My jaw tightens, and Cristina goes silent, but I think that’s because I’m squeezing too hard.
“Johnny here would be happy to do it for you if you can’t, Son.”
“Your dog will not touch her.” My voice sounds strange to my own ears. Hoarse and full of rage.
Christ.
Fuck.
He grins.
And I realize my mistake.
I just exposed myself.
Johnny’s gaze slides over Cristina, and this time when I squeeze, it’s to hold on to something to keep myself from lunging at them both.
My father’s grin turns gleeful and then they’re gone. I hear the wheels in the distance followed by the sliding doors of the elevator.
When I loosen my grip, a choked sob escapes Cristina, and she goes limp in my arms. Lifting her, I carry her to the chaise and sit her down. I get the whiskey, pour two fingers into my glass, and hand it to her.
She shakes her head, rubbing her face. Did she process what he said? Did she follow that part about what I did to my sister, or was she too caught up in seeing him? At what he told her about her father’s final moments. I wasn’t there for those. I was tucking a scared little girl into her bed while he was dying downstairs. I’ve never regretted missing it.
Violence is a by-product of our business. I deal with bad men, and to stay on top, I do what I have to do with little emotion. And I can’t say I don’t enjoy that part of the business. That similarity between myself and my father is worrying.
But that particular cruelty, the way he killed Joseph Valentina? The way he played with him? It was ugly even for him.
“Drink it,” I tell her. She’s shaking, arms wrapped around herself like she’s freezing. I think she’s in shock. Maybe it’s all hitting her now. Maybe she’s just processing the gravity of her situation.
He does have good timing, my father. I did just explain to her that this year of her life belonged to me.
And she’s a smart girl. She’s put together that it will be her last year. At least if he has his way.
I just didn’t think I would struggle with this particular piece myself.
14
Cristina
“What did he mean? Would you welcome me like you did your sister?”
His jaw tightens. “Nothing. Forget it.”
Damian takes the whiskey from my hands and finishes it, then pours another and sits down beside me.
“Here.”
I take it absently. “He’s here. In this house.” I knew he was. I knew all along.
“Let’s go upstairs.” He stands, holding out his hand.
I look at it, note the calluses. It’s the one that’s not damaged. I think about what those hands are capable of.
Then I look around at the house. The mansion. I think about what he’s been able to do. How he and his father got away with murder. How they used my family’s foundation. Bought my uncle. How Damian kidnapped me while people stood by and watched.
“How do you do it?” I ask finally.
“Do what?”
“Get away with murder? Kidnapping?” My uncle warned me about him. About the family. He said they’re dangerous. I knew it already, though.
Damian’s jaw tenses. He drinks the whiskey.
“What will you do to me in this year, Damian?”
No response. He turns as if to survey the room. Is that guilt? Can he not look at me because of guilt? I doubt it.
“And what happens to me after?” My voice breaks on that last word. Because I’m pretty sure there is no after. Not for me. “Am I free to go then? When it’s over?” It’s a pointless thing to ask. A waste of words.
Tears stream down my face. I can’t keep up wiping them away.
“Will you get away with my murder too?”
“Christ, Cristina.”
He sets the empty glass down, eyes zeroing in on me, rubbing the back of his neck. He’s still in his suit. Does he go to work in an office or something? Why else would he be in a suit?
“Tell me what you do. Where your money comes from.” Because whatever it is, it’s not legal. This family, they’re above the law.
“Imports and exports. The Di Santo family owns a shipping company.”
“Imports and exports of what? What do you ship exactly?”
“That doesn’t impact you.”
“Tell me.”
“Why?”
“Why not? Who am I going to tell? The house is surrounded by woods, you told me so yourself. You lock me in my room. You own my year, and there isn’t going to be another one after that, is there? So just fucking answer me.”
His eyes grow darker, utterly unreadable, but he doesn’t answer. He swallows the rest of the whiskey and moves to pour another instead.
I need to get out of here. Get out of this crazy house.
I’m on my feet in an instant and in the dining room.
“Cristina.”
I grab his dirty dinner knife.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
Turning, I glare at him, holding the knife between us.
“Cristina,” he starts, tone patient. “I asked you what you think you’re doing.” He puts his whiskey down, and I eye my path to the exit just beyond him.
“Get out of my way, Damian.”
He takes a step toward me, but I don’t back up. I sidestep him. He’s not scared of me, though, not even when I’m brandishing a knife at him. He puts his hands up between us, palms toward me, eyes on mine, then the knife, then back to mine.
“Give me that. Don’t be stupid.”
I shake my head, thoughts of his father’s words racing frantically, his voice, the hate in his eyes. Damian’s manner with me, how he plays with me.
This is a game to him. To them. I am a game to them.
“I said get out of my way,” I tell him, but when he steps toward me, I turn the knife on my own neck.
His jaw clenches, and he stops.
I push the point, wincing as skin breaks. But this is the only way he’ll know I’m serious.
Am I serious?
