He’s fucking me like I’m something he’s afraid to lose. Like this is the only way he knows how to keep me.
And I let him do it. He fucks me until I’m nothing but the feel of him inside me and the hot fizzing in my belly and the need for release that I can’t control. He shifts angles, hitting that spot that makes me see stars, and my whole body bows like a bowstring drawn too tight.
I come into his fist and he follows seconds later, his forehead pressed hard between my shoulder blades, his whole body shuddering against mine.
We lie there, breathing. He’s heavy and I don’t care.
“That was…” I start, muffled in the bed covers.
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“Different.” Not gentler. There was nothing gentle about it. But the roughness felt like shelter instead of siege. Like he was trying to hold me together instead of break me apart.
His mouth presses against my spine. “Yeah.”
And then he pulls out of me.
“We got a problem,” he says heavily as he pulls his pants up. “The Morellis ain’t gonna be happy you just iced their inside man.”
I actually laugh.
And then I pull out a slip of paper from the bedside stand. I wrote it out after I first came in here, before the shock had worn off and my hands started to shake. “Read it,” I tell Dami.
He opens it up slowly and reads it in a cursory glance. “‘You’re welcome’?” he repeats incredulously. “You’re really picking a fight with the fuckin’ Morellis right now?”
“I justsolveda problem for Don Morelli, and at his own invitation, I might add. D’Amato took in Scaglietti after my grandfather’s murder—was forced to, since Scags was the rat who sold Nonno Lou out among his bodyguards—but he wasn’t exactly working out.”
I’ve thought a lot about the arguments between the three Morellis who kidnapped me off the street. The hate in Scaglietti’s face as he looked at Sophia Vicente. Nick Fontana’s admission that the man tended to color outside the lines.
And Luca D’Amato telling me he planned to revisit Scaglietti’s position with the Morellis.
“D’Amato wanted Scaglietti dead, but he couldn’t do it himself. It wouldn’t do for the head of the New York Commission to start killing his own. So heusedhim. Got what information he could out of him—which is why I told everyone, explicitly, that I bear no ill will toward the Morellis at that first meeting. I wanted Scaglietti to carry that message to D’Amato, and apparently he did. But D’Amato sent him back, despite knowing he’d get no further information of use—basically sanctioning me to clean up his mess for once and for all. And now I have. So he owes me.”
Dami is staring at me. “You sure about all that?” he asks skeptically.
“I know how the mind of a Mob Boss works.”
“Yeah, you do,” Dami says at last. “You planned this, didn’t you? Before tonight. Before Sammy.”
“I planned to deal with Scaglietti, yes. Sammy—that part, I didn’t plan. But it made the timing right. And there was no way I was going to let Scaglietti leave this house alive after learning that.” The coldness in my voice surprises even me.
Dami’s expression is caught between admiration and wariness. “You know,” he says slowly, “you’re a lot fucking scarier than I thought you were.”
I smile. “Now get dressed, and go tell Strike to send the hand to D’Amato with that note. And try Sammy again.”
He smirks, just barely. “Those are your orders, Don Clemenza?”
“Those are my orders.”
He’s pulling on his shirt when Rosa’s voice comes up the stairs, urgent and loud, calling for Dami. Both of us are out in the hallway before she reaches the landing.
“Sammy is gone,” she says, breathlessly. Her face is tight with worry. “He packed a bag. He left through the back, I didn’t hear him go—” She stops herself, pressing a hand to her mouth.
Dami has already grabbed his gun from the bedroom and is pulling on a jacket. “When?”
“I don’t know. Twenty minutes? Maybe more. I went to check on him and the door was open at last, but his room was empty.”
“I need to go,” Dami says to me.