21.

TWENTY-ONE

Dominic

I get out of my car the instant Rocco’s van pulls up. Fucking finally. I’ve been losing my goddamn mind staring at that picture of Rafael with his lip bleeding and his eyes already empty because he knows what’s coming and doesn’t seem to care. Fuck him for accepting it like that.

I’ll beat his goddamn ass.

He lied to me too, blew me off.

But dealing with all that shit will have to wait until I deal with Moretti. I just did him a favor last night, so why the fuck did he grab my man?

That thought stalls me as I close my car door. I mean, yeah, Rafael is mine, but … that thought felt different.

I don’t have time to sort it out in my head. Rocco and four of his handpicked guys are crossing the street to join me.

“What the fuck took you so long?” I demand.

Every second Rafael spends with Moretti is a second too long. But I can’t go in there alone. A hard ass like Gianni Moretti requires a show of strength. Besides, shit might get ugly.

Rocco gives me a hard look. “Maybe if you’d knock it off with all this solo shit, your security would be with you instead driving halfway across the fucking city.”

Apparently, I need to beat his ass too if he thinks he can talk to me like that. Not that he’s entirely wrong.

I pin him with a glare as I lead the way to the parking garage entrance. “I’ll deal with you later.”

“Good. I’ll hold you to that.”

Dickhead. I haven’t been avoiding him that much.

I use Rafael’s code to get into the parking garage. We walk past his Maserati and Ducati to the elevator, passing through both of its sets of doors into the sex club.

Guns in hand, we walk down one hallway then another. We move through the open space with the bar and stage to the stairwell door used by the staff. From there, we climb past the cellar to the door into the nightclub.

The door is solid, offering no view of what we’re about to walk into. I give quick orders.

“Rocco, you’re with me. Sal and Joe, you flank us. Tommy and Emilio, hang back to cover us and hold the door in case we need to run.”

Everyone nods. I open the door, and Rocco sweeps in ahead of me. I go through next, gun raised as I scan the scene.

Moretti’s men are strategically positioned around the nightclub. In the center of the room, one man holds a gun on Noah, who’s bound to a chair. Moretti has his 9 mil pressed to Rafael’s head.

Rafael jolts when he sees me. He didn’t know I was coming, didn’t know it was me that Moretti called. He’s not happy about it.

That makes two of us.

“This is friendly until it’s not, Capelli,” Moretti warns me.

“There’s nothing friendly about you grabbing my man.” Jesus, there it is again, and Rafael doesn’t miss it. His eyes widen. “What the fuck is this about, Moretti?”

“You better watch your fucking tone, Dominic, considering your man took out one of mine last night.”

My footsteps falter. “What?”

“Lower your gun, Dominic, or I’m going pistol whip the shit out of his pretty face.”

I do what he says, but I don’t signal my men. They keep their guns up but away from Capelli, focusing on his muscle.

Capelli keeps his gun nudged against Rafael’s head as he speaks. “Are you asking me to believe you had nothing to do with the mess your boy made of Anton Silva?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“You’ve been in here on the regular for a while now, and Costa wasn’t here last night. I’m guessing he was with you.”

I don’t say anything. He can guess all he wants.

Moretti is losing patience. “So you do a favor for me while your man does a favor for the Scalzis, is that it? Playing both sides is good way to get taken out.”

I don’t have any choice but to holster my weapon and approach. Several guns track me.

I go for the truth. “I knew he killed someone. I didn’t know it was one of your guys.”

“You didn’t bother to ask whose cock he cut off last night? You have any idea how fucking disgusting that is?”

My mind stumbles over that briefly, but am I really surprised?

“Rafael told me that he killed an abuser. I believed him. I still do. So maybe you should explain to me what the fuck Silva was up to—and why he deserved to get his cock cut off.”

Moretti might be a murderer and criminal like me, but he has enough moral fiber to look uncomfortable. I know he’s aware of the Island and my history, and I know he’s against trafficking kids. If he weren’t, I would’ve killed him as soon as my father was cold.

Moretti grits his teeth. “Whatever he was doing was for me to check or allow. No one else gets to decide. This shit has consequences. If this really has nothing to do with the Scalzis—”

“It doesn’t. I’m not a fucking traitor.”

“Then you get to walk out of here, Dominic. But he doesn’t.”

Moretti’s finger curls visibly on the trigger. Jesus, no—

“You owe me!” I shout. “You fucking owe me!” As Moretti’s finger eases a fraction, I say hurriedly, “This is what I want in return.”

My heart pounds in the silence. I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever been this honest in my life.

This is what I want. Him.

Psycho.

Liar.

Murderer.

Masochist and sex fiend.

And he is all fucking mine.

Moretti lifts his gun. The mafia takes shit like this seriously. Normally, he wouldn’t let something like this go, whether he owes me a favor or not. He wanted Silva gone. He could still kill Rafael for it, but he’ll lose me if he does. Not to mention the fact that I’ll do my best to kill him before I get taken out.

“You better put a leash on him, Dominic,” Moretti tells me, signaling his men. “He’s a fucking psychopath.”

“I know.”

Moretti shakes his head. After a final, warning look at me, he walks out with his men. I watch them all the way to the door.

The second they’re gone, I glare at Rafael. I want nothing more than to light into him right here and now, but I’ve got my guys hovering. I just got outed very thoroughly, and I’m not about to make an even bigger display of it.

I think Rocco senses that. He snaps out orders that have the men scattering. He and two of them head up the mezzanine steps to guard the main entrance. The other two head down to the parking garage to protect that route. It’s a smart precaution, but more than that, it gets them out of my face.

Rafael is busy freeing Noah, and I’m pacing, trying to cover my panic with anger.

