24. Liam

24

LIAM

M y heart thudded against my chest as I watched Val walk into the store. The breakfast he’d bought me had formed a lump in my stomach. I was so fucking confused. I didn’t know how to read him. One minute he was babying me, and the next minute he had his hand around my throat threatening me. He said he was a monster, and God knows he’d treated me like one the night before, except I’d loved most of it. But a monster wouldn’t care where I was sleeping. He wouldn’t care about anything but me paying him back. It wouldn’t matter if that ultimately killed me as long as he got what he wanted, my body and my money.

Which side of him was the real Valentino? I didn’t know and if I could help it, he wasn’t going to know the real me either. All he knew about me right now was that I was a damn good dancer, I’d gotten myself into a desperate situation where I was willing to go to a loan shark, and I was living in a storage unit with hardly any money for groceries.

That didn’t sound very good. How the hell was I going to keep this up? So far, I’d managed to find enough money to keep my car running and buy enough gas to get back and forth to work, but how long would that last?

It would take me at least an hour to walk from the storage unit to Pound, and while I could ride the bus to work, I would have to walk back at night when there wasn’t any transportation. If I couldn’t buy gas, I sure as hell couldn’t afford a car service.

But if I let Val pay for an apartment, then he was paying my debt, and he said he wouldn’t do that. If I had to pay for it myself from my Pound earnings, it would add to my debt. I really would be an indentured servant. It would take years for me to pay it off, if I even could with interest piling up. I’d be stuck having to dance at Val’s club and fuck him whenever he wanted.

There were worse ways to live, but I wasn’t ready to let go of the hope that I was going to get out from under this and be able to be my own person again. No matter how much I loved the way Val touched me, no matter how conflicted he might be about whether to treat me roughly or take care of me, that ultimately didn’t matter. He was a loan shark and an enforcer. I’d watched him kill two men already for doing nothing but touch me.

Sure, they deserved to be punished, but he’d acted as judge, jury, and executioner, and that wasn’t going to change. He wasn’t going to walk away from his family. The only hope I had of staying with him was if he could convince his father to let him keep me. But then I would be his, a possession. I would be part of his criminal life, an accessory to trapping people into loans they couldn’t pay, to all the torture, killing, and God knows what else the Marchesi family was involved in. Could I accept that?

For a moment I thought about doing exactly what Val had forbidden, jumping into the driver’s seat and taking off. Where the hell was I going to go? Was Val right? Would he find me no matter where I went?

I didn’t have any money to get on a plane or even take a bus or a train that would get me very far. And I’d be conspicuous as hell driving Val’s flashy Corvette, if I even could. It was so much newer than my car that I might as well be trying to drive a spaceship. If I kept his car, I was certain he would track me down. Then I’d owe him a hell of a lot more than I already did, maybe even my life.

Instead of running, I sat there enjoying the cool air, letting my head tip back and my eyes close. I’d hardly slept the night before. The heat had been oppressive. At least with a generator to keep the fan going, maybe I’d be able to get some sleep.

Val returned to the car with several bags full of groceries and the generator. I looked inside the bags as he handed them to me and saw fruit, bread, peanut butter, protein bars, and more nonperishables. “Why are you doing this? Being nice to me, buying me food?”

Val turned to look out his own window. “I know what it’s like to be homeless and hungry, okay. I haven’t lived my whole life the way I do now. My father sought out me and Vito a while after our mother died. We never had much as kids, but for a few years before Dom claimed us, we lived on the streets.”

That explained how he was so different from his father. “How old were you when she died?”

“I was nineteen and I went to live with my father at twenty-one.”

“Thank you for helping me.”

“You’re welcome.” We didn’t say anything else until Val pulled back into the parking spot closest to my storage unit. I started to open my door, but he laid a hand on my arm. “You never told me about killing someone.”

My pulse sped up. Foggy scenes from the moments and days after the accident raced through my mind, some of them real, but most of them probably made up since I couldn’t really remember anything from the moment of impact until days later. “It’s not important.”

He reached for my hand. “It is to me.”

“Why?”

“Because you said no one else thought it was your fault. You shouldn’t be blaming yourself for something you didn’t do.”

“What difference does that make to you.”

He brushed the back of his hand over my cheek. “Baby, can’t I just want you to be happy?”

I swallowed hard, and my gaze fell to his lips. For a moment, I thought he was going to kiss me. A real kiss, like this was a fairytale. Then he dropped his hand and sat back.

I sighed. “If you really wanted to make me happy, you’d let me go.”

Val shook his head. “That’s not how this works.”

“I killed my parents. Are you happy now?”