Why wasn’t I stopping? This was crazy. Angelo De Luca was a mad man, but I was mad, too. Last night, I’d seen the way Damian winced when laying on the library’s divan. The day before that, I heard the whip of Angelo’s belt through the air vent connecting my room to Damian’s. My parents had odd ways of showing their love, but never once had they laid a hand on me.
Angelo slipped his finger from my grip and nodded at the gun. “There’s a bullet in that gun with your name on it.”
“Does that make you feel like a man? Do those threats help you sleep at night?” I took a step toward him, and I couldn’t get a grip on my anger. My dad raised me to be the stereotypical calm Vitali, but I was so far from calm, I wouldn’t be able to locate myself on a map. “Here’s what helps me sleep at night. Knowing you’re weak—”
“I’m not weak—”
“Only a weak man beats his son every night. You’re alive because my family lets you live. You’re alive because your son could beat you to a pulp but hasn’t decided to capture your throne. It’s that grace that has allowed the breath to flow through your lungs. One day, your luck will flee, and each breath you take will be a struggle. On that day, your son will lead your syndicate. I’ll be there to laugh. And the rest of the syndicates will move on with their daily operations—no changes made, because you mean absolutely nothing to anyone.”
I caught movement by the kitchen entrance. My eyes tangled with Damian’s over his dad’s shoulder. Black and red. Red and black. No way out of this stare down but to dive deeper into this mess and trust I’d find an escape.
But a part me knew there was no escape.
Chapter Twelve
“To be trusted is a greater accomplishment than to be loved.”
– George MacDonald
Damiano De Luca
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I turned my metronome on and placed it on the floor in preparation for Angelo’s visit tonight. The beat helped me focus, and I liked to concentrate on it instead of the whipping. And I had no doubt the whipping would be bad tonight. Angelo had to be mad after his show down with Renata, but he’d take it out on me.
I wasn’t a push over. I didn’t usually let people treat me like this. I’d always pictured fighting back throughout my childhood, but when I finally grew big enough to throw a mean punch, I had already set my eyes on dethroning Angelo. That was a job that would take more than brute force and a few clever punches.
So, I sucked it up. I held my anger in. And every night, like clockwork, Angelo came into my room, slid his ten-thousand-dollar snake skin belt from his pant loops, and went to town on my back, stopping just before the skin split to avoid physical evidence.
The door opened. I laid flat on my bed, not bothering to look up. His belt made noise as he unbuckled it. It slid across his pants, and still, I didn’t look.
His bored tone did nothing to abate my irritation. “Kneel. Floor. You know the drill.”
I realized I must have looked absurd, too damn old and big to let anyone beat me like this and not fight back. But I did as Angelo demanded, my mind blank. My knees met the floor. The wood dug into my skin. Still, no noise but the metronome.
A whip of the belt.
Tick.
Another.
Tick.
More, more, more.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The raw skin on my back blistered. This was about the time he would usually stop, but he kept going.
“You’re a disrespectful bastard.”
Whip.
“I never wanted you.”
Whip.
“You’ll be nothing.”
Whip.
I rolled my eyes and stared at the metronome on the floor.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Whip. Whip. Whip.
His words no longer made sense, his insanity growing wilder and wilder each time the snake skin connected with my flesh. He hadn’t always been like this. When Mama lived, he kept to himself while she raised me. When she died, he took it as permission to have his way with me. Never leaving a scar. Hitting just enough to take me to the brink of bloodied flesh.
But my skin split today, and I knew Renata’s words—true as they were—had done a number on him. Fuck my life. The belt sliced the skin below my shoulder. I grit my teeth. Didn’t she know she’d made it worse?
He growled out, his Texas accent strengthening with his fury. “No fucking respect in my own fucking household. I own the De Luca family.” Whip. “I own this land.” Whip. “I own this town. I own this state.” Whip. Whip. “Do you get that, boy?”
