Page 69 of The Beast Who Broke Me
I push open the door.
The whole room’s been torn apart. The wood paneling has been stripped from the walls in long, methodical sheets. Floorboards pried up and stacked. And the wall safe, a heavy steel box that must weigh eighty pounds, has been wrenched from its setting, the door swinging open.
Caligula stands in the doorway while I check the safe. Empty.
“The Feds drilled that open,” I tell him. “There was nothing inside.”
“Did the Feds also rip it out of the wall?”
It’s the first time he’s shown even a remote interest, so I open the photos my real estate guy sent after the sale. The safe’s in its housing in every shot, though the door is drilled open, just as it is now. And the floor is intact, along with the walls. “No.”
“So the intruder did this. They thought my grandfather still had secrets.” He looks up at the ragged hole where the safe used to sit. “They pulled it out completely in case there was another compartment behind it. Something hidden.”
I’m conscious that we’ve both started talking at a normal level, and I make a shushing motion with my hand. “Keep it down, and keep behind me. We need to keep looking.”
But the townhouse is empty, although every room on this floor tells the same story: floorboards pulled up, walls caved in, built-ins ravaged. Whoever did this was thorough. Looking for something specific.
I watch Caligula’s face as we move through the gutted rooms. His bedroom. The room that must have been his father’s. A bathroom with the tile smashed out. He walks through all of it with that same flat expression.
By the time we go back down to the first floor, I’m convinced.
He’s faking it. Hehasto be faking it.
He’s just real fucking good at it. Had a lot of practice, hasn’t he?
I holster my gun before we head toward the door. I’m pulling out my phone to call the realtor about security when Caligula steps out onto the stoop ahead of me. That half-second of distraction with my phone is what costs me. If I’d been paying attention, I wouldn’t have let him go out first.
He freezes on the top step, and it’s only because I’m a head taller than him that I see why.
A man is moving up the steps from the street below. Gun up. Arm straight. Muzzle aimed directly at Caligula Clemenza’s head.
Caligula doesn’t move. Doesn’t duck, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t dive back through the door.
He just stands there, looking down the barrel.
CHAPTER 24
CALIGULA
I didn’t feelanything in the townhouse. Walking through those empty rooms, seeing the stripped walls and ruined floors, Louie’s bloodstain across the foyer marble. I should have felt something. Grief, anger, loss. Something.
I felt like a ghost haunting the wrong house.
My family’s bones have been ripped out and rearranged in someone else’s basement. Two versions of the same life, neither one real anymore.
I know how it feels to be stripped to the studs. To have someone go through every room in you and pull up the floorboards looking for what’s hidden underneath. Damiano Orsini found the things I’d been keeping locked away, even from myself. He cracked open that safe and stole what was inside.
Now I’m not sure what’s left of me.
I’ve been functioning since he brought me up from the basement, but functioning isn’t the same as being alive. I ate food because it appeared. I showered because he told me to. I performed in front of Nick Fontana because the alternativewas letting Dami’s household go unprotected when the Morellis killed him for what he’d done.
I couldn’t do that to Rosa.
And maybe I couldn’t do it to Dami, either. Even after everything he’s done.
But underneath all that, there’s a silence in me I’ve never felt before. Like those empty and ransacked rooms in the townhouse, I’m the right shape, the right dimensions, but devoid of everything that used to make me, me.
Will those two realities ever come back together—the furniture and the townhouse, the man I was and whatever I am now—or are they both just…gone?
