“I put you in an…impossible situation, Cosi. I know it. I own it. You made the ultimate sacrifice for your family. I knew leaving was best for everyone, but how could I leave you all alone with those beasts? I did what I could from afar. Figured if you had the creep’s baby, it would give you some measure of power.”
The creep’s baby.
I squeezed my eyes shut as molten tears swamped my ducts and scorched trails down my cheeks.
Fuck me.
Why was my reproduction such an available tool of manipulation?
Mrs. White, Noel, and now my father had all schemed against me as if a baby was a tool and not a person.
I had only known about my pregnancy for a day, and still, the death of that baby haunted me. I couldn’t look at baby shoes without feeling an aching absence in my womb.
My father hadn’t killed that baby, but he’d put it in peril before it even stood a chance of survival.
I opened my eyes and stared into my father’s face so close to mine. He watched me with open, guileless eyes, offering his sincerity to me like a gift.
“I was trying to help,” he whispered after seeing the vivid pain in my expression.
He was only trying to help.
Hadn’t he always only been trying to help?
It was his excuse for gambling, for getting involved with the Camorra, for selling me to the highest bidder.
Well, the means did not justify any of the ends. Not to me. Not ever.
I pulled my hands from his and sat back, needing the space, hating that we were even breathing the same air.
Something spasmed across his face, a clenching and closing like an octopus poised to flee. “I’m in a better place now, Cosi. I have money, influence, that you couldn’t believe.”
“How?” I asked, both because he wanted me to and because I wanted to know where he was in life, how he could be here, and now, so that I could avoid him forevermore.
That slick smear of a smile again. “I moved to America when your mother and Elena did, just to keep an eye on things. Ended up hooking up with some old friends from my youth. Guy named Thomas ‘Gunner’ Coonan took me under his wing, joined me up to his successful enterprises.”
Of course. Everyone in New York knew who Kelly was; the most successful Irish crime boss since Coonan in the 70s.
“You joined the Irish mob.”
Seamus grinned from ear to ear, opening his palms in a gesture of smug nonchalance. “What can I say? I got a head for business, and they recognized greatness in me the way the Camorra couldn’t.”
“Dio mio, Dad,” I said, forgetting myself for a moment. “Do the Camorra know you changed sides?”
“I was never part of their outfit,” he argued. “Just beholden to it. ’S not a problem.”
I very much doubted that. The Irish and Italian mafia in New York were not friendly, and they never had been. Any excuse for conflict was flame to kerosene-soaked tinder.
“Why in the world would you practically kidnap me like this from an Italian held poker game then?” I demanded. “That’s just plain stupid.”
Or is it? His expression countered with the quirk of a red brow and twisted lips.
Oh.
I sighed, so exhausted by my own life, I thought I would faint from the strain. “You want to go to war with them.”
Seamus beamed at me, reaching out to pat me on the hand before I could pull away. “You always were such a smart girl. Taught you well, I did. Yes, things are escalating between the Camorra and the Cosa Nostra. It’s the perfect time to hit them while their down.”
“So again, you’re using me as a pawn.” The words were flat, two-dimensional, and plastic like fake currency in a children’s game.
Useless in the real world, but they still felt good to use.
His brow crinkled into a pleat like a checkmark, just like Elena’s and Giselle’s did. “Don’t be so dramatic. Two birds, one stone, carina. I’m multitasking.”
I couldn’t stop focusing on the hate growing inside me, poison like a weed, choking out all other thoughts and feelings until I felt consumed by it.
“You aren’t my real father,” I said, the words so cutting I thought for a moment they might really slice through his thick skin. “Did you know that?”
By the blank, unamused set of his features, I knew he hadn’t.
“Don’t play silly games,” he ordered, sitting back and righting himself.
“Amadeo Salvatore is my father,” I continued calmly. “You know him as capo Salvatore, head of the Camorra in Napoli.”
Seamus snorted derisively, but a muscle flexed in his jaw, betraying his unease.
I forged on, sliding my dagger between his ribs and twist, twisting. “Mama met him in the fish market one day, and they started an affair. He wanted her to leave, and she loved him, but she was too good and too scared to do it.” I paused, watched Seamus as he held his breath, confused and angry, unwilling to believe. “Haven’t you ever wondered why Sebastian and I look nothing like you while Elena and Giselle could be your carbon copies?”
“Not all children look like their fathers, Cosima,” he said drily, but his voice lacked conviction, and his eyes moved over me with X-ray focus, as if he could read the truth in my very bones.
“No,” I agreed easily. “But if you think about it for a minute, you might remember that Salvatore had very unique eyes too. Golden eyes. You might remember that despite all your infractions, the Camorra was relatively lenient with you…why do you think that was? Maybe because Salvatore had a soft spot for Mama and caved too often into her pleas to save your sorry arse? Maybe because you were a pseudo father, however poor, to the two children he would never be able to parent himself?”
I leaned forward, my voice a hiss, my eyes slitted like a snake to deliver the last of my venomous attack. “I know I was your greatest accomplish, Seamus. How does it feel to know that even that was never really yours?”
