Page 62 of The Beast Who Broke Me
“You can’t keep me down here,” I say, and my voice comes out thin and high and nothing like the man who was threatening Tony Stuccio only a few hours ago.
“You used Rosa and Vito and Sammy as bargaining chips,” he says quietly. He leans over me, close enough that I can smell him, the scent of our sex all over him. “What did you think was going to happen when I found out?”
I stare at him, searching for something in his face. Some glimmer of hope.
There’s nothing.
When he speaks again, he’s almost thoughtful. “You know what’s funny? You really do remind me of him. Your Nonno Lou.” He reaches down and brushes the hair off my forehead, and the gentleness of it is grotesque after everything he’s just done. “You’ve got that way of talking sometimes, where everyone in the room shuts up and listens. You’ve got his brain, too. The scheming, the long game, the way you use people withoutblinking.” His thumb traces down the side of my face. “But there’s one difference.”
I don’t ask. I won’t give him the satisfaction.
“He wasn’t a needy little bitch.” He pulls his hand away. “You’re all hunger, Caligula. That’s what makes you dangerous, and that’s what makes you useless. Because anyone who figures out what you’re starving for can walk you right into a prison and take everything you’ve got.” He straightens up. “Like I just did.”
He turns and walks toward the wall panel, calling down the elevator again.
“Please don’t leave me down here,” I call out wildly.
But he stands with his back to me, waiting for the elevator as though I don’t even exist. The doors open, but before he steps in, he reaches for the light switch.
“Don’t!” I cry out, but the lights go out just the same.
I see his silhouette step into the elevator. And just before the doors close, he pauses. Turns his face slightly.
Maybe he’ll stop. Maybe he’ll come back, let me out of this collar?—
The doors close.
The dark is total.
Naked, terrified, and chained, I stare into blackness and reach for the Clemenza composure that has carried me through every terrible thing that has ever happened to me. I reach for my grandfather’s iron, my father’s steadiness, the cold presence of mind that talked me out of a Morelli kidnapping.
I reach, but I find nothing.
CHAPTER 22
DAMIANO
By the third evening,the house smells wrong.
There’s no garlic. No onions sweating down in butter. No slow, rich scent of meat braising in red wine or tomatoes simmering until they give up and become sauce. No clatter of pans. No Rosa snapping at Sammy to stop hovering and wash his hands if he’s going to steal food off her cutting board.
Just silence.
That’s how I know something’s coming before I even get to the kitchen.
When I walk in, Rosa is standing at the counter as usual, but her apron is off. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Rosa in this kitchen without an apron on unless she was leaving the house, and even then, sometimes she forgets and Vito has to tug at the strings before she walks out the door wearing it under her coat.
Now it’s folded neatly on the counter in front of her. She has both hands braced on either side of the apron, fingers splayed against the counter, knuckles pale.
“Where’s dinner?” I ask.
Not my smartest opening line. I can tell from the flat set of her mouth that I’ve already pissed her off. “There is no dinner.”
I stare at her. “What?”
“No dinner.”
Behind her, the ovens are dark. The stovetop is clean. Too clean. I know she cooked breakfast and lunch, though, because I told her to send them down to the Clemenza. I also know he didn’t eat either. “You sick?” I ask.
