“He disembarked at port.”
There’s a pause, and then Nunzio says, “Grazie. He was not a good deckhand.” We hear his feet retreat from the door.
“I think you actually scored points there,” I tell Luca. But he doesn’t stop watching the door handle, and now neither can I. Is it going to turn? Is the friendly Nunzio really another assassin?
After a minute, I get bored of watching the non-moving door handle, so I roll out of bed and head towards the connecting door, which has also been jammed with a chair. Luca flashes out of bed, and grabs me back. “No,” he says.
“I need clothes if we’re going to dinner,” I say, shrugging. “They’re next door.” Because of you, you motherfucker, I don’t add. He’s the one who insisted on separate rooms.
Luca gives me a long up and down look, as though reminding himself of my nudity, and then nods once. “I’ll go first,” he says.
“I thought you said Brother Frank cleared the crew?”
“He did. But I haven’t.”
“Soooo…are we gonna hole up in here behind locked doors or are we going to dinner? Because you just said—”
“Shut up,” he says, but it’s weirdly polite, the way he says it. “I’ll get your clothes for you.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “You can barely dress yourself, baby. You can scope out my room, make sure no one’s hiding in there with a stiletto, and then I’ll get my fucking clothes.”
I’m half expecting a slapped face for that level of mouth, and his eyes are gleaming dangerously. But he just shrugs, and pushes me behind him as he approaches the connecting door.
There’s no one in my room, but I could have told him that. I pull out my distressed jeans that I bet cost more than Luca’s whole wardrobe, and tug them on, ignoring underwear. His eyes linger on my ass as I head to the closet for a shirt—I can see him watching in the mirror.
Yeah, he wants it.
I pull on my shirt and run my fingers through my hair. It’s longer than I usually wear, and my roots are coming through. But I think Luca likes it this length. I think he likes that he can grab me by it, move me where he wants me.
Control me.
He thinks he can control me, anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Two
LUCA
Like all honeymoons, I assume, ours seems to pass too quickly. I keep Finch with me twenty-four hours a day, allowing him only bathroom breaks, meals and sleep. But we spend most of our time in bed, which I suppose is pretty standard for a honeymoon. Once I’ve admitted to myself how much I crave him, I want to spend as much time inside him as I can while we have the time here together.
Because when we get back to New York, I’ll have to be much more restrained, at least for a little while. I’ve told him this, touched on it so he doesn’t start thinking this is what our life will be like: endless orgasms and luxurious yachts.
Yeah, the sex is great. But that in itself is a problem. I find it harder and harder to hold back feelings, useless as they are. My brain only seems to work these days when I think about Finch, about what his face looked like when I twisted my fingers like that, about the noise he made when I put my tongue there, about how he laughed at something I said, about how his eyes look different colors depending on the light…
While Finch sleeps I’ve been trying to plan, trying to think ahead and figure out what Fuscone’s next move will be, but I’ve become lazy. Lazy and drunk on my new husband. It’s a recipe for disaster, and I know it, but I still can’t bring myself to care about anything that might happen when Finch is with me now.
But by the last day, I’ve tried to put some distance between us. Finch is snappy, too, short-tempered about little things, and I know it’s because he’s worried about New York. I’ve told him a few times that things will be different there, and I don’t think he really believed me until he saw me start to change, start to pull my old persona back on with practiced ease. On the Maddalena I was gentle, but by the time we boarded the jet, I was Luca D’Amato again. It was a relief to find I could still be that way, that the old me hadn’t drowned under a rising tide of emotion.
To Luca D’Amato, the only thing that matters is business.
Our arrival back in New York is met with minimal attention; Frank is the only one to pick us up, and that’s the way I wanted it. There’s been another surge of infighting among the Families, and even Fuscone’s focus has been diverted by it—for now.
Frank found a new apartment for me and Finch, like I asked him to before the wedding. It’s nothing fancy, but it is easy to defend and has minimal entries and exits to the building. Best of all, Fuscone doesn’t know where it is, and by the time he does, I’ll have my defenses in place. Finch’s face when we walk in—up seven flights of stairs, since the elevator’s broken—is somewhere between stunned and mutinous.
“Jesus wept! I’m not living here,” he says, dumping his suitcases in the doorway. We came straight from the airport, and he’s still grumpy because I wouldn’t let him drink more than one bottle of Cristal on the plane. “What the fuck?” Finch asks, turning to me.
It’s a railroad apartment, which is how I wanted it. Fewer places to hide, and we can hole up in the bathroom if we have to and defend our position. But it’s old and it’s dirty; the furniture is from the seventies and the kitchen is hazardous.
“Now you’re starting to understand the real situation you’re in,” I say to Finch casually. I wander through the place, schooling
