by Reilly, Cora
Nino looked relaxed, back to his usual calm self. Maybe he’d overcome whatever had haunted him last night. “Where’s Adamo? Is he still gone?”
Remo’s face darkened. “Adamo!” he roared. “Get your ass down here.” There was silence. Remo picked up the phone, ordered pizza, then called again. “Adamo, I swear, if you’re upstairs and don’t get down here right this second, I’ll come and get you, and you will fucking regret it.”
Steps sounded from upstairs and then Adamo appeared on the stairs. He hesitated in the middle of them, looking nervous as he regarded his older brothers.
“What did you do?” Nino asked.
Adamo glanced at Remo, who was snarling. “Don’t tell me you crashed my Bugatti.”
Adamo shook his head. “There’s only one dent in the back because someone bumped into me.”
Remo staggered toward his brother and gripped him by the collar. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I told you to stop racing. You’ll get yourself killed.”
“So what? In a few weeks, I’ll be initiated. I’d do everyone a favor if I got killed before becoming like you.”
I held my breath. Nino, too, tensed beside me.
Remo pulled Adamo even closer, glaring down at him. “You are a fucking child. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe I protected you for too long. Maybe I should have initiated you sooner like Savio.”
“When did you ever protect me?”
Remo released him with a hard smile. “I ordered pizza. Or are you too good to eat with us?”
Adamo hovered on the staircase then slowly skulked down and moved toward us. He flung himself down on the sofa across from us. He gave me a smile then nodded toward Nino.
“Where’s Savio?” he mumbled.
“Out with Diego,” Remo said.
“Maybe you should go out more often too,” Adamo muttered.
Remo sat down beside Nino. “Someone has to make sure the west stays in our hands. I fought too hard for this to lose it because of laziness.”
I realized Remo and Nino hardly ever went out. With Nino, I’d thought it was because I was his wife now, but Remo, too, was mostly at home unless he was out doing business with his brothers or Fabiano. They lived in their own small world, a world I’d been allowed into. I was getting used to being a Falcone.
Nino and I returned to our bedroom after dinner and watching a few videos of past races with his brothers. We got ready for bed. I was sitting against the headboard when he joined me, looking almost wary. Was he worried about tonight?
“Did C.J. tell you I slept with her?” he asked quietly as he stretched out beside me.
“Yeah ... she did. But it’s the past. I’m not holding your past against you. You didn’t hold mine against me.”
Nino frowned. “There was nothing I could have held against you because you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know,” I said.
“Do you?”
I sighed. On a logical level, I did, but sometimes I still felt like I was to blame, which was stupid, but it was something deeply ingrained in me and difficult to shake. “Do you ever feel guilty for what you do? For what you did today?”
Nino considered that. “Not really. As I said, I don’t really feel pity. And those Outfit bastards would have done the same if they got their hands on one of ours.”
I yawned. He lifted his arm, and I snuggled up to him, propping myself up on his chest, and kissed him softly. We seldom kissed, mostly just during sex.
Nino gently touched the back of my head as his other hand brushed my arm. “What’s that for?”
“I just wanted to kiss you,” I admitted. “Or does it bother you if I do? Outside of sex, I mean.”
Nino tilted his head, his thumb lightly rubbing my neck. “Why would that bother me, Kiara? I enjoy kissing you. Did I ever give you reason to believe otherwise?”
“No, but you never kiss me during the day. We only ever kiss when we’re about to have sex.”
“When would you want me to kiss you?”
I sighed. “I don’t want you to kiss me because I want it. I want you to kiss me because you want to do it, because you feel like it.” I realized how foolish I sounded. Nino would never feel like kissing me. Every act of tenderness was for my benefit.
Nino searched my face and pulled me toward him then kissed me, the brush of his lips soft, his gray eyes almost unsure.
I blinked at him. “Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly.
I lowered my head to his bare chest, my cheek pressed up to his warm skin, confused by his actions and words.
