Jimmy flicks his eyebrows up and shakes his head. “You got it boss.”
When it’s all over, we left four dead Anastasios, including the two I dropped upstairs. The new kid, Dino, took a bullet in the neck and didn’t make it. Jimmy took one in the leg but the doc says it missed all the major arteries and he’ll be fine. No one has heard from Frankie, and I can’t even find anyone who saw him in the gunfight. It leaves a strange feeling in my gut, but with everything else going on, I don’t pay it much attention. He’ll show up. He always does. I wave the doc off when he tries to examine my wound, making him check every last scratch and bruise on Aubriella’s body instead. Once she’s stabilized enough to move, I have her brought to my penthouse.
I sit beside my bed, clenching my fists in rage as I wait for the doctor to finish examining her again.
“This may scar,” he says, pointing to a cut by her ribs. “Other than that, the wounds will take a few weeks to heal completely. She has two cracked ribs and a badly bruised bone in her leg. I’m leaving her some Percocet for the pain. Just keep an eye on it. You don’t want her taking this longer than she needs to. You really need to let me take a look at that, by the way.”
I glance down at my shoulder where blood has soaked my shirt to the waist now. I wave him off, although I do feel nauseous and dizzy, it feels like a betrayal, like worrying about my own pain minimizes hers.
“I’m not kidding, Vince.” He moves to where I’m sitting by the bed and feels the back of my shoulder. “It felt like your skin was on fire from the inside out after you were shot, didn’t it?”
I nod.
“That’s because the bullet stopped in here. It hit your bone and got lodged inside you. If I don’t clean it up, you could get a serious infection. Hell, there are probably tiny shards of the bullet shredding your tissue every time you move. The bleeding alone could kill you.”
I raise a hand to wave him off again but my vision goes black.
20
Aubriella
Everything hurts. It feels like I went skydiving without a parachute, like I have bruises beneath bruises and cuts on top of those. I want to cry, but I know it would hurt too much. The only feeling besides the pain is a mind-numbing anger. I can’t believe I let myself get involved with a criminal like Vince. Something like this was always going to happen. This is exactly why girls aren’t lining up to be mafia girlfriends. The mafia. My memory flashes with images of the man who harassed me at the stadium and the men in that dark factory and...
Warm tears slide from the corners of my eyes and pool in my ears. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, but I’m afraid to move to get the water out, so I just lay still.
“Aubriella,” says a quiet voice beside me.
I open my eyes and see his face. He’s like my dark angel, my salvation and my doom all wrapped into one. Not for the first time, I think how much easier it would have been to stay away from all this if he wasn’t so fucking beautiful. Even when his eyes are puffy from sleeplessness and his hair’s a mess, he’s stunning. My heart betrays me by increasing its pace when I guess at why he hasn’t been sleeping. Has he been so worried about me that he couldn’t sleep? Has he just been sitting here, for however long I was unconscious, waiting for me to wait up? It’s touching, but not enough.
I can’t look at him without feeling vivid reminders of the torture. I can’t look at him without blaming him.
I turn my head away from him, blinking away more tears and ignoring the sharp pain in my neck that comes from turning. His fingers are gentle against the soft skin of my cheek, but they hurt, too. He’s stroking my cheek so softly, probably as softly and tenderly as he can, but it still hurts. Isn’t that his problem? As much as he might want to protect me, even his most tender touch is still dangerous, still painful.
“I want to go home,” I say. My words come out thick and slurred through swollen lips and cheeks.
“And let you out of my sight again? You’re staying here.”
“I’m afraid of you.” The words leave before I have time to think them over, to find out if I really mean them in the way they will sound. The silence that follows says enough, it’s thick, heavy, and stifling like a blanket. I want to take them back, but I know it’s too late. There’s too much truth in them to say I didn’t mean them. They were the thoughts hanging on the tip of my mind and on the tip of his, the thing he was afraid to hear and the one thing I knew I shouldn’t say. After all, wasn’t that why I was special to him? He liked that I could look into his darkest corners and not run.
