by Loki Renard
“You and I could do great things together,” Angelo said. “They don’t make men like us very often. People call us evil because they don’t understand us. They think we go too far, when the truth is they’re too scared to go far enough. The world is full of people dipping their toes into life and running for their towels. You don’t do that. You’ve fought me every inch of the way. Imagine if you didn’t.”
Bobby thought about that for a second. If he didn’t fight Angelo, he probably wouldn’t be standing half naked and semi-erect in front of a fully dressed man who was old enough to be his father and who had just beaten him like a red-headed stepchild.
“So what if I do what you say? What if I call my men off and stop fighting you?”
“Then, Bobby,” Angelo smiled. “You get to win.”
20
BOBBY
Two weeks later…
“I’m glad you came to your senses, boy.”
Bobby looked out over the waters of the Hudson, then back at his handsome date “My senses?”
“You stopped fighting what’s between us.” Angelo reached out, took Bobby’s hand and ran his thumb over the back of Bobby’s knuckles. “You let me in.”
“Did I have a choice?” Bobby smirked.
“You could have broken instead of bent,” Angelo said. “ A lot of men would. A lot of men do.”
“I guess I’m just the kind of sick puppy to suit you,” Bobby said, smiling as he drained the last of his glass. “You want more Chianti?”
“Port will do.”
Angelo had taken Bobby out to dinner in his favorite Manhattan restaurant. Bobby hadn’t paid attention to the name of it. It didn’t really matter. It was one of Angelo’s and that was all he needed to know.
“Coming right up.” Bobby flashed a charming smile.
Angelo smiled back as Bobby got up to grab their drinks from the bar. It actually wasn’t that hard to please Angelo. He liked being in control. He especially liked being served.
Bobby had gotten to know Angelo very, very well over the last fourteen days. The sex was exceptional, of course. Even more incredible was being up close and personal with the workings of a bona fide black marketeer. Angelo called him an apprentice at times and Bobby was comfortable with that. It was better than a lot of the things Angelo had called him, and he was learning a very great deal - as much as he possibly could.
Angelo got up from the table at the same time as Bobby and walked to the balcony which overlooked the Hudson. The restaurant had a second floor and Angelo liked to station his men on the lower floors, giving him and Bobby some privacy to dine and talk.
While Angelo took in the view, Bobby jogged down the stairs, got their order from the bar and was just reaching the top of the stairs when he heard it happen.
BLAM!
It sounded like a car door being slammed. But car doors didn’t make a man suddenly go stiff. They didn’t make blood flower in the back of his shirt, spreading like the wings of a dark phoenix.
Most men would have dropped on the spot, but Angelo turned around. Slowly. Stiffly. A dead man walking. There was a hole in his guts, a gnarly mass of red flesh right in the core of him.
Bobby stopped. Stared. Lifted the glass to his lips and took a deep swig. He’d never seen a hit happen like this before. He was usually as far away as possible, waiting for the text confirmation. So this is what it looked like.
Angelo’s face was slack, a sick sort of grey as he put his hand to his stomach and pulled it off again. It came away bloody, bright red fluid and little bits of flesh on his hand.
He looked Bobby dead in the eye as he sank to his knees involuntarily. Blood loss was a bitch for making the strong weak. He opened his mouth to speak. Red spittle emerged before the word.
“You.”
“Who else?” Bobby put the empty glass down and sipped at the other. “You said it yourself, Angelo. I’m the devil.”
“You love me,” Angelo said. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even a statement. It was a truth.
“Maybe I do,” Bobby acknowledged. “That doesn’t matter. You fuck me, I fuck back. No matter what.”
Blood was beginning to trickle from Angelo’s mouth. His guards were downstairs, blissfully unaware of what was taking place above them. All the security in the world wouldn’t save Angelo now. He’d made the fatal mistake powerful men so often make - thinking that something small and vicious can be tamed.
“Why?”
Bobby drained the second glass, put it down and walked over to Angelo, crouching next to him. He took Angelo’s chin in his fingers and looked the man dead in the eye.
“You said it yourself,” he said, pityingly. “I’m unredeemable.”
Angelo shook his head. “This is a mistake, Bobby.”
“No,” Bobby said firmly. There was something inside him, a little voice that was screaming that it wasn’t too late to save Angelo. Pressure on the wound. Call for help. He might still make it. He silenced that voice. He had been weak for far too long where this man was concerned. Angelo deserved this. Every fucking bit of it.
Bobby pulled a sheaf of papers and a pen out of his coat. “Sign here,” he said with a deviant little smirk. “Don’t worry. It’s just a will that gives me everything. Just standard boiler plate stuff. I’ll lodge it with Mr Feldman.”
“Unoriginal,” Angelo chided, his voice rough with pain.
“Sign it, asshole.”
“Stupid boy,” Angelo groaned. “You get a signature before you shoot a man, not after.”
So fucking annoying. Even as he was dying, he was self-possessed enough to give a lecture on proper criminal protocol.
“Sign it!” Bobby insisted, forcing the paper at him.
