Page 31 of The Beast Who Broke Me
He swallows, and not because he has a mouthful of food. He pokes at his eggs.
“The trail’s cold,” I go on. “Stuccio gave us a name, but this Tiberius is a ghost. The Obelisk is burned after what happened with Grisha. There are no more leads.”
He picks up his fork. Puts it down again. His eyes keep drifting, unfocused, toward my hands, and there’s that flush climbing his throat again. “I’ll think of something,” he says.
“Yeah. You always do, don’t you?” I put my fork down and glare at him. “Like kissing me in front of Big Gee and D’Amato and the rest of the peanut gallery. What the hell was that, anyway?”
“That was me shoring up your reputation with D’Amato. You’re welcome.”
“And fucking me over with my actual Boss, so thanks for nothing.”
“Are you telling me the fearsome Giuliano Enforcer is too scared to be openly out?”
“That’s not it,” I growl.
But he’s pushing on a sore spot, even though I deny it. Big Gee has generally been cool with me, cool with Seb, in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell kind of way. The Clemenza throwing himself at me yesterday morning is the kind of in-your-face thing that I’ve always been careful to avoid around my Family.
No one’s ever said anything to me. But I’m not stupid enough to believe it’s because no one’sthinkinganything. It’s different these days—different since D’Amato took over the place, even though I don’t like to admit that—but all that hate being hidden away doesn’t make it vanish.
It just makes it fester.
And what Nick Fontana said on that car ride back from the warehouse stuck in my mind, which pisses me off. So I turn all that anger on the Clemenza, who’s the one who really deserves it. “You want to talk about being scared to be out in the Family? You need to look in a fucking mirror. Your grandfather?—”
“Alright,” he says sharply. “This is pointless. We need to strategize. Find a new lead.”
“Fine. Name it.”
“I don’tknow.” Frustrated, he pushes back from the table and starts wandering around the back of the room.
“Look, you’re the one who wanted to talk. If you got nothing to talk about, I’ll get to work.”
He glares at me. “I can’t…think.”
It takes me a second to get what he means, and then I laugh. “Can’t get the blood flowing to the brain, you mean?”
His cheeks stain pink, and so does his chest, where my robe is opening slightly across his throat. “That’s not—not everything is about?—”
“Sure it is. You told me that yourself just the other night. Everything is about sex.”
“God, you’re socrass,” he snaps, bright red now.
And he’s hard, too.
“Yeah? Well I’m not the one wagging my dick around the breakfast room.” I stand and take a step toward him. He steps back. “Come here, and I’ll get your brain working again.”
“That’s not what the problem is. I’m just…tired.”
I scoff. “You’re useless like this. You can barely string a sentence together. So either go deal with it yourself like you were doing when I walked in this morning—and that clearly wasn’t cutting it—or let me handle it so we can have this conversation you wanted. I don’t have time to waste on you, so tell me what it’s going to be.”
“Funny, you didn’t seem all that concerned about myfunctionalitylast night,” he snaps back, red as a stop sign now.
“You wanna clear that brain fog or not? Stop being so damn prissy about it.”
My heart is beating harder at the idea of touching him again, that same fog cloudingmyjudgment, too. But I want him to see that he doesn’t hold all the cards here.
“Fine,” he mutters, and starts to walk back past me. “Come on.”
I catch him. “No. Not in the bedroom. Here.”
