Page 51 of The Mad Don
“Your sister,” I say. “Listen to me. Just listen. I do not know what she has. I am not a doctor. But I will tell you what I do know.Her illness and her physical weakness do not look natural to me. A woman who cannot lift a glass of water does not have the strength to shove a grown man across a study floor. Today and yesterday, she —”
His face has changed. I pause.
He is not smiling anymore.
“And the room,” I say. “You said you have specialists. But the woman I have seen in that room is not getting better. She is getting worse. Faster, I would bet, than she was getting worse a year ago. There is something —”
His hand is at my throat.
It is so fast that I did not see him cross the distance. One moment, my back is straight, and my breath is in my chest, and the next his palm is around the side of my neck, and his fingers and thumb are pressing on either side of my windpipe, and my air is going.
He does not squeeze hard enough to crush.
He squeezes hard enough to make me feel it.
I feel the restriction and feel my own pulse against his fingers. I feel the room tilt one degree and right itself. I do not reach for his wrist. I stand where I am, and I look at him.
“You don’t listen,” he says quietly. “Do you?”
I breathe what air I can.
“Will killing me,” I rasp, “make her better?”
His fingers stay on my throat.
For a long second, he does not move, and I think he might.
Then his grip loosens, and the blood comes back into my head. My throat opens, and I pull in a breath that is not as steady as I would like. He looks at me for what feels like a long time but is probably ten seconds.
Then he steps back. He drops his hand from my throat. Then he steps back in and lifts me.
I am off the floor.
His hands are on my ribs, and he has lifted me cleanly. I should be fighting. I do start to fight. My knee comes up. He turns me and presses me back down, so my feet meet the floor again, but his hands stay where they are, and his body is against mine, and there is no daylight between us.
“What is wrong with you?!”
His hand closes around my jaw, and he tilts my face up, and he kisses me.
It is not soft.
His mouth is hot, his teeth find my lower lip immediately, and he bites. I cry into his mouth. The bite from the car opens again. I taste my own blood.
He pulls back, and his thumb is at my chin. His eyes are on mine. The small smile is back.
“Sorry,” he says. “I am thinking of creative ways to shut you up.”
“Giovanni —”
He kisses me again, and he bites again, harder. I cry into his mouth, and he swallows the sound and presses closer, and his hand at my jaw tightens, and there is nowhere for me to go.
My body is responding.
I hate that I notice it. I hate that I notice it the same way I noticed it last night and yesterday in the study and in the cold yard with a gun running down my ribs. I hate that my hand has crept to the front of his shirt and is gripping the fabric instead of pushing him away. I hate that my knees have stopped trying to drive themselves between his legs.
I hate that the snake is against my palm now, that I can feel the warmth of the skin underneath the ink, and that I am thinking about putting my mouth on the eye of it.
I hate the warmth moving down through my body for the second day in a row, and the way it is winning.
