A whip of the belt.
Tick.
Another.
Tick.
More, more, more.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The raw skin on my back blistered. This was about the time he would usually stop, but he kept going.
“You’re a disrespectful bastard.”
Whip.
“I never wanted you.”
Whip.
“You’ll be nothing.”
Whip.
I rolled my eyes and stared at the metronome on the floor.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Whip. Whip. Whip.
His words no longer made sense, his insanity growing wilder and wilder each time the snakeskin connected with my flesh. He hadn’t always been like this. When Mama lived, he kept to himself while she raised me. When she died, he took it as permission to have his way with me. Never leaving a scar. Hitting just enough to take me to the brink of bloodied flesh.
But my skin split today, and I knew Renata’s words—true as they were—had done a number on him. Fuck my life. The belt sliced the skin below my shoulder. I grit my teeth. Didn’t she know she’d made it worse?
He growled out, his Texas accent strengthening with his fury. “No fucking respect in my own fucking household. I own the De Luca family.” Whip. “I own this land.” Whip. “I own this town. I own this state.” Whip. Whip. “Do you get that, boy?”
Not for long, he didn’t.
I didn’t answer. He tore the skin on my lower back. My teeth drew blood from my tongue. Any more lashes, and I’d need a hospital trip for stitches. He didn’t relent, the belt whipping in rapid succession.
Each time someone challenged Angelo’s ego, he took it out on me. I was the threat to his throne, the only De Luca in the line of succession, the only one who could take over. That made me his target, and if he could kill me without incensing the entire town, he would.
Instead, he settled for a belt and my back, and I let him because I was biding time until the cogs fell into place and I gathered enough supporters, turned his caporegimes and soldiers against him, and could guarantee a successful coup. He sought short reprieves; I planned for the end game.
Angelo pushed me forward with the heel of his boot on my back. I let him, my eyes shifting to my dresser, where I knew a pen laid. A lunge forward. A swipe of the hand. A click of the pen. A push deeper, deeper, deeper into his neck, and Angelo would bleed out while I watched. I didn’t do it, but I considered it for point five seconds before I reminded myself of my grand plan.
The Benefactor’s plan.
Spend time with the lower level De Lucas at The Landing Strip. Treat them better than Angelo ever could. Work my way up to converting the caporegimes. Use my army to dethrone Angelo and his loyalists. And keep Angelo alive to watch the syndicate he could never wrangle thrive under my rule.
My face pressed against the cool wood. A final lash on my back severed another strip of my skin. The blood on my tongue pooled in my mouth. Tick. Tick.
“Look at you, taking a beating like a weak, pathetic, little bitch.” He really had no idea. His guffaw sounded too jovial for the blood dripping down my back. “You’re no son of mine.” The tip of his boot connected with the back of my head, whipping it to the side.
The last image I conjured before darkness faded in was the fall of Angelo De Luca.
* * *
Trust yourself.
You know more than
you think you do.
Dr. Benjamin McLane Spock
* * *
I wasn’t sure Damian would show up at the library that night, but he’d beat me to it. By the time I had a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet open, Damian had fallen asleep on the divan opposite of mine.
My eyes crawled the length of his body, studying him in a way I normally couldn’t. At six-two, his legs hung off the edge, and his muscular frame hardly fit the divan. He had an arm slung over his head, pulling the bottom of his shirt up. I caught a peek of the V leading into his sweats and bit my lip. Holy hell. They didn’t make men like him in Connecticut.
“You’re not reading.” I jerked my attention back to his face. His eyes still remained closed, and he looked like he was sleeping. He peeked an eye open. “If you’re not going to read, what’s the point?”
My brows drew together, and I pulled the book closer to my chest. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
The anger I’d seen on his face in the kitchen still lingered in my mind. I’d been wrong to intervene in his life like that, but I didn’t regret it. Not as much as I should have. Angelo De Luca needed to be taken down a peg or ten.
“Are we not doing this anymore?”
I wanted to ask what exactly this was. But that would cross an unspoken line, so I sighed, drew my knees to my chest, opened The Prophet, and started to read. Damian’s breathing leveled out again as I read him to sleep.
My eyes darted between the page and his body as I read, “The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.”
“Do you have any dreams?” His words jolted me. Not just because I’d thought he was asleep, but because his question went to a place I thought we’d never go.
We never talked like this. Sure, we would talk about things like absentee parents, but we wouldn’t talk about what it felt like for us to have absentee parents. That line I didn’t want to cross? He’d just crossed it with both feet.
I bit back a sigh. “Yes.” I dreamed of loving parents, a normal life, a room full of books, and someone to share them with. It struck me that an unbiased observer would say I had the last two. The idea scared me, so I blurted out, “I dream of leaving this place. Getting the hell out and running as fast as I can.”
“Running away?”
“Yes.”
His eyes remained closed, his arms clasped together atop his stomach. “Small words for someone used to speaking big ones.”
If anything, I thought he felt the same way. How could he live with Angelo De Luca and not want to run away?
