Caj made his way over to me, feet whispering across the dying leaves of autumn, getting so close that I had to tilt my chin slightly to look up into his face.
“There's always going to be an underground, a darkness, a shadow cast by the sun. But how do you want to see it run? Where do you want it to go? You can't dry up the river completely, but you can decide where to build a damn; you can determine the flow.”
“Why the fuck would the three of you want me in charge?” I asked, reaching a palm up and rubbing it over the slicked back surface of my hair. I had helmet hair now, tiny tendrils frizzing out here and there. Even in all black with a leather motorcycle jacket tossed over my shoulders, I probably looked like a hot mess.
Although … the leather and jasmine scent of the jacket was awfully nice.
“The three of you will never share; the three of you will never back down. The only solution is that I step up and take the mantle.”
“Why is that such a bad thing? Lucky told me he gave you his speech. Let's not split the keys to the kingdom, Adelasia. There's a solution to all of this—and that solution is you. Besides”—he flashed me a grin that made my heart stutter inside my chest—“your reputation precedes you.”
I felt my breath coming in long, hot pants.
If I allowed it, this moment would devolve into sex … or evolve maybe? Hmm.
“Let's find Renata and then maybe I'll let you fuck me,” I said, turning away from Caj and letting the soft, hot chuckles of his laughter roll over me.
He followed me though the woods for a while, letting me wander aimlessly for about a half hour before reaching out to grab my right shoulder.
“Now,” Caj said, his voice easing along the edge of my ear, sound made solid, a veritable caress without a single physical touch. It was quite impressive. “This is the part where you stay quiet,” he told me, bringing up flickers of old memory. Half of those memories involved sheets and sweat and sex while the others … the scent of gunpowder, the spatter of blood, the finality of death.
Caj took the lead—even though I'd been on missions like this before, it'd been years—and showed me where to crouch, to crawl, how to creep like a fox through the brush.
By the time the sun was hitting its zenith in the sky, we were looking at Renata Coppolina.
Fuck.
She looked like she was already dead.
For a while, I sat there and squinted, tried to see if I could find any sign of life in her, a shuddering breath, a throbbing pulse point, a twitch of fingers. I didn't see anything.
“She's already gone,” I said, feeling this sick, sad lurch inside of me.
“No,” Caj replied, pulling his gun from the holster across his chest. “She's still breathing.”
He looked up at the canopy for a long moment as I tried to see what he was talking about, examining Renata's pale, comatose form until I caught a glimpse of a single, shuddering breath.
I licked my lips and forced my own breathing to remain calm and steady.
“There're only two men out here,” Caj said, dropping his gaze back down. This close to him, I could barely stand the masculine curve of his jaw, the freshly shaved surface of his skin, lips too pink to belong to a monster. But his eyes, those had gone hard with violence. “And they're not Costello crew,” he added. Before I could think to comment on that, Caj was whispering again. “One clean shot to the skull should do it. They don't look worried; I don't think they're expecting company.”
“Let's get the camera first,” I said, thinking on my feet, “in case someone's watching the live feed.”
Caj flashed me a sharp grin and raised his brows.
He liked this. Right now, I was looking at a man who was having fun.
That terrified me.
And intrigued me.
“You take care of the camera then,” he said, running his tongue across his lower lip. “Let me worry about the men.”
We looked at each other for a long, hot moment, both our pulses picking up, adrenaline running hot and fast through our veins. When we finally turned back to the scene in front of us, I was ready. I took aim at the lens of the camera, sitting pretty on a tripod not a half-dozen feet from where Renata was laying, and I pulled the trigger.
In the span of a breath, Caj had taken a shot at the man on the left, hitting him square in the forehead. As he crumpled to the ground, I realized that Caj was right—these men didn't work for the family. Or if they did, I didn't recognize them.
The second one was a little luckier than the first, dropping down off the camping chair he was sitting on and getting belly down in the dirt. Tucked behind the brush like he was, the shot wasn't clear.
