Page 16 of The Beast Who Begged Me

“A hotel suite? That would be asking for another assassination attempt.”

“There’s—” I break off, but hell, he must have thought of it himself. “Your grandfather’s townhouse,” I say.

He reaches out a hand to me. “It’s no use, Dami. That place needs so much work since it was ransacked by—well, whoever it was. And we’d still have to set up security. It’s the work of months. No, staying with the D’Amatos is the best option we have right now. The only option.”

“They’ll bug every fucking room! Have live feed cameras in every corner!”

“Then I hope they’ll enjoy the show,” he says, and when he looks up at me from beneath his eyelashes, I remember exactly what we were doing just before D’Amato interrupted. “Besides, don’t you remember your own advice to me? When we were looking for Tiberius, you told me to go to the last lead I had and start there—with Uncle Tony. In this case, I’m looking for a ring. And the last place I know it was, with any certainty, was in the Morelli mansion on the night of my grandfather’s murder.”

I pull back slightly, still shocked after all this time by how that devious little mind works. He’ll put up with any humiliation if it gets him something he wants. Lou Clemenza bled out in that house. Now Caligula is volunteering to sleep at the scene of the murder that lit the fuse on all of this.

“Are you serious?” I sigh, because I know he is. “You’re doing this to search for a ring?”

His eyes narrow and he pushes the hospital blanket aside. “I’m making a strategic decision to obtain a lead about the most important relic my Family has. Unless you have a better idea?”

I’ve got nothing to say to that. Not when he’s right, and not when the memory of his hard dick in my fist is still warming my palm, and my eyes can’t stay away from his lap.

He must see it on my face, because a slow smile spreads across his. “Well, then. Are you going to help me, Dami? Or are you just going to stand there glaring?” He shifts in the bed, and the movement pulls the thin hospital gown taut, so I see the outline of him, still half-hard even after D’Amato’s visit.

Or maybe because of it. He gets off on playing people.

And I get off on watching him do it.

Besides, the way he’s doing it, offering it up so shamelessly and yet so subtly… He’s learned me just the way I’ve learned him.

He’s learned what works on me every goddamn time.

“Come here,” he says again, and the tone is different this time. Softer. Pleading.

And because I’m a weak, stupid bastard, I go.

CHAPTER 7

DAMIANO

I sit down on the edge of the bed and Caligula shifts closer, until we’re touching.

“I can’t do this alone,” he murmurs. “Any of it.”

Before I can stop myself, my hand is on his face, my thumb stroking the line of his jaw. His eyes close and he leans into my touch with a sigh.

I know it’s a performance. Knowing doesn’t help. He’s still the one man in this city who can bring me to heel with a single syllable.

I hate the idea of letting Luca D’Amato put a roof over my head. But Sammy and Vito and Rosa all had the same anxious question for me when I left Caligula sleeping before. What are we going to do? Where are we going to go?

I didn’t have an answer then, and I still don’t now. The fortress I built to keep everyone safe is a burned-out shell. My closest ally in the Giulianos is dead. The Morellis are circling like they smell blood.

Because they do.

It’s like I said to Caligula before: we’re fucked. And then it occurs to me, finally, what he was smiling about before.

We.

There’s a we.

And we might be fucked. But nothing on this earth is going to take him away from me now. When I heard he’d used my name at the hospital, called himself Orsini instead of Clemenza, something fierce rose up in me. It sounded right. I want to protect him with my whole self, body, soul, name. And the desperate need I always have for him comes roaring back to life now, a glowing ember sparking into a fire.

But this time, something else comes with it. An idea.