Angelo just shook his head, a curiously bright and deviant light in his eyes. Bobby felt a bolt of fear go right through him. Angelo’s heart should be pumping the last of his blood out of his body any moment now. He desperately needed that signature. If he didn’t get it, all this had been worthless.
“You’re not going to win this, Bobby,” Angelo said, hoarse. “Better run before they catch you.”
“Sign. Here.” Bobby grabbed Angelo’s bloody hand and tried to force the pen into it but the older man’s fingers wouldn’t close. The pen fell into the black blood pooling on the floor. Fuck.
“You’re a little shit,” Angelo said, his voice weakening. “A dumb little shit.”
There were footsteps on the stairs. Then there was a shout. Bobby turned to see a team of bodyguards charging him and Angelo.
There was a fist.
Large.
Coming fast toward his face.
Then nothing.
21
BOBBY
It was dark. It had been dark for a long time.
After being discovered crouching next to Angelo’s bloody body with a fake will in his hand, he had been grabbed by the bodyguards and lost consciousness not long after that thanks to their less than tender handling.
When he woke up he was bruised all over and locked in a cell.
At first he was afraid he’d been arrested, but as time went on he began to realize that being arrested would have been a kindness. Arrest lead to something. A sentence. Jail. An end to things.
He didn’t have any of that. He had day after day of a six by six concrete room without windows and often without light. With a thin mattress and little food. Without any due process, or even a warder he could recognize. When they fed him, they wore balaclavas and they never spoke. It must be Angelo’s men who were holding him, but they didn’t seem to have a plan for him.
Unaware of the passing of time, Bobby could have been in there for days or weeks. There was nothing to do but think. Nothing to do but go over the events of the past and begin to regret them. Mostly, he regretted his decision to have Angelo killed.
He missed him. More than he had realized it was possible to miss someone. In just two short weeks, Angelo had become a lover, a mentor. Not just a mentor, a torment
or. Bobby would have given anything for that now in this dark solitude. The emptiness and loneliness sank through his bones. He felt like a hollow man. None of this had been worth it. Not the final hit, not the business with the Taylor-Chapman boy, not any of it.
He could have become an accountant. He could have spent his days working in a nice office, with people who didn’t like Mondays and pinned pictures of funny cats to the walls. He could have lived a nice, safe life. He could have been someone. Not anyone of any note, but someone who wasn’t going to die alone in a dark room having killed the only person who had ever been able to breach his walls.
He had made so many mistakes in his short life, most of them on top of one another. None of them could be taken back. This was the end. He felt his death in every breath he took. Sometimes, when he tried to sleep, it was as though the room itself became his coffin. He felt the walls closing in and the decay setting in.
Was he already dead? Was this hell? He would deserve it if it was.
At some point in the timeless dark, they came for him. Two men in black, wearing balaclavas. They did not speak, they just came and drew him up from the bed. When they touched him he realized that he was naked. He had been aware of it when he first came to in the cell but since then it had become a meaningless distinction. There were no such things as clothes unless there were others around to be compared to. These men were dressed. He was not. They made him naked.
His thoughts were muddied and nonsensical as they took an arm each and wrapped a blindfold around his eyes before walking him out of the cell. Not a word was said. There was only silence and steps. He was moving again. Movement, another facet of reality that had been denied to him. His legs felt weak, but the men kept him erect as they lead him to… what? His death?
It would be a mercy. Existence as it was could be described as nothing but torture. In the darkness he was not a man. He was not a murderer. He was nothing but a mind unchained from reality, tormenting itself with black imaginings.
They stopped. Pushed him down. A chair was beneath him and he sat, shivering in it.
Fingers touched his face. A sweet caress before the blindfold was ripped free and he saw the most beautiful man in the world.
Angelo.
For a moment Bobby was sure he was looking into the face of a ghost. Then Angelo reached out and touched him on the shoulder and he knew that the man was real.
He burst into great sobbing tears which wracked his body and made his lungs burn for air. He had been dead in a thousand ways, but now he was alive. Bobby couldn’t hold himself up under the sudden wave of grief and relief. He collapsed and would have fallen off the chair entirely if not for Angelo crouching to catch him.
He curled up against the hard body of the man he had killed, his legs curling up into the fetal position as he clutched at Angelo’s shirt. A white shirt. Just as it had been on the night…
“You’re alive,” he whispered, shaking from head to toe.
“Very much so,” Angelo rumbled.
“How? I saw you die.”
“You saw what you needed to see.”
“You’re alive…” Bobby repeated himself, stretching his fingers out to touch Angelo’s face. It was him. Handsome. Dark. Beautiful.
22
ANGELO
The little shit had tried to kill him, but Angelo had been aware of the plan long before it was carried out.
Little Bobby had sent the message calling for the hit from Angelo’s own phone, thinking that a text could be deleted and not recovered. That took balls. Big, dumb balls.
He’d assumed because they shared the same bed, and because he wasn’t wearing physical shackles, that he was free. That was the problem with the stupid and the impulsive. They always thought that everyone else was as stupid and impulsive as they were.
