Who does that motherfucker think he is? It’s not like I fucked her; not that the thought didn’t cross my mind, because it had several times that night. I had to jerk off to her image in the shower after her father dragged her out of my house.
Even if I had fucked her, she is an adult. Does he really think she could still be a virgin? Has the man not seen her? Now that thought is laughable—a virgin in her twenties.
“Hitting that bag mighty hard, big guy.” Speaking of the fucking devil herself . . . A sigh leaves her mouth from behind me. “I think you left something in the other room,” she says, prompting me to grab the bag with both hands, stilling its movement, then I turn.
Sienna stands three feet from me with Brooklyn on her hip much like she was a few nights ago when we left the restaurant. “Looks like she found me.”
I shouldn’t have left my daughter alone with her father, but had I not walked away, I’m certain I would have lost my shit on the man, and I’m not stupid enough to believe I would have walked away from that situation alive, so I walked to the other side of the gym where the other set of heavy bags hang and started punching out my aggression. Not the smartest thing I could have chosen, but it’s my go-to to let off steam, and it usually works. Today, it doesn’t seem I’m that lucky. My body is tight from my neck down to my calves.
“Nah,” she tells me, a lopsided grin ghosting her lips. “I had to snatch scrappy up to keep her from trying to take out my brothers like she did my dad.” Sienna laughs like it’s a joke, and to her, I’m sure it is, but to me it’s not, and that only fuels my fire more; so much more, in fact, that I twist back around, throwing my right fist into the bag as hard as I can. “Whoa, big guy. What’s up with you?”
“Daddy is mad, Si.” Brooklyn purses her lips. “Your daddy beat you up. My daddy doesn’t like when boys are mean to girls.”
“My daddy didn’t beat me up. Didn’t he explain things back there?” Sienna throws her thumb over her shoulder.
“Just like you didn’t beat my daddy up,” Brooklyn follows up, and I roll my eyes. The fire coursing through my veins seems to settle the longer they’re standing here.
“Oh, I totally whooped your dad’s butt.” Sienna chuckles, her chest jumping up and down.
“If anything,” I chime in, “I let you take me down to the mat.”
This time it’s Sienna with pursed lips as she cocks an eyebrow. “You still trying to play that angle, huh?”
“No angle, babe. Like my kid said, I don’t hurt girls.”
“I’m not a girl, Matteo.” All playfulness in her tone is gone and that makes me eye her harder. Is she trying to tell me she’s a woman or is she saying she’s as tough as a man? Maybe both. Who knows? What I do know is that she is definitely a woman and the majority of them don’t make a lick of sense most of the time.
“Daddy, I’m hungry,” Brooklyn whines from where she’s perched on Sienna’s hip.
Looking at my daughter with Sienna’s arm wrapped around her back, I’m struck once again with the same odd feeling I had the last time I watched them together.
Maybe it’s that they’re both mouthy shits who act like they’re cut from the same cloth. But is that really it?
“Daddy,” Brooklyn draws out. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” I say, my eyes cutting to hers. “But I told you I have to get in a workout and . . . didn’t you just eat before we left the house?” I ask, reminding her and knowing damn well she can’t be starving. The kid doesn’t weigh shit but eats like a grown-ass man.
“I can take her across the street to Mario’s while you work out if you want?” Sienna offers, catching me by surprise. Si is grown, but no young adult wants to deal with a kid that isn’t theirs. Then again, she was just over at my house playing Barbies with her and reading stories, so maybe Sienna is different—not your typical twenty-three-year-old that’s looking for the next party or club to hit up.
If not, why isn’t she?
If given the chance and I didn’t have Brooklyn or a strict training regime, I’d like to think I’d be one of those twenty-something-year-old partiers. But I never got that chance. I didn’t even get to go to college. Once Kennedy got pregnant, I had to look for a job that paid well and I had to figure it out fast. I thought for sure my boxing dreams would crash and burn.
