Chapter 17
C ALLUM
Wet arousal trickles around my finger as she shakes and shudders, moaning against my mouth, her hands turning into claws jabbing at my neck and chest.
Holding onto me, she comes undone, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Her lips burn like clouds of steam, and her eyes look like she’s gone from this world.
Quiet moans keep rushing out of her heaving chest as I look down to fill my view with her tits.
Her nipples are puckered and hard, and her hips rock against my hand as she takes that trip up and up, frantic and crazed.
She’s tight, but I expected that.
She’s hot, and I expected that, too.
No one will touch her after me.
I’d rather kill them with my own hands than let them feel what I feel right now.
Her sweet, tight pussy throbbing around my touch, her smell filling my nostrils. The scent of wet arousal and perfume.
Her mouth perfectly open when she moans.
In a different setting, I’d have my hard-on slide between them, hit the back of her throat, while her hair would be nicely draped over my arm.
I’m so hard that I could rip her open, but I’d rather wait a little.
Take it step by step.
Stroking her pussy, I enjoy the clenching of her center, the force in her grip, the image of my cock in her mouth.
Those strands of hair would look amazing stuck to her face while she’d eagerly suck me.
Impure thoughts for impure times.
I know two men who would blow their brains out if they knew what happened between the walls of my headquarters tonight.
Leilani Gallo will be no one’s but mine.
She spoke, and I just delivered.
I push a second finger in and notice the wince on her face as she experiences pain, so I retrieve it and, as she slows down, pull my middle finger out and slowly stroke her clit, still playing with her pussy.
She has a drunk, satisfied smile on her face that could easily get me undone.
Then she leans on me and kisses me lustfully, stirring me up, knowing that I’m still hard.
“I need to change, I think,” she murmurs. “Would you like to watch me do that?”
My grip hardens on her as I remember that she was doing that for another man.
“Do you really want me to do that?” I ask, my arms around her.
Her eyes soften with a pang of sadness.
“It would help me to replace that image from my head with something better and maybe forget.”
I ponder an answer.
“All right. We can do that. Wait for me in the bathroom. I need to check with my men downstairs, make sure everything is all right.”
“Okay,” she says, smiling. “Can you help me with that?”
She brushes all her hair over one shoulder and turns her back to me. I pull her dress up and close the zipper before she lets her hair fall over her back and walks away from me, swaying her hips and glancing over her shoulder in a tease.
I watch her all the way to the door, where she vanishes before I adjust myself and button up my shirt.
I’ll need to do more than that to be able to watch her take a shower for me. Way more than that.
So instead of going downstairs and talking to my men, I take the stairs down and enter a different bathroom on the lower level.
I quietly close and lock the door, grab a towel from a shelf, toss it onto the tiles, and press my back against it.
The light is dim, luckily, so I can close my eyes and imagine whatever the hell I want to imagine. I can even think about her being upstairs, in the bathroom, waiting for me.
But I’d rather have her in my brain how she was moments ago, sweating, panting, throbbing, soaking wet around my finger.
My zipper goes down under my tense touch, and my erection bounces free.
Fuck me, she was hot.
I spit my palm and wrap my fingers around my throbbing cock, smearing the moisture over it.
Tilting my hips forward, I start moving my fist up and down. In no way my cock is as wet as it would be with her tight pussy around me.
The thought that one day I’d enter her and feel all that heat and pressure around my flesh makes my balls draw tight.
Like her, I wish I could prolong this, but that won’t happen tonight.
It’s a miracle I didn’t come when she did.
I’m a little cooled off, but I’m not cold.
I walked downstairs with an aching erection, so let’s call it what it is.
I could fuck her all the way into the Taormina party. The way I see things now, there wouldn’t be any wedding negotiations.
I’d probably just kidnap her and run away with her.
It’s the second time I’m considering this, which makes me think it’s not completely out of the question.
My eyes go to her mouth, and those lips… All happening in my head. The lips I’d want so much to feel around my hardness. The heat I’d want around my cock.