Rafael outed me a little the other day in front of Dante and Tristan, and, yeah, we fucked in dim haziness of the sex club, but this is a whole different level. This is public. This is going to be spread.

Part of me knows it isn’t a big deal. Moretti didn’t even bat an eye. But I’ve spent my whole life hiding my sexuality, terrified of the consequences.

It doesn’t matter that my father is dead. I can feel his eyes on me. I can hear all the things he would say right now.

How I must have liked getting fucked by all those men at the Island.

How it obviously didn’t fix me.

How I need a real lesson.

“Dominic—”

I wheel and punch Rafael in the face. He crashes into a table then hits the floor.

Noah helps him up then holds him back. Noah’s eyes are on me like he knows I’m freaking the fuck out right now. He doesn’t fuck with me, doesn’t say anything at all until I stop pacing and stand there with my chest heaving.

Then he says in a quiet, firm voice, “Everything is okay.”

My breath hitches. I don’t think anyone has ever said that to me in my life. I know what he said isn’t true, that nothing is okay. I know I should shout and throw the words back at him. But I just stand there with my throat so tight I can hardly breathe.

Rafael scrapes his hair back. “Silva had a hidden camera. I missed it. I fucked up.”

My brain is slow to process that, but when the implications hit me, I’m relieved to feel my anger surge back in and drown out everything else for a second.

I snap at Rafael, “So you killed him in his home ? That’s a fuck up all on its own.”

“I couldn’t get to him easily.”

“So you wait. You watch. You learn his movements. For fuck’s sake, Rafael, how have you never been caught? With a high profile target, it takes months to safely—”

“I know that!” Rafael loses it abruptly, flipping a table. It crashes down a short set of steps. “But it’s already been months, and I had to fucking know!”

“Know what ? What the fuck is going on?”

Rafael wheels away and goes stalking off.

That’s not fucking happening. I start after him, but Noah intercepts me. He knows better than to touch me, but he holds up a hand.

I could shove it away. I could go grab Rafael. I want to. Violence is absolutely churning inside me. But somehow, I stop myself. For some fucking reason, I let Noah deal with this.

“And?” Noah calls after Rafael, like he knows perfectly well what all this is about.

Rafael answers with a terse nod.

Noah pulls out his phone. “I’m calling Dante.”

That has Rafael spinning toward him. “Jesus Christ, Noah, don’t fucking call him.”

Noah only gives him a look and walks off with his phone.

Rafael scrubs a hand across his face then throws himself into the nearest banquette. His head thumps onto the back of it.

“What the hell is with you and Dante anyway?” I demand.

I don’t recall them being close at the Island. But then, nobody really was. The house managers didn’t allow it. Everything was monitored, every moment controlled, every boy handled differently.

Besides, I didn’t see much of anyone. I wasn’t at the dinners. I was mostly isolated, as my father had ordered.

But I was out of my room some, enough to recall how silent Dante always was, how he’d withdraw to a corner whenever he could, how his eyes tracked everything. I also recall how pampered I thought Rafael was, how he knew exactly how to please the men, how much he seemed to relish their attention.

But I recall, too, how they barely stopped him from hanging himself one night.

I know that Noah got Dante, Rafael, and a lot of other boys off the Island after my father had already retrieved me. I don’t know exactly how the three of them fit together after that. I wasn’t part of any of it.

All Rafael gives me in response to my question is, “It’s complicated.”

It’s his tone that sends a stab of nasty realization through me. I stare at the side of his face as he keeps his eyes away from me.

“You two have fucked.”

“Sort of,” Rafael admits, still not looking at me. “But that’s not the only reason it’s complicated.”

A dark, awful feeling roils inside me. I know Rafael has been with a lot of men. Generally, it doesn’t bother me that much. Somehow, I see it as a long extension of the Island. I section it off into the past.

But this is different. Dante is still part of his life. This is far more personal, far more meaningful—and I’m not at all prepared to deal with it.

Frankly, it’s just one thing too many for a single morning. So I walk off. I find a banquette far enough away from Rafael to make clear that I don’t want to talk to him right now but positioned so that I can see him.

Rafael almost got killed a few minutes ago. I’m still shaking from that. I still feel like I might throw up. I’m also still freaking out about being outed. I’m pushing it back, but the panic is hovering at the edges.

And somehow overriding all of that is the biggest fucking freakout of all: the realization that, fuck, fuck, fuck, I might be in love with him.

All of this makes me want nothing more than to beat the shit out of him.

For putting himself in danger.

For lying to me.

For putting me in this position.

Most of all, for making me feel a ton of shit that I don’t have any idea how to handle.

And I still have no idea what the fuck is going on.

Noah goes over to Rafael and says something I can’t hear. Rafael levers himself up from the banquette. He walks off toward the elevator. He doesn’t look back.

Noah heads my way. His face is beat up, one eye swelling shut. He says, “Tell your guys to let Dante through when he arrives.”

I don’t really want to let Dante through, but I pull out my phone and send Rocco a text anyway.

“Where did Rafael go?” I ask.

“I told him to go clean up. He’ll meet us downstairs. It’s more secure. This room needs fully swept. I don’t know how long Moretti was here before I arrived.”

Swept for recording devices he means. I doubt Moretti left anything, but it’s a smart precaution, which is no surprise, given Noah’s background.

“What?” I snap. He’s looking at me.

“I’m just trying to figure shit out.”

Me and Rafael, he means. “Mind your own fucking business.”

“Rafael is my business. And so are you.”

“I’m not one of your boys,” I tell him.

He didn’t save me. We’re nothing to each other. The bitterness that wells up inside me is an unpleasant surprise. Is that what I wanted? To be saved?

Fuck that. I don’t need that.

Noah doesn’t say anything. He just looks tired. Sad.

I look away, but when he says, “Come on, let’s go downstairs,” I get up and follow.