“That doesn’t sound good.” Brooklyn scrunches her nose and shakes her little head, her brown locks swinging in her face.
“It’s pizza, kid,” Sienna says. “If you tell me you don’t like pizza then we can’t be friends.”
“I love pizza,” Brooklyn beams, her eyes and lips simultaneously widening. Her head swings toward me. “Daddy, can I go? Please say yes!”
“I’m taking you to your moms in an hour. Can’t you wait?”
“But pizza!” she exclaims, her jaw dropping to the floor, waiting on my response.
“Matteo,” Sienna starts, “she’ll be less than five hundred yards away. You can work out in peace. Seems like a win-win to me.”
“Do you not have anything better to do than hang out with a five-year-old?”
“Guess not,” she deadpans as she hikes Brooklyn higher on her hip.
“No friends your own age?” I ebb.
“Careful, De Salvo. My friends are the weapon-carrying kind,” she sneers at me like it’s supposed to intimidate me. It doesn’t. If Antonio Caputo or his sons wanted me dead, there is no doubt in my mind that I’d be a cold stiff right now. Apparently, either they don’t, or I’m low on the Boss’s hit list. Then again, perhaps he expects his daughter to walk the straight line he thinks he set her back on.
“Are you even supposed to be talking with me?”
“Who says it’s you I want to talk to?”
“I’m hungry,” Brooklyn interrupts, irritation evident in her tone.
“Well, it seems your daddy doesn’t want to let you go eat with me.”
“Daddy,” she stresses, cocking her head to the side. “Come on. I want pizza. You want to hit things. Please,” she draws out.
“Fine. Pizza at Mario’s but nowhere else. I’ll be over once I’ve finished and showered.”
“Grazie,” Sienna says thank you in a tone filled with so much attitude that it makes me want to teach that mouth of hers my own form of a lesson. I wonder how she’d like me punishing her throat with my dick.
She smirks, rolling her eyes at the same time she turns, walking away from me like she could read that very thought. We’ll see what she thinks when my cock is sliding past her lips. My lips tip up, watching her leave.
I’m still smiling half an hour later after I’ve pummeled the heavy bag until my knuckles are bleeding and streaks of blood are running down the leather. I’m going to catch hell for this shit, but oh well. I can handle anything my team throws at me. It’s my fists that line their pockets with cash, so they can take their words and choke on them for all I care. Put any boxer in a ring with me and I will still be standing at the end of twelve rounds, unless I knock the fucker out before it gets that far, of course. Most say I’m cocky, and at times I am, but really, I’m just confident in myself.
My phone chimes with a text message that’s likely from Kennedy, so I grab it, but instead of checking, I shove it in my pocket and head for the locker room in need of a quick shower. Pizza sounds good right about now. I’ll deal with Brooklyn’s mother later. I have another woman on my mind, and doing everything I can to get my junk inside that sassy mouth of hers. Trust me, it’s going to happen.
That’s another thing I’m sure of—my ability to get any woman I want on her knees.
Chapter 12
DOMENICO
Being the eldest child of Antonio Caputo, I have to have eyes in the back of my head. I have to have eyes on everything and everyone, including my siblings, but especially my sister.
My father would have my ass if I didn’t.
I’m his second-in-command, the underboss if you want to get technical. I’m the one he tasks with t
he jobs he doesn’t want anyone else to know about, the jobs he doesn’t even want Ren or Si involved in. I agree with him in that aspect, and I respect him more for wanting to protect them from the ugly things my father sometimes has to carry out.
He’s not a bad man, though he has to do bad things more often than he wants to. He doesn’t enjoy the life he lives, and a large part of that is because it cost him his wife, my mother. She was the love of his life; his other half so to speak. I knew that early on in my youth. It was easy to see and he didn’t have a problem showing anyone what she meant to him. That was his biggest mistake; not the loving my mother part, but displaying his emotions for the world to see, for his enemies to witness, and he knows it.
