Rule

by CD Reiss

  How could I revel in it? How could I align myself with the most savage part of the man I loved? And how could I feel so right about it? So empowered by murder?

  “P-P-P…” the man sputtered.

  Antonio and I exchanged a look and understood each other very clearly. Antonio removed his hand.

  “Patalano,” he croaked. Domenico looked at Antonio expectantly, then me, breathing hard.

  A beat passed before Antonio spoke low and with forceful intent. “Liar.”

  In one fell motion, Antonio bent and scooped Domenico’s knees and pulled them up. The railing became a fulcrum and the man’s body a plane, and he tumbled down the space between the stairs. I heard banging and grunting, but I didn’t look. I only had eyes for Antonio.

  Then it stopped.

  Antonio wasn’t breathing heavily, as if he’d expended zero energy, physical or otherwise. His gaze burned my skin, peeling it off and looking through me. I felt vulnerable and soaked in desire, bare before him and still safe.

  “You’re made for this life,” he said.

  “I’m made for you.”

  Below, someone screamed, and the camera behind me whirred to life. He took my hand and pulled me upstairs. He took the steps two at a time, not as if he were rushing but as if the steps were simply too small for him, and I kept up. I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know why, because he hadn’t told me where we were going. But hand in hand, step for step, in a pine-scented breeze, I made it to the top landing.

  “We don’t have time,” he said without breaking his pace. “There are no cameras here, so we could get out. Paulie’s here. The place is crawling with his family, but it looks like Donna Maria found me.”

  Antonio turned back to me as he shouldered the door, checking on me. Admiring. Connecting. Yanking that spiritual tether between us.

  Before the door clacked open, I noticed the floor and walls shaking in a consistent rhythm. Not an earthquake.

  He yanked me forward, pushing the door all the way open and drawing me onto the roof where a helicopter waited. The pressure of the air almost slammed the door on me, but he held it. The rotors spun against the orange haze of the setting sun, and a man crawled out of the cabin to hand Antonio his headset.

  “You got clearance to Montecito,” he shouted over the whip of the rotors. “Maintain at two thousand. Call in at squawk oh-three-five-one.”

  “Got it.”

  Antonio motioned to me and headed for the cockpit. I ran after him.

  “Are you joking?” I tried to gather my whipping hair together and failed.

  “Get in.”

  “We can’t run away!” Even as I said it, I knew how ridiculous I sounded. Of course we were running away. “And you can’t fly this thing!”

  “Yes, we can, and yes, I can.”

  “You didn’t tell me you had a pilot’s license!” I yelled over the wind.

  “I don’t. Now get in before I pick you up and belt you in like a child.”

  I hesitated, and Antonio didn’t have time for that. He picked me up by the waist and tossed me into the helicopter. I dropped into the bucket seat just as he reached for the belt.

  “I have it.” I tugged the belt. “Just promise me you’ve done this before.”

  “It’s the only way to get around Capri.”

  He went around to the left side and slid in, buckled in, and put his headphones on as if he knew what he was doing. I put on mine. He reached over to my headset and snapped the broadcast function off.

  “If you kill us, that’s fine,” I said. “Do not kill anyone else.”

  He turned to me and raised an eyebrow before pulling the helicopter off the roof. The bottom dropped out of my gut, and I gripped the edge of my seat.

  “I think the word in English is ‘ironic,’” he said once we were airborne. “You don’t want to kill anyone by accident?”

  “You want to discuss this now?”

  “Yes.”

  I lost my train of thought when he swerved east and my stomach twisted.

  “I can drive anything,” he said. “They all work the same. This just has forward and backward plus up and down.” He dipped again, high over Hollywood. “Like this.”

  We swerved across Wilshire, north toward the hills and the Observatory.

  He leveled it and took out a pack of cigarettes. He offered me one and I refused. He bit the end of one and slid it out.

  “I hope Domenico’s dead,” he said, clicking open his lighter as if he wasn’t flying a helicopter at the same time. “I told you once, I’ll kill anyone who touches you.”