Not for long, he didn’t.
I didn’t answer. He tore the skin on my lower back. My teeth drew blood from my tongue. Any more lashes, and I’d need a hospital trip for stitches. He didn’t relent, the belt whipping in rapid succession.
Each time someone challenged Angelo’s ego, he took it out on me. I was the threat to his throne, the only De Luca in the line of succession, the only one who could take over. That made me his target, and if he could kill me without incensing the entire town, he would.
Instead, he settled for a belt and my back, and I let him because I was biding my time until the cogs fell into place and I gathered enough supporters, turned his caporegimes and soldiers against him, and could guarantee a successful coup. He sought short reprieves; I planned for the end game.
Angelo pushed me forward with the heel of his boot on my back. I let him, my eyes shifting to my dresser, where I knew a pen laid. A lunge forward. A swipe of the hand. A click of the pen. A push deeper, deeper, deeper into his neck, and Angelo would bleed out while I watched. I didn’t do it, but I considered it for point five seconds before I reminded myself of my grand plan.
The Benefactor’s plan.
Spend time with the lower level De Lucas at The Landing Strip. Treat them better than Angelo ever could. Work my way up to converting the caporegimes. Use my army to dethrone Angelo and his loyalists. And keep Angelo alive to watch the syndicate he could never wrangle thrive under my rule.
My face pressed against the cool wood. A final lash on my back severed another strip of my skin. The blood on my tongue pooled in my mouth. Tick. Tick.
“Look at you, taking a beating like a weak, pathetic, little bitch.” He really had no idea. His guffaw sounded too jovial for the blood dripping down my back. “You’re no son of mine.” The tip of his boot connected with the back of my head, whipping it to the side.
The last image I conjured before darkness faded in was the fall of Angelo De Luca.
Chapter Thirteen
“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”
– Dr. Benjamin McLane Spock
Renata Vitali
I wasn’t sure Damian would show up at the library that night, but he’d beat me to it. By the time I had a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet open, Damian had fallen asleep on the divan opposite of mine.
My eyes crawled the length of his body, studying him in a way I normally couldn’t. At six-two, his legs hung off the edge, and his muscular frame hardly fit the divan. He had an arm slung over his head, pulling the bottom of his shirt up. I caught a peak of the V leading into his sweats and bit my lip. Holy hell. They didn’t make men like him in Connecticut.
“You’re not reading.” I jerked my attention back to his face. His eyes still remained closed, and he looked like he was sleeping. He peeked an eye open. “If you’re not going to read, what’s the point?”
My brows drew together, and I pulled the book closer to my chest. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
The anger I’d seen on his face in the kitchen still lingered in my mind. I’d been wrong to intervene in his life like that, but I didn’t regret it. Not as much as I should have. Angelo De Luca needed to be taken down a peg or ten.
“Are we not doing this anymore?”
I wanted to ask what exactly this was. But that would cross an unspoken line, so I sighed, drew my knees to my chest, opened The Prophet, and star
ted to read. Damian’s breathing leveled out again as I read him to sleep.
My eyes darted between the page and his body as I read, “The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.”
“Do you have any dreams?” His words jolted me. Not just because I’d thought he was asleep, but because his question went to a place I thought we’d never go.
We never talked like this. Sure, we would talk about things like absentee parents, but we wouldn’t talk about what it felt like for us to have absentee parents. That line I didn’t want to cross? He’d just crossed it with both feet.
I bit back a sigh. “Yes.” I dreamed of loving parents, a normal life, a room full of books, and someone to share them with. It struck me that an unbiased observer would say I had the last two. The idea scared me, so I blurted out, “I dream of leaving this place. Getting the hell out and running as fast as I can.”
“Running away?”
“Yes.”
His eyes remained closed, his arms clasped together atop his stomach. “Small words for someone used to speaking big ones.”
If anything, I thought he felt the same way. How could he live with Angelo De Luca and not want to run away?
