20.

TWENTY

Rafael

I don’t know what kind of alternate reality I’ve stepped into, but Dominic Capelli is making me waffles. He’s using a whisk.

I’m sitting in his kitchen, wearing some of his clothes because mine were bloody, and drinking coffee that he made. I shift on the stool, chasing the soreness from where he was inside me.

I’m not ready to think about the sex we had, what I needed from him. My mind accepts that I like rough, dirty sex. I built my entire play room around it. I embrace that.

What happened last night was different. I needed it. I’m so fucking glad he did that for me, that he was able to. But it wasn’t just dirty. It was ugly. When I came, it felt ugly. Kind of awful. But it also felt like finally breaking through a window that I’d been screaming at.

And when I tumbled through to the other side of it, Dominic caught me. He could’ve left me. He was fucked up too. Looking back, I can see that. But he got me in that bathtub, and everything that had been so fucking ugly washed away.

We went back to bed after that. He never let go of me. We just lay there, breathing, letting it all fade.

And now he’s making me waffles.

He opens the waffle maker and pours batter into it with a sizzle. It’s six a.m. It’s way too early for me to be hungry, but I’m sure as hell going to eat that.

He closes the lid. “I have to work today.”

“I figured.”

There’s maple syrup in the microwave. He starts it heating. The door lights up behind him, rotating the pitcher inside. Dominic puts his back to it, leaning against the counter and crossing his arms. His white t-shirt pulls tight over his shoulders and biceps.

I love getting to see him like this, in a t-shirt and sweats, his short dark hair a little messy. His jaw is shadowed with stubble because he hasn’t shaved yet.

“What are you going to do today?” he asks.

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“So think about it.”

I sip my coffee. Lush is closed, so it’s technically my weekend. “Maybe the gym.”

“That’s a start. What else?”

I snort. “You want my whole schedule?”

The microwave dings. Dominic takes the syrup out and sets it near me. He goes to check the waffle and decides it’s not done.

Hovering over it, he says, “I want to know you’re not going to get fucked up.”

For some reason, that makes my throat go all tight. I can feel emotion on my face, so I sip my coffee to cover it.

I guess I don’t cover it very well because Dominic says softly, “Rafael.”

“I won’t get fucked up,” I tell him.

He doesn’t reply. I’m not sure he believes me. I’m not sure I believe myself. Right now, I feel like I’ll be okay today, but I know how easily that can change.

Dominic checks the waffle again and lifts it out with a fork. He slides it onto a plate, which he holds out across the counter. I take it.

He pours more batter into the waffle maker and closes the lid, then he walks around the island to come sit beside me. When I start dividing the waffle, he stops me.

“I’ll get the next one.”

I glance at him from the corner of my eye as I load up the waffle with butter, syrup, and strawberries. The past few hours have brought out such a different side of Dominic.

My mind drifts again to the bathtub. How everything settled as he held onto me. How I accepted tenderness from him when I would never have accepted it from anyone else.

It wasn’t the first time. There was that night when he wouldn’t let me leave the play room. Other moments too.

It doesn’t change the fact that he’s vicious. Sadistic. Full of rage. He likes hurting me. He likes fucking me like he hates me. Thank god. I don’t want that to ever stop. I love it. I need it.

But this …

Maybe I need this too—and that’s far more terrifying than having him string me up and point a gun at me.

“If you don’t eat that fucking waffle while it’s hot,” he says in a warning tone, “I’ll take that fork you seem to have no use for and stab it through your hand.”

A smile tugs at my lips. I pick up the fork and do what he says.

“Mmm, fuck,” I mumble around a mouthful. “Shit, that’s good.”

“Don’t make sounds like that.”

“Bad manners?” I tease, preparing to give him shit for being a snob while wearing sweatpants.

“No,” he replies as he gets up from his chair and walks behind me. He grips my hair and pulls my head back. His other hand goes to my throat as he whispers in my ear, “It makes me want to shove my cock in your ass.”

I close my eyes as a wave of arousal spills through my body. “Maybe you should.”

“No. You’re gonna eat your fucking waffle.” He shoves my head forward and walks off around the island.

He keeps his eyes on me, making sure I comply as he opens the waffle maker and lifts the waffle out with a fork.

We eat, mostly not talking. I tap out at two waffles because it’s six o’clock in the goddamn morning. After three waffles, Dominic switches to leftover chicken and rice. I tease him about it, but he says he can’t make it all day on waffles.

I don’t have work. I can eat again later, so I stick with coffee, glancing at him from time to time. For some reason, I enjoy watching him eat. He’s so serious about it, and I like how his jaw bunches as he chews. I like watching him swallow.

“So what’s going on?” he asks between bites.

My heart skips. I’ve been expecting him to ask, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready for it. I’m definitely not ready to tell him the truth.

It’s one thing to be vulnerable with my body. Sex is a whole different headspace. I can be honest there, at least with him. But this is different.

I don’t even talk to Noah about the Collector or anything that happened before the Island. We talk around the subject, not about it.

So I shrug and say, “I get like that sometimes.” It’s not totally a lie. I do get like that sometimes.

“Where you don’t know where you are and you walk about the city covered in blood?”

Okay, so that was a first. I ignore the question because I don’t have a good answer to it. I cut to what matters. “It won’t be investigated.”