“Cristina.” His eyes follow what I feel to be warm blood sliding down over my throat, down to the hollow between my collar bones.
I feel nauseous. Dizzy. It’s the wine and the whiskey and not enough food and meeting his father.
Shit.
His father.
“Cristina,” he says more cautiously. “Give me that knife.”
I walk around him, leaving a wide berth. “You afraid I’ll ruin your fun if I slit my own throat?” I wince, drag the knife, cut more skin. It hurts. Shallow as the cut is, it still hurts like hell.
Maybe I’m not as weak as he thinks.
Maybe I’m not as weak as I think.
“Stop!”
When I pass him, I pick up the subtle scent of aftershave. He’s become familiar to me in so short a time.
But maybe it’s something I’ve held on to all these years. Something I subtly registered and catalogued for later.
He helped me when he caught me in the hallway ten years ago. Inadvertently maybe, but he saved me from his father. From the hell playing out in the study. He got me a glass of water and took me back to my room. Tucked me into my bed.
He could have ordered me upstairs. I would have run if he’d told me to. I would have fled back to my room if he’d barked the order. But he’d taken care with me.
Maybe because he knew his time was still coming.
“Stay the fuck away from me, or I swear I’ll do it!”
He mutters a curse.
I see the toys as I walk through the living room. Toys for a child. Children are innocent. How can one grow up in this house among this evil?
He’s behind me but keeping his distance. I hurry my steps to the front door.
“There’s nowhere to go, Cristina. Give me the knife and we’ll forget about this.”
I don’t answer him or turn around even though a part of me knows I’m not getting away. I don’t t
hink he lied about the woods surrounding the house. A house like this would be guarded, impenetrable.
A fire rages in the fireplace, loud in the otherwise silence apart from the clicking of my heels. But when I get to the doors, I stop.
They’re bigger than I’d thought earlier, much more foreboding. Eight feet of what I know is solid wood with hardware that looks like that from my bedroom door but heavier. Doors to a fortress.
But that’s not what has my mouth falling open. That’s not what makes me pull the knife away from my own throat as I process what I’m seeing.
I turn to Damian, who stops the instant I do. With only a few feet between us, I think if he lunges for me, he can grab me. But he just watches me.
I step closer to the doors, reach a hand to touch one of the protruding figures.
The gates of hell.
The gates of my hell.
They’ve taken a scene from Dante’s Inferno and put them at the entrance of their home. Who did this? His father? Him?
It all hits me then. Seeing the damned souls. Their pain. Their inescapable destiny.
Turning on my heel, I wobble as the room spins. The food I ate too quickly and the wine I drank too much of threaten to make a return appearance as my fate crystalizes in my mind.
What did the old man say at the end? Welcome me like he did his sister? How exactly did Damian welcome his sister?
I bring the knife up between us now, brandishing it. I’ll hurt him before he takes it from me. I can at least do that and earn the punishment I’m sure he’ll dole out after this.
“Give it to me,” he commands.
“You want it? Come and get it, you fucking bastard!”
He lunges for me then, and he’s even quicker than I expect, but determination makes me move faster, too.
We both shift position, and instead of catching my wrist, he grabs the sharp end and when he does, I push.
Shock registers on his face. In my gut.
I stab the knife into his palm, feeling the resistance of skin and bone. I feel it give, feel his body tense, hear his sharp intake of breath. No scream, though. Nothing vocal at all. He didn’t seem to feel it when I scratched him earlier either. It’s like he’s made of stone.
We both look at his hand at the same time.
I let go and back up. The knife doesn’t fall to the floor, though.
Blood seeps from the wound. He puts his other hand around the handle, and I’m the one who screams when he pulls it out.
He closes his damaged hand. Blood runs down his wrist, and when he turns to me, I back away.
Because now, he is rage.
Raw. Unfiltered. Rage.
15
Damian
The knife clangs to the stone floor.
“Come. Here.” Hearing the rage in my voice, I see the panic on her face as her eyes shift from the bloody mess of my hand to my face.
She’s in shock at what she’s done.
And I don’t waste the opportunity.
Lurching forward, I close my uninjured hand around the back of her neck and draw her to me. When I raise my other hand, her gaze locks on it.
It hurts like fucking hell, but I don’t make a sound. Pain isn’t new to me. I know how to take it, and the one thing I learned early on is not to show it. It steals at least some of the pleasure from the one inflicting the injury.
“I told you to give me the fucking knife.” I sound calm, but I’m not. I shift my grip to her arm.
Her mouth opens and closes, eyes huge on the bloody mess she’s made, hands flat against my chest to ward me off.
“Look at me.”
Her ragged breathing is the only response I get as I watch shock morph into panic and fear in her eyes.
“I said fucking look at me.” I tug her closer, squeezing my hand around her arm.
She makes a sound that makes me think of a cornered animal, something small and helpless.
Cristina is that animal. There hasn’t been a moment since the accident that she wasn’t that.
She meets my eyes, and what she sees in them has her trying to pull back.
