She felt the scars there, and they were part of this, too, somehow. They were part of him, of the violence and chaos of his life, and she needed to feel them all, to etch them into this moment. Without any clear thought or intention, with only that sense of need, just as the excruciating pleasure at her core was rising to the peak of release, Billy reached over Tony’s thrusting, grunting, pummeling body and strafed all her nails up the full length of his back. Her fingertips juddered over the terrain of old wounds like wheels over a rutted road.
Tony went tense—and then came, slamming harder into her than ever before, triggering her own shrieking explosion at the same moment he roared with his.
Billy didn’t know how long they stayed frozen like that, locked together in a post-orgasmic rictus, his body so deep inside hers they were practically fused. But the water was cooling when Tony finally lifted his head from her shoulder and looked at her again.
She saw guilt. The shadowy dance of demons returning.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked, before he could ask the same question, in the hopes that doing so would defuse his worry.
It did. His eyes flared with subtle surprise, and a little smile flickered at one corner of his mouth. His lips were much darker than usual, flushed with the heat of their passion.
“No. I don’t feel much back there. Nobody’s ever done that before. It was—I don’t know.”
“Bad?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what it was. But I came so hard I think I strained a muscle, so ...”
She laughed, and they both groaned when the clench of her muscles moved through their joining.
“How about you?” he asked. “You okay?”
“I’m okay. I think I understand why you need that. I feel ... better. Not just because that was the most intense orgasm I have ever had, but my head’s on straight again, after ...”
“Yeah.”
The reference to the night before, no matter how oblique, brought reality back. He pulled carefully out—oh, okay, that hurt some—and set her gently on the floor of the shower. They rinsed in the cooling water, and Tony turned to shut the tap off.
His back was streaked with bloody scratches, from about the bottom of his ribs to his shoulders. Billy didn’t have long nails, but she’d clearly been determined to leave a mark. That was too much, though. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him, wound him.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I bled you.”
“Yeah?” He twisted to try to see over his shoulder, but of course could not. He stepped out of the shower and checked in the mirror over the sinks. “Damn, Bill.”
“I’m so sorry.”
But he grinned. “Don’t be. I love that you were so into it and wild. I do need that sometimes, you’re right. It makes me feel better, too.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her close. “You think you can fill your divot, though? I don’t want to bleed on my white sheets.”
Billy hugged him. “You are a complicated guy, Tony Cioccolanti.”
“You’re not so easy yourself, Billy Jones. That’s why it’s fun.”
~oOo~
They slept until nearly noon, curled into a spoon, and then Billy had to face her life and the consequences to it of her relationship with Tony.
As she’d offered him at the beginning of the week, Tony gave her a t-shirt and a pair of sweats, and he drove her back to the club. They passed Christ the King Church and Cover to Cover Books on the way, and Billy’s stomach rolled at the sight of the damage. Windows blown out, parts of the bookshop sagging and falling, brick and glass everywhere. All the stained-glass windows of the church were shattered, and the heavy wood doors were scorched. Yellow crime scene tape fluttered in a summer breeze at both locations.
The whole town was quiet. Even the boardwalk, on a mid-July Saturday. The shops were closed. The beach was deserted. Everyone was afraid to be outside.
The lot was empty but for her van and Cain’s. Tony parked right in front of the door and followed her to it. He’d announced his intention not to leave her alone for even one minute today, and she hadn’t argued. She was afraid. More now, having seen the ghost town Quiet Cove had become, than at any time since the bullets had stopped flying.
Before she could reach for the door, it flew open, and Cain lunged for her, snagging her into a fierce hug. “Thank god, baby girl! Goddamn!”
She indulged him for a few seconds, then wedged herself free. “I’m okay, Cain. I told you last night. I didn’t get hurt.”
He threw a narrow scowl Tony’s way. “Brother, you gotta know you’re no good for her. Bringin’ shit like this into her life?”
“Cain, shut up,” she said.
At the same time, Tony said, “I’m not your fucking brother, you junkie piece of shit. What kind of shit’ve you been bringing into her life all these years? Dumping it on her and running off.”
Cain puffed up, and Billy pushed him back. “Both of you, shut the fuck up. Neither of you have a single word I want to hear about how I live my own damn life. Assholes.”
She pushed past her father and went into the building. It was her intent to slam to the door on them, and she gave it a good strong heave, but Tony caught it before it hit the latch and pushed it back open. He came in, and Cain followed. They didn’t look at each other, but at least they weren’t fighting.
“Both of you, sit. Cain, I need to talk to you.”
There was half a pot of coffee in the maker, still hot. Billy pulled two cups down and made them for her and Tony. She brought the cups and the carafe over and sat at the table with two glowering men.
After a deep sip for energy, she looked at her father. “I do not want to talk to you about last night. I don’t want your opinions about my life. I do not give you that right. But I will answer questions about what happened, if I have the answers. First, though, I want to tell you what happens now. I need to close the club, until whatever this is blows over and it’s safe again. I’m going to call everybody on the payroll and tell them to stay home. I’ll pay everybody as long as I can. Hopefully this will only be a few days. I’ll pay you as assistant manager, like we discussed. But I’m closing up the club and staying with Tony until things are right again, so you should find another place to stay.” He meant to find an apartment, anyway. This just expedited his search.
