by Naomi West
“Oh my God! I hurt you,” I lift one hand to the bruise and gently touch it, horrified with myself.
He shrugs as he turns the water off and lifts me into the tub and onto his lap. He grabs the loofa and starts gently cleaning me off. “So?”
“But, isn’t it really painful?” I look up at him, chagrin all over my face. I know I was kind of in another place when I just went to town on him, but I shouldn’t have hurt him like that.
“Was it really painful when I spanked your perfect little ass?” he asks, running the loofa over my stomach and breasts and dunking it down to gently wash over my pussy.
I blush at his blunt words and gasp at the gentle contact but I answer his question. “A little bit. But mostly it felt good.” I look up at him as I admit it. “It made me come so hard.”
“See?” he said, smiling down at me. “Why would this be any different than that?”
“I don’t know,” I shrug and let him tip my hair back into the water, “because I’m the one who did it.”
His hands stroke over my scalp and it makes my eyes fall closed. “You’re too hard on yourself, gorgeous. You gotta start from the truth.”
“What do you mean?”
“The truth is that you’re a good person. You gotta start from there. You judge yourself so harshly. You see your own actions through the idea that you’re bad. In your mind, a bad person bites her man too hard and bruises him during sex.” He reaches for the shampoo and starts to smooth it through my hair. “But I, for instance, see your actions through the lens of you being a good person. You know, this amazingly sweet, kind, passionate woman got caught up in the moment and gave her man the kind of pleasure/pain that made him come so hard he left earth for a minute.”
“You think I see myself as bad?”
“Sometimes. You can just be so hard on yourself. Like right now, you’re beating yourself up for talking to your father that way.”
My stomach tightens and I turn to look at him. “How did you know that?”
He starts to wash the shampoo out of my hair and his voice gets quieter. “Because I see you, remember? I know you. And I know Patrizzio. He deserved those words, gorgeous. Trust me. He deserves far harsher words than the ones you just gave him.”
“I know that,” I say as I drop my eyes. I hate talking about this. “I know my father is bad man.”
“No. That’s not what I mean. I don’t mean he deserves those words as punishment for his sins. I mean he deserves it because he needs it in order to get his head on straight. Somewhere inside him he still believes that he can use his children as pawns and manipulate them into relationships with him.”
“He’s delusional,” I whisper, the realization of it washing over me. “You never think your own parents are just straight up out of their minds. Even when they are murdering, reprehensible, mob bosses.”
“Definitely,” Dare agrees with me. “And harsh words from his beloved daughter might help him to get a clearer understanding of the situation. That you’re not to be fucked with. And if he wants to know you, he has to respect you.”
I dunk my head under water and our hands tangle as we scrub the shampoo out of my long hair. I come back up and brush the water out of my eyes. “How come you get that and he doesn’t?”
He shrugs. “Because I see you clearly. Because I was never blinded by emotions so I could always see the missteps that everybody made along the way.”
I freeze in his arms. Does that mean that he’s blinded by them now? I want to ask, but my stomach flips too much to get the words out. Instead, I switch positions with him and start to get his hair wet.
There was one little string he left before that I can’t help but tug at. “So you’re my man, huh?”
His eyes come open as I massage his scalp and he holds me in his steady stare, his head in my lap. “You got a problem with that?”
“No,” I shake my head.
“Good,” he says, dunking his head and scrubbing off the shampoo. “Because you’re my woman.”
“And what does that mean?” I ask, cocking my head to one side. “What comes with the territory of being your woman?”
He stands up in the tub and water streams from him. He reaches down and drags me to my feet. “It means I take care of your needs.”
He grabs a towel off the hook and wraps me up in it. “It means that I protect you and keep you safe. I feed you when you’re hungry and carry your bag. I make sure you don’t sleep at the kitchen table. I get you to your classes on time. I take you to the doctor when you’re sick. And I fuck you when you’re horny. That’s what it means.”
He stalks out of the bathroom, slightly riled up. And I follow him, grinning like a fool.
Chapter Eighteen
Dare
“Baby, I need your help.” Alessia stands in the doorway of my bedroom, which I pretty much only use as my office these days. Every night I sleep in her room, wrapped around her like a coat. I inwardly shrug. Maybe that makes me whipped. I really don’t care. She’s worth being whipped for.
I put down the manual I was reading on a new kind of security camera I’m installing and give her my immediate attention. “With what?”
“It’s Rett.” Her words and the expression on her face makes my stomach drop. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t smelled something off with Rett over the last few weeks. Really, since Alessia and I started hooking up, she was suddenly a lot harder to get ahold of. She came around way less often and she barely stayed to shoot the shit with Alessia. Which struck me as odd considering how much they would talk before Alessia and I hooked up. And I knew it had been hurting Alessia’s feelings. I could see it in her every time her calls went to voicemail or Rett canceled plans.