CHAPTER 22
KIARA
That night, familiar sounds of distress woke me. I sat up and fumbled for the light switch, blinking against the sudden brightness.
Nino jerked upright beside me, his hand reaching for the bedside table and grabbing his knife.
His wild eyes locked on me, chest heaving, his fingers clutching the handle.
“I’m getting Remo,” I murmured and slowly slid out of bed, worried about startling Nino. His free hand curled around my wrist, stopping me.
I gasped in surprise, my gaze searching his face. The wild despair was gone from his expression, replaced by a mix of confusion and the familiar blankness he had always displayed in the past. “Stay,” he said quietly.
Hesitating, I climbed back into bed, and Nino pulled me toward him. I settled on his chest. He put the knife back down on his nightstand, but the tension remained in his body. Tracing the tattoos on his torso, I tried to count his scars to distract myself, but it was difficult to determine where many of them ended and others began.
“All these tattoos ... why did you get them?”
Nino’s fingers trailed up my spine and continued to my neck, then higher up, tangling in my hair. His lips brushed my forehead, and I peered up at him. Was this simulated affection? Simulated tenderness?
“Pain and pleasure,” he said in a low voice. “I can feel those like anybody else, maybe even stronger.”
“But if you feel pain even stronger than others, why would you submit yourself to having a needle pierce your skin over and over again for many hours? Why do you go into the cage? Why do you seek out pain?”
His mouth twisted. “To remind myself that I’m alive.”
My brows drew together.
“To remember who I am, what I am.”
“I don’t understand,” I admitted. “What happened to you and Remo to make you the way you are?”
Nino tilted his head down to me and regarded me. I returned his gaze, even if I didn’t know what he was looking for. “Like you said, it’s not only my story but also Remo’s.”
“I won’t talk to him about it,” I promised at once. I would never think about talking to Remo about something that obviously affected both him and Nino like that. It would be suicidal.
“Our mother was insane,” Nino began in a distant voice. “Maybe she always was or maybe our father made her that way. I only remember her like that. She had better days when our father stuffed her full of pills, but on this particular day, she was heavily pregnant with Adamo. She couldn’t take the pills. Maybe she had wanted to kill herself for a while.”
Something tight coiled in my stomach, and I almost asked him to stop because I knew that day was when Nino’s childhood ended. Nino’s mother wasn’t the first wife of a Capo who ended her life. Being married to someone raised to be cruel could destroy anyone.
“Our father had sent us all to our cabin out in the Rockies because he wanted us gone from Vegas. We were a burden. One night, our mother pulled me out of bed and led me into her bedroom. Savio was already there, but he wasn’t moving. She’d given him her sleeping pills. I didn’t know what was going on, but she gripped my arms and slit both my wrists with a knife. She wanted to kill us too. Maybe to punish our father.”
I sucked in my breath, fingers seizing on Nino’s stomach, but he was stock-still. Those scars on his wrists, th
ey were remnants of that day.
“I was confused and scared.” His brows drew together as if he was trying to remember how being scared felt. “She left after that and came back with Remo a few minutes later. I think she took him last because she knew he’d be her biggest challenge. The house was filling with smoke by then. She’d set fire to the kitchen and living room. Remo rushed over to me, and she locked the door and shoved the key under the gap below the door. Then she moved to cut Remo’s wrists, but he fought her, unlike me. She managed to cut him over and over. That’s where he got the cut on his face. When she realized she couldn’t hold him down, she set the curtains on fire and then slit her own wrists. The room filled with smoke, and I sat in my own blood. Savio wasn’t move on the bed.”
Nino’s voice was mechanical, detached, cold. His eyes were as smooth and impenetrable as mercury, but each of his words burned into me, wedged itself like a knife into my heart. The horrors he described, they were incomprehensible. I had lived my own share of horrors, true, but somehow hearing him describe what he’d gone through as a young boy broke me. “How did you get out?”