“Damn it,” Caj cursed, rising to his feet and running across the open expanse of the clearing. He made it about halfway before another shot rang out and he was crouching and rolling, coming and raising his weapon about waist high. Birds scattered above us as he aimed and took fire at the second man, ending him without any pomp and circumstance.
No, that would come later.
I made my way over to Renata and rolled her onto her stomach, so I could get access to the metal cuffs that bound her, digging into the soft paleness of her flesh. Blood and bruises bloomed where the shackles kissed her skin.
“Looking for this?” Caj asked, and I glanced up, lifting out my hand for the key. He dropped it in my palm and stood back, watching as I freed the poor unconscious woman from what was essentially an outdoor prison cell.
“Renata,” I said, turning her back over and slipping out of Caj's motorcycle jacket. I tossed it over her body and then leaned down to listen to her breath. She wasn't beyond saving—it'd only been one night—but the weather was crisp, and without any protection, I imagined she'd be hypothermic. “We need to get her out of here and to a hospital,” I said, knowing that unfortunately, any hospital in the immediate vicinity was out of the question.
They'd find her there—and they'd kill her.
It was also at that moment that I realized we'd taken a fucking motorcycle out here. How did that not occur to me sooner?! I truly was falling apart, just pieces of broken glass clattering to the forest floor around me.
Guess finding out my father'd either murdered my mother himself or hired someone to do it for him had really fucked with the logical half of my brain.
“I'm calling my men in to grab her,” Caj told me. “Where do you want them to take her?”
I accepted a bottle of water that Caj must've pilfered from the now dead men and tried to figure out an answer to that question.
We needed Renata to talk, but she clearly wasn't in any state to do so. Fuck, I didn't even know if she would live. Sitting back on my ass in the dirt, I pulled her into my lap and brushed tangled strands of hair from her forehead. Dribbling a bit of water on her dry and cracked lips got her to stir, but she definitely wasn't waking up anytime soon.
“Take her to the hospital in Albany,” I said, knowing that was several hours drive from here, but also realizing with a sickening clench in my gut that that was her only chance to survive and get the hell out of Dodge. There was an airport in Albany; I'd make sure Caj bought her a plane ticket out of town … not to mention a new identity.
“Done,” he said, as if he weren't the underboss to a decades old crime family. He wasn't used to taking orders from anyone but his father, the don of the Bellincioni family. Even then, I imagined there was tension. Caj moved away and made a quick call that I didn't bother trying to listen in on.
If he wanted to fuck me over now, he wouldn't have to be surreptitious about doing it.
“Leave her here and let's go,” he told me when he came back, pushing one of the dead men over with his boot. Caj took a few pictures with his phone and then looked up, his green eyes meeting mine with with a small spark of heat and violence.
The situation was terrible and I had a sinking feeling that things were only going to get worse, but … he wanted me in the worst way; I wanted him right fucking back.
> “Andrà tutto bene, vedrai,” I told Renata, wondering what other horrible things had happened to this woman in the last twenty-four hours. You'll be alright.
I just wasn't entirely sure if that was the truth … or a horrible lie.
Caj led me away from the bloody clearing in a completely different direction than we'd come in and yet, somehow managed to take us back to the motorcycle, hidden in a cluster of winged burning bushes, their red leaves billowing in the cool afternoon breeze.
Standing here at the edge of the tree line, just me and Caj, everything seemed so peaceful, so blessedly normal.
And it was all a fucking lie.
What the hell had happened during the years I'd been gone?
There was a web of lies that I wasn't sure how to untangle. Trying and failing … well, now, that would get me killed.
“This is …” I ran both hands down my face and felt beads of sweat collecting on my skin, a mix of adrenaline, exertion, and … something else. I looked Caj hard in the face. “My mother, she was too smart to cheat on Carlo,” I said, knowing how sad and pathetic that statement was but also how true.
