Page 6 of The Beast Who Begged Me

It was so hot…

I remember the deafening noise and the heat. Crawling with my nose to the floor because it was the only place I could find air to breathe. Looking up through smoke and seeing Sammy in the doorway. Reaching for him.

And watching him step back.

All he had to do was nothing. But then he was there, a woolen blanket dropping over my shoulders, hands hauling at me. “Get the fuck up,” he shouted at me. The roar of the fire was so loud I could barely hear him.

He wouldn’t let me go, no matter how much I stumbled or fell back down. He dragged me with him until we fell out onto the icy sidewalk. That first breath of clean, cold air was the best thing I’d ever tasted, even though I coughed like hell right after.

My eyes were streaming, but I saw Rosa and Vito watching me from the back of an ambulance, Rosa sitting up with a silvery sheet wrapped around her, held there by Vito. She tried to move, reaching out for me, but he forced her down gently, and they closed up the ambulance and left.

I remember a stretcher. Being lifted into the back of another ambulance. Sammy climbing in with me, coughing, refusing an air mask of the same kind they fitted to me.

And then nothing. Nothing until now.

I turn my head, slowly, carefully, toward the weight against my legs.

Damiano Orsini is folded into the chair beside my bed, slumped forward onto his arms next to my legs, breathing deep and slow. Asleep.

My heart swells, then drops.

He’s hurt. Even in this low light, I can’t miss it. One eye is swollen and bruised. His jaw is mottled dark. One hand is wrapped up in a fat white bandage.

But despite all that, all I feel is safe. Dami is the safety I need. I can’t even pretend to feel conflicted about wanting him anymore, because he knows how far he can push. How far I can bend. And he knows how to make me break.

He knows me inside out. And yet…

I don’t know what we are to each other. We’re not enemies. We’re not anything so ordinary as friends, and the word “lovers” doesn’t encapsulate it any better. His touch is never gentle. It’s always fierce. Possessive.

I belong to him. I’m his, and I don’t think that will ever change. But it’s not a one-way street.

He belongs to me, too. That mark on his hand is covered up, and that means I can pretend he’s completely mine, here and now. That the mark he bears no longer has any power over him. Over us.

My vision blurs.

I thought I’d never see him again. I thought I’d die down there in the mausoleum of my Family. That thought snags on something and pulls, and the letter comes back to me in a lurch. Nonna Mellie’s letter. My father didn’t kill his father. Twenty-one years of Dami’s life wasted on a lie.

How am I going to tell him? Would he even believe me if I told him?

And what difference would it make if he did?

Maybe the proof of it didn’t survive. I’m not in my clothes. I’m in a hospital gown. I have no idea what happened to the letter.

Maybe it’s enough just to have what we have. I have a list in my mind of every wrong done not just to me but to my Family. I might have loathed Nonno Lou, but I still plan to avenge him. But what Dami put me through, well.

There’s no forgiving that. Even if my father had killed his, what he did was…

Unforgivable.

The Romans didn’t forgive Carthage. They burned it, salted the earth, and wrote poetry about the power of vengeance. Like my ancient ancestors, I recognize only one settlement: Mercy to the worthy, the sword to the unworthy.

Vengeance is the only language Dami understands, too.

But I offered him a ceasefire once before. That seems close enough to substitute for forgiveness. Because if he learns the truth, that my father was blameless, then everything he did to me stops being justice and becomes plain cruelty. A debt, unpaid and unpayable. And with no one but himself to collect from, Dami’s obsessive focus on vengeance—on me—would become unmoored. Tied to nothing, what would it do to him?

Nothing good.

I know the kind of destruction Dami can wreak when he believes he’s lost everything. So I need to be careful about this letter. Need to choose my moment, so he won’t turn those destructive instincts inward.