It’s why people outside of our family only see how hard he is on us, like today with my sister. Everyone else sees a controlling hard-ass, but to his kids, Antonio Caputo is the best father. That’s not to say he isn’t hard on all three of us, because he is; more so with Sienna than Lorenzo and me.
Our father made sure all three of us could protect ourselves if the need were to ever arise, but even knowing Sienna could bring down a man twice her size, he’s still terrified that something is going to happen to her like it did our mother.
He watches her like a hawk.
I also watch her like a hawk, but what my father doesn’t realize is that he still shows his hand. His ruthless reputation may hold strong in every circle it needs to, but his love for his children breaks free from his cold, hard eyes anytime we walk into a room.
That’s where my father and I differ. He doesn’t enjoy hurting another human being, but he’ll do it in a heartbeat if the need arises. I, on the other hand, love inflicting pain. The twins enjoy it almost as much as I do, but they’re up front about it. I’m not. I hide my need well, and being the enforcer in the family, that need easily stays hidden.
Only my siblings know my true nature. It’s likely why Sienna engages me as often as she does. Whereas Ren and Si’s need for fighting is more to relieve the buildup of pressure, a way to calm them when they get out of control, my need is more often about euphoria and pleasure. I get off on others’ pain, they don’t.
Believe it or not, our father is the more normal one of all of us.
My eyes are on the muted baseball game that’s playing on the screen, but they also track Matteo De Salvo as he slips out the door, leaving the gym with his gym bag slung over his shoulder.
The front of the gym is lined with floor to ceiling windows, so it’s easier to track his movements once he’s exited the glass door. He doesn’t head to his SUV that I know he parked down the sidewalk. Instead, he jogs across the street, going into Mario’s pizzeria directly across from the MMA gym.
If I were in a joking mood, I’d laugh at the name. Mario isn’t Italian. The owner’s name isn’t even Mario. It’s Kevin. An average white guy with a beer belly and thinning hair on top of his head. But even I have to admit the pizza there is the best I’ve ever placed on my tongue, so really, who gives a fuck that he isn’t Italian? Pizza is pizza. His is authentic.
“Watch her.” His order hits my ear before he steps in front of the treadmill I’m running on. “Hell, watch him too,” he says, and his words piss me off more than they should.
“She’s an adult now. You know that, right, old man?” I slow my speed, bringing the machine down until I’m at a steady jog instead of an all-out sprint. I ran my ten miles, so now I can cool down before hitting the shower.
“Since when have I ever given a fuck about her age?” He doesn’t wait for my reply, not that I had one. “Watch your sister, Dom. That’s an order. And if she leaves with him, I want to know immediately.”
“Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll be the first to rat my little sister out. I always am.” Because God knows Ren wouldn’t, I think to myself. He’d let her elope with that bastard if she ever tried to. We all know Sienna still has a crush on De Salvo. She proved that when she wouldn’t let me take him to interrogate like I did her college buddy, Calvin Ross.
I enjoyed every second I was on top of that fucker, beating the snot out of him. And although he passed every question I threw at him, and every question my father demanded an answer to, there was something I instantly didn’t like about him.
My sister thinks his brother-in-law needed money, or wanted money, and thought he could play both sides. Levi had an in with Vin working for us, so with Vin paying him to help him with jobs, he took that to Frankie Romano and told the rat he could bring back information to use against us.
I don’t know if I buy that, but Vin swore up and down he didn’t know Levi was working with Romano, that he was only trying to help his sister with money problems by giving her husband a side job. It’s plausible, of course, I have to admit that. His sister doesn’t have a job and her very dead husband did everything he could not to work. They lived in a house that was paid for and once owned by Vin’s deceased mother. Still, you need money for utilities and food—and in Levi’s case, cocaine. His coke problem wasn’t a secret. He’d been known to drop his pants if it scored him some blow.
Still, something in my gut doesn’t sit right when it comes to Sienna’s friend Vin, but for now, the shit for brains is nursing cuts and bruises and a broken nose. He was lucky, all things considered, and he won’t get another job from my father; that bridge has been burned.
