by CD Reiss
“I don’t need to fuck your ass to hurt you.”
I close my lips and suck his finger.
“I need to own you. My wife. All of you.” He leans back, removing his wet finger, then presses it against my exposed rear. “Breathe.” With my inhale, he slides in to one knuckle. The sensation is so new, I buck and groan. Lightly brushing against my clit, he goes deeper. “Does this hurt?”
“It’s only a finger.”
He leans over me to open a night table drawer, plucks out a tube of lotion, and cracks it open with his teeth.
“It might hurt.” He squeezes a line of white lubricant on his hand, then between my cheeks. “For a moment.” Two fingers enter my ass with no resistance.
“Oh, my God,” I cry, then I’m utterly open-mouth speechless as he twists those fingers, removes them, and pushes in again, while using his other hand on my clit. The threat of pain hovers on the other side of the sensation, and if he doesn’t break down the door, I’m tempted to invite it in.
“Your ass is so fucking tight.”
His fingertips slide along my folds where I’m so slick I can’t tell where the pleasure in my clit begins and my stretched muscles end. I’m past shame or discomfort. I’m not worried about pain anymore. I want it.
“Take it,” I say, because I’ll say anything right now.
“Take what?”
“My asshole. Take my ass. Fuck it.” I’m so close to breaking, I’m near tears.
“Your ass is going to worship my cock, but first I want to feel how it comes.”
He flicks my clit faster. I should have come by now, but the way his fingers stretch me hold the orgasm at bay. He’s smiling. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
“Please. Fuck my ass so hard. Please.”
“You’re the dirtiest virgin I ever met.”
“God, yes.” I am filthy, indecent, and I’m breaking into ecstasy, asshole pulsing around his fingers to draw them deeper, blind in a pleasure more intense and a surrender more complete than I ever imagined possible.
Twisting with his touch, I’m face down when he removes his fingers and I feel something cold and wet on my ass. More lube. He pulls my hips up.
“Knees apart,” he says impatiently.
I spread them.
“Now,” he says, breathlessly rubbing the head of his cock between the cheeks. “Now you are mine.”
“I am yours.” Sliding a hand between my legs, I feel how wet I am. My body has ceded utterly. “Take me.” My whispers are heavy with want. I am so hard in love it hurts. “Take what you want.”
The last word ends in a squeak as he pushes against the tight opening.
“You are mine.” He is all muttering growl, lost in a prayer of possession. “You are mine.”
Gently, his cock breaks me open, and I feel the split like a tear in my very core.
“Slow, my violet,” he whispers, pulling out. “If we go slow, it will only hurt for a moment.”
“I trust you.”
“Bene.” He shifts me to my side, puts one of my legs over his shoulder, and straddles the one on the bed. Now I can see him and the expression of care he intends to take, and that relaxes me.
“Bene,” I say, smiling.
He pushes into my ass again, and I’m split again. As gentle as he is, the act is not. It tears and expands, distends and breaks, marking and scarring a piece of my body forever.
We work into a careful rhythm, thrusting and rocking. He stops every few strokes and massages my clit so my body can catch up, then, without warning, the pain is rerouted into pleasure, and the stretching turns into submission as he drives deep and stops to close his eyes as if in prayer.
“Violetta,” he whispers.
“Santino.” I pant. My body begs and pleads. “Don’t stop.”
“Not yet, my blood violet.” He bends the leg over his shoulder, exposing more of me. “We come together.”
“Tell me when, amore mio.”
My Italian cracks him. He slides one finger over my clit and uses the other to steady us as his thrusts grow harder.
“Now, amore mio,” Santino commands.
We come together with broken shouts and tight grunts. My body stretches and contracts. I shake, I cry, I scream. Santino works my clit as we ride the waves together. As he marks me deep inside, I surrender to the man he is and the man he promised he could be.
Santino pads back from the bathroom with a warm, damp towel. He cleans me up carefully, whispering in two languages. How much he loves me. How much I am his. How much he is mine. Then he lays next to me and pulls me close, kissing me hard, his breath minty and clean. “I thought I would lose you today. It made me crazy.”
“Would you have given me the annulment if I wanted it?”
He’s silent for a minute, looking at me with a gaze deep into himself. Then he snaps his focus back to me.
“Yes.” He frowns, brushing the hair from my face and stroking my cheek. “But there would have been consequences.”
He rolls onto his back, and I scoot closer to him, tucking my head on his shoulder.
“Such as?” I figure the answer will be a few words about the consequences to me. Being chased forever. Being caught and broken over his cock like a twig. Or the consequences to him. Shattered heart? Endless sadness?
“What I gave up, other men would try to take. I would be unable to protect you unless I locked you in my basement.”
I get my elbow under me and put my face between his and the ceiling. As over-the-top as the declaration of love I expected might have been, it probably wouldn’t have demanded a reasonable response the way this one does.
“I’m just a nursing student who didn’t marry well.”
“You’re a treasure worth stealing.”
Our sweet love talk got very serious, very quickly, and there seems to be something besides his subjective feelings about me at the core of his promise.
