Page 17 of Renata Vitali (The Five Syndicates)
Dr. Benjamin McLane Spock
I wasn’t sure Damian would show up at the library that night, but he’d beat me to it. By the time I had a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet open, Damian had fallen asleep on the divan opposite of mine.
My eyes crawled the length of his body, studying him in a way I normally couldn’t. At six-two, his legs hung off the edge, and his muscular frame hardly fit the divan. He had an arm slung over his head, pulling the bottom of his shirt up. I caught a peak of the V leading into his sweats and bit my lip. Holy hell. They didn’t make men like him in Connecticut.
“You’re not reading.” I jerked my attention back to his face. His eyes still remained closed, and he looked like he was sleeping. He peeked an eye open. “If you’re not going to read, what’s the point?”
My brows drew together, and I pulled the book closer to my chest. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
The anger I’d seen on his face in the kitchen still lingered in my mind. I’d been wrong to intervene in his life like that, but I didn’t regret it. Not as much as I should have. Angelo De Luca needed to be taken down a peg or ten.
“Are we not doing this anymore?”
I wanted to ask what exactly this was. But that would cross an unspoken line, so I sighed, drew my knees to my chest, opened The Prophet, and started to read. Damian’s breathing leveled out again as I read him to sleep.
My eyes darted between the page and his body as I read, “The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.”
“Do you have any dreams?” His words jolted me. Not just because I’d thought he was asleep, but because his question went to a place I thought we’d never go.
We never talked like this. Sure, we would talk about things like absentee parents, but we wouldn’t talk about what it felt like for us to have absentee parents. That line I didn’t want to cross? He’d just crossed it with both feet.
I bit back a sigh. “Yes.” I dreamed of loving parents, a normal life, a room full of books, and someone to share them with. It struck me that an unbiased observer would say I had the last two. The idea scared me, so I blurted out, “I dream of leaving this place. Getting the hell out and running as fast as I can.”
“Running away?”
“Yes.”
His eyes remained closed, his arms clasped together atop his stomach. “Small words for someone used to speaking big ones.”
If anything, I thought he felt the same way. How could he live with Angelo De Luca and not want to run away?
I brushed my hair out of my face and stared at his closed eyes and the slow rise and fall of his chest. “What do you mean?”
“I’m referring to the way you speak to my father, and you know it.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not a good idea to talk to him like that.”
“I know.”
“If you think you’re doing me any favors, you’re wrong. What do you think happens after all that? You rile Angelo up, and he has no way of simmering down. He’s not made like you and me. He’s a boiling pot with his lid superglued on tight. We can lift our lids. We can let the steam out. We can release our anger. He can’t. Not until he reaches a crux, and someone gets hurt.”
“Who got hurt?” I reexamined him again, noting the way he laid over three plush blankets, his body more rigid and less relaxed than I’d initially thought. His leveled breathing? Not sleep, but rather a way to prevent him from moving and exacerbating his injuries. “Oh. I-I—” I didn’t know what to say, but the sound of Angelo beating his son echoed in my head.
He saved me from answering by standing up. His movements drew a wince, but he tampered it. My jaw dropped a bit when I caught sight of the crimson soaking the sides of his gray shirt, stretching into the back.
My eyes dipped to the divan. Violent red stained one of the blankets. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had soaked through the three thick blankets and into the black fabric of the divan. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why he’d come here. To the library. To me.
He faced me, his eyes never wavering from mine as one hand clutched the front of his shirt. His fingers tugged the shirt over his head. Chiseled abs met my gaze, but I didn’t dare focus on them. I watched in sheer horror as he tossed his shirt to the side and turned around, his movements slow and no doubt painful.
Angry pink crisscrossed lines littered his back. Dried blood decorated some, but others still bled. Trails of red ran down his back in streams like scattered rain drops.
I shook my head and begged him with my mind to spin his back away from me. “Why haven’t you washed the blood away?”
He turned around and arched a brow at me. “It’s on my back. I can’t reach it myself. Hospital trips aren’t an option. The closest one is the next town over, and there aren’t many De Luca contacts there. I’d need someone to make arrangements just to head over.”
This. This was how the De Luca syndicate had kept Damian a secret all these years. He stayed in Devils Ridge, a town with nearly a hundred-percent mafia ties. They kept his secret because they belonged to the syndicate, and the Vitali and other four syndicates would never spy because they’d long ago written off the De Luca family.