I brushed my hair out of my face and stared at his closed eyes and the slow rise and fall of his chest. “What do you mean?”
“I’m referring to the way you speak to my father, and you know it.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not a good idea to talk to him like that.”
“I know.”
“If you think you’re doing me any favors, you’re wrong. What do you think happens after all that? You rile Angelo up, and he has no way of simmering down. He’s not made like you and me. He’s a boiling pot with his lid superglued on tight. We can lift our lids. We can let the steam out. We can release our anger. He can’t. Not until he reaches a crux, and someone gets hurt.”
“Who got hurt?” I reexamined him again, noting the way he laid over three plush blankets, his body more rigid and less relaxed than I’d initially thought. His leveled breathing? Not sleep, but rather a way to prevent him from moving and exacerbating his injuries. “Oh. I-I—” I didn’t know what to say, but the sound of Angelo beating his son echoed in my head.
He saved me from answering by standing up. His movements drew a wince, but he tampered it. My jaw dropped a bit when I caught sight of the crimson soaking the sides of his gray shirt, stretching into the back.
My eyes dipped to the divan. Violent red stained one of the blankets. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had soaked through the three thick blankets and into the black fabric of the divan. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why he’d come here. To the library. To me.
He faced me, his eyes never wavering from mine as one hand clutched the front of his shirt. His fingers tugged the shirt over his head. Chiseled abs met my gaze, but I didn’t dare focus on them. I watched in sheer horror as he tossed his shirt to the side and turned around, his movements slow and no doubt painful.
Angry pink crisscrossed lines littered his back. Dried blood decorated some, but others still bled. Trails of red ran down his back in streams like scattered rain drops.
I shook my head and begged him with my mind to spin his back away from me. “Why haven’t you washed the blood away?”
He turned around and arched a brow at me. “It’s on my back. I can’t reach it myself. Hospital trips aren’t an option. The closest one is the next town over, and there aren’t many De Luca contacts there. I’d need someone to make arrangements just to head over.”
This. This was how the De Luca syndicate had kept Damian a secret all these years. He stayed in Devils Ridge, a town with nearly a hundred-percent mafia ties. They kept his secret because they belonged to the syndicate, and the Vitali and other four syndicates would never spy because they’d long ago written off the De Luca family.
I shook my head. “So, make them. Unless Angelo won’t let you, in which case, fuck him. Let the bastard rot in jail.”
“He’d be out in a heartbeat.”
“But you’d have medical attention. The marred gashes on your back will scar, Damsel.” I realized my slip a second too late. I was supposed to call him Day. Anything—literally anything—but Damsel.
“Damsel?” He took a step toward me, steel in his eyes. “I’m the Damsel, and you’re the Knight? Do you think you’re brave antagonizing Angelo, Knight?” The mocking way he spit out ‘Knight’ provoked me.
Deep down, I knew I shouldn’t have said anything to Angelo. It was a mistake, one I’d realized too late. But I stood my ground anyway. “Someone had to.”
“No, Renata.” He shook his head, something like disgust in his eyes. “That’s exactly the kind of behavior I’d expect from Angelo, not someone who argues Apollonian and Dionysian in the context of The Birth Tragedy in ways that would put Nietzsche to shame.”
How did he manage to make me feel so ashamed of myself?
My head dipped down, and I stared at the rug my toes dug into. “Can you put your shirt back on?”
“Why? The consequences of your actions too much for you to handle?”
I ignored his provocation. I just couldn’t look at the welts anymore. He’d turned, but I still caught some lashes on his sides.
“Please,” I begged.
He stared at me for a moment before moving. Slowly. So slowly. His knees were partially bent, his arms outstretched to his shirt on the ground, when I said, “Wait.”
“Yes?”
I bent over, grabbed his shirt, then reached for his hand. I knew if I told him where I planned on taking him, he’d deny me. So, I led him to the bathroom in our hall, walking slowly to accommodate his back.