Getting my knees under me, I straddle him and put my hands on his chest as if that’s the way to speak to his heart. “Like you did?”
His manner snaps from tranquil to alert like a folding magician’s wand released from inside a sleeve. Our postcoital cocoon has been torn open.
“Like I did. But I’d throw the pieces of the crown away before I hurt a hair on your head. You are the precious thing, Forzetta. You are unique, and powerful, and beautiful. That crown puts you in danger, and it keeps you safe. That’s why I want it.”
“Too bad. Your lust for power is kind of a turn-on.”
He laughs, cupping my jaw and stroking my cheeks with his thumbs. “What is power, my blood violet?”
“Belief,” I whisper then kiss him. “It’s people believing you have it. No one thinks I’m powerful.”
“I do.”
“If that’s your final word,” I coo, dropping my cheek onto his chest, “I will accept it.”
“Will you?”
“Lo voglio.” I repeat the words he told God I used at our wedding, when a cry to be free was manipulated into I will, because the first way to have power of choice is to get your husband to believe you have it.
20
SANTINO
Laser-Topia is more pleasant hours before it opens, when the house lights are on and the exclamation points aren’t flashing. The club is far less excruciating without darkness to cover the patches in the matte black walls and the lights distracting from the stains in the floor. It’s a real place.
Damiano sits on a barstool, nursing an amber liquid, spotting me in the mirror behind the bar. The bartender wipes down glasses with a dingy gray towel. He’s a young, handsome guy with light brown hair and the potential for a gut in ten years.
“Robert,” I say as I slide onto a stool.
“Hey, man. Loretta said to pour you something.”
“San Pellegrino.”
“You got it.” He snaps a green bottle from the fridge and leaves to get ice.
“The little wife not like it when you drink or something?” D
amiano says.
I just smile, flicking away a crumb from the bar’s surface.
He knows nothing about the power of wives.
Damiano and I were like brothers. We loved each other and hated each other. We pulled each other up and dragged each other down. We both knew I was Emilio’s favorite, but we were partners. When we thought he was going to die, we agreed it was too soon for us to try to fill any vacuum he left. When we were ready to have our own territory, we’d run it together.
Those were the rules until the day Emilio gave Rosetta to me.
When Damiano left the room without promising to honor our boss’s wishes, I chased him to the end of the hall. He was getting into a crowded elevator. I stuck my hand in the doors and, after they bounced open, wedged myself next to him.
“Fuck you,” he murmured.
A pretty nurse gave him a look. She was too young to be such a prude, but out of respect for her, I didn’t tell him to go fuck himself.
In the lobby, we went right for a couch in the corner that was bordered by tall, brass ashtrays. I took out a smoke even though I didn’t want it.
“He’s going to live, you know,” I said.
“Yeah. And he’s still giving it all to you.”
“He’s going to be buried with the crown up his ass and you know it.”
Damiano laughed. I laughed. It seemed like it was going to be all right. Nothing had to change.
“You know,” he said. “The last few days? When we all thought he was gonna kick? My dad?”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t have to say another word. Cosimo had taken over as if the territory was his birthright, but he would have to relinquish control when Emilio was out of the hospital. He was loyal, but ambitious. A week with a power vacuum was a dangerous time.
“When he hears you basically got the crown?” Damiano shakes his head and blows smoke. “Feel sorry for your ass.”
Emilio’s preference for me wouldn’t protect me from Cosimo, who could kill me in an instant. And if I killed him, I’d have to answer to Emilio, who’d probably kill me just to prove the preference didn’t exist.
“Don’t tell him,” I said. “Please.”
Camilla Moretti came down the long hospital hallway in a brown, ankle-length wool coat and black boots, hair flying behind her. Her strides were long and confident, as if she was the daughter of Altieri Cavallo, not the docile wife of a capo who was almost drowned.
“I won’t.” Damiano stamped out his cigarette. “Fuck, I’m pretty sure he’d slit my throat for being second in line.”
We shook hands on it just as Emilio’s wife reached us.
“Mrs. Moretti,” I said with a respectful bow. “We just got out. He looks good.”
“Did he give you the state bar license number yet?” she asked me without mentioning her husband’s health. “For the American lawyer?”
I wouldn’t know what she’s talking about for a few days, but I didn’t want to admit ignorance when she seemed to know more.
“No.”
She nodded and turned toward Damiano. “Your father is here.”
“Cool. I was just up there, so I don’t think I can go again.”
She tsked. “He’s in first floor recovery. Just getting out of the ER. You should check on him.”
Damiano ran one way. Camilla calmly walked the other.
I finished my cigarette, thinking Emilio had put in the order to put Cosimo in the ER to tell the man who was in charge.
It had never occurred to me that Camilla was taking care of business while Cosimo playacted the role of boss. Not until I sit at the bar of an empty club with Damiano, watching Pellegrino bubble around fresh ice, thinking about the power of wives, did the possibility occur to me clearly enough to dismiss as nonsense.
The days to my possession of the crown are ticking away, and none of this old stuff will help me.