I motion for Alessia to come sit with me on the small love seat under the window of my room. “What is it?”
“I can’t explain it, just a really bad feeling. Something is really off, I think. She’s been out of touch lately and in part it’s because you and I got together and I was less available. And then she told me that she’d started dating somebody too. This guy, Anthony.”
I rub her back and listen hard to her story, my feeling of dread growing every second. “And then last night she posted a picture of the two of them to Instagram. And I got this weird feeling like I recognized him. Only, I have no idea how. I just can’t place him. It was a really weird picture too. Rett almost looked scared in it. I was sleepy when I first saw it, but I was kind of like, why would she post this weird picture of herself? And when I looked again this morning the post had been deleted. She’s not answering her phone. And when I called her work, her manager told me she’d been fired two weeks ago because she’d stopped coming to work.”
“Hm, okay,” I run a hand through my hair and try to think how to react. I don’t want to freak Alessia out, but all of it sounds really bad. “Do you know if she’s been going to class?”
She shakes her head. “No. We talked last week and she made it seem like everything was great. Including her job and her relationship. So, I don’t know anything, I guess.”
“Okay, what do you want to do?” I’m already organizing a plan in my head to have Rett checked out. I’ll get one or two of my guys from Chicago out here to track her down and trail her, look into her affairs a little bit.
“I think I just want to swing by her house and see if she’s there. Maybe they broke up and she’s just laying low.”
I think for a second. She’s really not going to like this. “I’ll go by myself.”
“What?” Her back goes stick straight and her eyes flame. “Why? No way. She’s my best friend! There’s no way I’m sending my bodyguard to do my friend duties.”
She crossed her arms over her chest but I glared right after her. “You’re not sending your bodyguard. You’re sending your man.”
She uncrosses her arms and her eyes warm a little but I can see she’s still going to try and argue her way out of this. “Dare-,”
“Alessia,” I cut
her off, “if Rett is really in trouble, there’s no way I’m going to let you walk into that trouble? And in all honestly, the fact that you think you recognize her boyfriend but you can’t remember where from is a really big red flag to me? It means it might be someone from your past. Maybe someone you’ve seen around your father’s house. I’m not letting you walk into a Greco family trap even if it is your best friend who’s in trouble?”
She opens her mouth to argue, but suddenly her face crumples and she drops her head into her hands. “How did this happen, Dare? What did my father even do to the Greco’s that they want to kill me this badly?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. But your father has made a lot of deals with a lot of people. And he goes back on them when it suits him. And he shoots his way out of others.”
“Why did you work for him? He’s so awful. Why did you stay? The money?”
I’ve been hoping she wouldn’t ask me that question. I’m not proud of the answer. “Mostly it was the money. Your father pays very well for loyalty. And I was loyal to him.”
“What do you mean you were loyal to him? You’re not anymore?”
I shake my head and brush the hair back from her face. “I’m loyal to you now. I’ll choose you over him every time. And to your father that’s equal to betrayal. Maybe he’s right.”
She rests her forehead against mine and sighs deeply. “I want to go with you to Rett’s house.”
“No, gorgeous. If something goes wrong, I don’t want to have to worry about you.” It’s a manipulative argument but I know it’ll get her to make the safer choice.
“So I just stay in the house and wait?”
“No. You stay locked in your room and wait.”
“What?!” she screeches, glaring at me indignantly.
“If I’m not here, you’re locked in your room.”
She pushes off from my lap and stomps out of the room. “Fine! But only if you go right now. I’m really worried about her.”
I stand and strap my gun to my chest and watch her perfect ass stomp away from me.
Chapter Nineteen
Dare
Rett’s front door is unlocked and my stomach is in knots as I slide into her house. I pray there’s nothing grisly for me to find. She’s a good girl and doesn’t deserve to have anything bad happen to her.
Her apartment is small, one of many in the complex. There are signs of a struggle in her small living room. Pillows from the couch on the floor, a knocked over vase, untouched food on the stove. The refrigerator door is open and I close it as I pick my way through the small kitchen toward her bedroom. I inch the door open and see some of her clothes strewn around on the ground. The bathroom is undisturbed but a little untidy.
I check the closets and determine that she’s definitely not there. I search around the apartment for some indication of the last time she was home but I don’t find much. Before I leave I knock on the doors of her neighbors. One of them is a totally zoned out stoner who probably couldn’t pick his own mother out of a line up but the one on the other side of the hall is helpful. She’s kind of nerdy and seems nervous to be talking to me, but she tells me that Rett left in a hurry this morning with a guy with black hair. They got in a big black car that ran over a mailbox on its way out. I look down in the parking lot and see that one of the mailboxes is splintered on the ground.