I feel him slip off the bed and hear the door close quietly a short time later.
It has been nearly a week since I was tortured. My swelling is mostly gone now and I just have a sore chest and some nasty bruises to show for my trouble. To my surprise, Vince kept taking care of me, even after what I said. I’ve caught him changing his own bloody bandage several times now, but he acts as if I’m the only one who’s hurt. He sleeps on the couch, I guess, because I can’t say for sure. The doctor told me to stay in bed for a week until my ribs healed, and Vince has made sure I do that. He helps me up when I need to use the restroom and waits outside to help me back to bed. He helps me into the shower and steps out while I bathe, waiting just outside the door incase I call for help. He does all of this with barely a word. It’s like he’s suddenly a professional nurse and waiting on me hand and foot doesn’t strike him as anything unusual.
I’ve done nothing but think. I’ve thought about how things between he and I have gone, about the life I left outside this apartment that’s probably crumbling into an unrecognizable heap, about my dad who is going to have another round of bills he can’t pay soon, and about Aria, who must be worried sick by now. She might think I’m dead. I have no way of knowing, because Vince said my phone was lost and he won’t let me make any calls. He just tells me to focus on getting better and not on trying to deal with what’s going on out there. I think the real truth is that he doesn’t want me calling for help. He doesn’t trust me. It’s probably in his best interest, because I honestly don’t know what I’d do if he gave me a phone right now. I would probably call the cops.
I carefully sit up in the bed, looking out at the ridiculous view through his huge penthouse windows. The bed is comfortable, but after a week, it feels like a prison, even though Vince has been taking the times I bathe to change out the sheets. He has really surprised me. I thought he was a man of all hard action. I never imagined he could be so considerate or tender in caring for me. His behavior makes me regret what I said even more, but I still can’t be with him. What happened could happen again, it probably would happen again. He lives a dangerous life and apparently has dangerous enemies. It would only be a matter of time before they came after me or someone I care about.
I can’t keep doing this. Staying with him is going to get me killed. I have to end it.
21
Vince
I find her sitting up in bed. As usual, the sight of the dark bruises against her white skin makes me want to kill those fuckers all over again. I clench my fingers so hard on the plate I carry that I feel the ceramic start to crumble under my fingers. I try to relax. C’mon, Vince. You got them. It’s over. I didn’t get all of them though. And they got Dino. He was just a kid. Whoever killed Jackie is still out there, too. As if I needed any more reason to want to put the entire Anastasio family under the ground.
I try again to smooth my features. There’s not an hour that goes by where I don’t hear her words. She’s scared of me. I’ve never let anyone or anything matter this much to me in all my life, and she’s fuckin’ scared of me. I took a long, hard look in the mirror after she said that. I asked myself if I could change for her. The answer is that I can’t. I won’t. Not because I don’t want her. God, do I want her. I won’t change because she’s scared of who she thinks I am, not who I am. If she was an Anastasio or one of those Sanatore rats? Yeah, then she should be scared, but the only people in the world who need to be scared are the o
nes who want to hurt her.
I set the tray down in front of her. I tried PB&J yesterday, but she didn’t eat it. I’m a shit cook, but she wasn’t eating anything I ordered in, so I decided to try making something for her myself. Yesterday, I sprinkled a few cheetos on the plate and a pickle. The sandwich was untouched, the cheetos were completely gone, and the pickle had a bite taken out of it. So today I tried cutting the crust off the sandwich like Ma used to and slicing it into small triangles. Then I piled as many cheetos as I could fit on the plate until they towered above the sandwich and three pickles.
She eyes the plate and then locks in on the tower of cheetos. The ghost of a grin touches her face, so faint that I’m almost sure I imagined it. It was there, I know it was. I’ve been chipping away at whatever wall she’s trying to put up between us, I can feel it. I just want to show her I can actually be patient. I can be calm. I want her to stop being afraid of me.
