I’mnaked and caged in the basement yet again, but at least this time I’m free to wander around. And it’s still warm down here, too.
The cameras had to be covered, and there was nothing down here to do it with except my own clothes. My first instinct was Nonna Mellie’s serviettes from the credenza—she kept a set of hand-embroidered linen ones that she brought from Italy, wrapped in tissue paper. But when I opened the credenza doors, it was empty.
And that’s one thing I’ve discovered about this version of my home: it’s as empty as a stage set. There’s no china in the cabinets. No silverware in drawers. No clothes in closets. And no serviettes in the credenza.
The more I searched, the more I realized thisisn’tthe old townhouse.
I mean, obviously. Because it’s in a claustrophobic, low-ceilinged basement with no windows. But less obviously in the sense that it’s not a perfect recreation. Damiano told me he set it out according to the pictures he saw in that magazine story,but either he forgot or didn’t know that those things are always staged.
He spent years obsessing over a magazine spread, but he never knew what really went on inside those walls.
So, with no other option, my clothes went over the cameras, and I spent the day naked except for the cage, methodically working through the furniture in the study “set.” Every drawer pulled out and checked for false bottoms. Every table leg knocked on for hollowness. Everything tipped and turned and examined from beneath, tracing over joints and seams, looking for compartments, hidden catches, anything.
I find nothing. Certainly not the Clemenza ring, a thick band of gold with a ruby-set snake’s head eating its own tail, and diamonds for eyes. Does Tiberius have it? Was that why he bid on me at auction, too? Maybe he wanted both the ring and their heir.
Once I admitted there was nothing in the study, I had to start looking elsewhere. I started with Nonno Lou’s bedroom, but I’m beginning to lose hope.
Rosa sent meals down throughout the day, but frustration dulled my appetite. By ten, I’m exhausted, and my fingertips are raw from running them along wood grain for hours. By eleven, I can barely keep my eyes open. I take a shower, hoping the warm water will revive me, but it just makes things worse.
I need to sleep. But I don’t want to turn off the lights, and the “punishment” bed Damiano put down here—no pillows, no covers—is not something I’d sleep on again in a million years.
My own bed looks so tempting. I’m sure it’s even the same mattress and pillows, and it’s definitely Nonna Mellie’s choiceof quilted coverlet: ivory with pale blue stitching, the one she ordered from a linen house in Florence. I remember her smoothing it over my bed when I was small. “There,” she’d say. “Fit for a prince.”
I lie down, and the sensation is so familiar it makes my chest ache—the cool cotton sheets, the silky weight of the quilt, the pillows at exactly the right firmness. For a moment, I’m nine years old again, safe in my room, Nonna Mellie downstairs making espresso, my father reading in his room.
Except the pillows don’t smell the same. They smell like…
Like Damiano.
I roll over onto my stomach and bury my face into the pillow, breathing in. Yep. It’s definitely him. I feel like a Reverse Goldilocks: Papa Bear has been sleeping inmybed.
I pull the covers right up over my head to block out the light, press my face into the pillow as much as I can without suffocating, and then I fall asleep so fast it’s more like passing out.
I dream about Dami.
His hands sliding up my calves, over the backs of my thighs, fingers trailing the crease where my legs meet my body. His lips pressing into the small of my back, warm and slow.
I wake with a moan, and then I realize it’s not a dream.
There are hands on me. Real hands, rough and massive, pulling at my ankles. I start to move, to twist, and those hands grab myhips and wrench them upward—my knees beneath me now, my chest still pressed to the mattress, the covers tangled around my shoulders.
My head clears the blankets and I blink into nothing.
Pitch dark. He’s turned the lights off.
Panic spikes through me, sharp and electric, my breath catching in my throat. But before the fear can take hold, his hands spread me open and his mouth?—
Oh.
Oh.
His tongue is hot and wet and impossibly intimate, pressing flat against me and then curling, probing. The sensation is so overwhelming that I bury my face in the pillow and make a helpless sound.
He works me with patient, devastating thoroughness. His thumbs dig into the muscle of my ass, holding me open, and his tongue pushes inside me in slow, slick strokes that make my thighs shake and my hands fist in Nonna Mellie’s sheets. The darkness strips everything away. There’s no performance.
Just sensation.
And every time I think I’ve hit the ceiling of what this can feel like, his tongue provokes a new sensation.