  He was dead serious, almost bored. As if stating the date a war ended or began. As if vengeance was no more than a mathematical equation that needed to be solved. And it was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. Almost as sexy as the knowledge that I’d kill for him with the same seriousness.

  “Capo,” I said to get his attention.

  He shifted his attention while keeping the helicopter at a steady level.

  “I don’t know who I am with you, but I like me better now than I ever have. I’m scared. And elated. But the wife. Your wife—”

  “Stop. We are not discussing her.”

  “We have to,” I said.

  We crossed the twisting thread of the LA River, which actually had water in it from the recent rains.

  “You are my life. It doesn’t matter what I am, or what I’ve done, as long as you’re mine. Nothing in the past matters. There is you, and nothing else.” He didn’t look at me but kept his eyes on his work. A cluster of taller buildings appeared ahead, and he headed for them. “My one job,” he said, holding up a finger, “is to make sure you know how to protect yourself when they finally kill me.”

  “Stop it.”

  “It’s very clear to me. Do you know why I didn’t confess to doing Paulie? Because if they send me to jail, I can’t protect you. And yes, I have to protect Valentina too, because I made a promise to her. But it’s not the same. Do not make the mistake of thinking it’s the same.”

  He looked at me, a world of confidence and confusion churning in his eyes. Both and neither. I read him like a book and understood that he knew what he had to do, even if he didn’t like or understand it.

  I wasn’t as sure. I didn’t know what I had to do. I wasn’t as confident that I could keep him alive or as comfortable with the moral ambiguity of the past week.

  I gripped the seat on our descent, but he landed the helicopter smoothly.

  He winked at me. “Easier than the beach.”

  “You’ll have to tell me how you managed this,” I said.

  “I’m surprised you don’t know already.” He snapped off his headset. I unbuckled as he got out and crossed the front of the craft to my side.

  “I’d just like a straight answer,” I said.

  He held out his hand, and I took it. “You come from a very powerful family, Contessa. They are no less organized than mine.”

  I should have been insulted. Shocked. Confused and curious. But I wasn’t. I was frozen in place as I remembered everything I knew and had been told. My father’s way of moving mountains to get what he wanted. Margie’s way of making things happen with a phone call. The way people who hurt us wound up ruined or dead.

  Was I made for Antonio by dint of my genetics?

  Was I an animal from birth? Had the real me been dormant all this time?

  I took Antonio’s hand and slid down into the whipping wind of the landing pad. I felt a twinge of guilt for even touching a married man, but I stifled it. We had too much to do.

  He paused for a moment as the rotors wound down. His head keened a little, peering inside me. “Some things are in the stars. I was meant to protect you. And you were meant to rule.”

  fifteen.

  theresa

  ntonio hustled me down the stairs, waving to the pilot who was waiting for the craft. Montecito Hospital was less luxurious than Sequoia, but it spanned four city blocks.

  Antonio seemed to
have planned everything in the half an hour I’d spent giving Jonathan my ring. We careened down two flights of stairs before cutting through a bridge across Pacific Boulevard and catching an elevator. Everyone faced the door, and he pulled me into him until my shoulder blades touched his chest. He put his finger on the back of my neck, drawing on it from my hairline to the place where my spine disappeared under my shirt. I shuddered, and his dick got hard before we made it to the lobby.

  I had no idea what to do about that beautiful erection, or what it did for me.

  Or what it made me. The interloper. The other woman. The siren call to a taken man’s filthiest desires. Not a speechwriter in sensible shoes, but an accountant and a killer with the grime of Tijuana still in her hair.

  I was all those things, and more. And less.

  I followed Antonio to the parking lot, listing them in no particular order.

  Tramp.

  Trash.

  Fool.

  “My god, Spin,” Zo said when we got to the deepest level of the parking lot.

  I hadn’t said a word, because I didn’t know what role to speak from.

  “You look like shit,” he said, hugging Antonio and kissing each cheek, left then right. He pointed at me and apparently chose courtesy over truth. “You look nice, of course.”

