KIARA
That night, familiar sounds of distress woke me. I sat up and fumbled for the light switch, blinking against the sudden brightness.
Nino jerked upright beside me, his hand reaching for the bedside table and grabbing his knife.
His wild eyes locked on me, chest heaving, his fingers clutching the handle.
“I’m getting Remo,” I murmured and slowly slid out of bed, worried about startling Nino. His free hand curled around my wrist, stopping me.
I gasped in surprise, my gaze searching his face. The wild despair was gone from his expression, replaced by a mix of confusion and the familiar blankness he had always displayed in the past. “Stay,” he said quietly.
Hesitating, I climbed back into bed, and Nino pulled me toward him. I settled on his chest. He put the knife back down on his nightstand, but the tension remained in his body. Tracing the tattoos on his torso, I tried to count his scars to distract myself, but it was difficult to determine where many of them ended and others began.
“All these tattoos … why did you get them?”
Nino’s fingers trailed up my spine and continued to my neck, then higher up, tangling in my hair. His lips brushed my forehead, and I peered up at him. Was this simulated affection? Simulated tenderness?
“Pain and pleasure,” he said in a low voice. “I can feel those like anybody else, maybe even stronger.”
“But if you feel pain even stronger than others, why would you submit yourself to having a needle pierce your skin over and over again for many hours? Why do you go into the cage? Why do you seek out pain?”
His mouth twisted. “To remind myself that I’m alive.”
My brows drew together.
“To remember who I am, what I am.”
“I don’t understand,” I admitted. “What happened to you and Remo to make you the way you are?”
Nino tilted his head down to me and regarded me. I returned his gaze, even if I didn’t know what he was looking for. “Like you said, it’s not only my story but also Remo’s.”
“I won’t talk to him about it,” I promised at once. I would never think about talking to Remo about something that obviously affected both him and Nino like that. It would be suicidal.
“Our mother was insane,” Nino began in a distant voice. “Maybe she always was or maybe our father made her that way. I only remember her like that. She had better days when our father stuffed her full of pills, but on this particular day, she was heavily pregnant with Adamo. She couldn’t take the pills. Maybe she had wanted to kill herself for a while.”
Something tight coiled in my stomach, and I almost asked him to stop because I knew that day was when Nino’s childhood ended. Nino’s mother wasn’t the first wife of a Capo who ended her life. Being married to someone raised to be cruel could destroy anyone.
“Our father had sent us all to our cabin out in the Rockies because he wanted us gone from Vegas. We were a burden. One night, our mother pulled me out of bed and led me into her bedroom. Savio was already there, but he wasn’t moving. She’d given him her sleeping pills. I didn’t know what was going on, but she gripped my arms and slit both my wrists with a knife. She wanted to kill us too. Maybe to punish our father.”
I sucked in my breath, fingers seizing on Nino’s stomach, but he was stock-still. Those scars on his wrists, they were remnants of that day.
“I was confused and scared.” His brows drew together as if he was trying to remember how being scared felt. “She left after that and came back with Remo a few minutes later. I think she took him last because she knew he’d be her biggest challenge. The house was filling with smoke by then. She’d set fire to the kitchen and living room. Remo rushed over to me, and she locked the door and shoved the key under the gap below the door. Then she moved to cut Remo’s wrists, but he fought her, unlike me. She managed to cut him over and over. That’s where he got the cut on his face. When she realized she couldn’t hold him down, she set the curtains on fire and then slit her own wrists. The room filled with smoke, and I sat in my own blood. Savio wasn’t move on the bed.”
Nino’s voice was mechanical, detached, cold. His eyes were as smooth and impenetrable as mercury, but each of his words burned into me, wedged itself like a knife into my heart. The horrors he described, they were incomprehensible. I had lived my own share of horrors, true, but somehow hearing him describe what he’d gone through as a young boy broke me. “How did you get out?”
“Remo threw a lamp through the window and got burned ripping the curtains off the ceiling. Part of his clothes began burning too, but he didn’t stop. My father’s men were trying to get inside the house and trying to extinguish the flames. Remo grabbed me and helped me out of the window. I jumped and broke my leg from the impact. Remo jumped out with Savio in his arms. He broke his elbow and shoulder because he tried to protect Savio. Our mother was saved by my father’s men later.”
I swallowed hard, unable to speak, and Nino fell silent as well.
“It seemed to take forever as I watched my own blood run down my arms. I felt the deep burn and it was almost soothing.” He lifted his arms, wrists up, showing me the long thin scars covered by dark ink. I leaned forward and kissed both of his wrists, my heart aching for Nino—and for Remo.
I tried to picture Nino as a child, kneeling in his blood, watching his mother cut Remo, smelling the smoke. I could picture how scared he must have been, how utterly broken and shocked that his own mother had tried to kill them in a barbaric way. It explained so much, explained why he had shut off his emotions and why Remo had turned toward them. Different ways to cope with the same horror.
“Where is she now? Did your father kill her after what she did to you?”
Nino shook his head. “After the doctors cut Adamo out of her, he sent her off to psychiatric hospital for a while, but eventually he moved her back home.”
“He forced you to live under a roof with the woman who tried to kill you?”