That supple neck of hers.
She’d probably choke on me, and she’d still not stop bobbing her head until she swallowed every drop of my seed.
And then her hips.
Those perfectly curved hips.
I’d grab them and drink the juices from her core while moving my mouth over her entrance, getting a taste of her.
She’ll be all mine.
And she’ll give everything to me, and so much more.
My mouth waters at the thought.
My fist hardens around my dick, and I move it firmly, knowing full well that I want to come. I can’t wait to go upstairs and see her again for two reasons now.
I want to feed myself on her again. I also need to learn what happened in the past.
Grunting, I press the back of my head against the door and come at the image of me penetrating her, until dark tears fall down her cheeks.
CALLUM
I feel better. Much better. More settled and in control.
I toss the towel into the hamper and check my appearance in the mirror.
A calm hand arranges a few stray bangs.
I look like I’m about to kill someone, with a smile on my face.
On my way up, I pick up my suit jacket and waistcoat, and I enter the room she’s waiting for me, looking sharp and ready for anything.
It’s the most spacious bathroom in the house, and maybe she’s picked it on purpose, or not, but there’s a lot of room for whatever dark games I’m about to witness.
She’s fully dressed. Her hair is in order. Her face is stripped of emotion or a smile.
“Has he touched you?” It’s the first thing I ask as I walk in, and her eyes meet mine.
“He hasn’t slept with me,” she says.
“Finally, some good news today,” I murmur with dark humor.
“Has he touched you without sleeping with you?”
“Not sexually, no. He liked to watch and brush my hair, though.”
Something twists inside my chest.
“How old were you?”
“Old enough to know it’s wrong. Old enough to bear children. So, old,” she says, her voice heavy, her eyes suddenly downcast, trailing down.
That’s not old.
I walk to her and tilt her chin up to see her eyes.
“We don’t need to do that. You’re probably better off seeing a professional and talking about it. You don’t need a man to do to you what he had done to you.”
“I need to feel in control. That will help me a lot. I felt small and scared with him. It was creepy. And that stupid thing has stayed with me. I want to replace it and remove the memory of that sensation.”
My thumb moves slowly over her cheek.
“Who was that man?”
She shakes her head.
“I can’t tell you. It’s too embarrassing.”
“Nothing is too embarrassing when you’re talking to me. Plus, I could take care of him, make him pay for it.”
“It won’t change what he did to me. Plus, there was the rest of the family. They knew something was going on, yet they dismissed me when I asked for help. They pretended I was crazy. So, no. You’d need to take care of all of them.”
“I might do that, too.”
She splays her fingers over my chest.
“It’s too much for me to think about right now. Let’s do this without pondering the implications.”
“All right,” I say, glancing at her body.
“You can touch me, by the way,” she says, reaching for her zipper.
“You want any help with that?”
“No. I can do it. That’s how I did it in the past. You can sit over there.”
She points to the only chair in the room.
“He used to sit when he looked at me before he’d rise and come closer.”
“Hmm.”
“You can do it any way you want, but that’s how it started.”
“Okay.”
I slide into my seat and look at her.
Her back is turned to me, as she drags her hand down, unzipping her dress down to her rear.
She’s removed her panties, so once she steps out of them, with her back to me, I have the perfect picture of her legs, round ass, tapered waist and beautiful shoulders.
Her hair tumbles down her back before she gathers it and ties it into a bun at the top of her head.
Then she slips out of her shoes and walks into the shower booth, naked.
I imagined she did it with her back to him so she couldn’t see his eyes.
There is nothing sexual about this.
Nothing arousing, but it was probably for him, since his request wasn’t about sex as much as it was about exerting power over her.
And it fucking worked.
For the next few moments, I watch her clean her body with a small sponge. I barely get a glimpse of her tits, and she never turns around so I can see her pussy.
At some point, she runs the sponge between her legs, and although I can’t see a damn thing, I imagine that small object brushing her clit, which ignites a dark desire in me.
