The trembling stops. His hand goes still. His chin comes up—that Clemenza chin, that prince-in-exile posture that I thought I’d broken down in the basement but that keeps reassembling itself, over and over, no matter what I do to him.
“Then make your choice, Orsini,” he says. His voice is cold and clear. He doesn’t plead. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t try to manipulate or bargain or cry.
He just looks at me with those golden eyes and waits.
CHAPTER 36
CALIGULA
“If you’re waitingfor me to beg for my life, you’ll be disappointed,” I say.
Damiano doesn’t answer at once.
He’s standing a few feet away from the bed now, though I don’t remember him moving. One moment he was beside me, my hand in his, his confession about Daniel King sliding out of his mouth. The next he was on his feet, enormous and silent in the dim bedroom, his shoulders hunched.
“I know,” he says.
So he fucking should. This man has spent enough time trying to break me to understand my pride. He knows I would rather bite through my own tongue than offer him the sound of me begging for my life.
“Then what?” I ask. “You want absolution before you kill me?”
“No,” he says.
“You don’t want absolution?”
The tendons in his neck are taut, and he looks, for the first time since I’ve known him, defeated. “I’m not going to kill you.”
I don’t understand him at first. But once I do, there’s still no relief. There’s only anger. “But you thought about it.” His face changes. Barely. “How were you going to do it?”
“Caligula. Don’t.”
I’m not the old me, the one who could verbally flay this man with a sentence. That version of me has been gone since the basement. Since I curled on my side in the dark and let my mind go quiet for three days. But something else stirs now, and my voice drops lower. “I asked you a question. How were you going to do it?”
He looks at me for a long moment. His throat works once. “Fast,” he says.
“Fast,” I repeat.
“That was the point.”
“The point?”
“I wasn’t going to let King have you. He wouldn’t do it…fast.”
“I see. How noble of you.”
His mouth tightens. He doesn’t defend himself. That, more than anything, makes me want to hurt him. I spent three days in the darkness he made for me with no voice at all, and I thought I’d lost this. The precision. Thecruelty. The ability to find the exact word that cuts deep.
I want the old me back. And I want the old Damiano, too. The brutish one who growls and threatens and reaches for my throat. I want him to give mesomethingto rail against besides thisawful, silent acceptance. But he just stands there. Twice my size and half as armed, because at least I still have words.
He’s not going to apologize. Some part of me knows that much. Damiano Orsini doesn’t ever say he’s sorry. He just makes decisions that he lives with, and if living with it kills him, so be it.
He’s not going to apologize or make excuses. So I keep cutting.
“Were you going to fuck me first?”
His face goes white beneath the olive of his skin. There. I drew blood. “Don’t do this,” he says.
“Oh, I think I will.” I swing my legs over the edge of the bed. The floor is warm, like it always is in this house. Even in that hellscape of a basement. “Were you going to touch me first, Dami? Kiss me? Make me come? Was that part of your mercy, too?”