That child fucker didn’t just rape her. He made her thank him for it. He fucking made her like it.
She gave a long moan. “So yes, I came for him, and he taught me how to thank him…just like Mom used to do. I was her replacement to him. He’d convinced me that was why God made me look like her, so when she died, I’d take her place.”
Revulsion and fury blistered inside me. It was a shame a motherfucking prick like him could only die once.
“You know what else he said? Whenever I begged him not to touch me, he said God gave him two girls so when one wouldn’t obey and give herself to her father as she should, the other would.”
To save her sister, she told herself it was okay to let him use her, and to keep going, her mind tricked her into accepting it without resistance, to fucking enjoy it.
“Is that what you wanted to hear or do you want more?” she asked.
“If there’s more, tell me. I want it all.”
She stared at me with her big blue eyes, terrible shadows of darkness dimming them. “It wasn’t over when he died.”
“What do you mean?” I knew what she was going to say, but I asked anyway.
“Every time I’ve touched myself since then…he’s there. After everything he’d done, everything he’d taken from me, how he fucked me up beyond repair, I still come for my fucking rapist and thank him when I’m finished.”
With that, she burst into tears. As if hearing the confession out loud was too much to bear. As if she couldn’t take it anymore, and neither could I.
The sound of her defeated sobs did bring me to my knees. Literally. I fell right in front of her and wrapped my arms around her, wishing I could have found her before it’d all happened and protected her like I would from now on.
Here they were. Her real tears I’d yearned to see soaking my skin, seeping through the pores, eating at my soul like acid. The door she opened for me to claim her as mine. But in this moment, it was her that owned me.
CHAPTER 35
Nicky
Slut. Dirty. Leftover. Pathetic. Weak. Damaged goods. Fucked up.
After I broke and told him my dirty little secret, that must have been how he saw me. The woman he lusted over and went through all that trouble to own was nothing but a smashed, straight fucked up girl that couldn’t be fixed, a filthy little whore that was worth shit.
Now what? He’d take me back to Tino? Return the defective wife to shop and buy another he could play with without issues?
As if I didn’t hoard enough self-loathing to last an eternity, I hated myself some more for wishing Domenico would never return me to Tino or tell anyone about my dark shit, for wishing he would let me stay with him. The man I ran away from once, the man I vowed to hate until death did us part, the husband I kept calling captor, my tormenter, my punisher, the beast from whose prison I was yearning to break free. Now, I wished he’d accept me. I wished he’d keep me his, even as his captive prisoner.
That was how much I was willing to pay to keep my shame in the dark, a secret I’d long denied. At least, from other people, from my baby sister I’d always been desperate to protect.
After a long silence interrupted by nothing but our troubled heartbeats and uneven breaths, Dom fell to his knees.
I had to blink to make sure what I was seeing was real. The formidable, dominant, cruel Mafia enforcer on his knees in front of the captive he imprisoned brought down her last wall of defense, broke and had under his mercy.
I chanced a glance at his face. He looked different and yet so familiar. His eyes held a secret as dark as mine, one he, too, had been hiding for so long. One that haunted him and his nightmares. One that had broken him once before and shaped him into what he’d become, and like me, he’d denied it to stay strong, so that nothing would break him once more.
When he wrapped his arms around me, so carefully, so tenderly, I felt it. His pain. His shame and guilt. They found mine and wrapped around them, too.
How could that be? How hadn’t I seen it before?
He got me out of the restraints, pulled me into his embrace and carried me to the bed, his eyes, suddenly too beautiful to resist or reject. He placed me there and nestled next to me, pulling the velvet covers over our naked bodies. “Get some rest. You earned it.”
There was so much I wanted to say, too many questions spinning in my head, but exhaustion took over me. My eyes drooped, and in no time I drifted to sleep.
When I woke up, my body had draped over his, and his arm was supporting my head like a little cushion. He was half-asleep, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Buongiorno.”
“You let me sleep in a bed…without cuffs,” I said in disbelief.
He sat up. “And I’ll even make you breakfast in bed.”