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His face shifts.
Gone is the spritely, somewhat cocky demeanor. In its place, his lips curl into a snarl. His eyes darken, but unlike Elio’s that flash with emotion, his flash with something else entirely.
Rage.
Evil.
It’s like looking into the eyes of a shark, except a shark would probably hold more kindness. There’s something flat in his look that makes my mind flash panicked warnings at me.
Yeah, I need that knife.
“Do not speak to me about Elio Rossi, you bitch,” he snaps. “I have no need to prove myself against him. I was fightin’ for my business when Elio was at a fancy school. I was slitting throats and clawing my way through the darkest gutters while he was partying in Ibiza. Don’t fucking talk about him. You were never promised to him. You were promised to me.”
I flinch.
His cheeks are flushed red. He’s clearly actually enraged by this.
The only question is, does he want me to be afraid of him?
Or does he want me to stand up to him?
My whole life, my greatest superpower has been that people underestimate me. My brothers. My parents. Elio.
I’m going to let him do exactly the same thing.
I flinch and tuck my head into my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper. I pretend to shiver, curling my legs up.
I’m wearing some kind of ridiculous lacy teddy, which I absolutely hate. I’m pretty sure that I have panties on, but I refuse to think about the logistics of that right now.
If I do, I didn’t put them there.
And I definitely don’t want to think about that.
I make little sniffling noises, pretending to cry. I hear Kieran make a shushing noise, and he crawls onto the bed.
Step one.
“Oh hush, little one,” he says. It would be comforting, if he could somehow manage to take some of the crazy out of his voice.
I doubt he can, honestly. He seems unhinged in a way that isn’t just the same as my brothers, and I know they’re pretty messed up from living this life.
We all are.
Every last one of us who is in this life, we’ve got issues.
But some of us handle it better than the others.
He climbs onto the bed and pulls my legs down. It takes every ounce of my will to not kick him as he crawls on top of me. He kicks my legs apart slightly, so his hips are between my legs, and his cock, behind his rough tactical pants, is pressed against my center.
I’ve never been so repulsed in my life. Everything in me wants to panic and scream, to kick and fight and get him the hell off of me.
Calm, Caterina. You have to stay calm.
Sal and I used to train for this.
We would scream at each other, yelling and being chaotic. The other one had to keep a pulse below a certain rate to win. When we got older, everything that Sal learned from our father and uncles and Marco, he practiced with me.
Sal was our spy. He had trained for that his whole life.