Cain refreshed his coffee from the carafe and stared into the mug for a while. Tony wisely kept his mouth shut, too. Billy filled the space of quiet by listing in her mind the calls she had to make this afternoon.
“Okay, Bill. I understand. And I guess it’s time for me to go. This isn’t workin’ out.”
Billy laughed. At first, it was just a harsh scoff. Then, as the realization of her foolishness flowered and mixed with the remnants of exhaustion, worry, and fear of the night before, that single barked syllable became a fit of laughter, until she pushed her cup aside and laid her head on her arms and just guffawed.
When it ran its course, she sat up again. Both men stared at her.
She turned to Cain. “Fucking hell, I am the world’s biggest fool. Of course you’re gonna run off again. Why the fuck would you stay now? Things just got hard, and we all know you don’t have the sack for that.” She darted a glance at Tony before she added, looking for something that would stab deep, “Hey—you know what? I heard a rumor that there’s somebody dealing off the boardwalk. I bet you could get a hookup before you rattle your rusty ass out of town.”
“Jesus, Bill,” Cain gasped. He rubbed his chest, as if she’d made a literal wound.
Tony’s expression was blank, but his eyes gleamed with keen observation.
“Can you give us a minute, Tony?” Cain asked.
“No.” Tony didn’t even look his way to deliver that word. His eyes were locked on Billy, who didn’t know whether to laugh more or cry instead.
Cain gave Tony a dirty look, but decided to have his say with the mobster in the room. “You don’t want me here, Billy,” he said, in a voice halfway to a whisper. “You don’t call
me Dad, you won’t tell me about your life or let me say a word or have a thought about it. You don’t want me. I know I earned that, but there’s no point in me stickin’ around, then.”
“You did earn it. If you want to be my father, you have to fucking be my father!” She didn’t have the emotional reserves for this. Not now. “Why are you doing this now?”
“What time would be better? I’m just in the way here, with everything goin’ on. You’re right—things are hard now, and you won’t let me help you make it better.”
“So you’re going to make it worse instead. Typical. Okay, go. Now. Get out.”
“Billy...” he reached for her hand.
“GET OUT!” She shoved her mug across the table. It sailed between Tony and Cain and hit the staff lockers. The ceramic broke, and hot coffee splashed everywhere.
Cain stood. “Okay.” He dug into his pocket, pulled out his keys to the club, and set them on the table. “I love you, Wild Bill.”
She stared at the keys until the door had opened and her father had walked out of her life again. Tony sat where he was, perfectly still. He said nothing, but she could feel his eyes on her.
Fury and pain charged through her veins, and she could no longer sit still. She jumped up with a guttural growl, and her chair fell back. She charged toward the door, but pulled herself back before she grabbed the handle. What had she meant to do, run after him? FUCK that!
Instead, she spun around. Cain had made himself breakfast, and left a typical mess. A carton of eggs on the worktop. The wrapping from a package of bacon. A wedge of cheddar on the cheeseboard. His plate with the greasy remnants of the meal he’d made.
It all went flying, in every direction. And then the pots from the shelves beneath the worktop. She was screaming, she could hear herself, could feel the sound strafe her throat, but she couldn’t stop. When the worktop was clear and the shelves empty, she snatched open the glass cabinet and started heaving barware at the walls.
Tony’s arms clamped around her from behind, and he folded forward, forcing her to do the same. She was still screaming, and fighting to free herself, until he brought her all the way down to the floor, and then the screams stopped and she could only sob.
Then, when her screams abated, she heard that he was speaking. He chanted, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay” at her ear, softly. Calmly.
She turned into his hold and wept on his chest.
~ 21 ~
Tony started awake, his breath trapped in his throat. That goddamn dream, of course.
But it was different now, had been different the past few times. Since the firefight at Dom’s. Before, for months, the dream’s sensory details had been as vivid as life, in some ways even more. Things he didn’t know he’d seen that night in a Jersey video store had been blade-sharp in his dreaming memories. Like the color of Artem Honcharenko’s eyes: light brown, the same color as Tony’s mother’s tiger’s eye ring.
Now, the dream was just noise and flash. Shadows. Familiar enough to be recognizable as the same memory, but the details were fading. He hadn’t seen the boy in the dream since Dom’s. A week had passed since that night, and this was the third time he’d dreamt shadows. He relived that night as often as ever, and yet it was fading. Finally.
Why it was happening now, after months, he hadn’t taken the time to sort out yet. Maybe just because more recent events were crowding his head. Or maybe because he hadn’t slept alone since Dom’s.
As he lay contemplating his psyche, Tony came to understand that he was alone in bed right now. Billy had stayed with him all week, long enough for a sense of familiarity to emerge. It turned out that Billy was a busy sleeper. Though they started each night curled up together, at some point he lost contact with her in his big bed. So it hadn’t been immediately obvious that she wasn’t in bed at all.