“Lies,” he barked meanly, but his eyes were wet with something softer than rage, and his mouth was pale with desperate tension. “That bastard lied to you, Cosima.”
“Yes, but not about this.” I leaned back, collected myself by smoothing down my dress and tossing my hair over my shoulder before I slid closer to the door and put my hand on the handle. “I’m not your daughter, Seamus, so you can stop ‘watching over’ me. I’m not your daughter, so you can stop the games. I’m not your daughter, and even if I was”—I smiled meanly, feeling my lips parted and pulled into a grotesque farce of good humour—“I would never want to see you again.”
Seamus stared at me, more ruined by my revelation than he ever had been by my sale into sexual slavery. His own ego was the root of his misery. I was beautiful and clever, and Seamus had taken pride in the creation of me.
I battled the urge to take out my horrible anger in violence on his flesh and instead lifted my chin and ordered imperiously, “Let me out here. And Seamus, if I see you again, I’ll give Alexander free rein to end you in any way he sees fit.”
After a brief hesitation, he knocked on the partition behind him with two knuckles. We stared at each other, watching the bond between us disintegrate into ash.
“I love you,” he told me, as if it mattered.
To him, I supposed, it did.
“Do you love me enough to stop trying to instigate this mob war? I have people I care about on the other side of this, and I don’t want to see them hurt. Would you save me from that pain?” I asked, not hard, just curious even though I already knew the answer.
He pressed his lips together, flatlining the conversation. “Love has nothing to do with something like that. It’s a business decision, Cosima.”
“You don’t know this, and it almost makes me sad for you,” I admitted softly as the car cruised to a stop, and I opened the door. “But this, this isn’t anything close to love.”
“And I assume you think what you have with the lord is?” he snapped back.
I knew that very moment Alexa
nder was finding a way to get to me, hunting me down as a surely as any predator faced with the imminent loss of his prey. Seamus raised a good point, though. What made his wrongdoings so much worse than Xan’s?
I decided, as I looked at my father’s frustrated confusion, that the difference was choice. Alexander had been given very little rein to make his own decisions over the years, but when he could, he made the right ones even if they still seemed horrible given the dark circumstances. Seamus had liberty all his life, and he squandered it because he was selfish and weak.
Alexander had made the choice to take care of me no matter what.
Seamus had made the choice to use me for his own gains, proven even further today by his decision to steal me away from my friends in an attempt to start a mob war that would benefit him and his.
Pathetic.
But I didn’t explain any of that to the man in front of me, the man who had been my father for most of my life but who I was determined to leave behind as a stranger forevermore. I didn’t explain because he didn’t deserve it, but also because, tragically, he was incapable of understanding it.
Instead, I smiled sadly at him, and said pointedly, “There is a difference between saying something and doing it. You do one, and Alexander does the other. Love is so much more than words, Dad. I hope one day you understand that.”
Cosima
I stood alone at the mouth of an alleyway between two brick buildings somewhere I thought vaguely might have been Queens for only five minutes before he found me. The moment the sleek black car turned the corner onto the street, I knew it was him, and I braced.
Which was prudent, because the moment the car was close, the vehicle not even stopped yet at the curb, Xan was opening the door and swinging out gracefully, powerfully onto the walk. My breath caught in my throat as he stalked toward me and then expelled in a sob when he caught me up in his arms and crushed me to his hard frame, one hand sank deep in the hair at my nape and the over banded around my lower back to pin me exactly where he wanted me.
No matter how much wealth or status I accrued in this life, I knew there would never be anything more luxurious to me than the feeling of being secured in Xan’s confining embrace.
“Mine,” Alexander growled into my hair before moving forward, striding farther down the dark throat of the alley.
“Yes.”
I gasped as he pinned me against the rough brick with his hips and a hand cradling the back of my head so that it was protected from the wall while the other dipped down to ruck up the silk of my dress so he could reach my sex. He pressed his entire palm to my pussy, cupping it as to confirm his mastery over it, and then in one breathless moment, he tore the scrap of satin from me. The lines of the thong cut into my hips, abrading my skin as they pulled away, but I arched into the sting and found Alexander hard as a steel pipe between my legs.
The sky above us split open the same moment Xan parted my folds and sank two fingers into the wet gathering at my entrance, and when I tossed my head back to the sky on a moan, the first raindrops fell on my tongue. I swallowed them, then licked one off his stubble-roughened cheek as he pumped those thick, long fingers inside me.
Just as an orgasm tightened the seams in my body until I felt near to bursting, he pulled away, ignoring my whimper to unbutton his trousers and fist his mouthwatering cock in a big hand. His other hand moved from the back of my head to my throat, wrapping firmly around it so that his thumb was on my pulse.
“No one will ever take you from me again,” he vowed as he notched the thick, round head of his cock against my entrance and impaled me in one fierce thrust.
My cunt spasmed around his girth, trying to accommodate him. I relished in the struggle, loved that he didn’t give me time to adjust, just pulled back sharply and then tunneled forward again and again until my flesh yielded and sucked him tight into my body. His hand found my hair again, wrapping it around his fist and tugging to the side until my throat was exposed and his mouth could press there, teeth scraping deliciously down my skin, biting hard at the junction of my neck and shoulder.
