Touch (The Pagano Family Book 2)

by Susan Fanetti

  But now he could fight back. Unarmed against three huge, armed men, his odds sucked, but he had his body, and he had skill. And he had fury, beating fiery hot and enormous in the place where his heart had been.

  oOo

  As it had ended his fighting career, his knee ended his round with Mouse and the Henchmen. He’d taken crushing blows and kept his feet, even managing to get the bat from Henchman #1 and take that son of a bitch out. Jones had still been lying on the floor—Luca wondered whether he’d killed him with that punch to his chest—and Henchman #1, reeling from a blow from the bat that had become Luca’s, tripped over him and went down. Luca knew full well he’d killed that guy once he was done with him. There wasn’t much left of his head. He’d ignored certain damage to his kidneys from Mouse’s brass knuckles to make sure that fuck stayed down for good.

  Early on, he’d gone for Jones’s blade, but Mouse had grabbed it first—then closed it and put it in his pocket. They did not intend to kill him, then. Luca had used the opportunity of Mouse putting the blade away to take his legs out from under him, enjoying the way his head bounced on the floor. But then he’d been hit across the back with the bat—and that was when he’d made it his mission to get control of that blasted thing.

  For a brief, miraculous moment, with two of his attackers out, Luca had thought he had a chance to take them all down.

  But Henchman #2, who’d gotten in several blows with that chain wrapped around his hand, wised up and sent it out like a whip. He managed to get it around Luca’s right knee and then yanked like he was pulling out a tree stump. Luca went down, and it was over after that.

  But he was still conscious—barely—when they were suddenly done with him.

  Now they were dragging him down a hallway to yet another room. He was getting the full tour tonight. He closed his eyes and let them drag him, not fighting or even paying attention, too focused on managing the pain as broken bones and dislocated joints were stretched. There was a rattle of keys and then a thick, metallic sound as another door was opened. They dragged him in, dropped him, and left him, locking the door behind them.

  The floor was cool and clean, so he simply lay there, unmoving, letting quiet have him. Then a muffled whimper sliced through the silence, and he opened the one eye that would.

  Lying on the floor, broken, concussed, and his open eye hazed with red, he couldn’t see at all clearly, and the distorted image before him seemed like something out of a nightmare. He blinked, breathed, and forced himself up onto an elbow connected to a dislocated shoulder. The vicious spike of pain cleared his head.

  Manny was across the room, curled in the corner. She was bound and filthy, her long hair knotted and sticking up around her head. The left side of her face was swollen and purple, and dried blood coated her chin and the front of her shirt. And she had a motherfucking ball gag in her mouth. It was too big for her mouth, and her jaw was stretched severely.

  She was awake, her eyes huge and more terrified than he could stand to see.

  “Oh, fuck, little bit.” His words were thick and mushy. He was not bound, and he forced himself to sit up, to ignore the fire in his body. John was also there, bound and unconscious. They’d beaten the shit out of him, too. Luca hoped he was only out and not worse.

  Luca tried to stand but could not. His artificial knee was fucked. So he dragged himself to his girl.

  It seemed to take hours to cross the twenty feet that separated him from her. Manny didn’t move or make another sound. She simply stared, watching him cover the infinite distance between them. He tried to smile, but his mouth wouldn’t move like that.

  “Hey, sugar.” He got close enough to reach for her, ignoring his screaming joints and muscles, intending to get that awful thing out of her mouth. But she moved then, rearing back away from him, slamming into the wall behind her.

  “Manny. It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

  She shook her head vigorously. He’d just lied to her. He knew it, and so did she. He nodded. “You’re right. It’s fucked. But we’re together. I didn’t know if I’d see you again.”

  Her face changed, sorrow moving in over the fear.

  “Let me take that thing off, bit. Let me touch you. Don’t go away from me now. Not now.”

  She stared for a few seconds, and then she lowered her head so he could reach the clasp at the back. He undid it and threw that shit away from them. Her jaw popped loudly as she closed her mouth. She spat blood and saliva onto the floor.

  She laid her head on his arm, and he forced his other to lift enough to hold her. She let him. He sent up a prayer of thanks that he could still touch her, after whatever they’d done to her. He was afraid to ask what they’d done. “I’m so sorry about this, bit. So fucking sorry.” He eyed her bindings but knew he wouldn’t be able to get them free with his hands.

  “They hurt John. So bad. Like you. You’re so hurt.” Her voice was hoarse and raw.

  He turned and looked hard at his younger brother. Finally, he saw his chest move. “He’s breathing. Maybe right now he’s got it best of all of us—sleeping through this.”

  “I can’t…Luca, my head. I can’t make sense.”

  There was no sense to be made, but he understood what she was trying to say, and it chilled him. “I love you, Manny. Stay with me. Focus on me. On us. We make sense. I love you.”

  She whimpered and then was quiet.

  The door opened again, Manny cringed against him, and he moved as well as he could to put himself between her and whatever was coming. Mouse, looking like he’d been through a battle, too, came back in.

  “Okay, kiddos. Time to take another ride.”