He turned his head to be sure, and yep, the covers on the other side were turned back and the linens were cool. She’d been gone a minute. The room was still dark, with no sign of dawn at the windows. A quick glance at his phone showed at it was just before four a.m. They’d been keeping slightly more regular hours with West Egg closed.
He got up and rooted around on the floor for the boxer briefs he’d discarded last night. Pulling them on, he headed out to hunt up his girl.
He found her sitting on the sofa, cross-legged, with her MacBook open on her lap. She wore his shirt from yesterday, with only a couple buttons closed. The glow of the screen illuminated her face in a halo of soft light; the rest of the room was dark.
“What’s up?” He sat beside her.
A couple spreadsheets were open on the screen. He didn’t know her accounting system, but he saw enough red on the screen to understand what had her sleepless. This dead week was killing her.
All of Quiet Cove was hurting, in fact. The Ukrainians had made a big, violent mess all over their sleepy beach town, smack in the middle of the summer, and with Nick and Angie still in the hospital—and Nick still in a coma—the Pagano Brothers couldn’t guarantee the town’s safety. Most of the town was buttoned up tight, and tourists had fled in droves.
All hands were on deck, patrolling the town like some kind of militia, but that didn’t really settle the minds and hearts of the town citizens. They saw the closed church, the boarded-up market and bookstore, the ruin of Dominic’s, and Pagano men rolling up and down the streets like beat cops, and they were not reassured.
Donnie was working around the clock, shoring up alliances and trying to work some kind of deal to make it safe enough to get the town back on its feet. He’d kept Tony and Trey close, as if they were his consiglieres, but Tony didn’t know enough to be more than a sounding board, and it was turning out that Trey didn’t know as much as Tony had thought, either. The only reason Tony could figure that he and Trey had Donnie’s ear right now is that they had been at Dom’s, and they had been the ones to end the fight and kill most of the shooters. All but one.
Capos were grumbling that two underlings had been pulled up, especially since Nick was still unconscious and in intensive care, and people were beginning to talk about the next generation of the Pagano Brothers. If Donnie became don, a lot of things in the organization could change. An entirely different path to the future. Maybe Trey didn’t get made at all. There were a lot of Pagano men who would be relieved for Trey, a half-blood, to get pushed out.
But here Donnie was, bringing Trey close, just as Nick had. And the men were talking about it.
Tony knew, though, that Donnie wasn’t thinking about leading the organization. He was protecting Nick’s work, his family, his legacy. His entire focus was on making sure that Quiet Cove and the Pagano Brothers were exactly as healthy and powerful when Nick returned to his seat as they’d been when he’d left the office for dinner at Dom’s.
Billy closed her Mac, and the room went full dark. Her head dropped to his shoulder. “I think this is it. I don’t see how I’m going to recover from this week.”
She was paying her whole staff according to the hours they would have worked had the club been open. Tony had thought that foolish and had told her as much, but she didn’t want to lose employees she valued, and she didn’t want them hurting while they waited for the club to open. So instead, she was taking on all the hurt—and it was killing her.
Frankly, Billy’s financial situation was a puzzle. Her family, on her mom’s side, was insanely rich. The one-percenters of one-percenters. It seemed odd that she would ever have any money problems at any moment of her life.
He’d asked her about it—they’d talked money a few times in the past few days—and she’d given him an explanation, but he understood only imperfectly. As far as he could tell, she’d been pretty low on the inheritance list, and she and her mother were embarrassments to the family in some kind of way, so she either couldn’t or wouldn’t ask her uncles for help.
Why she’d be an embarrassment was the thing that hung him up. She was classy and smart, with a frilly degree from a fancy
college. She handled her shit. She was the kind of person to be proud of. And yet she fell short of their standards somehow.
So here she sat, drowning in red, all alone.
Conversely, Coastal Ballistics and Self-Defense had stayed open—it would have pretty fucking ridiculous for a self-defense training center to close in this situation—and, in fact, had enjoyed its best recruiting period since they’d opened. The shooting range was booked solid, the martial-arts and boxing classes were packed, and people were signing up for all-inclusive memberships. Even the basement had seen a small surge in use—word had gotten around about what he’d accomplished in Hell’s Kitchen, and some of his fellow Pagano men were hitting him up to get time at CBSD. He’d worked out a ‘friends and family’ discount package. Some guys were irritated that he wasn’t just giving them a free pass, but the scenarios were fucking expensive. They had to at least pay what it cost for them to use the setup.
Tony felt more than a little guilty to have his business enterprise turn the corner toward the black in exactly the same moment, for exactly the same reasons, that Billy’s was swirling the drain.
He kissed her head and wrapped his arm around her. “Don’t give up yet. We got some things coming up real soon that could put everything right.” He didn’t know exactly what those things were, but he trusted that Donnie was handling shit.
“It might already be too late.”
This was more than West Egg and her financial troubles, he knew. That explosion when her father left seemed to have depleted her fire. She’d been downbeat and restless all week, doing the things she needed to do, but not really handling them. Not fighting for what she wanted.
Cain Jones would be a fool ever to cross Tony’s path again. Because Tony had a taste for some righteous vengeance on that deadbeat motherfucker.
Accidental Evils Page 25