I brushed my hair out of my face and stared at his closed eyes and the slow rise and fall of his chest. “What do you mean?”
“I’m referring to the way you speak to my father, and you know it.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not a good idea to talk to him like that.”
“I know.”
“If you think you’re doing me any favors, you’re wrong. What do you think happens after all that? You rile Angelo up, and he has no way of simmering down. He’s not made like you and me. He’s a boiling pot with his lid superglued on tight. We can lift our lids. We can let the steam out. We can release our anger. He can’t. Not until he reaches a crux, and someone gets hurt.”
“Who got hurt?” I reexamined him again, noting the way he laid over three plush blankets, his body more rigid and less relaxed than I’d initially thought. His leveled breathing? Not sleep, but rather a way to prevent him from moving and exacerbating his injuries. “Oh. I-I—” I didn’t know what to say, but the sound of Angelo beating his son echoed in my head.
He saved me from answering by standing up. His movements drew a wince, but he tamped it down. My jaw dropped a bit when I caught sight of the crimson soaking the sides of his gray shirt, stretching into the back.
My eyes dipped to the divan. Violent red stained one of the blankets. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had soaked through the three thick blankets and into the black fabric of the divan. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why he’d come here. To the library. To me.
He faced me, his eyes never wavering from mine as one hand clutched the front of his shirt. His fingers tugged the shirt over his head. Chiseled abs met my gaze, but I didn’t dare focus on them. I watched in sheer horror as he tossed his shirt to the side and turned around, his movements slow and no doubt painful.
Angry pink crisscrossed lines littered his back. Dried blood decorated some, but o
thers still bled. Trails of red ran down his back in streams like scattered raindrops.
I shook my head and begged him with my mind to spin his back away from me. “Why haven’t you washed the blood away?”
He turned around and arched a brow at me. “It’s on my back. I can’t reach it myself. Hospital trips aren’t an option. The closest one is the next town over, and there aren’t many De Luca contacts there. I’d need someone to make arrangements just to head over.”
This. This was how the De Luca syndicate had kept Damian a secret all these years. He stayed in Devils Ridge, a town with nearly a hundred-percent mafia ties. They kept his secret because they belonged to the syndicate, and the Vitali and other four syndicates would never spy because they’d long ago written off the De Luca family.
I shook my head. “So, make them. Unless Angelo won’t let you, in which case, fuck him. Let the bastard rot in jail.”
“He’d be out in a heartbeat.”
“But you’d have medical attention. The marred gashes on your back will scar, Damsel.” I realized my slip a second too late. I was supposed to call him Day. Anything—literally anything—but Damsel.
“Damsel?” He took a step toward me, steel in his eyes. “I’m the Damsel, and you’re the Knight? Do you think you’re brave antagonizing Angelo, Knight?” The mocking way he spit out ‘Knight’ provoked me.
Deep down, I knew I shouldn’t have said anything to Angelo. It was a mistake, one I’d realized too late. But I stood my ground anyway. “Someone had to.”
“No, Renata.” He shook his head, something like disgust in his eyes. “That’s exactly the kind of behavior I’d expect from Angelo, not someone who argues Apollonian and Dionysian in the context of The Birth Tragedy in ways that would put Nietzsche to shame.”
How did he manage to make me feel so ashamed of myself?
My head dipped down, and I stared at the rug my toes dug into. “Can you put your shirt back on?”
“Why? The consequences of your actions too much for you to handle?”
I ignored his provocation. I just couldn’t look at the welts anymore. He’d turned, but I still caught some lashes on his sides.
“Please,” I begged.
He stared at me for a moment before moving. Slowly. So slowly. His knees were partially bent, his arms outstretched to his shirt on the floor, when I said, “Wait.”
“Yes?”
I bent over, grabbed his shirt, then reached for his hand. I knew if I told him where I planned on taking him, he’d deny me. So, I led him to the bathroom in our hall, walking slowly to accommodate his back.
“Princess—”
I opened the door. “Let me help you.”
“Like you helped by talking to Angelo?”
“I’m sorry, okay?! I was mad.”
He let loose a bitter laugh. “What I don’t get is why. You’re normally unfazed. You’re the girl who stole my phone without blinking an eye—”
“I didn’t steal—”
He cut off my denial. “You’re not the girl who gets mad.”
I tossed his shirt to the floor, grabbed a hand towel, and dipped it in the bathing pool to soak it. “I hear him. Every night, when he comes to your room, I can hear him through the air vent separating our rooms. Don’t flatter yourself and think my anger is for you. If it were anyone else taking the beating, I would be angry for them, too. I may keep my calm well, but that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to feel empathy.”
“Let me make this clear, Princess. I don’t need your help.”
“Fine. Point taken. But let me clean your wound.”
His eyes dipped to the wet towel in my hand. “You have ten minutes.”
My eyes traced his tanned skin. The hard ridges of his abs. The way his biceps bulged. He was cut like a warrior, lean but ripped, and he’d let his father tear him up. I didn’t understand it.
“Why don’t you fight back?” I pressed the towel against his back, forcing myself to continue when his body went rigid.
