’re all thinking the same thing: Salvatore’s preparing his contingency plans. Rekhson, the Commission, or Aldo could retaliate at any moment, so he needs the Chicago capos at his side.
If this doesn’t all go perfectly, he’s going to start a war.
As for my own plan B, once I discovered the encrypted phone network CryptTalk was already infected with malware by Dutch police, Worm and Salvatore green-lit the operation of a Luporini phone manufacturer and network carrier. When—and not if— the police build enough of a case against CryptTalk’s criminal customers, they’ll hamstring everyone’s communications at once—everyone, except the Family’s. Once everything comes to light, Salvatore will look like a hero.
Or, if Salvatore needs a nuclear option, a little nudge to the police will set things in motion early, throwing even the Family into a complete network blackout for weeks, if not months.
After I brought this forward, Salvatore fucked me reverently for hours, hissing praise in my ear the entire time.
The memory makes me glance his way.
He stands with his arms crossed, his fourth cup of espresso hooked on a long finger. The intense frown darkening his face suggests disappointment with the whole cluster of monitors in front of him. Every few minutes, he stirs to change an image or two.
Worm’s mentioned several times that he’s never seen Salvatore under this much stress. I can see the effects on everyone else. Dom’s been a walking powder keg, yelling at all the men and stomping into the house with blood on his knuckles. Davide’s a nervous wreck. Giordana snaps at everyone who crosses her path. Camillo and Nola are constantly whispering to each other in the kitchen. But Salvatore seems unaffected.
His phone rings on his desk, and he answers with a tap.
Speaking in rushed Italian, a man’s voice pipes into the room.
Salvatore adjusts several of his monitors until they land on the interior of the Capitol—scenery I’m becoming intimately familiar with. He listens passively for the most part, only asking the other man a few brief questions until he catches me watching and crooks a finger in my direction.
I should get back to work , I think, even as an invisible string tugs me forward.
Once I’m standing before him, he reaches out to run his fingers through my hair.
I’ve learned how much he loves to touch my hair. How much he loves to rub his face into my breasts and knead my belly and grip my thighs. He worships my softness.
I turn my face to kiss the inside of his forearm, and he pauses, waiting patiently until I’ve lifted my lips from his skin.
He treats every single touch from me like the most precious gift.
Desire flares to life inside me, sharp and unbearable. I’ve been told and shown in a hundred different ways these past few weeks that if Salvatore messes up what he’s doing, we’re all fucked. But the only worry I feel is a sort of aching desperation to steal more kisses and affection before the timer runs out.
I give Salvatore a sly smile and drop to my knees at his feet.
He smiles back, but he doesn’t adjust his belt and doesn’t stop stroking my hair as I kneel before him.
“Allora, cosa farai adesso? ” Salvatore asks in his rich Italian, his eyes fixed on me.
The other man bursts into a long response, but whatever Salvatore said wasn’t to him. He’s talking to me.
I touch the warm metal of his belt buckle, my forearm brushing against his rising erection, but he stops me with a firm hand to my wrist.
He takes a step back to his chair, sits, and pats his upper thigh. So he wants to play this game instead?
I rise to straddle his lap, but before I can kiss him, he twists me so my back is to his front and traps my head against his shoulder, baring my throat. With his free hand, he touches me—stroking down my hair, collaring my neck, rubbing and cupping each breast, seeking every inch of softness on his way down. He finds my clit over my cotton shorts and rubs in tight circles.
I jut my hips into his hands as my face burns. A few nights ago, he made me spread my legs on the bed and show him how I got myself off. Then he made me come three more times as he mastered the technique. Heat builds with every strum of his talented fingers.
He shoves his hand inside the waistband of my shorts, and when he touches the wetness gathered in my panties, his entire body tenses under mine.
“Ho avuto un imprevisto. Continueremo questo più tardi.”
Without waiting for a response, Salvatore reaches over to hang up. Abruptly, he shoves me forward onto the plush carpet, softening the fall at the last second with his arm wrapped around my waist so I float onto my hands and knees. I barely have time to grasp what’s happening before he wrenches my shorts down and plunges into me.
I jerk forward, almost head-butting the floor, but he’s still got me. He cups a handful of my breast and ruts into me with harsh thrusts.
I cry out in delighted surprise, my clit throbbing with need, and Salvatore laughs.
“You shouldn’t have spent all day tempting me if you didn’t want to get fucked like an animal, passerotta.”
He completely pulls out of me and spanks me hard before shoving back in again. Pleasure tears through me as I squeal and buck under him. He wrenches me up against him, gripping my jaw in his hand, and hisses in my ear, “I’ve been under a lot of stress, Marisol. I won’t be held accountable for my actions while you let everyone see your cunt through those tiny shorts. Is that what you want, you little tease? You want to push your husband to the edge?”
“Sir, I’m… I’m gonna come,” is all I can get out before Salvatore twists my nipple, and I whimper.
His cruel laugh is low and rich in my ear. “You were made for me, passerotta. You were made for my pleasure.”
“Yes… s-sir.”
Salvatore bites into my shoulder like a beast, setting off a hot and dirty orgasm that rips through me like a tornado. He crushes my body into his, and then he’s coming too, the faint pulses inside me setting off aftershocks of pleasure.
We catch our breath in the otherwise silent room. Salvatore eases me onto the carpet where I lie like a rag doll.
“Stay there. I’ll be right back.”
His footsteps fade away to the connected bathroom, and after a minute, he returns. I jolt at the sensation of a warm, wet washcloth between my legs, but Salvatore soothes me with a shh and a hand down my spine. He kisses the spot he bit, and once I’m clean, he gathers me into his arms and sits us both on his computer chair.
We watch the monitors for a while as I bask under a golden sunbeam of contentment.
When he reaches for his espresso again, some of my awareness returns.
“What was that call about?” I ask. I glance through the monitors showing the Capitol.
“We bribed an intern in Rekhson’s office to convince her to drop the case she’s building against Aldo.”
“And it didn’t work?”
Salvatore kisses my shoulder. “How’d you guess?”
“You don’t want me to give you blow jobs when you’re upset.”
Salvatore stills for a moment, considering this. “I don’t want to be too harsh with you and have you not be able to clearly tell me to stop.”
That’s… kind of sweet? In either case, I certainly won’t say no to the pleasant soreness of his angry fucks. “I trust you. I know you wouldn’t hurt me.”
He doesn’t answer and instead hugs me closer against him. His cock gives a valiant stirring underneath me.
“Are you gonna plant another intern in her office?”
He sighs. “No. I’ll leave her alone for a while. Not make it so obvious she’s getting under our skin. But time isn’t on our side. She has a charity gala coming up next week—I’ll donate an obscene amount of money and talk to her then. Maybe she’ll pick up it’s better to be friends than enemies.”
“Am I going with you?”
He hesitates. “If you want to. You’re doing important work. I don’t want to interrupt it just so you can be on my arm.” He rubs his face into my neck and palms one of my breasts. “I won’t lie, though, the thought is very tempting. I wonder what I could get away with while there’s a crowd of people nearby.”
I nearly scoff at the idea that I’m doing “important work”, considering I’ve been fucking around with logos of cartoon apples for the past hour.
“I’d love to come,” I say, before a wet blanket settles over my excitement. “I’ll need a nice dress though, right?”
“I have a personal shopper. She’ll take care of it,” Salvatore says. He nips at my ear. “You can thank me on your knees later.”
“Sounds like I should be thanking your personal shopper,” I laugh.
He growls and pins me to him. “Over my dead body.”