21. Dante

TWENTY-ONE

Dante

My phone dings another fucking text alert. I look at it even though I shouldn't. Rafael. Again.

Stop acting like a little bitch. I thought you were past that.

It's better than Tristan's messages.

Where are you?

Are you coming home?

Are you ok?

Are you safe?

There's nothing from Noah. I knew there wouldn't be.

I turn off my phone, hands shaking. I don't know what to think about what I did last night.

I kissed Tristan.

I cut Noah out.

I killed one of Capelli's thugs when I caught him following me.

The last one should have helped me forget about the first two. It didn't.

So I'll work here in my office for a while. Focus on something practical. Get my head straight.

Richard, who is officially my PA but mostly functions as my liaison to the office since I work from home a lot, bustles in with a folder as soon as I sit down. When I'm here, he hounds me nonstop. That's his job, so I can't exactly bitch about it, but fuck, give me five fucking minutes to think. I know I missed yesterday, but I do spend at least thirty hours a week in this goddamn office.

My father, though, regularly clocks sixty, so I get that I'm a slacker by comparison. But I have a second job. So to speak.

"Oh my god , Dante, your face!"

Jesus, it's not that bad.

"What happened? Never mind. Review and sign."

He slaps the folder down in front of me. I flip it open and start skimming. Richard's so damn good. But then, I do pay well.

I sign a page and flip to another, skimming again. "Have we heard from a real estate developer, name of Evers?"

Richard consults his tablet. "No. Do I need to reach out?"

"No. It's fine."

I lost that one when I went after Tristan at the charity dinner. And I don't have Noah's company to offer as an alternative anymore anyway.

Did I really fucking cut Noah out?

My heart starts pounding.

Yes.

No.

I don't fucking know. I can't think about it right now. I almost turn my phone back on but stop myself.

He had no fucking business trying to tell me how to handle Tristan. Tristan is mine. No one gets to be involved in our shit. It's hard enough to figure out without a bunch of assholes asking me questions.

I don't want to hear how I never do that or how it's not gonna work . Fucking Rafael.

Why the hell did he have to put that in my head? What's not gonna work? What is this?

Are you coming home?

Are you ok?

Are you safe?

Yeah. I've been avoiding him too.

When did he start … caring? Is that what his texts meant? Do I want that?

"I don't fucking know," I mutter.

"Um, which section?" Richard asks.

"Huh?"

"You're looking at the Milano factory report?"

"Oh. Never mind. I see it."

I keep reviewing until Richard's tablet chimes. He sucks in a breath. "Shit."

"What?"

"Three second warning, your—"

My office door flies open and my father walks in. So much for my three second warning.

"I've tolerated this long enough," he says.

Richard scurries out without being told. He snaps the door shut.

My father looks business-perfect in his three-piece gray suit as he comes to stand in the middle of my office, old-fashioned amid the sleek modernity. He's got the same Ivy League haircut he's had all my life, though the black is now peppered with gray. He's classy and handsome and a powerful man in the city, but all I can see is those cold dark eyes. Even now, when he's angry, they're cold.

I doubt that mine are, even though I remain seated in my executive chair.

His hands plant on his hips, parting his open jacket and revealing the heirloom watch chain. I'd like to wrap it around his neck.

He looks down his nose at me and says coolly, "I've ignored your disrespect of me. I've helped you all I can—"

"How have you helped me?" Above the desk, I say calm. Under it, my fingers dig into my thigh.

"This company, Dante. Your startup capital."

"That was my trust fund from Grandfather."

He died soon after Noah brought me back. I had one week with him in Rome. I don't think I spoke the whole time. He didn't try to make me. We just drank wine and ate gelato and walked around, and when I panicked, he just stayed with me until it passed.

I don't think I would've made it to eighteen for Noah to save me again if not for that week with Grandfather.

My father argues, "My name paved the way for you—"

"It's his name too."

I'm baiting him. I want to see if he'll say it. I fucking hope so.

He says, "You think his money is any cleaner than mine?"

My smile makes him uncomfortable. Maybe his own words do too. He likes to pretend that the Adesso family fortune is and always has been clean. Like all those years we were importing olive oil and wine from Italy we weren't also importing guns and drugs for the mafia.

He likes to pretend that he and Lorenzo Capelli weren't the best of fucking friends and the coziest of business partners before my father screwed Capelli over by selling the import company out from under him and getting "clean." Like that isn't the very reason that Capelli retaliated against him by kidnapping me when I was fourteen and selling me to the Society.

Of course, for my father, that never happened. I was just "away." I wasn't being raped on a nightly basis by rich, crooked men. Not at all. I was studying abroad, like a rich man's son is supposed to do.

I don't bring it up. I haven't tried to talk to him about it since I was sixteen. I haven't tried to talk to anyone. I guess my father succeeded in part. I did manage to shut it all away. Sort of. I do kill people, after all.

But on the surface, I'm what my father wanted: a successful, respectable businessman.

I don't press the point. It's enough for me to have my father's words hanging in the air. Instead I ask, "What do you want? I know you didn't come in here to reminisce."

"You need to stop riling Capelli up. He contacted me, Dante. He threatened me."

"Oh, no," I drawl.

"He says you're stealing his clients."

"Next time he contacts you, just refer him to me."

My father's face purples even through his Italian complexion. I'm actually kind of enjoying this. He's usually so calm and collected. His anger is actually soothing mine. Until he opens his mouth again.

"It would've been so much better for everyone, especially your mother, if you'd never come back."

I thought I was way past the possibility of being hurt by my father, but his words hit me in the gut so hard that for a second I can't breathe. It must show on my face because, for that same second, he looks like he wishes he hadn't said that. Then his face hardens, and so does mine. I feel it. The way my jaw turns to stone. The way everything tightens.

