Page 33

And then he’d stood, prowled to me, and placed a weighty hand on my shoulder, slowly, firmly pushing down.

I’d dropped to my knees on instinct, mouth already watering, thighs trembling.

After he taught me how to take a rigorous, sloppy face fucking, I only lasted thirty seconds with his hand between my drenched thighs before I was coming.

That night, he made me climax so hard and so often, I literally passed out before he could leave me alone and cold in bed.

I decided, after that, not to make any more pacts to resist the touch of my husband.

The idea of an affair had occurred to me briefly, especially with Bryson, but two days after my dinner party and the night I lost my virginity, Bryson had called to tell me he had an offer from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and he and his dog Maya were moving.

I didn’t need to confirm with Dario to know it had been his doing.

And truth be told, I was grateful he hadn’t taken more serious offense to Bryson’s flirtations.

There was a capo in my father’s Sicilian outfit who had cut off a man’s dick for daring to kiss his wife on the cheek at a party.

I knew Dario did it because I was his possession, his bambolina, and not because he cared.

That hopeless-romantic ideal had been driven out of my head.

But there were moments.

Moments outside of waking up with his cock already inside me, his mouth on my neck, to find my erotic dream was a reality. Moments outside of those placid public dates where we acted the part of a happily married couple.

The times he brought home Alla Vita takeout because he knew it was my favorite, or when he noticed me wincing after a particularly grueling workout at the dojo and ordered Bonnie to draw me a bath. Those instances when I caught him staring at me as if transfixed, the way an artist might study his muse while committing her to paper.

Moments like this very morning when I woke up at 4:00 a.m. to noises coming from deep within the house. I followed the cacophony down to the main floor and farther, into the bowels of the basement where the gym, pool, and utility rooms were.

Like any house of a Mafia don, our utility rooms included a wet room.

Not for any kind of kink play, but for torture.

The door was open, the noise spilling out along with the light into the shadowy hall.

“Now you know,” Dario was saying calmly as I approached the door, “what happens when you fuck with a Ferretti.”

“Fuck,” a grown man expelled on a sob of pain. “I h-heard your men say that you don’t even like the girl. What was the harm?”

“What was the harm,” Dario repeated flatly, and I could see, now that I was closer, that he stood just inside the door, cleaning his wavy-edged keris dagger on a bloodstained silk handkerchief. “What was the harm, you ask, in threatening to fail my wife if she didn’t suck your pathetic excuse for a cock?”

I froze, my heart rabbiting in my chest like chased prey.

I had not told Dario, or anyone, about my run-in with Professor Hewitt.

There was no point.

Things like this happened in academia—happened to women—all the time. As a female and as a member of the Italian and Italian American Mafia, I was more than aware of how men could take advantage of a woman they saw as unprotected or lesser than them.

Professor Hewitt, of course, had no idea that I was not unprotected.

He was just a philosophy professor with tenure at one of the top universities in the world who thought he could get away with anything.

He couldn’t, and I hadn’t planned on letting him, especially because if he thought he could pull that cazzate on me, it likely meant he had successfully pulled it with other women who were unprotected.

So it was up to me to show him the error of his ways.

And I was okay with that.