  Whore.

  Slut.

  Mistress.

  “It’s about a mile away,” Antonio said with no preamble. He opened the back door for me and sat in the front with Zo.

  I didn’t mind being his whore, his one and only plaything. The shoe fit, and I wore it with pleasure. But being his mistress, his second, ate at me. He had a wife, and I wouldn’t be the one to break that, nor would I become what destroyed my own life, no matter the circumstances. I wasn’t exonerated because we hadn’t known she was alive.

  “Where are we going?” I asked in the car, feeling like I didn’t belong there or anywhere.

  “Up a hill.” Antonio twisted in his seat to face me. “You’re taken care of. Don’t worry.”

  I’d made a concerted decision not to think about Valentina while we were getting out of the precinct, but in the backseat of the car, with him unintentionally using a phrase for the whores of married men, I lost the battle for my own composure.

  “Stop looking at me,” I said. I couldn’t do this in front of Zo. I couldn’t break down. I had resources. I’d kept myself from falling apart in worse situations. Goddamnit. My chin wiggled, and my sinuses filled up. I couldn’t recall a prime number over two.

  Antonio put his hand on my knee. I let my fingers slip around his, and I closed my eyes, just feeling his hand around mine. A deep breath. His presence in the car. The glue that held my mind together.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  I nodded, squeezing my eyes shut against tears.

  “You are first,” he said, reading my mind.

  I didn’t want him there. His left hand was on mine, with its bare ring finger. I pulled my hand away. “You’re married. I can’t touch you. It’s not right.”

  He snapped his seat belt off and thrust himself over the front seat, extending his body back to me and leveraging himself against my knees. His body bridged the front and back. His face was an inch from mine, and his smell of the forest after a fire consumed me.

  “Sit down,” Zo said a hundred miles away. “You’re gonna get us pulled over!”

  “Sei mia,” he whispered.

  “Don’t kiss me,” I said. “Just don’t, I’m—”

  But he did, and so gently that the kiss itself was a request for a kiss. I squeaked involuntarily, because I didn’t want to kiss him. I didn’t want to do what I’d said I wouldn’t do. I wanted to stay strong in my conviction that until we worked out what was happening with his wife, there would be no touching, no kissing, no nothing.

  And he ripped all of that away. In the first microsecond of the kiss, when his parted lips brushed the length of mine as if introducing themselves for the first time, I lost every ounce of will I had against him. I needed him. I wouldn’t make it through this without some part of his body against some part of mine. I was going mad, surely. Mad with violence or mad with need, but mad mad mad.

  I opened my mouth, and his tongue greeted mine. It wasn’t a lusty kiss but a joining. A reassurance. A nod to our connected destinies.

  I put my hands on his cheeks, and he pulled back ever so slightly.

  “I’m scared,” I said. “And I love you.”

  “She admits it,” he said, smiling. “Amore mio, you may have to carry our love alone, but it won’t be heavy.”

  “It will be, and I don’t have the strength.”

  He pulled back to kneel on the front seat. Before turning toward the windshield, with his left hand on the back of his seat and his right on Zo’s headrest, he said, “Then it’s agreed. We live. We live, and we share the load. Dimmi di sii?”

  His confidence was infectious, and I let myself believe him for a second before spiraling back into doubt. “Si, Capo. Si.”

  “Great,” Zo said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but there’s a cop two car lengths behind.”

  Antonio slapped Zo in the back of the head and twisted back into his seat.

  Zo stopped at the end of a twisted path, at a modern little house with no windows in front, and we all got out of the car.

  “What’s the plan?” Zo asked, rubbing his forehead.

  “Tonight we sleep.” Antonio clapped Zo on the shoulder. “Tomorrow we plan. Give me your piece.”

  Zo unbuckled his shoulder holster and gave it to Antonio.

  “Grazie,” Antonio said, then motioned at the car. “You have one in there for Theresa?”

  The crickets creaked, the wind crackled through the palm trees, and Zo looked at Antonio as if he’d lost his mind.