  24

  They were in the back of a cargo van, the same one John and she had been shoved into when the men had taken them from her apartment. They’d bound them both right away. By now, they’d been bound for hours and hours. Manny’s arms and legs were like heavy hunks of rock attached to her torso.

  They’d stuffed dirty rags into their mouths when they’d first been bound; they’d smelled like oil or gasoline or something. Manny had gagged and puked, the rag blocking the sickness from its path.

  John, awake again by then, had helped her, signaling for her to get her head near his bound hands so he could pull the cloth free. Once she was done retching and gagging, she’d taken the cloth from John’s mouth, too, and the men had let them be, simply yelling back to keep quiet.

  They had. It had seemed hopeless to call for help. Everything had been hopeless since the door had burst in and knocked John down. Even seeing Luca again, seeing him alive, had not assuaged her hopelessness. It was not going to be okay. It was never going to be okay.

  Different men were in the front of the van now. She had not seen the man John had shot since they were muscled into a back entrance of a building in a dark alley.

  She hadn’t seen the other man, the driver, the one who’d pulled her out of her bedroom, since she had bitten a chunk out of his cheek. That had gotten her beaten and that fucking sex toy thing shoved into her mouth. But it had stopped the other things.

  She had screamed a lot during the other things. Screamed herself almost totally out of her voice. The other things were bad, but they could have been a lot worse. Biting that bastard’s face off had kept them from being worse. So she didn’t mind her sore head and aching jaw so much.

  Now, though, they were lying on the steel floor of the cargo van, packed in four abreast. Luca was bound, now, too. He’d made a horrible, low sound when they’d wrenched his arms behind his back, and his shoulders had looked strange and distended. But now, he was behind her, talking to her. She could hear the pain and struggle in his voice, and the loud, rasping sounds of his breath, but he kept it up. Soothing her—or trying to, at least.

  Anthony’s body was lying before her, his dead eyes open and staring into hers. Even in the near dark of their late-night drive, she could see, and it was the worst thing she’d ever known. Luca had gotten her to press as close to his
body, and as far from Anthony’s, as she could.

  John was lying at the far end of their row, on the other side of Anthony, still quiet. Manny didn’t know if he was still breathing. They’d beaten him and kicked him while he was bound hand and foot, until he was unconscious, and he had not opened his eyes since.

  The van went over a pothole; the jostling made Anthony’s head loll loosely. She whimpered at the sight.

  “Close your eyes, bit. Don’t look. I’m right here. Feel me.” Luca’s voice was weary and ragged but stalwart.

  “We’re gonna die.” Her voice sounded odd, like she’d been smoking three packs a day for fifty years.

  “Yeah, I think so. But stay with me, okay? Just stay with me.”

  She nodded, feeling her head move against his chest. Through all the horrors of this night, she had not gone over. She had not raged out. She could feel it pressing in on her consciousness from all sides, the incoherent frustration of not understanding or being understood that had, for all her life, grown into a kind of massive unknowing that became rage. Senseless rage, in its most literal meaning. But she had staved it off tonight. She didn’t know how she was managing. She wasn’t trying—in fact, she would have welcomed a little senseless rage and the violence that came with it. But it was as though this fear was too great and too real—it focused her. What was happening made no sense to her because it was senseless, not because she was incapable of understanding, and that gave her focus.

  Until Luca had been brought into the room. Then she’d slipped a little, and things had started to go dark. But he’d pulled her back from that, too. Crawling to her, leaving a path of smeared blood behind him, holding her with his terribly broken body.

  Holding her. Loving her. Turning the spiders into butterflies.

  The van made a sharp turn, the force pushing her firmly against Luca, but also causing Anthony’s body to press into her. She could feel that he was stiffening. “Oh, God.”

  “Easy…easy, bit. Think about us. That’s what I’m doing. I’m thinking about our first kiss—sitting on the log on the beach, you on my lap, telling me not to touch you. That was wicked hot.”

  She smiled at the memory, and a tiny claw of fear eased up. “That wasn’t our first kiss.” She’d kissed him the night before that, parked in front of her apartment, after he’d rescued her at Quinn’s. Her and her brother.

  “First one that counted. God, I wanted you so bad. I love you, bit. Maybe since that night. Haven’t stopped thinking about you for one second since.”

  The van stopped, and the men in front got out.

  There wasn’t much time left. “I love you, too. I love you so much. I learned to do it for you.”

  The back doors swung open, and they were yanked into the cold, late-November air.

  oOo

  Manny was alone.

  Luca was unconscious, now, too. He’d tried to stay with her, but she’d heard the crack of something else inside him breaking when they’d dropped his body to the pavement, and only a few minutes after that, he’d lost his fight. He was breathing, though; she could hear it.

  They’d been dropped onto the ground and then abandoned. The men had simply gotten back into their van and driven away.

  They were lying in the parking lot in front of a warehouse or something—a big, low building. She couldn’t see any signs and didn’t know where they were. Near the harbor—she could hear the water and the docked boats, and she could smell their fishy smell.