I’m more mad than I am aroused now that I know the context of this story.
She said we shouldn’t think about it.
It’s the only thing I can think about.
I’m jealous.
More like outraged, really.
I wish I could travel back in time and smash that man’s skull against the wall.
It must’ve been an authority figure. Someone in the house. Someone who had access to her. Bianca, God rest her soul, brought all kinds of misfits to their place.
It must’ve been someone who spent enough time in their house so they could make a ritual out of this.
And what was Bianca thinking? She wanted to keep Leilani away from me? Really?
She probably told herself her daughter had brought it onto herself.
Leilani finishes showering, turns off the water, and waits in the middle of the glass booth, looking at the wall.
I imagine this was the moment when he rose from his chair, picked up a hairbrush, and pretended she was a doll so he could play games with her.
Testing my theory, I do just that.
Walk to her, turn to my right, and collect a hairbrush from a vanity before bringing my hand to the top of her hair and undoing her bun.
The tips of her hair are damp when I run the hairbrush through them.
She keeps her head bowed down, which breaks my heart, and her hands clasped together in front of her, hiding as much femininity as she can hide.
“What else did he do to you, Leilani?” I ask, setting the hairbrush down.
It takes her a moment.
“He ran his fingers down my back and along my shoulders.”
Her voice is heavy as if she’s on the verge of crying.
I do that, though, watching her skin break out in goosebumps.
There’s no way I can replace this.
I let the back of my finger trace her spine, and I’m tempted to touch her backside.
And then I stop.
“I think our experiment has failed. You won’t be able to desensitize yourself by replacing that memory with something more palatable. Here,” I say, removing a bathrobe from the shelf and draping it over her shoulders, before I nudge her to turn around and I take her in my arms.
Her face is still tilted down, and as I look more closely, I realize it’s covered in silent tears.
I hold her in my arms and let her sob her heart out, shushing her as you’d do to a little girl without chiding her.
“You can still tell me who he is, so I can kill him,” I say against her hair while she stays locked with me as if I’m her only way out of this.
She shakes her head for now, although I’m sure that one day, I’ll know who he is and he’ll become food for the fish at the bottom of the sea.
I make sure she gets to her room, and I tuck her in myself before leaving guards at the door and heading straight to Cosimo’s room.
He’s not there.
He’s having a cigarette with a few other men in the courtyard downstairs.
I head that way.
The thing with the life we live is that every moment is precious.
We can’t delay anything.
We don’t have the privilege of waiting for that perfect moment. We have to grab whatever we can and live everything like it’s a carousel of madness.
We kill. We fuck. We joke. We dance. We get married and love our children. Sometimes, our wives.
We do everything at speed, without dwelling much.
So, truly, it doesn’t surprise me that they have such a good time not far from where, a couple of hours ago, a pile of black bags occupied the center of the courtyard.
“What’s up, Boss?” he asks in a good mood, reading my eyes, as if aware of what just happened upstairs.
“We need to move house. Security reasons,” I say, lifting a clean glass from a tray and pouring myself a drink. “We’re going outside town.”
“I know a place.”
“That’s the place I have in mind, too.”
We both know that particular villa on fifteen hectares, a rural property outside town. It’s surrounded by vineyards, trees, and a vast terrain. We can spot potential dangers from a distance.
Multiple houses in that compound offer the best living conditions for us.
The interiors have been updated.They’re luxurious. The garden is magnificent. And the pools are a pleasure to be in.
I looked at it when I considered purchasing property in Sicily.It wasn’t clear to me why I’d do that, but now everything starts to make sense.
“It’s still on the market. I already checked,” I say. “The owner is willing to sell it to me at a discount if I make up my mind. And I might.”
I realize that they’re all silent as I put out everything that’s consuming me.
“All right,” I say and take a swig. “At ease, boys. We’re moving to amazing quarters. Just ask Cosimo,” I say, and wink at them before going back into the house, musing over what an eventful day this has been.