“Remo threw a lamp through the window and got burned ripping the curtains off the ceiling. Part of his clothes began burning too, but he didn’t stop. My father’s men were trying to get inside the house and trying to extinguish the flames. Remo grabbed me and helped me out of the window. I jumped and broke my leg from the impact. Remo jumped out with Savio in his arms. He broke his elbow and shoulder because he tried to protect Savio. Our mother was saved by my father’s men later.”
I swallowed hard, unable to speak, and Nino fell silent as well.
“It seemed to take forever as I watched my own blood run down my arms. I felt the deep burn and it was almost soothing.” He lifted his arms, wrists up, showing me the long thin scars covered by dark ink. I leaned forward and kissed both of his wrists, my heart aching for Nino—and for Remo.
I tried to picture Nino as a child, kneeling in his blood, watching his mother cut Remo, smelling the smoke. I could picture how scared he must have been, how utterly broken and shocked that his own mother had tried to kill them in a barbaric way. It explained so much, explained why he had shut off his emotions and why Remo had turned toward them. Different ways to cope with the same horror.
“Where is she now? Did your father kill her after what she did to you?”
Nino shook his head. “After the doctors cut Adamo out of her, he sent her off to psychiatric hospital for a while, but eventually he moved her back home.”
“He forced you to live under a roof with the woman who tried to kill you?”
Nino’s eyes were focused on his fingers, which ran up and down my side. “For the first few years. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The smile on his face felt like a bucket of ice. “But things were difficult. Remo became harder to control, and my lack of emotions eventually unsettled my father too much, so he sent us off to boarding school in England, up in the countryside north of Norwich.”
“But what about Savio and Adamo? Weren’t they too young?”
Nino nodded. “Adamo was four and Savio seven when we were shipped off. At the time, Remo had already been inducted and killed a few, but he wouldn’t let us be separated, so we went together to England. Of course, that’s what our father had intended. He wanted Remo and me gone. He was scared of us.”
I couldn’t imagine Remo in a posh boarding school. Nino could look like a sophisticated gentleman when he covered his tattoos and tried to form his expression into one of pleasantries, but Remo was far from restrained and posh.
“That didn’t work out long,” Nino said quietly. “Eventually, we ran off and returned to the States to kill our father.”
“But you didn’t. Luca’s Enforcer, Growl, did.”
“That’s something Remo will never forgive our half-brother for. He robbed us of the chance to destroy our father, piece by piece.”
I tended to forget that the Falcones and Growl were related. “I’m sorry,” I whispered eventually, my insides churning and hoping that Nino couldn’t see how much his story had affected me.
Nino made a low sound in his throat, a sound I’d only heard twice before, when he’d been on the verge of snapping, but his face was still unsettlingly void of emotion. His hand on my side dipped lower, over my hip and between my legs.
I jumped, surprised that he was looking for that kind of closeness in a situation like this. His fingers found my clit. He hovered over me and kissed me, harder than ever before, and his fingers strummed a fast rhythm between my legs. Despite the jumbled mess that was my emotions, my body responded to his kisses and touch.
Suddenly, he pushed himself up and moved on top of me, his strong arms on either side of my head. I stilled as he held himself over me, his eyes not emotionless at all. Instead, his expression twisted with something akin to despair. He’d never been on top of me during sex.
“Tell me this is okay for you, Kiara,” he managed to say in a raw and dark voice. “I’m not sure I can be as gentle as you need me to be. If you can’t do this, tell me and I’ll leave, but ...” He shook his head.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, because I wanted to console him in any way I could. If this was what he needed, I could give it to him. I wasn’t scared of Nino or his body.
NINO
Kiara looked up at me with trust that I had no trouble reading in her eyes. Her hands curled around my shoulders, holding on to me, and I grabbed my cock and guided it toward her pussy. She was wet and soft, even though she had been anxious about this position because it made her feel like she had no control, because my physical strength intimidated her. I lowered myself to my elbows. The closeness would calm her, not unsettle her, and I felt her body become even softer under me.