Bobby wasn’t entirely stupid, but his actions absolutely were. He had not been free from the minute he had come onto Angelo’s radar - and he would never be free again, not as long as Angelo drew breath.
Angelo allowed himself to feel some small amount of pity for the snivelling boy in his arms.
Bobby didn’t know what he was up against, plain and simple. He’d spent ten days in solitary. Not that long in the grand scheme of things, but long enough to begin to break his sense of self as he was tortured with the reality of his own actions.
Easing Bobby off his chest, Angelo pushed him into the chair. He wasn’t looking good. His hair was greasy and stuck to his head, his eyes were dull and confused. Ten days had been rough on the boy. Fourteen might have broken him completely.
“You and I need to talk,” he said, standing up and pacing back and forth, his hands behind his back.
“What’s there to say?” Bobby formed the words with some difficulty. “I betrayed you.”
“Of course you did,” Angelo snorted. “You didn’t owe me loyalty, Bobby. I kidnapped you, took everything you owned and fucked you.”
“Uhhh...” Bobby looked at him with addled confusion.
“Someone get him some water,” Angelo said. “I want him alert for this.”
Water came. Bobby clutched the glass like it was his life-line. He had the dazed look of a man who wasn’t sure what was real and wasn’t. Angelo pushed back feelings of sympathy. This boy had tried to get him killed. Sympathy wasn’t what he needed.
“Let’s run over the mistakes you made.”
“What?”
“If you want something, you can’t just kill someone. I’ve tried to explain this to you before, but you’re remarkably resistant to the concept.”
“What?”
“Stop saying what, boy. It’s an irritant.”
“But… you’re talking… why… are you going to let me live? I tried to kill you.”
“Badly,” Angelo said, calmly.
“Uhm…”
“I’m alive,” he continued. “So that’s your first clue things didn’t go to plan.” Angelo allowed himself the pleasure of a smile. Dear bittersweet little Bobby. Still didn’t understand a damn thing.
“Aren’t you worried I’ll try to kill you again?” Bobby trembled the question.
“I count on it.”
“You want me to try to kill you again?” Water spilled from the glass, sloshing across his bare thigh. “You’re insane.”
“I’m not insane. I know what I value. I know what I want. I don’t need to be safe, Bobby. Besides, you didn’t want me dead. There are a lot of ways to kill a man. Precision gut shot from a crack sniper isn’t one of them. You wanted to hurt me. You wanted to scare me. You wanted to see me suffer.”
“Yeah,” Bobby admitted.
“Did it satisfy you?”
“No.” Bobby’s face fell as he answered. His shoulders slumped and he wavered on the chair. He was totally defeated, and it was gorgeous.
“Viciousness is an admirable trait, Bobby. Don’t get me wrong. But you have to think.” Angelo tapped the side of Bobby’s head with his knuckle. “You never think.”
Bobby stared up at him in wonder. “I’m glad I didn’t kill you,” he said. “You’re too weird to die. I can’t believe you haven’t put a bullet in me yet.”
Angelo snorted. “It would be weirder to kill the one person capable of still making my twisted life worth living.”
“Me?” Bobby formed the word doubtfully.
Bobby didn’t know what love was. Not really. Neither did Angelo. But he understood connection. He understood importance. Bobby was important. Right now he was a mess, but he wouldn’t be forever. He’d learned something. Angelo could see it in his eyes.
Bobby had taken a lot of punishment over their association. A cane. A taser. Angelo’s cock. But it had taken being imprisoned with his own thoughts for Bobby to finally learn some respect. The boy wasn’t just his own worst enemy, he was his own worst nightmare.
23
BOBBY
Crossed and double crossed. Was there any way to get the better of Angelo Vitali? Bobby didn’t know. He didn’
t care either, not once he’d had a shower and gotten dressed and eaten a real meal, all under Angelo’s watchful eye.
Angelo had mindfucked him. Hard. When Angelo took his shirt off in the bathroom Bobby saw that there wasn’t a mark on him. It must have been make up and stage props that night in the restaurant, an elaborate theatrical presentation. Angelo had put on a gory, brutal show just for his benefit, and sentenced him to ten days in the dark just to prove a point.
Bobby couldn’t help but feel that he’d gotten off easy. Angelo seemed to have already forgiven him for trying to kill him. It was a novel experience. Bobby had never been forgiven by anyone. Ever. Hell, maybe it wasn’t really forgiveness because as far as Bobby could tell Angelo didn’t really feel wronged. Angelo was a brutal man, there was no doubt about that, but he had the ability to tolerate things other men didn’t.
“What else are you going to do to me?” Bobby asked the question over the remnants of his pasta. Angelo hadn’t eaten. He just sat there, watching, his dark eyes filled with ineffable satisfaction.
“Everything,” Angelo answered simply. “Everything and anything.”
Bobby bit his lower lip. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
“Yes,” Bobby said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I had every reason to want you dead, but…”
“You needed vengeance,” Angelo said. “Revenge is a dangerous game, Bobby. If you’re going to play it, you have to have a clear mind.”
“Still giving me tips,” Bobby smiled, shaking his head. “I swear, I don’t know what you want with me, Angelo.”