“I should hope so, Dom. And believe me when I say I wish I didn’t have to put the responsibility of your brother and sister’s safety on you.” His brows turn inward, his breath coming out in huff through his nose.
They are my responsibility. Though, I don’t tell him that. They’ve been my responsibility for nearly twenty-four years.
Lifting my hand to the machine, I jab the decreasing speed button with my finger, bringing the treadmill to a walkable pace.
“I’m going to grab a bite to eat, then I plan to head home,” he tells me as I pluck my smartphone out of one of the cup holders.
“Don’t worry too much about Si. I’ve got her. You know that.” I hold up my phone, angling it so it recognizes my face. Once open, I tap my finger over the application that tracks everything and everyone of value to me.
It’s public knowledge among us that we all know each other’s whereabouts at all times. My siblings know mine, the same as I theirs, and our father knows where all three of us are. But my tracking abilities of the people that mean more to me than my own life go a bit deeper, and that’s something Ren and Sienna aren’t in the know about. My old man, on the other hand, does know the lengths I go to make sure everyone in our family remains breathing.
Looking at the screen, I see Sienna is exactly where I know her to be. I can also see her through the gym window on the other side of the street. She and the kid are in a booth and De Salvo is sliding in across from her now.
Ren, on the other hand, is exactly where he shouldn’t be—but I keep my trap closed about that. I may divulge a lot to my father, but there is still a great deal I don’t for everyone’s sake.
Little sister doesn’t know her bestie the way she thinks she does. If she knew where Ren spends a large amount of his time, she’d flip her goddamn shit.
Si spent so much of her youth pretending to be docile and shy that she does everything in her power to prove she is anything but. Tame my sister is not. And although she was quite the little actress back in her school days, even she couldn’t hide her feelings for a certain boy that grew up to be known as The Beast.
In a boxing ring I couldn’t take Matteo De Salvo. Hell, I probably wouldn’t make it five rounds. On the street, however, that motherfucker would be dead before he got one swing.
Ren is different, though. He harbors a secret; a sinful desire that would create the biggest war our world has ever seen if it got out. So, yeah, my siblings are my responsibility, and Sienna’s little crush is the least of my problems.
“I worry about all my kids, Domenico, every second of everyday. When you have some of your own, you’ll understand that.”
“Night, Dad,” I say, not acknowledging his comment. Kids aren’t on my list of life goals. Neither is a wife, for that matter.
“Son.” He nods his head before turning away, leaving me as I press the stop button on the machine.
Grabbing my shit, I head for the shower, but not before glancing back in my sister’s direction. Why she had to go and fall for De Salvo, I have no idea. Why my brother had to fall for his forbidden fruit I don’t understand either. Both of them are set up for heartbreak, and that is something I never want to partake in.
Not today.
Not tomorrow.
Not next fucking year either.
I lost love once and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I allow another woman to break me. Not in this lifetime.
Chapter 13
SIENNA
My eyes wander from where Brooklyn is seated across from me in a booth to several feet behind her as Sasha Nikolayev enters, my gaze following her until her long bare legs stop at the counter in front of the register. Her blonde hair is pulled back into a high ponytail, the strands slick and a shade darker, telling me her hair must be damp like she just took a shower. Her pink running shorts barely poke out from underneath the sleeveless hoodie she’s wearing. It’s black and oversized for her slender frame, the arm openings so large you can see her pink sports bra and most of her inked flesh down to her hip.
The same teenager that took my order steps up to her, asking what she’d like to order this evening. It’s still early, not even six o’clock, and I usually wouldn’t eat dinner until later in the night, but Brooklyn was complaining about being hungry, so I offered, not believing the words as they fell out of my mouth. Brooklyn’s excited expression warmed my chest, and then pizza sounded like the best idea I’d had in a long time.
But now that the Russian whore has graced us with her presence, the small appetite I’d mustered up is gone.
Bad Princess: A Mafia Romance Page 8