She tugged me down for a kiss, and I allowed her this small sliver of control, even if I was longing for something harder, darker. Even if I wanted to exert dominance and not gentleness.
But I needed to be inside her. Now. I slid in without pause, until her pussy touched my pelvis. I shuddered, needing more, needing it fast, needing to get rid of the sudden pressure on my chest that had never been there before.
I forced myself to wait a couple of heartbeats, allowed her body to adapt, forced down the raging flood of need in my body. I had never felt like this, like I needed to consume Kiara completely. Like she was the only thing that could satisfy a hunger unlike anything I’d ever felt.
My chest was tight, my stomach hollow, and I wasn’t sure what was going on. Why suddenly every look from Kiara made my insides explode with fire, almost painfully but good too.
I pulled out and thrust back into Kiara, and her nails dug into my back, leaving scratches. It felt like relief, an outlet for the pressure. My lips found hers as I slammed into her, and she returned my gaze with a burning need of her own. Again, that same ache for something I didn’t understand. I had always been in control, but I couldn’t control this. I reached between us and rubbed Kiara’s clit then latched onto her nipple, sucking and nibbling as I drove her into the bed with long, hard thrusts.
Even her smell opened the hole in my chest wider. Everything about her made my body react, made me long for something impossible, for something foreign and inexplicable.
Kiara started to shudder under me, but I kept thrusting even as her walls tightened from the force of her orgasm. I got on my knees for more leverage and kept thrusting, hoping it would fill that hole in my stomach, would satiate the deep hunger of my soul, but even as I came with a violent jerk and my cock softened, the longing remained wedged in my chest.
I sank down on top of Kiara and breathed harshly against her throat. Her fingers played with my hair, and she kissed my ear, then my temple, and for some reason those two meaningless gestures fulfilled some of my longing.
I twisted my face to look at her. Her skin was flushed, and she was breathing fast. She looked stunned, overwhelmed as she met my gaze.
“Did I hurt you?” I rasped.
>
Her brows pulled tight. “No. When you said you couldn’t be gentle, I’d expected worse.”
So had I. It had felt like I was on the verge of losing control, but somehow Kiara had held me fast through it all.
“Nino?” she asked quietly. “That look on your face, what does it mean?”
If only I knew.
She kissed me. “I know our pasts hold horrors, but we can get beyond that, don’t you think?”
I stroked her cheek. I had gotten past the horrors. I’d seen and done so many horrible things, how could an event from long ago still hold any power over me?
CHAPTER 23
KIARA
The next morning I found Remo pummeling the life out of the punching bag, but all I could think of were Nino’s words, and I knew I’d never see Remo the same way again. Christ, he still terrified me, but I almost understood him—part of him anyway. Remo was cruel and brutal, merciless and quick to snap, but it wasn’t all there was to him.
“Why are you staring?” he panted as he sent the bag flying with another hard kick.
I wasn’t even sure why I had come here. It was where Nino and his brothers hung out to play pool, watch fights and discuss business, or pummel a punching bag during the day. In the evening when we all had dinner together, my presence was tolerated, but I usually stayed away the rest of the time, giving them their space.
My eyes were drawn to Remo’s back. I had never been close enough to him to notice that the tattooed fallen angel covered up burn scars. I hadn’t realized the rough patches on his palms were burns and healed wounds from fending off his mother.
Remo turned to me fully, narrowing his eyes, and for a moment I wanted to go over and hug him, hug the young boy who saved Nino and Savio and even the unborn Adamo, who fought an insane mother and burned so they could all live, but Remo was a man now and not one you wanted to console. My eyes lingered on the scar crossing his eyebrow, and compassion for him filled me. Maybe Remo was beyond redemption in many people’s eyes, but he had saved his brothers, had saved Nino.