  It was cold, and she had no coat. The little flutter of hope she’d found when the men had driven away lost its power as she lay alone, bound, amid three unconscious, possibly dying, or already dead bodies, wearing nothing but a knit skirt and a thin cotton hoodie, in the winter chill of the weekend before Thanksgiving. She lifted her head and tried to yell or scream, but she’d expended her voice on the asshole with the new hole in his cheek.

  They were still going to die, but now they were going to die of hypothermia. She closed her eyes and looked for sleep. Eventually, her body stopped shivering, and sleep found her.

  oOo

  She woke up in an ambulance, an oxygen mask over her face. A cute guy in a blue uniform smiled down at her. She closed her eyes.

  oOo

  They released her from the hospital after twenty-four hours. By then, the place was lousy with Timkos and Paganos. Besides some temporary nerve damage from being bound, the bruising in various places, torn piercings in her tongue and a breast, and what the doctor called a ‘touch’ of hypothermia, her worst injury was a concussion. So they’d gotten her body temperature up, monitored her for a day, and released her.

  And she went exactly nowhere. Up one floor. No farther than that. That was where Luca and John were.

  They were sharing a room, which was convenient for the family and probably the hospital itself. It kept the family corralled, anyway.

  Dottie and Adam had shown up at the hospital while Manny was still in the ER. Her father had cocked a suspicious eye at her and said, “Mugged, huh? Luca. And his brother. Mugged. Right.”

  That was the first she’d heard of what was apparently the story. She’d hoped someone would come around eventually and tell her what she was supposed to say, because otherwise, she was going with the truth. She liked the truth. The truth was stable. Lies were codes that she rarely had the key to.

  To her parents, she’d only shrugged. She wouldn’t lie to them. But she needed to try to understand why a lie was around before she said anything.

  An intense-looking man with dark hair and piercing eyes came in while her parents were getting lunch. He introduced himself as Nick, Luca’s cousin. He’d told her how they’d been mugged, and that Anthony had not been with them. He’d stressed the importance of these ‘facts.’ And then he’d suggested that she remember as little as possible.

  She went with that. She remembered every second, but saying she didn’t seemed much easier than remembering a lie as well as the truth. When the cops came, she told them she didn’t remember. They were gentle, and if they didn’t believe her, she couldn’t tell.

  It was Thanksgiving week, and it seemed like everybody was off, so the Paganos, occasionally including uncles and aunts she hadn’t met, camped out at the hospital, and Dottie and Adam stayed most of the time, too. Dmitri came to see her the day she was in a hospital bed herself. It went okay. They talked, sort of.

  Luca and John were both messes, but their prognoses were good. Luca had a broken back, two dislocated shoulders, three broken ribs, a concussion, a broken nose, internal bleeding, and bruises over most of his body. His right knee was a disaster and would need to be replaced again. He had sixty-five stitches in his face and head. And more elsewhere. He’d spent most of the first day in surgery and looked like something Boris Karloff would have played. But he was conscious, and he smiled when she came into the room. Carmen had told her that he’d been a total shit since he’d woken, needing to see her.

  She liked that.

  John had a severe concussion, a broken cheekbone, a dislocated hip, four broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a broken arm. They’d drilled into his head to ease pressure from the concussion, and he was on a ventilator because of his lung. But he woke on the first day they were in the hospital, and he seemed like he’d be okay—though he looked as bad as Luca. Maybe worse.

  Manny’s father kept calling them Mutt and Jeff, which she didn’t understand.

  While Luca was sleeping on the third night, Manny went out to get a soda from the machine. It was quiet—her parents and most of the Paganos had gone home for the evening. There was a guy she’d seen hanging around all the time without actually being a part of anything—there were a couple of guys like that, but never together—but nobody else seemed to have a problem with it, so Manny figured it therefore wasn’t a problem. Maybe a bodyguard for Luca and John, like she’d had. She was okay with that.

  Carlo was in the waiting room near the vending machines, on his phone. She didn’t eavesdrop, but she heard
enough accidentally to know he was talking business. Some big building project he was working on.

  The chairs in the hospital rooms were uncomfortable, and Manny wasn’t in a hurry to get back in one while Luca was sleeping, so she walked the corridor while she drank her Orange Crush. She went digging around in her head a little as she walked. Things were different. She felt different. Like coming through all that, being sure she would die, and finding a life and love and family on the other side had forged a connection in her that had always been broken. Like all that angry, hurtful contact, all that violence and terror and blazing evidence of the worst that people were, had reset her own context.

  Her parents had tried holding therapy when she was a kid. The intent was to force touch on an attachment-resistant child, to forcibly hold her until she calmed and understood that the touch was not harmful. Except that forced holding was harmful. It hurt to be held while she struggled, and it hurt her mind to be forced to do something so abhorrent and terrifying by someone who was supposed to take care of her. Talk about mixed signals. Maybe it worked for other kids. It had set Manny back years. Her parents had abandoned it quickly, despite her doctor at the time insisting that they hadn’t given it a chance to work, but the damage had been done.