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I shift my weight slightly to see if it’s there, and it is. In the dress’s pocket, a small rectangle bumping my thigh.
Dresses with pockets are freaking miracles.
It’s something, at least. A connection to the outside world. But it won’t solve the problem of that debt hanging over my head.
A dark thought makes my stomach turn, and I don’t even want to say it, but I do anyway.
“There are ways for young women like me to make good money fast.”
His nostrils flare.
“I told you I don’t need a whore.”
I bristle. “Who said that you would be the client?”
Somehow his gaze turns blacker and burns brighter at the same time. I give a small, startled cry as he forces me backwards until I’m against the wall. His hard thigh is once again between mine, forcing my legs apart. The smooth leather of his gloves finds my jaw, trapping my face so there’s nowhere to look but at him.
“What part of your life is mine did you not understand before?” he growls. “Everything you have belongs to me now. The clothes on your back, which I’ve already paid for. The phone in your pocket, which won’t do you any good here, by the way.” His voice grows gruffer, more raw. “Every flaming hair on your pretty little head, every breath you dare to breathe, every song in your fucking soul. All. Fucking. Mine.”
He nudges his thigh harder against me. Heat explodes along my spine as he bends to whisper against my ear, “And that includes what’s between your legs.”
A hot, hateful throb goes through me. My nipples prick against his jacket while I shove against his chest with my elbows, trying to protect the violin and bow.
“I thought you said you don’t fuck redheads,” I hiss. It had seemed such a bizarre thing for him to have mentioned before, but I latch onto it now like it’s a lifeboat.
“I don’t,” he grits out. “Doesn’t mean I won’t kill any man who tries to touch what’s mine.”
Another treacherous pulse between my legs makes my insides squeeze. My heart beats so fast it feels like a buzz. My breath is shallow as I wriggle in his hold, but every move I make just puts more friction between my clit and his thigh until I’m aching. Aching and ashamed and needy, needing something but I don’t fucking know what.
More pressure. Maybe even pain.
Some kind of release from all of this.
And I get it – a literal release. Elio lets me go and straightens when a voice calls his name from down the hall. The man who called to him is tall and thin, with grey hair and round spectacles perched on his nose. His sleeves are rolled up, and he’s drying his hands on a pristine white towel as if he’s just washed them.
“Come on,” Elio says. He doesn’t grab my arm this time, but places a firm hand against my lower back. “Time for your first performance.”
Chapter 8
Elio
“Elio,” Morelli says with a nod as Deirdre and I walk into my bedroom.
“Doc,” I grunt in reply. Doctor Tommaso Morelli is one of the few people who calls me by my first name instead of boss or Mr. Titone. He’s earned the right. He’s been sewing up my scrapes since before I got my first pube. When I was fourteen, he was the one who bandaged my burns, pumped me full of antibiotics, and got me in good enough shape to leave our home in Taormina for Canada. In the end, he came with us. It wasn’t safe for any of us in Sicily anymore, and as my Uncle Vincenzo’s best friend, he was tainted by his link to our family, so it wasn’t safe for him, either.
Didn’t work out too badly for him, though. Working for our family he earns twice what the most sought-after plastic surgeons in this city make and all he has to do is be on-call to pull out the occasional bullet or sew up a knife wound now and then. He met his wife here, too, and now they have adult twin daughters, Lucia and Giulia.
“The girl?” he asks in Italian as I settle myself on a stretcher that’s been brought up from the main med room downstairs. He and I both look at her, and I see what he sees. A young woman with a ruined dress soaked in blood.
“She’s fine. It’s all my blood,” I reply, also in Italian. It’s Morelli’s preferred language of conversation. He was almost forty when he left Taormina and learning English was harder for him than it was for Curse and me.
“You know the drill,” he says, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. “Shirt off.”
I unbutton the garment with my right hand, trying to keep my left arm still. As I do it, I keep my eyes on Deirdre. She watches me silently from a corner of the room. There’s wariness in her eyes, amplified by that little stunt I pulled in the hallway, shoving my thigh between her legs and telling her that her pussy was mine.
Must be the blood loss. I’m losing all sense of sanity, of control. But I hadn’t expected her to challenge me like that. To imply she’d start whoring herself out just to be free of me.
Even now, the idea makes my teeth grind and my fists clench.
