Page 7 of Renata Vitali (The Five Syndicates)
Another year closer to what?
Goosebumps traveled across my skin, and I forced myself not to eye the open door. It was late. The last of the East Wing staff had retreated to their quarters after drawing my bath. I trusted Angelo De Luca like I trusted a jock to do his own homework. I was alone with this sinister excuse of a man, and though calm had nestled itself inside my body from a young age, it burrowed deeper, hiding somewhere between apprehension and concern.
Still, I didn’t allow my anxiety to manifest. I ignored him, reached for the shampoo, and formed a lather in my hair. A gust of wind flew in from the open door, chilling the exposed skin on my neck. I wanted to dip lower into the water, but being vulnerable in front of a man who enjoyed feasting on prey wasn’t an option. Instead, I continued washing my hair.
His jaw ticked as I ignored him. “You are a guest in my household, Miss Vitali. You will not disrespect me.”
“You’re right.” I tapped my foot beneath the water, hoping to expend the energy of my anxiety and replace it with amusement. “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
Pretty sure that wasn’t what Dr. Seuss had meant when he wrote that.
Oh, well.
Hard eyes burned my skin as some of the bubbles covering my breasts fizzled and died. “Careful, little girl.” He crouched and reached out. I forced myself to act aloof as he cupped the side of my face and shut his teeth with an audible snap! “I bite.”
During my boarding school’s unit on Irish literature, I’d come across a Laurence Sterne quote: “Respect for ourselves guides our morals; respect for others guides our manners.” Clearly, Angelo De Luca had neither, but it dawned on me that if I stayed here long, perhaps that would be my fate, too. I begged any higher power to not let me succumb to the De Luca madness.
Angelo's palm wandered down my cheek, past my collarbone, and toward my left breast. Goosebumps met his touch, and he cackled near my ear. “I scare you, don’t I?”
He did, in the same way I feared poisonous spiders and walking home alone late at night. Logically. Clinically. And entirely detached. These things could hurt me if I let them, but I wouldn’t let them.
“While we’re exchanging fears, yours is my family.” I stepped into his touch, enjoying the way his eyes flared in surprise. “I may fear you, Angelo, but I’ll still face you. The fears we don’t confront grow into limits, and I have no limits. But you?” I taunted him with my laughter. For a split second, I felt less like Harry Potter and more like Draco Malfoy. “You’re bound by them each time you move.”
“I could kill you right now, and we’d see just how scared I am of your family.” Angelo’s grip on my flesh became brutal, and his hand rested beneath the water, just short of reaching the top of my breast. Figured that’d be the time Damiano De Luca chose to enter the bathroom we shared.
His eyes took us in, narrowing on his dad’s hand beneath the water for a split second before a sneer twisted his lips. “I put up with you fucking the help, Angelo,” he spoke as if he owned the household, “but I will not put up with you further threatening the De Luca name by fucking the Vitali child.”
The Vitali child.
Good grief. I’d asked the housekeepers for Damian’s age. As of today, we were the same age, yet that was what I was to him. A child. Somehow, those words were all I could focus on. It wasn’t lost on me that he may very well have just saved me from his father, but something I would come to learn about Damiano De Luca was that his presence crippled my logic.
It didn’t just cripple it. It nuked it, then buried it six feet under until I wasn’t sure my logic had ever existed.
Angelo stood from his crouch, and I’d never seen so much hate a father held for his son as I saw in Angelo’s eyes. “Finally home, son?”
Damian leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, amusement radiating off of him in waves, but I saw past the show he put on for his father. He was taunting him, just like I had taunted Angelo earlier. A defense tactic that shouldn’t have built a connection between us—especially given the way he spoke of me as a child instead of an equal—but it did. “Obviously, if you’re looking at me and we’re in this house…”
Angelo met his son in three long strides until they stood mere inches apart. “One day, I will learn what it is that you do when you are gone, and I will destroy you.”
A smarter man would have tempered his anger and hid his weaknesses. Instead, Angelo had laid his cards bare for me. The friction between him and his son and the ensuing power struggle between them weren’t for outsider eyes and ears, but here I was, an unwilling voyeur with a front row seat. Who could blame me for pocketing the information?
Damian remained unfazed. “How can you destroy me when all you’re capable of is self-destruction?”
And that was when I knew he would win. That he would always win. Calm, cool, and collected, Damiano De Luca was everything his father should have been as the head of one of the five American syndicates.
Damian’s eyes shifted to me, reminding his father of the audience. Angelo pulled his shoulders back, standing taller than anyone in the room thought he was, and left.
My eyes met Damian’s, and I wore the calmest expression I could manage. “Those who plot the destruction of others often perish in the attempt.” I dipped my hair back into the water, rinsing the shampoo from my scalp. The tops of my breasts peeked out of the water at the movement, and I was painfully aware of my audience of one.
“Quoting Thomas Moore doesn’t make you smart.” His gaze swallowed mine as I lifted my head from the water, shock at his knowledge of the Irish poet driving my actions. “It makes you unoriginal.”
“Coming from the boy plotting to dethrone his father, I’m not so sure I trust your judgment on originality. Read too many Marvel comics?” I grabbed the soap bar and ran it across my skin. “Is it the Loki and Odin relationship or the Blade and Lucas Cross relationship that inspires your every move?” My words may have lashed, but as I dipped the bar of soap under the water and rubbed at my body, I couldn't shake the feeling that I’d never been this physically vulnerable in front of another human.
But Damian wasn’t his dad, and he didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in my body. “You should have stayed out of things that are none of your business, Princess.”
Excuse me?!
Being in Devils Ridge hadn’t been a choice and being in this home had been even less of one. His father was the one who barged into the bathroom, and now Damian had the gall to accuse me of imposing? So much for kindred spirits.