  But Antonio just stood straight with his hand out. “They took everything on the way up.”

  Zo reached into the glove compartment and took out a small gun. He checked for bullets and slapped it into his boss’s palm. “She know how to use it?”

  “Blow your left nut off from ten meters.”

  “All right.” He shrugged, resigned. They shook hands, and Zo drove away.

  Antonio punched a code in the door, and we entered. He dropped the weapons on the counter with a clatter. The back of the house overlooked the San Gabriel Valley. I saw the barest of furnishings. A couch. A table and three chairs. Blinds, not curtains. Not a single painting, picture, or scuff mark broke the white expanse of the walls.

  “This your house?” I asked.

  “It’s your sister’s. I’ve never met a fixer like her.”

  “Margie? God, I—”

  He crushed me in a bruising kiss, and I responded by accepting it, yielding to what was right, what fit, what made sense. His hands yanked up my shirt, his tongue owning mine.

  I pushed him away. “Stop.”

  Whatever agility he used to hurt people, he used on me, twisting me around, pushing me against the window overlooking the valley and tying my shirt until the tension held my hands behind me. “Cosa c’é?”

  “I just…” His scent distracted me. His breath in my ear. The hard-on pushing into me. My body made excuses, but damn it, I had a long explanation planned, one that was well-suited to a sane and civil dinner or a car ride. “I can’t. I… we need to talk about—”

  He clamped his hand over my mouth and pulled my head to his shoulder. “I don’t want to talk,” he hissed into my ear. “I want to fuck.”

  I couldn’t make more than an mmm into his palm. He pulled off my shirt, freeing my hands, while keeping my head stable against him.

  “Pull your pants down, Contessa.”

  I grunted a no and tried to shake my head. I was sweating and spit covered his hand, but he held me.

  “You’re going to pull your pants down right in front of this window. And you’re going to be quiet when I fuck your pussy. Not a word. No talking. No yelling. Then I’m taking your mouth
, and you’re going to swallow all those words.”

  I begged with my eyes, but we’d done it rough so many times.

  He was so serious, squeezing until he dented my cheeks. “Pull your pants down. Let me see it.”

  He pulled me back until I could see us in the window. He was hidden behind me except for the hand covering my mouth and the face growling into my ear. I swallowed. I saw my hard nipples in the window’s reflection, and if I took my pants down, he’d feel how wet I was.

  “Don’t make me take my belt to your ass before I fuck it.”

  I heard and felt him undo his belt with his free hand. I made a sound in my throat. He looked at me in the darkened window. I wasn’t allowed to protest.

  “Look at us, Contessa. Watch when you give yourself to me.” He locked my head forward, and I watched him put his hands down my pants. “Adesso”—his wrist disappeared below my waistband—“put your hands on the glass. Let’s see how much you want to fuck.”

  I shook my head, but he pushed me forward, and I had to hold my hands against the glass to keep from falling. Cruel. He was so cruel. And my body was lit from within by his brutality.

  He slid his hand to where I was soaked for him and put two fingers inside me as if he had every right to. My knees nearly buckled.

  “No!” I said it behind his hand and knotted my brows, rattling my vocal cords.

  If this wasn’t serious enough for him, if he didn’t hear this cry of mind over body, we were over. I swore it. My better self needed to be heard.

  sixteen.

  antonio

  he always resisted when she was tense, and I always forced my way through. This was us. This was how we were. I felt better afterward, no matter how I felt before, and our ferocity always lapsed into tenderness.

  But she was crying, and she meant it. She wasn’t playing. I was about to hurt her, or I’d done it already.

  Had I lost her?

  My pain was almost physical. I took my hand off her mouth.

  “Let me go,” she gasped.

  “Why?”

  I didn’t know why I asked. To fill the space, maybe. I stepped back with a heavy heart. I’d done something wrong. Maybe too rough? I didn’t have a minute to ask what exactly had gone over the line in the sand for her. I didn’t have a second to make it up to her. She buttoned her pants and walked out of the room.