Page 93 of The Beast Who Broke Me
But he belongs to them.
“I’m gonna drop you home,” he says, turning back to me, and I hope he didn’t see me looking. “But you keep to the bedroom. Stay away from Rosa and Sammy.”
But thinking about Sammy brings up another question I’ve been thinking about. “Dami, why didn’t you tell me how badly Sammy was hurt by my Family?”
“Because I’m not gonna let any of you Clemenzas gloat over it,” he mutters. “You fucked him up good, though. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Of course not,” I protest, appalled. “Dami, I…I don’t want to be like Nonno Lou. I don’t want to be the kind of Boss who?—”
“Oh, yeah,” he says sarcastically. “I forgot you turned pale at the sight of blood.” He’s needling me. And he keeps going. “Thing is, I remember exactly how calm you were after I killed that Bratva fucker. But after I saved your life again at the townhouse, you puked your guts up. So what’s a performance, and what’s real?”
He’s not wrong. After he killed Grisha, I was totally calm. “It just seemed…unnecessarily violent,” I say weakly. “What you did at the townhouse.”
But he doesn’t seem to hear me. He’s in full flight. “So how am I supposed to believe a damn thing you say? You beg me to fuck you and then you sneak out and leave me in the middle of the night!”
Leave him? “I?—”
“If you were smart, you would’ve stayed gone,” he mutters, and turns back to the window.
There’s no point continuing this line of conversation. I can’t help dropping my gaze to the “G” tattoo on his hand again.
He belongs to them. I need to remember that.
Back at the house, Dami walks me to the front door. For one second, in the hallway, he pauses. His hand is on my arm, the one with the “G,” and I can’t help looking down at it again.
He follows my gaze, takes a breath, as though he’s about to say something. Then his phone buzzes, and the moment dissolves. “I gotta get to this meeting,” he says. “I’ll lock this place down againfrom outside.” He heads out the door without looking over his shoulder.
Rosa is in the kitchen; I can hear the faint clatter of pans, and something smells…extraordinary. Something chocolate.
I should go upstairs. Dami told me to stay in his room, and after everything, the least I can do is follow one instruction. But the smell pulls at me, and I find myself drifting down the hallway toward the kitchen.
Rosa is at the stove, presiding over a complicated arrangement of pots, baking tins, and mixing bowls. One bowl holds something dark and rich—it looks like a cake batter. On the stovetop, a sweet sauce simmers, thick and glossy and red.
The kitchen is warm from the oven. “Wow,” I say from the doorway. “Is that for dessert?”
“It’s for Sammy,” she says. “Black Forest cake. His favorite.”
“So I probably won’t be getting a taste?”
The small smile on my face dies when she turns to me with a serious expression. “It’s his birthday tomorrow,” she says. “He’s been very unhappy recently. I thought this might help.”
“Oh.” I lean against the doorframe. “He’ll love it, Rosa. It smells incredible.”
“Food can only do so much.” She turns back to stirring the sauce with the kind of focused attention that suggests the conversation is over.
“Can I help?” I ask, and I don’t know why. Dami told me to stay away. And Rosa certainly doesn’t owe me warmth or welcome, not after I so shamelessly used her as collateral against Dami.
But I’m standing in this kitchen that smells like chocolate and cherries and someone’s birthday, and I want to beuseful. Just for an hour, I want to be part of something that isn’t strategy or survival or war.
Or whatever the hell is going on between Dami and me.
She gives me a long look. “You can take the stones out of those cherries,” she says at last, pointing to a bowl of dark fruit on the counter. “Wash your hands first.”
I wash my hands and accept the gadget she offers. She shows me how to use it, and I start work on the cherries. The juice stains my fingers, and I think about Dami’s blood-stained hands, the hands that he used to protect me at the townhouse.
Instinctively. Instantly.
The same hands he used to pull me close on a broken sofa.