As soon as the grin passes, the same deep sadness crosses her face. I want to pull her close and kiss the tender place beneath her ear, to whisper the dirty things I want to do to her. There’s so much I want to do but none of it is right, not now, at least. If I want this to be more than casual fucking, I need her to trust me. So I set the plate down in front of her and then sit beside her on the bed, close enough that my leg touches hers. I’ll give her space, but there’s no way I can avoid any excuse to touch her. She’ll just have to get over that.
“You need to eat,” I say.
“I need to go home,” she says. It’s getting old. Any attempt I make at conversation with her feels like a circular path that leads straight back to that idea. She needs to go home. She wants to get away from me, from here. Too bad. She’s going to stay here until she learns to trust me and until she learns that she needs me right now. There’s no way I’m letting her out there until my soldiers and I have put this war to bed. No way in hell.
“C’mon. Eat something. You’re wasting away, doll,” I say, running a finger down her side where I can feel her ribs jutting through. It makes me sick to see her take such poor care of herself. It makes me feel like shit that I can’t take care of her because she won’t let me. She needs the food right now if she’s going to recover.
She shakes her head and a tear falls from her nose.
I move closer, taking her cheek with my palm and forcing her to look at me. “Hey,” I say softly, circling her with my arms and pulling her close to me, taking care not to squeeze her ribs or press on her bruises. She doesn’t resist and it feels so fuckin’ good to have her in my arms, to feel her warmth against my chest, even the wet heat of her tears soaking through my shirt. It’s her. All of it. I hate seeing her cry, but I don’t ask her what’s wrong. She’s upset, she knows I’m here for her, and she can tell me what it is if she wants. If she doesn’t, she can hold it in. For now, at least. My patience does have limits, and if it’s really bothering her I need to know at some point so I can set it straight.
She cries and sniffs in my arms for a few minutes. When she pulls away, she finally looks into my eyes. “I can’t keep doing this. Whatever was between us, it has to end.”
My eyebrows pull together. It feels like she just twisted a knife in my stomach. The familiar warmth of rage quickly replaces everything else. I shake my head. “No. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Maybe you can use brute force to get money out of people or whatever it is you do, but you can’t force me to stay with you.”
“Watch me,” I say slowly.
She rolls her eyes. It takes all I have in me not to grab her by the hair right then and make her apologize, but she’s still recovering. Instead, I raise a finger. “Be careful. Be real careful.”
“Or what?” she asks. “What can you even threaten me with? If you let me go, I’ll probably be kidnapped again or worse.”
“I’m working on that,” I say, standing to pace. Adrenaline is flooding my system and I can’t sit still anymore. I want to hit something, someone. I want to fuck something, her.
“Working on it? You mean you’re going to kill more people? Maybe that’s normal to you. Maybe you’re used to it, but I don’t want it on my conscience. I just want things to be normal again.”
“Tough shit. It doesn’t matter if you like it or not, you’re targeted. They are going to come after you to get to me. Unless I get to them first.”
She shakes her head, raising her hands as if she doesn’t know what else to say. She lets them drop lifelessly to the bed, where the sheets and blankets are pooled around her wide hips. She looks so fuckable in those sheets. I can see the hard tips of her nipples pushing against the cotton of her shirt. Maybe she thinks she can live without me, but she can’t. She’s had a taste, just like I have, and there’s no way she can leave now.
I sit down on the bed beside her again. “Listen. I get that this all freaks you out. I do. It’s fucked up that I put you in this situation, but I’d do it again in a fuckin’ heartbeat if it was the only way to get my hands on you. I’m not sorry for it. I’m going to make it right, though.”
She frowns, looking down and playing with her fingernails. “I can’t,” she says again, so softly I can barely hear it.
I move closer on the bed and capture her mouth in mine. For a few seconds, she doesn’t respond. It’s like kissing a corpse, albeit a warm corpse with fuck-me lips. I move my hand up her thigh and she finally responds to my kiss, hesitantly. She pulls back just barely, still so close that her lips brush mine when she speaks. “Please,” she whispers.
