Page 42 of The Beast Who Broke Me
“Listen to you,” he scoffs. “Thinking you’re some fucking king in exile come to reclaim the crown.Your peopleare dead and gone. All the useful ones, anyway. You got nothing left and the only crown you’ll ever wear is a crown of thorns. I’ll make fucking sure of that before I crucify you myself.”
“Don’t you remember what happened at the end of that story?” is all I say in response.
“You Clemenzas won’t resurrect,” he says in a low hiss. “I’ll make sure of that.”
Nonno Lou was paranoid about certain things. He kept emergency cash where he could reach it, for example. The ring would have been the same: close, accessible, never entrusted to a bank or to his lawyer.
In his study. It could have been in his study.
And that study—every stick of furniture, every drawer, every hollow compartment—is beneath Damiano Orsini’s house, reassembled with obsessive precision by the man sitting next to me.
The ring could be down there right now. Hidden inside a desk leg, taped under a drawer, tucked into the lining of that wingback chair.
“Listen, I need to go to work,” Damiano snaps.
“Drop me home. Then you can go beat up half of New York, if you’re so eager to split your knuckles open.”
“Home, did you say?” he asks, a dangerous edge to his voice.
“Your house,” I amend. God, he’s so particular about that.
“You liked that, didn’t you?”
“Liked what?” I ask distractedly. I’m wondering where to start in the study.
“The old man on his knees, kissing your hand. You liked seeing him bow down to you.”
I don’t answer. I just keep staring out the window, wishing he’d shut up so I canthink.
Damiano shifts beside me. His thigh is inches from mine. I can smell his cologne and underneath it, the clean heat of his skin.
“I think that’s what gets you off,” he goes on, conversational, almost lazy. “People on their knees for you. Isn’t that right, golden boy?”
“I’m not having this conversation.”
“No?” I hear the clink of his belt buckle. The rasp of a zipper. “Then how about you put that mouth to better use?”
I turn my head.
He’s taken himself out. Hard, thick, resting against the dark denim of his jeans with the casual obscenity of a man who is used to getting what he wants. He doesn’t look at me. He’s staring straight ahead, one arm draped across the back of the seat, the other resting on his thigh.
His hand drops to the back of my neck and squeezes a warning. “It’s not going to suck itself, Clemenza.”
The shame hits first. A hot flood of it, from my chest to my hairline. Because the infuriating, mortifying truth is that my mouth is already watering.
This is the pattern. Every time I pull ahead, every time I command him, outmaneuver him, make him obey, Damiano Orsini tries to drag me back down with sex. It’s his reset button. His way of reminding me that whatever titles I claim, whatever old men kneel for me, I’m still the virgin he bought for ten million dollars.
And I’m going to do it. I’m going to suck him off. Partly because keeping him sexually invested is a leash I can’t afford to drop, but mostly because, God help me, I want to.
I lean over. His fingers thread through my hair, gripping hard enough that my scalp burns. I take him in my mouth and his thigh tenses under my hand, a sharp exhale escaping him that he tries to swallow back.
The taste of him is immediate and overwhelming—salt and musk and the dark tang of desire. My jaw aches from the stretch ofhim almost instantly. And between my legs, the cage bites as my body tries to respond and can’t—a dull, maddening pressure that turns arousal into something closer to pain.
His hand tightens in my hair. “That’s it,” he murmurs, and his voice has dropped into that low, rough register that makes reality fall away, so that the only thing that exists is the two of us. “There’s the little prince in his proper place.”
There’s nothing but the throb of him on my tongue and the sound of his breathing and my inexcusable, consuming desire to drown in him.
I take him deeper, and the sound he makes sends a surge of satisfaction through me. He may be the one twisting up his fingers in my hair, but I can still affect him. I feel his thigh shaking, the tension building in his body, his hips shifting restlessly on the seat.
