Page 13 of The Beast Who Begged Me

“Yeah,” I say as I dunk a piece of toast in the soup. “It’s okay.”

“You up for more visitors after you eat?” he asks. “Rosa’s foaming at the mouth, and Vito wants in, too.”

“Sure,” I agree around a second piece of toast. “Let them in now.”

Rosa hurries in as soon as Dami opens the door and beckons, Vito behind her. She sits on the bed and clucks her tongue at me. “Look at you. Too thin, and so pale. And what is this that they’re feeding you?”

I let her fuss over me as long as I can bear it, smiling at Vito over her shoulder, and then I catch her hands. “I’m okay, Rosa. I promise.”

“That fire could have…” Her hands clamp down on mine.

“We’re all alive. That’s what matters. And Dami will take care of everything. You know he will.”

Dami is standing closer to the wall, and turns his face further into the shadows at my words.

Tears stand in Rosa’s eyes, but she blinks them away and briskly pushes my hand toward the spoon. “Eat. And as soon as I have a kitchen again, I’ll bring you something better than this.” She shakes her head at the tray. “This is barely food.”

By the time Rosa allows herself to be herded out, the soup is gone and so is most of my energy. But I sit up again when Dami shoves a chair up under the door handle and drags the privacy curtain around the bed. All the way around, until the world is one small, pale green room with two people in it.

My first thought is that there’s a threat. “What’s wrong?”

He comes to the side of the bed and looks down at me.

“Dami, what is it?”

“Tell me to stop,” he says, “and I’ll go sit in the corner and act like a saint.”

I stare up at him as his words finally form meaning in my still-hazy brain. He’s been patient through Sammy, through Rosa and Vito and my lunch. And now his patience has run out—unless I command him otherwise.

But my patience has run out, too. I want his hands on me again. I want proof that I’m here: alive and safe and still able to feel everything he can give me.

“Come here,” I say.

He’s careful when I want him to be careless. He palms my face and kisses me deep and slow and gentle, swallowing the sound I make. His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, my collarbone, and I get my hands under his shirt and dig my fingers into the muscle of his back just to feel it jump.

“You’re going to be my good boy,” he tells me, low and husky. “You’re going to be nice and quiet for me. And you’re going to take whatever I want to give you without any backtalk.”

I flush head to toe with heat. What is it about Dami, the way he commands me, that makes me ache to obey? How can I so eagerly take orders from him when I’m so contrarian about everything else?

Clemenzas don’t kneel. We don’t give way. That truth has been central to my life. So why, when it comes to sex, am I so eager to get on my knees? Everything is about sex, I once told Dami. Everything except sex.

Sex is about power. Control. Vulnerability. About giving it all up to someone else.

No—not someone else. Damiano Orsini. Specifically him. I want him to take me. To claim what’s his. I get hard at the thought of it. And he’s the only one who’s ever made me feel like this. Desperate. Greedy.

A needy little bitch.

And I revel in that idea.

Maybe there is something wrong with me, but I don’t care. I want this. Want him.

Dami strips off his shirt, revealing the same canvas of bruises that shocked me so much in the shower earlier. But the look he’s giving me is so filthy it makes my asshole clench in anticipation. He leans over me and pulls off the blanket, slides up the flimsy hospital gown. I’m naked underneath and now I’m trembling—not from cold, but from the thrill of being at Dami’s mercy like this.

He traces a finger up my inner thigh, and I groan.

“Quiet,” he breathes against my ear.

“Then stop doing things that—” His hand closes over me under the hospital gown, and the rest of the sentence dies from natural causes.