She'd know that by cheating on him, she was putting her life on the line; she wouldn't do that. She'd probably at least discuss divorce first. There was a chance that, too, could've ended her life, but if she were desperate … that's the route she'd go.
I paced in a small, tight circle as Caj watched, leaning against his motorcycle and smoking a cigarette. He didn't seem to smoke much except for when he was stressed. Although, when I thought back on it, I could remember sneaking a few cigarettes while hanging out with Caj as a teen, leaning against the brick walls of New York City alleys and feeling invincible.
Again, our courtship—and sex—had happened during a brief lull of violence between the families, a short-lived amicability that hadn't lasted the year.
“Good point,” he said, watching me with slightly narrowed green eyes, taking long, slow drags on his cigarette and holding it with two long fingers. The diamonds in his ears and the ones on either side of his lip twinkled in the sunshine. “A don's wife cheating … not a particular bit of news you'd want getting out.”
“Everyone knows,” I said, continuing to pace, knowing we should leave but taking a cue from Caj's relaxed stance that at least for the moment, everything was alright. We must've been far enough away from the clearing to take a breather. “Carlo wouldn't want everyone to know—”
“—unless it wasn't true?” Caj guessed, his voice adding shadows to the sunny afternoon. Didn't matter. The mood was dark enough as it is.
“She didn't cheat,” I said, trying to puzzle my way through this before I got back on that bike and headed to Millie's house. Even if Juliano already knew I was gone—there was at least a fifty percent chance of that—I was going to play the same game as everyone else.
I would lie.
I would bullshit.
I would win.
“So if she didn't cheat then she knew something else …” My voice trailed off and I found myself standing still, staring into Caj's face. It was not a face of comfort, but at least I felt confident that he wouldn't betray the words I was telling him to anyone.
He wanted this arrangement to work out.
And he wanted me.
How had I not recognized that sooner?
Caj was interested me in a way that was … more than just casual. For whatever reason, I intrigued him.
“Are we going to fuck now?” he asked, putting out his cigarette with a thick soled motorcycle boot and smiling in a way that wasn't meant to put anyone at ease.
“Did you even really need to ask?” I said, stepping back and turning into the woods. I walked through the sun dappled tunnel beneath the trees, turned and put my back up to the rough trunk of a sugar maple.
Caj stepped in close, smooth and easy, almost like we'd rehearsed this.
In reality, I knew this was going to be a violent and messy affair.
“That night,” he began, and I knew exactly where he was going with that statement. I didn't want him to continue, so I leaned in and bit his lower lip, sucking it into my mouth until he groaned and stopped talking.
“I wasn't going to say what you thought I was,” he whispered after he arced the tip of his tongue against my own, grabbed a handful of my hair and tilted my head back. Caj slanted his lips to mine with a rough, wild frenzy, the dark eyes of violence watching us from the shadows. It was just barely contained, that gaze. Just barely.
But I'd seen some awful things today, heard some awful things. I wanted them erased, eradicated … if only for a moment.
“Have you even seen Niccolò since you got back,” he whispered in my ear and I felt my entire body go cold. I would've pushed him away if he wasn't so damn strong.
“If you were planning on having sex with me, this would be a good way to ruin it,” I growled, trying not to think of the night I left, a night cloaked in blood and pain and horror. Niccolò was not a man I'd liked as a child, as a teen, or as a young adult … but I knew that if I were at all serious about turning this thing with Caj, Marcell, and Lucky into reality I'd have to deal with him.
Niccolò Lansky was the current underboss of the Costello crime syndicate, the technical next in line for the throne, so to speak.
He'd hated me from the day I was born it seemed. Getting past him … would not be an easy task.
“I'll help you kill him,” Caj offered, reading my body language. Couldn't have been that hard, pressed up against me like he was. I noticed his pulse pick up with his words. “I'll hold him down while you slit his throat.”
