Page 71 of The Beast Who Broke Me
But it’s not just what Dami did that made me sick.
The sight of it brought in a flood of memories I’ve done my best to forget over the years. My father did his best to protect me, but you can’t live in the house of a Mob Boss and never see anything.
I’m still shaking. Damiano still has his hands on my arms.
“Are you sick again?” he asks cautiously. “Like...like that time I had to get the nurse in for you? Is that the problem?”
“No,” I say. “I just…I thought maybe it was over, since I had the Morelli protection on me.”
His hands close harder on my arms. “Well, it wasn’t Luca fucking D’Amato standing between you and a gun back there, was it?”
“No,” I agree. “It was you.” I look him straight in the eye, see surprise register on his face.
“Whatever else has happened,” he says after a moment, “you’re still mine. I told you before, the only person who gets to hurt you is me.”
I just nod, because what else is there to say? He owns me. He hurts me. He puts himself in front of knives and bullets for me. The math of Damiano Orsini doesn’t add up, and I’ve stopped trying to make it.
My brain is trying to do what it used to do. Make patterns. It takes longer than it should, like thinking through water. “That guy,” I say. “He wasn’t a professional.”
“Hell, he was barely an amateur,” Dami agrees. “What’s your point?”
“None of the men who’ve come after me has been a pro. So that means...”
“What does it mean?” he asks, frustrated.
My brain offers nothing more, and the blankness where strategy used to live is frightening. I used to be able to do this. Turn over the pieces, see the pattern, find the edge. Now I’m just staring at scattered fragments. “I don’t know,” I say helplessly. “Perhaps whoever is behind this doesn’t have the money to hire a professional.”
The amateur quality of these attempts doesn’t fit someone like Daniel King. This feels…smaller. More personal.
More desperate.
“I hate to break it to you,” Dami says, “but it doesn’t take all that much these days to hire someone for a killing. There’s a guy who sleeps rough around the house—he told me someone approached him with a couple of hundred to do the job. And some out there would do it for a five-buck fix.”
“How unpleasant to think that my life might be worth so little,” I say coolly. “Especially when you paid ten million for it.”
The words come out before I can think about them, and they sound…almostlike me.
Like the version of me that existed before the basement.
“And we’re back with the snark,” Dami mutters. But before he looks away, I think I see something like relief in his eyes. “Put your damn seatbelt on,” he adds, as Vito takes another turn that shoves me into him. But he doesn’t even let me do that myself, strapping me in like I’m a child who can’t manage it. When he pulls back, his knuckles brush my hand, and I don’t know if it’s accidental.
I look out the window. The adrenaline drains out slowly over the next few blocks, replaced by something cold and certain: nobody can protect me from this indefinitely. Not my Loyalists. Not the Morellis. Not even Damiano Orsini, who just drove a man’s head onto a spike for me.
I glance at Dami’s hands. The blood is darkening in the lines of his knuckles. For a moment, I thought he was going to rip that man apart limb from limb, he was so angry.
That fact sits next to everything else he’s done to me. All those things don’t cancel each other out, the good and the bad. They just coexist, the way violence and tenderness coexist in him, and I’m not sure how to reconcile them.
I need to think about something else. Anything else. “Did you hear from Stuccio?” I ask. “While I was in the?—”
“No.” He goes on quickly, “So you think your cousin’s behind this? Wants to take over? I don’t see how he could. I don’t even get why he’s in the will after you.”
“Tiberius Vicario was Nonno Lou’s nephew by marriage. As for adding him to the will, it was probably another way for Nonno Lou to flatter Carmine Vicario, Tiberius’s great-grandfather. But I doubt he ever expected…”
The truth is, although I don’t share it with Dami, Nonno Lou was always trying to suck up to theCapo dei Capiof his day. So Tiberius being included as a last resort in the will makes sense to me.
What if it wasTiberiussearching the townhouse? What if he was looking for the ring? What if hefoundit? If Tiberius has the ring and I’m out of the way, then…
“But he’s a Vicario,” Dami says, interrupting my thoughts again. “He doesn’t have the name.”