It’s both a relief and a disappointment. I certainly didn’t want to find her hurt or dead but being missing is pretty worrying in itself.
On the drive back to our house, I mull over a million different reasons for Rett’s bizarre behavior, but in the end, come up dry. I’m going to have to break the news to Alessia and then get some of my guys on it as soon as possible hopefully before the police get involved. Police just fuck everything up and take about a million times longer with all their paperwork and procedural bullshit.
I disarm the three different sets of alarms I have coded for entering our house and come through the living room. I can hear her talking on the phone in the bedroom. I smile to myself. Good girl. She stayed in there. I half expected her to be lounging in the living room when I got back. She has no respect when it came to my rules for her security. I go to the door to knock and tell her I’m back but I freeze in my tracks when I hear the words she’s saying.
“That wasn’t the plan, Dante! Are you out of your fucking mind?” she pauses while she listens. “The plan was to get Dare out of the way for a few months so you guys could set up Dad. Get Dad arrested and get him the fuck out of our lives for good.”
Her voice sounds weirdly dead. What the fuck does she mean ‘get Dare out of the way’? What the fuck plan is she talking about?
“You’ve fucked it up, huh? All this work for nothing, huh?”
Work? What work is she referring to? Making me think we were in a relationship? Tricking me into leaving Chicago?
My phone buzzes in my hand and I see a message from one of my guys, Artuz, flash across the screen.
Holy Fuck, man. Check the news.
I ignore it and stride over to Alessia’s bedroom door, yanking it open. She jumps about a mile in the air and turns to look at me, her face slack with shock at seeing me so suddenly. I just heard everything she was saying to Dante. Now I know the truth.
Chapter Twenty
Alessia
I’m going out of my skin waiting for Dare to come back from Rett’s. I’m praying that he’s just going to come back with Rett in tow. She’ll have some crazy story about her sordid affair that ended in some big fight and I’ll make her dinner and we’ll chat about it.
Something tells me that Rett is in serious trouble. If only I could remember where the hell I recognized her boyfriend from it could give me some tiny indication what kind of trouble she’s in.
I flop down on the bed and kick off my shoes. I flip through my phone for a second, looking for anything to distract me, but I almost immediately toss my phone down. I’m strung too tight for something mindless. The only thing that’s going to calm me down right now is hearing some good news about my friend.
I run my fingers through my hair and almost jump out of my skin when my phone rings. I feel a stab of disappointment when I realize that it’s Dante and not Dare.
“Hey, Dante,” I say trying not to let my mood soak through into my voice.
“Alessia,” he says and I’m immediately at full attention. Dante never sounds so solemn on the phone.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m not completely sure yet. But it’s gone bad. Our plan.”
He sounds like he’s had too much to drink. Or been drugged.
“What plan? Dante, what’s going on?”
“Me and Fabi had a plan. We were gonna make sure you were safe. But now Fabi’s gone missing.”
I sit straight up on the bed as my stomach tightens and threatens to be sick. “What?”
“I talked to him a few minutes ago on the phone. But he won’t tell me where he is.”
“Dante, start from the beginning and try to tell me what’s going on.”
“Fabi and I have been intentionally fucking up some of Dad’s deals with Greco. Our plan was to get him caught dealing dirty and get him sent to prison. But Dare kept getting in the way. He had good instincts. He’d always lead Dad out of the deals we’d set as traps. So when Dare went to Michigan with you, we knew it was perfect timing. We knew you’d keep him out of the way for a few months at least. Especially since you weren’t coming home for the holidays. And then we could set up Dad. But everything went to hell tonight.”
“What happened tonight?” I feel like I’m going to be sick. My mind is racing. In the space of a few sentences Dante has brought my life crashing down around m years.
“They got Dad. But they got Greco, too. They chased me. Car crash. I got out. Fabi never showed. And the Greco’s are mad we got him arrested.” His words are slurring badly and it occurs to me that if he’s been in a car accident tonight he’s probably badly concussed. “I gotta go, two
shoes.”
“No! Dante, stay on the phone with me. Don’t go. Just talk to me.” I put the phone on speaker and quickly text Clara.
Do you know where Dante is? I just got a weird call from him.
She texts back almost immediately.
Don’t panic, but he’s in the hospital. He suffered a concussion tonight. Car accident, but he’s going to be totally fine. I’m about to talk with the doctor right now. He’s resting in the other room.
“Do you have any idea where Fabi went tonight, Dante?”
“Where’s Fabi?” he asks.