"Orlando didn't trick me twice, Noemi," Cassio whispers. "He thought he was disposing of Dario’s leftovers, but instead he gave me a crown, and the stupid bastard didn't even realize it."
He turns his body fully toward me. He doesn't reach for his clothes. He doesn't leave the room. He just stares at me, his black eyes burning with a sudden, obsessive intensity that makes the air in the room feel too thin to breathe.
"You are mine," he says, the words no longer a threat, but an absolute, undeniable law of the universe.
9
Cassio
I am a man who deals in calculated violence. I know the exact amount of pressure required to snap a collarbone. I know the precise angle a blade needs to slip between ribs to puncture a lung. I understand anatomy, resistance, and the breaking point of the human body better than most surgeons.
Which is why, when I drive my hips forward, intending to bury myself inside the woman I believe to be well experienced, the sudden, absolute resistance I hit doesn’t just confuse me.
It paralyzes me.
The wet, slick heat of her body parts for me initially, offering a completely false sense of security, fueled by the sheer amountof slickness her climax just produced. I thrust hard, driven by a vicious, territorial need to stake my claim, expecting a smooth, welcoming slide into a body that Dario Lombardi supposedly broke into years ago.
Instead, I hit a physical wall. A tight, unyielding barrier of flesh that has never, in twenty-four years, been breached by a man.
The force of my thrust drives me through it, tearing the delicate tissue. Then Noemi screams.
I stop so completely, so abruptly, that my heart actually stutters in my chest. I am buried barely an inch inside her, locked in the vice-like, suffocatingly tight grip of her untouched core.
My brain misfires, struggling to process the sensory data. The tightness. The wall. The blood I can already smell.
Virgin.The word drops into the center of my mind like a live grenade, detonating with a force that blows my entire worldview to fucking pieces.
My breath stops in my throat. I look down.
Noemi is sobbing beneath me, short, hyperventilating gasps, her eyes are squeezed tightly shut against the pain. She is trembling violently, a terrified, vulnerable creature pinned to the dark charcoal sheets of my bed. She looks exactly like what she is, an innocent woman who was just brutalized by a monster under the assumption she was a whore.
I pull back.
I withdraw from her with a sudden, jerky movement, as if I’ve just been burned alive. The slick sound of our bodies separating makes her flinch. I roll off her and I sit on the edge of the mattress, my back to her.
I drop my elbows to my knees and bury my hands in my hair, gripping the strands so tightly my scalp burns. I am breathing like I just ran ten miles, my lungs are fighting for oxygen in a room that suddenly feels entirely devoid of it.
She’s untouched.The realization slaps me in the face. The rumors were lies. The whispers at the galas, the mocking jokes exchanged between men over cigars, all complete, utter bullshit. Dario Lombardi never had her. No one ever had her. She spent her entire life too proud to hand herself to any man, fiercely guarding an innocence that even her own father was too blind or too stupid to leverage.
Orlando didn't hand me Dario’s sloppy seconds. He didn't pawn off damaged goods.
The arrogant, archaic old fool handed me the actual prize of his bloodline. He wrapped his untouched, fiercely intelligent, unbroken daughter in white silk and delivered her directly to my altar, thinking he was insulting me.
A violent, involuntary shudder rips through my heavy frame.
I curse.
Behind me, the bed shifts. I hear the rustle of the sheets. She is scrambling away from me, retreating to the headboard, pulling the covers up to hide herself. The shame radiating off her is palpable. She thinks I’m disgusted. She thinks I’m angry that she didn't come with the instruction manual I assumed she had.
"You're a virgin," I say, my voice sounds completely unrecognizable. It’s hoarse, broken, completely stripped of the cold, volatile authority of the Vellutini Don.
"I didn't..." Her voice is a tiny, broken choke. "I never... Dario never touched me."
The sound of his name, coupled with the absolute confirmation that his hands never wandered her body, sends a dark, terrifying thrill straight to my groin. The jealous, bitter rage that had been boiling in my veins for the last hour evaporates instantly. In its place, something far more dangerous takes root.
Obsession.
Extreme, unadulterated, psychopathic possessiveness.