“So Noah was involved. That’s why he was trying to get a hold of you. Because you had vanished.”

In a way, sort of, technically yes, but I know what he’s assuming. He thinks Noah helped me and disposed of the body after. He thinks I freaked out and left.

I’ll just let him keep thinking that.

“Yeah,” I say.

“So there’s no mess,” he presses.

I think about tossing Anton Silva’s severed cock and balls on the blood-soaked bed beside his corpse.

Dominic is backing me into a corner. I can’t answer this one without an outright lie.

“No mess,” I assure him.

***

“Ah, shit.”

“What?” Dominic asks as he pulls up at Lush. His gaze follows mine to an old truck parked down the street.

“Noah’s here.”

Dominic sends me a narrow-eyed look. “Why are you avoiding him?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t want to talk to him last night, you don’t want to see him now. What the hell is really going on?”

I don’t want to have this conversation with Dominic any more than I want to have it with Noah. Anything I say is going to get me grabbed, so I open the door and get out before Dominic can react.

“It doesn’t concern you,” I tell him as soon as my boots hit the pavement, putting me out of reach.

From this angle, I can’t see his face, but his words tell me how angry he is. “Then close the fucking door and fuck off.”

I’m already filled with regret, already wanting to backtrack, but he’s pissed and everything I would need to tell him to fix this feels like a mountain I can’t hope to climb.

So I close the door. He doesn’t give me a chance to fuck off, however, because the instant the door is shut, he hits the gas, cutting someone off to vanish into the traffic.

“Fuck.”

Part of me wants to just walk off down the sidewalk and get away from everyone and everything, but it’s cold and I’m suddenly so damn tired that I walk to the door instead.

The main entrance lets me into the foyer, where one door leads into the nightclub, another to the sex club below. I can cut through either to reach my elevator. I choose the nightclub because it’s more direct.

The instant I open the double doors and step onto the dark mezzanine, I know something’s wrong. I can feel it in the air, in the prickling along my scalp, even before I hear a muffled shout. Light filters in from behind me, but it’s faint and my eyes aren’t adjusted. I can’t pick out all the figures, but I have no trouble hearing the gun that cocks near my head.

I freeze.

“Hands where I can see them.”

I put my hands up. I wait for the asshole holding a gun on me to approach for a search. When he does, I grab his wrist and punch him in the throat.

I’m wearing my bloodstained leather pants and jacket from last night, but I don’t have time to grab any of my knives, so I break his wrist and take the gun. He lands a punch, but I’m already wheeling, ignoring the shouts around me as I hurl him over the railing.

I lose him in the dark, but I hear him hit the piano, which pisses me off so much that I almost shoot in his general direction. Then light floods the room.

Half a dozen guns are pointed at me. Even if I were willing to risk a hail of bullets from those guns, there’s one that stops me dead—because it’s pointed at Noah’s head.

The asshole holding that gun is dressed in sleek mafia style, his suit shiny and expensive with a yellow pocket square. His salt and pepper hair is slicked back, his eyes are empty, and his steady hand shows just how often he’s done this.

Noah is bound to a chair, arms behind his back, a gag in his mouth. Blood runs down the side of his face from his hairline. He’s furious. Noah hates being tied up. Even more, he hates being used as leverage.

The mafia boss aiming his gun at Noah asks, “Do you know who I am?”

On the stage below the mezzanine, the shithead who damaged my piano slides off it with a groan.

“Gianni Moretti,” I reply. He looks just like his picture from Anton Silva’s file.

“Do you know why I’m here?”

“I assume because Silva had a camera that I missed.”

“A personal camera, not part of his security system. Lucky for him, unlucky for you, he’d forgotten to turn it off. You were easy to find, after he mentioned you by name.”

A hidden camera. Probably a porn camera. My stomach churns at the thought of what kind of shit he was recording.

“Do you know what that sick fuck was doing?” I ask.

“I’m more concerned about what you did. You made a real fucking mess, Costa. Now drop the gun, or Mr. Carter’s brains will be all over this cream leather.”

I drop the gun and hold up my hands again.

“Get down here. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Two men are waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. I know what’s coming, so I tighten my gut—and not a moment too soon. The blows land hard and fast. I fall to my knees, gasping for air, curling around the pain.

They haul me to my feet. One asshole holds my arms behind my back while the other searches me, finding my knives. Most people wouldn’t have found them all, but these assholes know what they’re doing.

Those knives weren’t going to do me any good anyway. Moretti’s going to kill me. My only hope is to get Noah out of this.

Moretti’s thugs hit me a few times to get my head spinning. Then, while the other men hold their guns on me and Moretti keeps his on Noah, I get dragged to a banquette. They toss me onto it.

One of the others takes over with Noah so Moretti can approach me. He’s not emotional. He doesn’t care about this. It’s principle only. Silva was one of his men.

Moretti reaches into his shiny gray suitcoat and pulls out his phone. He snaps a picture of me. His thumb moves around on his screen like he’s sending it to someone. Within seconds, his phone rings.

When he answers it, he doesn’t get a chance to say anything. Whoever called is shouting.

Moretti waits it out then says, “Get your ass to Lush, and we’ll sort this shit out.”