Page 70 of The Beast Who Begged Me

I pull the knife from my ankle holster.

“Dami! What⁠—”

I cut.

The pain is excruciating but I barely flinch. I carve right around the curve of the “G,” then around again in a quarter-moon shape. I turn it to catch the straight line, slash down once more, and pull the whole damn thing off my hand.

Caligula makes a strangled sound and lunges, too late. “Don’t.”

It’s already done. The new room is full of blood—dark drops splattering over the new carpet, loud in all that quiet.

The Giuliano has been carved right out of me.

I throw down the strip of flesh at his feet, but he steps right over it and comes to me instead. I go down on my knees, catch his wrist. My hand is streaming with blood, but I ignore it and press my mouth to the ouroboros on his finger.

I look up at him. “My life is yours.” My voice shakes once, then holds. “My loyalty. My service. Everything I’ve got. I swear to you, Don Clemenza.”

I don’t know the right words, the words his people use. But they must be close enough. It’s the oldest contract I know.

Blood for blood. Fealty for belonging.

Caligula makes a broken sound. “Dami…no.”

He’s crying. Not all the way—his eyes wet, his breath uneven—and he looks more frightened than anything. He sinks to his knees as well, and now he pulls his shirt off and wraps my ruined hand in it, both of his closing around mine hard. The white cotton goes red almost immediately.

“I wish it were that easy,” he says.

I stop breathing.

“But it’s not that easy. It was never going to be easy with us, Dami.” His thumb slides in the blood pouring over my wrist and he winces like the hurt is his. “There’s always going to be…something terrible between us. Everything you did, everything I did. A black hole of horror, and there’s no filling it in. Not with money or blood or oaths.”

I want to argue. I want to offer him another house, another promise, one more thing I can buy or build or bleed for…

But there’s nothing.

The house didn’t work. The blood didn’t work. And here, at the end of everything—house refused, flesh refused, vow refused, no orders left to follow and nothing he wants from me—I only have one thing left to offer.

Everything here was supposed to be proof. Something I could point to. Something tangible that showed I’m trying to make it up to him.

Sorry isn’t like that. It’s a beggar’s word. It offers nothing, demands everything. And I have no goddamn right in the world to ask for his grace.

Besides, I already know he can’t forgive. It’s not in his nature. But I hear it coming out of me just the same, scraping my throat like barbed wire.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Please.”

CHAPTER 23

CALIGULA

My hands are hot with Damiano’s blood as it soaks through the shirt I wrapped around his self-inflicted wound. The bedroom smells of the faint cedar scent that’s been following Dami around recently, and underneath it all is the sharp copper stink of blood that I’ve come to know too well.

But this is different, because it’s his blood.

“Please,” he says again, clutching at my hands.

“Dami. I can’t—” I break off, unwilling to let the words out. But I told myself I’d be honest with him. That I would not promise what I could not give. That I would not forgive what I could not forgive.

Forgiveness is not in my nature. I’m too much like my grandfather.