"I don't care whose fault it was." Her eyes are wet and furious at once. "My father is dead. My mother spent the next ten years married to a man who beat her because your family's world was the only place left for us to fall into once he was gone. Your father's people put us on that path, Nico. Your family ground my father up and handed the pieces to Frank like a gift."
"That's not fair."
"Fair?" She laughs, and there's no humor in it at all. "You want to talk to me about fair."
"I didn't choose any of it."
"Neither did I." Her voice breaks and she doesn't let it stop her. "Neither did my mother. Neither did the eleven-year-old girl I used to be, waiting for a father who was never coming home because your family decided he was in the way."
I have no answer for that. There isn't one. Nothing I say undoes the years she spent in that house with Frank's hands on her.
"Your mother was right," she says. "You are your father's son."
It hits harder than the raid did. Harder than Anastasio's voice at six in the morning telling me the one clean thing I had left is gone. My chest tightens around the words, a burn that keeps building.
I move before I decide to move.
I close the distance between us in two steps. She doesn't retreat, not until her back finds the wall and there's nowhere left for her to go. Then I'm standing over her with both hands bracedflat against the wall on either side of her head, close enough to smell the coffee on her breath, close enough that neither of us is breathing right.
"I am nothing like him," I say.
Her eyes don't drop. They hold mine, furious and unafraid, and something in the set of her mouth almost looks like pity.
"Look at what you're doing right now," she says. "You're so deep in him, in what he made you, that you don't even see it anymore."
I don't move back. I can't.
"So go ahead, Don Nico," she says, quiet now, and steady, and that steadiness scares me more than the shouting did. "Do what I know you want to do. Punish me."
Neither of us moves.
The kitchen holds its breath around us. I stand there with my hands on the wall and her face six inches from mine, and every word left in me is dangerous.
32
LYDIA
He doesn't answerthe dare with words.
His hand comes up and closes over my mouth, hard, fingers spread wide enough to cover my jaw too. I know this hand. I know what it did the first night any of this started, a different room, a different woman standing where I'm standing now, back before either of us had done anything irreversible to the other. I didn't know him yet, that night. I know him too well now, and it doesn't matter. The hand is the same. The wall at my back is the same kind of cold, plaster biting through the thin cotton of my shirt.
This isn't that night. He's not claiming anything.
He's punishing me. Exactly like I asked.
His body pins mine flat, his forearm braced beside my head, his mouth dropping to my throat instead of my mouth, since my mouth is covered, since he took that from me on purpose the second I gave him the opening. His other hand shoves my shirt up and closes hard around my breast, no gentleness in it at all,and I arch into the rough grip anyway, hating myself a little more for how good it feels.
He rips my shorts down my legs and shoves two fingers into me without warning, no build, no patience. I'm already soaked enough that they slide in easy, and that fact alone makes me want to scream.
I say it anyway. Muffled, useless, into his palm.
"Fuck you."
He doesn't stop moving. Doesn't even slow. He works his fingers rough and fast until I'm right at the edge, and then he pulls them out, undoes his own pants with one hand, and drives into me in one hard thrust that punches every bit of air out of my lungs. His hips grind into mine, one hand still clamped over my lips, the other dragging my thigh higher against him, his fingers pressing hard enough into skin that I already know I'll find the marks tomorrow.
"Fuck you."
I say it again into his throat when his hand shifts, again when he drags my hip higher against him, again when there's nothing left in my chest but the words and the shape of my mouth making them against his skin, his jaw, the heel of his hand. They stop meaning anything around the fifth time. By the tenth they're just breath with edges. A sound instead of a sentence, the only sound left in me. I keep making it anyway because it's the one thing he hasn't taken control of yet, so I hold onto it and grind it out against him until my jaw aches and my voice goes rough and small behind his palm.