“What do you want?” Damiano asks, tapping his fingertips together like Venus’s clamshell gnawing on the goddess.
“The Tabonas? When they tried to grab my wife on Flora Boulevard? You came to Mille Luci to tell me, as a friend.”
“I warned you in good faith.”
“I didn’t give you the appreciation you deserved.”
“Damn right.” He puts down his empty glass. “And now you called me here because you want something. So spit the toad.”
The roar of an industrial floor-buffer starts behind us.
“Call it off with Gia,” I say.
“What? Why?”
“Because I’m asking you to.”
“I just overlooked the whole broken flower thing,” he exclaims.
“You were going to anyway.”
“Fuck you.” He taps his glass and Robert pours him another finger of amaretto.
“Listen.” I turn to face him, because I’m not interested in trading insults anymore. “Twice now, you asked to come back. As friends. As business partners. Like it was.”
“It was good.”
“It was. I’ve been thinking, I have no one in my organization I can use when things expand.”
With a single, sharp nod, his whole demeanor changes from guarded and suspicious, to excited. “Which they will. When you get the corona, boom. World at your feet.”
“And that’s coming soon.”
“So you know how to get it?”
Damiano’s willing to marry a woman he doesn’t know to get on my side of the veil. The admission I’m about to make proves my good faith by shifting the veil just enough for him to trust that he’ll be inside my world.
“Yes,” I say. “I know how to get it.”
“Wow.” He clicks his glass with mine. “Salute, coglione.”
Calling me a jackass just as he finds out I’m close to the crown is a sign he’s going to be casually disrespectful when no one’s looking. I drink my Pellegrino rather than correct him. There will be plenty of time for that.
“So what are you thinking?” he asks. “That school over the river, maybe? What’s the play? Those kids don’t carry cash, but there’s plenty of receipts.”
“True. It could work.”
“And I have an angle on the real estate market over there.”
“Good. But first…” I wedge the lime between my teeth and pull off the pith. “I’m going to end the ‘mbasciata.”
“What?” He blinks hard, eyeing me sidelong as if my stupidity can’t be looked full in the face. “You’re serious?”
He thinks I’m an idiot, but I’m not. I’m just a fool blindly chasing love over a cliff.
“With the Corona Ferrea, you can expand your territory to the four corners, but this crazy shit is what you want to try to do?” he asks.
“There will be no more debt brides.” I jam the sucked-dry peel into the ice. “Starting with yours.”
He laughs, then waves, rocking in his seat as if his body can’t contain everything he wants to say.
“Man,” he says, shaking his head with false regret, “I’d really like to take you up on that. But you’re just not getting it. This entire thing with Gia? It’s out of my hands now. That’s not my money. It’s a deal I brought to my father, and it was good enough for him to smile on me. That’s his money, and if you have the choice between insulting him and walking away with your life, or insulting him and ending up in the ground? You shit on his lap. You kick his dog. You fistfuck his mistress, but you do not throw his money back in his face.”
“We’ll see about that.”
He gets off the stool and slaps my shoulder. “Call me.”
I’m left with a choice I never wanted to make. My wife or a war.
“I’m going to miss dinner,” I tell Violetta on the phone as I get into the Alfa.
“Okay. I need to go to the store for the party and some woman things.”
“Make Armando a list.” I’m being more terse than I want, but I have bigger problems on my mind than her feminine products.
“For the party stuff, it’s fine,
but for the other stuff… it’s the kind of thing a woman does for herself.”
Especially now, with her birthday so close, I don’t want her outside alone. “Celia can go with you.”
“She’s off tomorrow.”
Flora Street taught me a lesson I don’t want to learn again. If the Tabonas had succeeded in taking her, I would either be standing in the rubble of Secondo Vasto or I’d be dead.
“You go with Armando or you don’t go.” I start the car. “And go to the drugstore over the river. The big one, by the school.”
“Why?”
“Damnit, Violetta, just do it.”
Silence. I should apologize for snapping at her, but I need her to do what she’s told.
“Please,” I add. “Trust me.”
“Fine.” She hangs up, and I’m left staring at Genovese Street out my car window.
Fucking Christ. I want to make her happy and keep her safe. That was what the house by St. John’s was about, but I don’t know how to do either.
If I could take her away—far away—and live with just the two of us, I would do it. We could start over. I’d run a café and she’d run her life around simple things. Our home. My cock. Eventually, children. And she’d be happy, because she’d never know of another ‘mbasciata, or think it was in my power to stop them.
That’s how it started.
Not with a decision. Just a desire for a life I didn’t want.
All I wanted from that fantasy was for her to forget what I’d done and what I’d allowed. She said she forgave me, but she’d never forget.
21
VIOLETTA
My strategy is to get the guy in the bright blue jacket to meet me at the front with a pregnancy test, and it works. I bring a basket full of birthday party junk—streamers, candles, little plastic tooters, and party hats—to the register.
Bright Blue Jacket puts the test on the counter, pushes his thick wire glasses up, and says, “This is the one you wanted?”