I get up from my chair. I walk around my desk. My father's eyes widen. He draws back. We've been so cold and distant with each other for so many years that I suspect he had forgotten, until this moment, how I once threw him to the floor in our kitchen and almost choked him to death.

He backs toward the door as I prowl his way. His hand fumbles with the latch, but he gets the door open. He's clumsy, scrambling out. It makes me want to attack him.

I want to throw him down again. I want to hit him. I want to kill him.

I stand in the doorway, rage crashing through my body while my face remains stone still. Only when my father turns the corner, vanishing from sight, do I register another presence.

I'm so far gone that I must stare at Tristan for a full ten seconds before I'm able to react. Even then it's only because he bites at his lower lip. My emotion reconfigures itself. The heat in my body moves down. Not all of it. I'm still angry. But my cock starts hardening.

"Um …" Tristan trails off.

"Get in here."

Tristan's hands are shoved in the pockets of his jeans. He's wearing a green t-shirt that hugs his chest and teases at the lean perfection of his abdomen. It brings out the green in his hazel eyes.

He glances at me as he walks into my office. I close the door.

"Um—" he tries again, but I cut him off with, "Face the desk."

His breathing becomes audible as he walks to the desk, standing between the two chairs that face it. He looks over his shoulder at me, so I grab the back of his neck.

He tries once more. "Dante, I came here to—"

I force him down until his hands plant on the edge of the desk. "Don't move," I tell him before walking away. I round my desk and open a drawer, considering the options.

I want to fuck him, of course, but I'm not going to. An orgasm isn't going to help me enough right now. I need something more, something that will last. Something that will help me put everything back in its box.

There's too much shit swirling around, too many moving parts. I need at least one thing under control and easy to understand. Kissing Tristan last night fucked up my head more even than what happened with Noah. And his texts, even the fact that he's here right now …

I can't deal with what it might mean. Or what I might want it to mean. I just fucking can't.

So I get out the lube and a large plug. Tristan's lips part when he sees them. I hope he doesn't fight me because things might get ugly if he does.

I walk around behind him. He's breathing harder by the second, but he doesn't try to stop me when I reach under him to open his fly. I tug his pants and briefs off his ass, but I leave them hung up on the head of his swiftly hardening cock.

I lube the plug and tease his hole with it. His hole is eager, even greedy. It clenches and opens at the stimulation. He starts panting.

I watch, entranced, as his hole stretches around the toy. I want to tie him up and spend all day sliding every toy I own in and out of him again and again and again, just to watch that tight ring of muscle stretch and clench.

The toy seats itself inside him. I stare at it for a while then I pull his pants up. I make him straighten. He falls back against me as I zip and button his jeans. Then I pull out a chair for him and make him sit. His body convulses as the plug shifts and bumps inside him.

I walk around to take my own seat. I get back to work, soothed by the sound of Tristan's ragged breathing and the occasional shudder that I catch from the corner of my eye.

"I was worried about you," Tristan finally manages.

"As you can see, I'm fine."

"Where were you last night?"

Killing a man , I almost say. How would he react?

"Working," is the answer I give him.

"When will you be home?"

"I thought you were working tonight."

"No."

I raise my eyes to his. "Did Rafael fire you?" If he fucking did—

"No," Tristan replies. "I asked him for the night off. Was that your father I saw leaving?"

"Yes."

I expect him to ask questions about my father or about Noah or about Rafael. I'm ready to punish him for them.

But what he asks is, "Dante … are you okay?"

Something awful happens inside me when he asks that. Normally, I wouldn't react to such a question. I'd just brush it off, not let it touch me. But after seeing my father, after what said to me, after all the times I needed him or my mother to ask me that very question, I feel … I don't know. Not good.

"You should worry about yourself, Tristan."

"Why didn't you come home last night?"

"Why do you keep calling it home when you insisted on having your own separate place?"

He flushes. "I didn't want a separate place. That wasn't the point. That's just what you chose to focus on because that's all you cared about."

It takes me aback. Apparently, that shows on my face because Tristan says, "You can't figure everything out by observation. Sometimes, you do have to ask questions."

"So what was the point?"

He suddenly looks uncomfortable, like he didn't expect me to actually ask. But he has to answer.

"You fucked with my things. Behind my back."

"And …?"

"And that's not okay! My shit is my shit. I'm sure that someone who grew up like a rich brat can't understand that, because everything is fucking disposable to you, but when you have no one and basically nothing , little shit matters. It's all you fucking have."

His words shove me so far into the past that I flinch. I do understand, actually, more than I'd like to. I know what it's like to curl up around something that's basically a piece of trash like it's a fucking life raft. I didn't connect that to Tristan. In fact, I haven't thought about it in years. I don't want to.

Everything, it seems, is conspiring to bring the past boiling over into the present. I fucking hate it.

I can't tell him that I understand, but I do say, "Noted. I won't do it again."

Now he's the one taken aback. "Really?"

"I will not fuck with your shit. That doesn't mean, however, that I won't fuck with you ."

And he smiles. He fucking smiles like I've handed him the world, and I can't fucking take it, so I get out my phone and send Kenzie a text.

Then I inform him, "Kenzie will be babysitting you this afternoon."

His expression sours. "What the fuck, Dante?"

"You think I trust you not to come? Not a chance. You will be supervised. You can go to lunch, the movies, I don't care. But the plug stays in."

"Why don't you do those things with me?"

I think, Because I can't fucking handle how badly I want to do just that. Because I might say something that I shouldn't say. Because I might kiss you again.

What I say is, "Because I don't have time."