Page 28 of The Beast Who Begged Me

“Stop.”

I freeze with the barrel against my temple. My hand starts to shake.

“Look at me.”

I look. Caligula is sitting up on the bed, hospital-pale, but familiar. And yet unfamiliar, because what’s looking out of his eyes is his grandfather’s ghost.

“Your life is forfeit,” he says. “It belongs to me now. I still have use for you, and you will not leave this world until I allow it. Is that understood? You will keep breathing until Don Clemenza tells you otherwise.”

It shouldn’t work. Words alone shouldn’t be able to hold me back. But he’s speaking my native tongue, the one language I never need translated.

My arm comes down and I drop the gun. My knees go down too, so I land heavily on the carpet.

But I keep breathing, because I’ve been ordered not to stop.

CHAPTER 11

CALIGULA

If I actively tried to find a less appropriate moment for the fallout from Nonna Mellie’s letter, I couldn’t find one. I’m sitting on the bed with my ass clenched hard, very aware of the mess threatening to drip out of me, while Damiano Orsini kneels before me.

I’ve fantasized about him kneeling. Just like this. In my darkest hours, in the basement, I made idle promises to myself that one day I would have that beast kneeling before me.

Now I find I don’t want it after all. I don’t want it in the slightest.

I just watched Dami put a gun to his head to solve his pain, with no hesitation, no thought behind it, and I had to do something.

I’ve learned during my time with him. If you take everything from a man, if he has nothing to live for, he will embrace death. So I knew if I gave him anything soft—an emotional plea, cried out for him to reconsider—it wouldn’t work. I’d lose him to his despair in the form of a bullet.

So I gave him an order instead to keep him alive.

I go on giving him orders now. “Stand up.”

He does.

I think about taking the gun away from him and immediately reject the idea. It would be pointless. Damiano Orsini doesn’t need a gun to end himself. He looks at me, and it nearly undoes me. The shock. The pain. The confusion. I want so much to wrap myself up in his arms, tell him the reason I kept this from him was exactly this: his loss of purpose.

Dami is not a man who can live without an obsession. So I can’t let him out of my sight before morning. Morning will bring perspective.

I hope so, anyway.

“We can’t discuss this in here,” I tell him, and beckon him to follow me to the bathroom, where I turn on the shower. I tell him to undress, feeling physically ill at his clumsy obedience, and pull him into the shower with me.

I don’t expect him to talk. And hell, I have no idea what to say. But we both need to shower, and I can’t stand being any further away from him than two inches right now. The water comes down in a stinging torrent, scouring the night from our skin.

His face is turned away from the spray, eyes closed, and the sight of him, broken by my Family’s secrets, twists my heart.

But clemency won’t help Dami right now.

I take the soap and start to wash off the physical evidence of what we did downstairs in the dining room. I hope the Morellis heard. I hope they have night vision on all those cameras. I hope they play it back again and again, until they feel the full force of my contempt for them.

But as I start to lather him up, Dami grabs my wrist and takes the soap from my hand, wordlessly, and turns me around. He starts to wash me instead, thorough and pragmatic. I have to close my eyes against it all. The hot water, his hands, the scent of him still all over me. My ass is sore, and a dull throb is starting in my lower back, a souvenir of the pleasure we took in each other in that haunted room.

He cleans me down like he’s washing a car. Even when his hands slide between my asscheeks, there’s no lingering. But it’s better than not having him touch me at all.

When we get out, he takes the lead again, toweling me off, avoiding my eyes. He hasn’t said a word, and his silence is frightening.

He tucks me into bed. Gets in with me. He pulls me into his arms, holds me against his chest. His cock, soft but still sizable, presses against the back of my thigh, and I want to turn around, climb on top of him, make him forget everything for a little while.