Page 60 of The Beast Who Begged Me

“I don’t have a name for you,” Rossi says. “And even if I did, it wouldn’t do you any good. The Gees are going through a purge right now. Half the men who might have been involved were already out before this, and any remainders, they’ll get killed off. Big Gee doesn’t like anyone with too long a memory.”

Dami whirls around and stalks off. “Thank you, sir,” I say to Rossi, backing up quickly. “I appreciate your candor. And I meant it—about the Brooklyn block.”

“Of course you did,” he says. “We shook on it.”

But I’m already jogging after Dami. He’s reached the stairs now and is starting up them. I grab him back. “Where are you going?”

“To find some old Giuliano and make him talk,” he snaps.

“Dami, you can’t—Dami, wait!” I have to run up the stairs after him and grab him on the landing. “You can’t leave until the dinner is over.”

“Far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”

“But it’s not. And that means the Morelli guards will stop you if you try to leave—the house is on lockdown while the Commission meets.”

He grabs me by the arms and pushes me against the wall. “You already had me kneeling at your feet like a trained dog,” he snarls down at me. “What the fuck more can I do to prove myself to you? To them?”

I look up into his face and wait until I see the rage subside. “I’m sorry I had to do that, Dami. I’ll never ask you to do it again. But you can’t leave until this dinner is done.”

He stares down at me. “Don’t you hate it?” he says at last, low and quiet. “Don’t you hate being here as much as I do?” He lets me go. “Or maybe you’re relieved you don’t have to be dependent on me for your safety.”

Now I’m the one who reaches out to grab him. “That’s⁠—”

“We’ll resume shortly, gentlemen,” says a cool voice from down the hallway. We both turn to see Luca D’Amato standing there. “Perhaps you should come down now?”

“Of course,” I say after a brief pause. “We’ll be right there. Won’t we, Dami?”

It takes him a second, but he nods.

I make him go down first, just to keep an eye on him. But I hope by the time dinner is through, his temper will have cooled off. Dami can’t seriously think he’ll be able to torture information out of a bunch of retired mobsters. He’ll see sense.

And if he doesn’t, I’ll make him.

CHAPTER 20

DAMIANO

By the time we finally make it to bed, I want to brick the door up behind us, just to have a little fucking privacy.

But I stay as far away from Caligula as I can. The night has shaken me enough that my self-control is on the edge. It started out bad, with the memory of rutting into him about two feet away from where I was sitting at the dinner table; got worse when he made me kneel before him; and ended up at rock bottom when I understood what Salvatore Rossi was saying.

It might have been a Giuliano who killed my father. One of the men from my own Family, and the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.

I never saw the act, only the aftermath. I’ve been sure all these years it was Cesario Clemenza because, up in my bedroom, I heard a late-night knock at the front door, heard my father let him in happily.

It wasn’t unusual for Cesario to show up. Sometimes he’d be in the kitchen with a group of his men, breaking down tactics in the afternoon, and back again that same night.

My father never once turned him away.

I see now what it really showed, and I’m a fool for not seeing it before. The late nights, the body language, the way my father looked at Cesario.

I knew I was queer only after I tried with a few women. It never felt right. My first same-sex experience was with some twink who wanted forty bucks to suck my dick in a back alley. I was drunk enough to pay him, and I never saw him again. By then, I was already in deep with the Giulianos, and I was just lucky that Sebastiano was an advocate for me.

So maybe it was the same for my father. Maybe he never bothered to look outside the box until someone opened it up for him.

He adored my mother.

But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t feel the same for a man, too.