“Stay out of my business, Vitali.”
Fine. Fair enough. He didn’t trust me, and I didn’t trust him. Message received. Instead of talking to him, I focused on my work. The fresh blood was easy enough to clean, but the dried blood wouldn’t let up. I could rub at it, but that would be painful for him.
“Do you have hydrogen peroxide?”
He shook his head. “No.”
My eyes drifted to the pool. “Take off your pants.”
“Listen, you’re attractive, but—”
Good Lord, have mercy.
“No, I meant take off your pants, so you can soak the dried blood off.”
I turned the water heater on, and when I turned around, he’d barely gotten his pants a few inches down. I couldn’t image the pain he was in. Without a word, I pushed his hands to the side and slid his pants slowly down his legs. Neither of us said anything as I squatted, fully aware of the intimate view. His boxers would have to remain, or I wouldn’t be able to get anything done.
When I stepped back, his eyes stayed on mine as I slipped my shirt over my head. Back when Angelo had walked in on my bath, Damian hadn’t bothered to stare at my body. Today, he was shameless in his perusal.
His hooded eyes crawled their way down my body, relentless in the way he watched me slide my sweats down my legs until I stood in front of him in black lace panties and a matching bralette. The only cute things I ever bothered wearing.
If anything, he inspected me on purpose. To make me as uncomfortable as I was sure accepting help from me made him. I watched him step into the bathing pool. He had to be in pain, but he didn’t show it. Stoic as ever.
This shouldn’t have been erotic, but my heart battered my chest as I waded to him. He watched me, his attention so focused on me as I stepped around him until I stood at his back. Cupping water into my hands, I let it run down his skin. After a few repetitions, the dried blood began to clear.
His muscles tensed as I ran my hand down them. For the first time ever, I felt truly off kilter. I pushed my emotions out of my mind and grabbed a bottle of shampoo.
“What are you doing?”
I popped the bottle open and squeezed some onto my hand. Forming a lather, I ran my hands on his head. His skin felt hot against my fingers. “I’m betting you haven’t showered, and you won’t be able to lift your hands high enough to wash your hair for at least another day.”
I’d expected him to fight me on this, but he didn’t. So, I massaged the shampoo into his hair, taking longer than necessary. My toes pointed as I used them to push me higher, trying but struggling to reach his head. My chest nearly bumped into his wounds, so I stepped back and walked to his front.
From this angle, we couldn’t avoid staring at each other as I ran my hands through his hair. I still stood on my tiptoes, but this time, he helped me. His arm wrapped around my back, and he held me still against his chest. My nipples pebbled beneath my bralette. They pressed against his bare chest through the thin fabric.
His breath fanned my face as I massaged his scalp. He closed his eyes. I took the opportunity to study him. The distinct jawline. The high cheekbones. He could be a model or a movie star if he fled this town, ran away from this mafia life, like I’d always wanted to.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “It’s hard to hear. Okay? Every night, it’s hard to hear.”
He said nothing. I cupped water into my palms and poured it over his head. When the water ran clear, I stepped back.
His eyes shot open. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Okay.” I figured I owed him as much.
“Make sure I don’t fall asleep. I could have a concussion.”
“He hit your head?”
“Kicked it. On the side. My hair hides it. No bruises that way.”
“He can’t get away with this.”
“He won’t.”
And if I wasn’t so focused on his pain and how close we stood, I would have realized what his words meant. Da
mian had a plan to get back at Angelo. Maybe even take him down. That was treason, and he’d just confessed it to me.
Trust.
He trusted me, and I didn’t even realize it.
* * *
In the end, you have
to choose whether or not
to trust someone.
Sophie Kinsella
* * *
Now that you’re friends
with Miriam, Miriam will take
her dad to you when the abuse
gets too big to hide from him.
They’ll ask you for help.
You’ll convince them that
dethroning Angelo is
the only way.
* * *
I’d gotten the message from The Benefactor exactly two weeks after Renata arrived in Devils Ridge. I waited. Waited. Then, waited some more. I almost thought The Benefactor had gotten something wrong when Miriam and her father ambled their way into The Landing Strip.
The dark club shadowed Miriam, but I could see the shiner burgeoning on her eye. The closer she came, the more bruises I caught. She hid them with makeup and long sleeves, but I’d gotten good at recognizing abuse.
When they approached me, I stood and led them to Irene’s private room. The three of us sat on the leather, neither Miriam nor her dad Manuel talking.
I took pity on them. “He hit you again.”
My dad’s advisor Jacapo was a real nasty piece of work. When I was ten, he’d walked in on my father beating me and stayed to watch. It wasn’t a stretch to assume he was responsible for Miriam’s bruises.
Manuel glanced at his daughter before returning his gaze to me. “Yes. I don’t know how long Mir’s been hiding this from me, but even a second is too long.” His voice caught, and he paused. “It’s too long, Damian.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry this is happening to you, Miriam. You deserve better. But the options here are slim. If you flee, Jacapo will find you. If you kill him, you’ll end up in jail or Angelo will kill you both.”