“Look what you did. To me. To yourself.” The cut to her throat, though, it’s shallow.
“I…I…”
“Move.”
I don’t release her as I turn her toward the stairs. She resists, and fuck, my hand fucking hurts like fucking hell, but I keep moving her. I need to get her to her room. Lock her inside it before I do something rash.
“Let me go!” Her shock wears off, and the fight is back as she stumbles. We’re moving too fast up the stairs, and she can’t keep up. I have to haul her upright more than once. “Let me go. Let me fucking go!”
“Stop fighting me before you send us both down the stairs!”
“I’ll send you to hell where you fucking belong!”
She manages to twist free as we enter the narrower hallways and runs, but it’s darker here, and she doesn’t know her way, and a few moments later, I hear her steps slow.
“Come back here,” I stalk, following more slowly as she runs.
“Stay away from me!”
She stops when the hallway splits, giving her two options, one a dimly lit staircase up, the other a dark corridor.
She chooses the stairs. Good girl.
I don’t run after her. I don’t need to.
By the time we get to the top of the stairs, she’s fallen twice, and she stops again, looking at her options, three narrower corridors, all dark.
“Cristina.”
“Stay away!”
She chooses, and I hear her heels clicking as she runs.
She’s going the wrong way. Down the corridor that will lead to the west wing of the house. Toward Lucas’s rooms.
I need to get a bandage around my hand. I’m leaving a trail of blood as I walk.
“Come back here and I’ll take it easy on you.” I won’t. I open a door and slip inside, moving through the connecting rooms to head her off at the end of the path.
“You stay the hell away from me, Damian!”
I step out into the ever-darkening corridor. Her steps have slowed, and I remember what she told me when she was little. And I know that she’s still afraid of the dark.
I don’t speak. I barely breathe as I listen for her.
She stops altogether about a dozen feet from me, but she can’t see me. It’s pitch-black where I am. She’s panting and out of breath.
“Shit.” It’s a whisper, but I hear it. She takes a step, then another. Stops, changes direction, feeling her way back toward the little bit of light that comes from the mouth of the corridor.
I step silently out into the hallway and from here, I can smell her fear.
“Damian?” she asks into the darkness when I’m only two steps behind her, and I’m surprised. I think that her calling for me is the biggest surprise of the evening.
“Boo!”
She screams as I clamp my arm around her middle, lift her off her feet and toss her over my shoulder to carry her through the darkness back toward the light, to the other passage she should have chosen, up the winding staircase and finally into her room.
I drop her on the bed.
She bounces twice, face wet from tears. I’m not sure if it’s her blood or mine that stains her throat and face, her dress. The wine she spilled has dried into a deep, dark mauve, so much like blood, too.
She sits up, ready for more, ready to claw and scratch.
I capture her wrists, straddle her, pinning her arms over her head as she twists and turns.
“You fucking bastard! Let me go!”
“Stop fighting me, Cristina!” My hand throbs. It bleeds onto her wrist as the pain intensifies.
She twists once more, and I squeeze, biting back the pain as she presses herself into the bed as if she can put space between us.
I snort. Doesn’t she know there’s no escaping me? Her gaze shifts between her pinned wrists and me. I take a breath in to steady myself and manage the pai
n. I need to get out of here. Get away from her before I retaliate.
“You need to learn to do as you’re told before you get hurt,” I say, trying to level my voice but failing.
I drag her arms over her head and hold them with one hand while reaching between the mattress and the headboard to find the cuffs there. I installed them months before her arrival.
One by one, I secure her wrists over her head, then stand.
She twists to look at the bonds, to test them. They hold fast. She turns back to me making a sound I translate as defeat.
I look her over, look at the mess of blood.
I should take the dress off and clean her up, but I don’t trust myself right now. So instead, I turn and walk out of the room, locking the door behind me.
That’s not to keep her in. She’s not going anywhere bound as she is.
It’s to keep the monsters out.
It was always to keep the monsters out.
16
Damian
That wine spilling tonight, the glass shattering, all the blood after, it was almost like a foreshadowing of her future. Of our combined futures.
There will be more blood if my father has his way.
There should be if I, as head of the Di Santo family, do as I should do to avenge the deaths of my mother and sister and that of her unborn baby. That’s why we were rushing the wedding. If we’d waited like she’d wanted, she’d still be here today. None of us would have been out on that particular road on that particular night.
I wrap a bandage around my hand and use my teeth to rip it off before securing it. I cleaned the cut, but it hasn’t quite stopped bleeding yet.
My father’s words ring in my ear. Will I welcome her like I did my sister? Motherfucker.
That was my mistake. I should never have followed through on his order. He will forever hold that over my head because ultimately, I am ashamed of my actions that night.
But it’s how he grew up. How I grew up. Violence is second nature to the men of the Di Santo family.
When I’m finished, I grab the bottle of whiskey I keep in my room and slip out into the hallway.
Unholy Union: Unholy Union Duet Book 1 Page 12
