Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Pfeiffer
I close the door quietly behind me and lean against it, exhaling a long breath.
“Dad?”
When there’s no answer I walk into the living room and find him slumped in his chair, the TV flickering silently. His eyes are closed, and his breathing is slow and gentle. He’s sleeping.
My chest softens with relief. I don’t have the energy to be strong right now.
I lock myself in the bathroom, and strip out of my clothes. When I step into the shower, I make sure it’s burning hot. I need to feel heat outside of my blistering pulse.
The water pounds my shoulders, filling the room with thick, rising steam. Only when I can’t see beyond my nose do I rest my forehead against the tile and close my eyes.
And that’s when it comes back.
Callum leans over me, his face contorted into a horrifying grimace. “Say his name again.”
I’m standing in our kitchen, my fingers digging into the countertop so hard my nails hurt. Dad is at work. He always is when I get home from school.
“I don’t want to,” I say in a quietly trembling voice.
“You don’t want to?” he echoes. “That’s funny, sweetheart. Because I don’t want to put my hands on you either.”
My stomach twists into a knot as he leans in a little more. His breath, laced with cheap alcohol and bitterness, drifts beneath my nostrils. I want to gag.
“You know what happens if you don’t bring me something useful.”
I try to turn my face away but he grips it between bony fingers and tilts me back to him.
“I told you,” he continues, almost conversationally, “these little mafia princes… They think they’re untouchable. Their fathers, their uncles… they run everything.”
His fingers brush my arm and I flinch.
“I’m not good enough for them, am I? Not trustworthy enough.”
Pettiness seeps into every word.
“They shouldn’t have turned me away, should they? Because I have a weapon that they don’t have, right sweetheart? I have you. And you’re going to help me give them a taste of their own medicine.”
He strokes a hand over my wrist, sending my pulse thundering through my ears.
“They’ll rue the day they stopped returning my calls.”
I swallow but because my throat’s so dry, it hurts.
“I give you names,” he says, like he’s talking to a small child. “You bring me information I can use. Okay? It’s called teamwork.”
“I don’t know how.” I whisper. “What kind of information?”
He lifts a shoulder then traces his fingertips down the length of my arm sending tendrils of fear through my flesh.
“Anything incriminating. Humiliating.”
“Humiliating?” I frown. I doubt the sons of mobsters do anything humiliating. “What if I don’t hear or see them being humiliated?”
He leans ever closer and licks his tongue up the side of cheek making my entire body seize.
“Then, my dear Pfeiffer, do something to humiliate them.”
The water burns into my skin but it’s nothing compared to the pain in my heart. I remember Callum’s instructions now as clear as if he’d given them to me yesterday. My fingers find purchase on the tile, steadying me from the sway of dizziness.
Finding ways to humiliate very specific people wasn’t easy.
It was impossible. First I had to identify them, then I had to try to move in their circles without seeming too obvious.
Then I had to come up with ways to undermine them.
Every Friday when I arrived home to find Callum McAllister in my father’s kitchen, waiting for me, I had no news to give.
No information to deliver. And so I had to stand there and let him put his hands on me.
My awareness shut down as he pushed his hands into my skirt and under my shirt. He’d touch a fresh part of me each time, like he was stumbling across a new, forbidden fruit.
I tried to push him off once. But he threatened to tell my father what we’d been doing.
My father was still, fourteen years on, grieving my mother.
I couldn’t put him through the grief of losing either me or his brother.
Because he would have to choose. And he and Callum were so close, a small part of me thought too that perhaps, if pushed, Dad would choose his brother.
I didn’t want to find out. So I stood there and took it.
When he was done, I’d walk numbly to my room, lock the door and throw up into a trash can. I’d wait for him to leave then I’d clear up the mess and scrub myself raw under a hot shower.
It was the only thing that ever numbed me.
There’s a boy standing at the side of my desk—I don’t remember seeing him before. He came to check that I was okay, but I can’t process anything he’s saying because the name ‘Bellucci’ is ringing in my ears.
Of all the names my uncle gave me, Bellucci was the one person I couldn’t find. And he was in my class all along?
Callum’s bitter words slot into place.
“Watch that one. Family’s trying to claw their way back into New York. Could be useful. Make sure whatever you do damages him double, or…”
I swallow. “Or what?”
“Or next time, I’ll be sliding my fingers inside you.”
Tears roll down my cheeks, dropping into the shower tray with the scorching water. My knees wobble, either from the heat or from the memory of feeling so helpless.
“You think I’m weak?” I ask quietly.
Something in me wants to stop, but I can’t, because stopping means going home with nothing. And going home with nothing means…
“If you’re going to pretend to be a man,” I say, cruelly, “you should wait until you at least have a man’s voice.”
The laughter fills me with a feeling much like freedom. Relief rolls from my shoulders. Because that laughter means, for once, I’ve done enough. I’ll be safe tonight.
I sag against the wall of the shower, shaking. The water runs cold, but I don’t move. Something else is crystallizing now. Not a memory though; a realization.
The first night I entered Velvet… The masks, the scowls, the stares. The weird manner in which people greeted me.
The way everything unfolded so… precisely.
My breath stutters and I push away from the wall, wrapping a towel around myself with shaking hands as I stumble out of the bathroom.
How quickly Callum’s debt turned into me—how convenient. My stomach bottoms out. The whole thing was orchestrated.
Fiero Bellucci, the quiet boy who dared to ask if I was okay, is the man who now owns everything.
This wasn’t chance. It wasn’t coincidence. It wasn’t some twisted fate bringing us back together. It was him.
This is how Fiero Bellucci got his revenge.
My mind races back through the last month.
That first night when he made me undress, he wanted to humiliate me. And he did, until he kissed me. The way he reacted now makes sense; he didn’t want to like it.
And he didn’t stop. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time but every encounter felt a little like punishment, like I wasn’t just repaying Callum’s debt, that somehow I was repaying my own. It didn’t make any sense.
Now, it does.
My knees almost give out as I stagger back into my bedroom.
He knew who I was, right from the beginning, and he waited until the time was exactly right.
I sink onto the edge of the bed, gripping the sheets.
He took everything I inflicted on him—the laughter, the humiliation, the mortification—and he twisted it into a pain all of my very own.
I willingly gave him my virginity. I let him fuck me with the handle of a blade.
I let myself fall for him.
I press my hand to my mouth, trying to steady my breathing. This is the man who killed men that hurt me. He held me as I cried it out. The man who didn’t touch me when he could have.
He’s also the man who built this entire situation, brick by brick, just to break me.
I tip my head back, staring at the ceiling through blurred vision.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper into the empty room. I don’t even know who I’m saying it to anymore.
I broke him; he broke me.
And neither of us have won.