I kiss her again before she can finish. Please stop, please don’t stop—I don’t want to know what she was about to say, because I know what she wants, what she needs. She kisses me back as I ease her down until I’m straddling her, careful not to let my weight press on her bruised body. Though I want to climb atop her and fuck into her until she cries my name, I know it’s not the time. She’s still healing, and she’s still in a fragile state of mind. I move my hand down to cup one of her breasts, whispering in her ear and kissing beneath it as I do. “I’m going to make you cum with my fingers inside you. I’m going to do it every day until you’re better, until you’re begging me to give you my fat cock again.”
She moans, arching her neck.
“Tell me you want my fingers inside you,” I growl.
She says nothing and I see her cheeks burning red. I stop moving my hand and it rests on the swollen flesh of her mound, inches from her clit.
“I want it,” she says quietly.
“You want what?”
“Your fingers.”
“Where?”
“Inside me. Fuck me with your fingers. Please.”
My cock is so hard it feels like it’s going to burst, but I bite my lip and keep it in my pants. It’s going to feel so good fucking her when she begs me for it, when she can’t help herself from asking for it. It will be worth the wait. I move the flat of my hand over her clit, circling it with the point of my middle finger.
“You’re so fuckin’ wet. You wanted this so bad.”
“Mhmm,” she moans, eyes squeezed shut. Her small hand squeezes her heavy tit and teases the nipple.
God. It’s like she’s trying to make me give up and just fuck her raw right here. She’s so unbelievably hot. I work her with my fingers, whispering the dirty things I want to do to her in her ear. She rocks against me, biting my shoulder and groping for my cock as she rolls into me, scissoring my hand with her thighs. She squeezes my cock hard as her legs spasm, she cries out, her breath tickling my chest.
“Vince!”
“Fuck,” I say. I pull my hand away and then lift her chin as she’s still shaking. I make her suck her own juices off my fingers and watch as she closes her eyes, lapping it up, circling my fingers with her tongue. She moans against me and I fuckin’ love it. “You like that? You like tasting your own pussy?”
Her cheeks burn red, but she nods, pulling her lips from my finger with a wet sound. Once she’s finished, I still have a raging
hard-on, but I said I wouldn’t give it to her ‘til she begged for it, and I’m sticking to that. Besides, a little finger-fucking isn’t going to slow down her recovery, the way I need to fuck her would. I want to fuck her so hard that she forgets how to even think she could live without me.
I’m considering giving her another round, maybe going down on her this time, when my phone buzzes on the nightstand. Everybody knows not to dare calling me unless it’s important, so I don’t waste any time grabbing it and answering.
“Boss. We got him.” It’s Jimmy.
“Where?” I ask.
“Your pop’s place.”
“The fuck are you doing bringing him to Pops? Nevermind. I’ll be there soon. Keep him fresh for me.”
I hang up the phone and jab a finger at Aubriella. “I need you to stay put this time. Do you understand me?”
She crosses her arms beneath her tits and gives me a petulant look. “I think I learned my lesson. You don’t need to remind me.”
I sigh. “Fair enough. Just be careful. If you stay here, you’re safe. No one can come up that lift without my personal approval. You’re untouchable here.”
She looks sour, but nods.
“Good girl,” I say with a smirk. I lean in to kiss her hard on the mouth and cup one of her tits while I’m at it. She arches her back toward me, but I pull away, still smirking.
22
Aubriella
Vince left after the mysterious phone call at two in the afternoon. He still hasn’t given me a phone, so I’m practically stranded. I could probably take the elevator and just walk back to my place in an hour or so, but thinking about going out there right now makes my knees weak. Every time I picture myself on the streets again, I want to hug my arms around myself and find a corner to hide in. It was so easy for them to find me and take me. I look out from the large penthouse windows to the streets below and imagine how many of the miniscule dots are bad men who want to take me.
His: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance (Citrione Crime Family) Page 12