We needed no words.
His tightly leashed muscles spoke of his trauma, his body a thickly curved shield over my own told of his desperate need to protect me even in his lust-filled haze.
We required the physical joining to confirm our connection, to prove that we were still whole, still together even after another attempt by someone else to rip us apart.
I pushed back against him and groaned as he ground against me while I was impaled on every iron inch of him, my clit rasping against his coarse pubic hair. My eyes nearly rolled into the back of my head as he sucked ruthlessly at my neck, leaving proof of his ownership under my skin.
Only when they rolled back did I noticed someone looming at the entrance of the alley. At first, I tensed, worried there was another threat.
But I knew the set of those impossibly broad shoulders, the cast of the wavy night black hair pushed away from a broad forehead, glinting vaguely in the light from the lamppost behind him. I even recognized the quality of his stillness because it was so similar to Xan’s when he was faced with a hazard, assessing and coiled like a predator waiting to strike.
Dante didn’t move, even when he must have seen me looking at him just a few yards down the alley, stuck to the wall by his brother’s hands and driving cock. I felt his gaze like another set of hands on my body, tweaking my hard nipples and sliding calloused fingers down my back. A shudder jarred through me as Xan angled his cock and rubbed it ruthlessly against the soft spot inside me that made me see stars.
I was going to come.
I was going to come so hard all over one brother’s dick while the other watched with an intensity as burning and bizarre as a midnight sun.
I was soaked through with rain, rattled by not only the confrontation with di Carlo, but the unexpected arrival of my faux father, yet all that existed for me at that moment was my body pressed between a body and the brick and a pair of black eyes.
“Come for me, topolina,” Alexander ordered through gritted teeth as he pounded into me, hands on my hips now so that he could hold me and pump into me like a sex doll built only for his pleasure. “Come for your Master.”
My muscles locked against the impending orgasm, but it still wrecked me from the inside out. I thrashed, my entire body one taut line like a fish struggling against the net, but Xan kept me pinned by his hands, Dante with his eyes. I could feel myself drenching the base of Alexander’s cock and balls, his open suit pants, in my cum, and I shivered as it slid down my inner thighs.
Alexander grunted in my ear, taking the lobe between his teeth in a sharp nip. “Watch what you do to us.”
He reared back, pressed his hand carefully but firmly to the side of my head so I was pinned with my eyes on Dante at the mouth of the alley, and then pressed one of my own hands over his heart so I could feel his galloping pulse.
And then he came with a fierce kick inside me and a hot flood down my thighs as he pulled out to shoot his messy load all over my clit and swollen lips.
I almost came again feeling that, seeing Dante reach down to squeeze himself through his trousers, knowing I was enough to turn on two of the most powerful, implacable men I had ever met. It was so heady, I felt drunk on it, so when Xan reached down to run his fingers in the combination of his seed and my wetness then hold them up to my lips, I didn’t hesitate to suck them down. I closed my eyes at the bliss of the brine and tang of our joined juices. My mouth sucked hard, licking at the webbing between his fingers so that they were nearly lodged down my throat, seeking every last drop of the evidence of our union.
A small, errant part of me knew Dante was watching, and it jolted through me like an electric current.
Sensing my unebbing lust, Xan pushed against my body and arrowed his other hand between my thighs, his fingers pinching my clit hard.
“If you want to come again, my beauty, all you have to do is beg loudly for the privilege,” he coaxe
d, his voice a silk scarf wound too tightly around my throat. “Beg your Master.”
“Oh God,” I groaned, legs already shaking, heart running an endless sprint in my chest. “Please, yes, Master. Make me come, please. I promise to be your good slave, just, please, let me come all over your fingers.”
I was babbling loudly, my mind lost to my surroundings, our public setting forgotten, even Dante lost in the fog of lust I felt around my Master.
“Such a good, sweet slave,” Xan cooed, but his voice was a cruel edge, the sharp tip of it dragging along my consciousness in a way that made my sex clench. “You’d do anything to please me, wouldn’t you?”
I didn’t realize his voice was pitched louder than normal, or that Dante had moved closer, his face a snarl in the thin orange light of the streetlamps.
There was only the wanton, shameful sound of Alexander’s fingers on my drenched pussy, my rough breaths in the cool air, and my increasing desperation to break open and come, come, come.
“Yes, Master,” I keened as he twisted his hand so his thumb could dip into my entrance and rolling deep, powerful circles just inside me that threatened to drown me in pleasure. “Yes, Master, anything for you.”
“Then come,” he said simply, but the words cut the last taut threads holding me together, and I came, spilling out over his hand. “Come for me.”
My cries pierced the night, bounced off the brick walls and came back to me so it seemed we were all so submerged in my ecstasy we might drown.
Even Dante.
I didn’t remember him, though, not as I finally came down, gyrating my swollen sex over Xan’s soothing, petting touch, lolling my head against the wall as I tried to catch my breath.
I didn’t remember him until Xan called in the voice I was all too familiar with, the one that was cold and deadly as an icicle impaled through someone’s chest, “I hope you enjoyed the show, Edward, because that is as close as you will ever get to her.”
Enamoured Page 26