“You're a sick man, Mr. Bellincioni,” I said, and then I wrapped my arms around his neck, knowing that the first time we fucked … I'd gotten lucky. I'd known that the chances of falling … were high. I'd managed to crawl out of that hole once. Could I do it again?
Doubtful.
Caj moved his mouth to the side of my neck, licking along the throbbing beat of my pulse. Apparently the idea of Niccolò meeting an untimely end excited me, too. Maybe I was as sick in the head as Caj? Or else … it was just a natural response to the trauma that bastard Niccolò had put me through. Flickers of a night best left forgotten chased around my head, but I drowned them out by letting the hardness of Caj's body overwhelm me. The man had muscles in places I didn't know muscles could grow. He was lean and strong and capable of so many naughty things.
My left hand dropped down and cupped the hardness of his cock through his jeans, kneading and caressing, drawing groans from his throat that pebbled my skin with goose bumps. He sounded like a drowning man coming up for his first gasp of air. Surely—like me—he'd had plenty of sex in the last few years. So what was it about me that he liked?
What was it about him that I liked?
Caj's fingers deftly unbuttoned my jeans, tugging the zipper down and sliding his fingers along the crotch of my panties, teasing a warm wet spot to the surface and a moan from my throat. The sound echoed around the quiet forest, mixing with birdsong and drowning out both my memories of the night I left the family … and the awful ones I'd just made in the clearing.
I would not think of poor Renata in that moment, not my mother's death, not my father's … it had to be betrayal. It had to be.
My father … he was the rat.
Caj paused to push my jeans down my hips, drawing his lips from mine and slowly working his way down my body, biting my nipples through my bra and t-shirt, lifting my shirt to kiss my belly. He didn't stop until he was face to face with my black lacy panties. I hated to admit that they were a pair Vera had given me to win the men over.
My fingers teased through Caj's dark red hair as he pressed his mouth to my underwear and started to nibble and play with the fabric using his teeth. Even through the layer of silk separating us, his tongue on my clit was beyond fantastic. It was … everything. I hadn't had oral in so long, I barely remembered what it felt like.
Bo and I fucked, sure, but we were both
so busy all the time, we just kept a quick routine in mind, a ten or fifteen minute jaunt that would get us both to orgasm. That was it. Nothing romantic or sexy or … dangerous about it.
And I wanted dangerous.
Craved it.
Caj licked along the edges of the panties, tracing their outline with his tongue. I was a bit surprised when he spun me around and then yanked the fabric over my ass cheeks.
He spread the soft flesh with his fingers and then pulled my hips toward his face, opening up my pussy from behind. Long, sure strokes of my tongue took the rest of my thoughts on a ride of hormones, whisking them away and leaving me blissfully empty. All I could feel was that burning hot Costello family blood igniting and promising that more sinful pleasure, more wicked need, that all of it was mine for the taking.
My impulse control was shot.
Caj didn't ignore a single part of me, teasing my lips with his own, using his tongue to his full advantage. He explored me with his mouth while I stood there, completely exposed from my waist to my knees. The cool autumn air teased my bare flesh, and the wind rustled the dying leaves of the trees. None of it mattered; the only thing I felt in that moment was heat.
My fingers came down to tease my clit, but Caj didn't leave me unsupervised there for long. Pushing my hand aside, he took over that duty, too, using my own wetness to slick his fingertips over the hardened nub of flesh, working it until I felt the shattered glass pieces of my body start to grind together.
Sparks of pleasure rose like flame, a blazing fire that flared into an explosion when Caj used his other hand to enter me.
“Ah, so tight already,” he said, his mouth brushing my ass cheek. “You're hurting my fingers, Adelasia.” When he grinned, that vulpine curve of his lips, I could feel it. “Wonder what you'd do to my dick then?”
Lavish: A Reverse Harem Miniseries (Mafia Queen Book 2) Page 7