Nino’s eyes were focused on his fingers, which ran up and down my side. “For the first few years. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The smile on his face felt like a bucket of ice. “But things were difficult. Remo became harder to control, and my lack of emotions eventually unsettled my father too much, so he sent us off to boarding school in England, up in the countryside north of Norwich.”
“But what about Savio and Adamo? Weren’t they too young?”
Nino nodded. “Adamo was four and Savio seven when we were shipped off. At the time, Remo had already been inducted and killed a few, but he wouldn’t let us be separated, so we went together to England. Of course, that’s what our father had intended. He wanted Remo and me gone. He was scared of us.”
I couldn’t imagine Remo in a posh boarding school. Nino could look like a sophisticated gentleman when he covered his tattoos and tried to form his expression into one of pleasantries, but Remo was far from restrained and posh.
“That didn’t work out long,” Nino said quietly. “Eventually, we ran off and returned to the States to kill our father.”
“But you didn’t. Luca’s Enforcer, Growl, did.”
“That’s something Remo will never forgive our half-brother for. He robbed us of the chance to destroy our father, piece by piece.”
I tended to forget that the Falcones and Growl were related. “I’m sorry,” I whispered eventually, my insides churning and hoping that Nino couldn’t see how much his story had affected me.
Nino made a low sound in his throat, a sound I’d only heard twice before, when he’d been on the verge of snapping, but his face was still unsettlingly void of emotion. His hand on my side dipped lower, over my hip and between my legs.
I jumped, surprised that he was looking for that kind of closeness in a situation like this. His fingers found my clit. He hovered over me and kissed me, harder than ever before, and his fingers strummed a fast rhythm between my legs. Despite the jumbled mess that was my emotions, my body responded to his kisses and touch.
Suddenly, he pushed himself up and moved on top of me, his strong arms on either side of my head. I stilled as he held himself over me, his eyes not emotionless at all. Instead, his expression twisted with something akin to despair. He’d never been on top of me during sex.
“Tell me this is okay for you, Kiara,” he managed to say in a raw and dark voice. “I’m not sure I can be as gentle as you need me to be. If you can’t do this, tell me and I’ll leave, but …” He shook his head.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, because I wanted to console him in any way I could. If this was what he needed, I could give it to him. I wasn’t scared of Nino or his body.
NINO
Kiara looked up at me with trust that I had no trouble reading in her eyes. Her hands curled around my shoulders, holding on to me, and I grabbed my cock and guided it toward her pussy. She was wet and soft, even though she had been anxious about this position because it made her feel like she had no control, because my physical strength intimidated her. I lowered myself to my elbows. The closeness would calm her, not unsettle her, and I felt her body become even softer under me.
She tugged me down for a kiss, and I allowed her this small sliver of control, even if I was longing for something harder, darker. Even if I wanted to exert dominance and not gentleness.
But I needed to be inside her. Now. I slid in without pause, until her pussy touched my pelvis. I shuddered, needing more, needing it fast, needing to get rid of the sudden pressure on my chest that had never been there before.
I forced myself to wait a couple of heartbeats, allowed her body to adapt, forced down the raging flood of need in my body. I had never felt like this, like I needed to consume Kiara completely. Like she was the only thing that could satisfy a hunger unlike anything I’d ever felt.
My chest was tight, my stomach hollow, and I wasn’t sure what was going on. Why suddenly every look from Kiara made my insides explode with fire, almost painfully but good too.
I pulled out and thrust back into Kiara, and her nails dug into my back, leaving scratches. It felt like relief, an outlet for the pressure. My lips found hers as I slammed into her, and she returned my gaze with a burning need of her own. Again, that same ache for something I didn’t understand. I had always been in control, but I couldn’t control this. I reached between us and rubbed Kiara’s clit then latched onto her nipple, sucking and nibbling as I drove her into the bed with long, hard thrusts.
Even her smell opened the hole in my chest wider. Everything about her made my body react, made me long for something impossible, for something foreign and inexplicable.
Kiara started to shudder under me, but I kept thrusting even as her walls tightened from the force of her orgasm. I got on my knees for more leverage and kept thrusting, hoping it would fill that hole in my stomach, would satiate the deep hunger of my soul, but even as I came with a violent jerk and my cock softened, the longing remained wedged in my chest.
I sank down on top of Kiara and breathed harshly against her throat. Her fingers played with my hair, and she kissed my ear, then my temple, and for some reason those two meaningless gestures fulfilled some of my longing.
I twisted my face to look at her. Her skin was flushed, and she was breathing fast. She looked stunned, overwhelmed as she met my gaze.
“Did I hurt you?” I rasped.
Her brows pulled tight. “No. When you said you couldn’t be gentle, I’d expected worse.”
So had I. It had felt like I was on the verge of losing control, but somehow Kiara had held me fast through it all.
“Nino?” she asked quietly. “That look on your face, what does it mean?”
If only I knew.
She kissed me. “I know our pasts hold horrors, but we can get beyond that, don’t you think?”
I stroked her cheek. I had gotten past the horrors. I’d seen and done so many horrible things, how could an event from long ago still hold any power over me?