“Princess—”
I opened the door. “Let me help you.”
“Like you helped by talking to Angelo?”
“I’m sorry, okay?! I was mad.”
He let loose a bitter laugh. “What I don’t get is why. You’re normally unfazed. You’re the girl who stole my phone without blinking an eye—”
“I didn’t steal—”
He cut off my denial. “You’re not the girl who gets mad.”
I tossed his shirt to the ground, grabbed a hand towel, and dipped it in the bathing pool to soak it. “I hear him. Every night, when he comes to your room, I can hear him through the air vent separating our rooms. Don’t flatter yourself and think my anger is for you. If it were anyone else taking the beating, I would be angry for them, too. I may keep my calm well, but that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to feel empathy.”
“Let me make this clear, Princess. I don’t need your help.”
“Fine. Point taken. But let me clean your wound.”
His eyes dipped to the wet towel in my hand. “You have ten minutes.”
My eyes traced his tanned skin. The hard ridges of his abs. The way his biceps bulged. He was cut like a warrior, lean but ripped, and he’d let his father tear him up. I didn’t understand it.
“Why don’t you fight back?” I pressed the towel against his back, forcing myself to continue when his body went rigid.
“Stay out of my business, Vitali.”
Fine. Fair enough. He didn’t trust me, and I didn’t trust him. Message received. Instead of talking to him, I focused on my work. The fresh blood was easy enough to clean, but the dried blood wouldn’t let up. I could rub at it, but that would be painful for him.
“Do you have hydrogen peroxide?”
He shook his head. “No.”
My eyes drifted to the pool. “Take off your pants.”
“Listen, you’re attractive, but—”
Good Lord, have mercy.
“No, I mean take off your pants, so you can soak the dried blood off.”
I turned the water heater on, and when I turned around, he’d barely gotten his pants a few inches down. I couldn’t image the pain he was in. Without a word, I pushed his hands to the
side and slid his pants slowly down his legs. Neither of us said anything as I squatted, fully aware of the intimate view. His boxers would have to remain, or I wouldn’t be able to get anything done.
When I stepped back, his eyes stayed on mine as I slipped my shirt over my head. Back when Angelo had walked in on my bath, Damian hadn’t bothered to stare at my body. Today, he was shameless in his perusal.
His hooded eyes crawled their way down my body, relentless in the way he watched me slide my sweats down my legs until I stood in front of him in black lace panties and a matching bralette. The only cute things I ever bothered wearing.
If anything, he inspected me on purpose. To make me as uncomfortable as I was sure accepting help from me made him. I watched him step into the bathing pool. He had to be in pain, but he didn’t show it. Stoic as ever.
This shouldn’t have been erotic, but my heart battered my chest as I waded to him. He watched me, his attention so focused on me as I stepped around him until I stood at his back. Cupping water into my hands, I let it run down his skin. After a few repetitions, the dried blood began to clear.
His muscles tensed as I ran my hand down them. For the first time ever, I felt truly off kilter. I pushed my emotions out of my mind and grabbed a bottle of shampoo.
“What are you doing?”
I popped the bottle open and squeezed some onto my hand. Forming a lather, I ran my hands over his head. His skin felt hot against my fingers. “I’m betting you haven’t showered, and you won’t be able to lift your hands high enough to wash your hair for at least another day.”
I’d expected him to fight me on this, but he didn’t. So, I massaged the shampoo into his hair, taking longer than necessary. My toes pointed as I used them to push me higher, trying but struggling to reach his head. My chest nearly bumped into his wounds, so I stepped back and walked to his front.
From this angle, we couldn’t avoid staring at each other as I ran my hands through his hair. I still stood on my tiptoes, but this time, he helped me. His arm wrapped around my back, and he held me still against his chest. My nipples pebbled beneath my bralette. They pressed against his bare chest through the thin fabric.
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