“I’m not lonely,” she says. “I just don’t know what I’m doing. It feels like a hundred things have happened and I don’t have brain space to put them anywhere.”
So, she came and found me and watched me swim. Another good sign she wants my dick. I’m about to point that out when her big green eyes fill with tears. I get that duct-tape feeling in my chest again. “Tits…”
“Sorry,” she says, wiping her eyes. “I know I don’t have anything to cry about. I’ve been rescued and your sister is still gone and poor Emilia is withhim.”
For a second I have no idea who Emilia is, then I remember the redhead getting her tit squeezed in Parker’s video. “Yeah. Her.”
I have no idea what to say about Emilia. Velvet House has been watching Parker for seventeen years and there’s been a long line of corpse girlfriends. With the pressure we’re putting on him, the redhead’ll be lucky if she sees Christmas. Another woman dead because of Parker. Which means, because of me.
I stare into the rippling green water. Three years ago, when Morelli finally okayed us to kill Parker, I pushed for torturing him first. Adriano could have shot him between the eyes from a mile away, but I wanted bloody, ugly revenge. I wanted to run his business off the rails, to clip off his fingers with bolt cutters, to fuck his fiancée right in front of him. If I’d kept my head, he’d be gone. Alessia avenged. Emilia free. January Whitehall safe.
And now I’m supposed to sign a contract and let him keep fucking up other people’s lives the way he fucked up mine?
“Doc? Are you okay?”
She looks at me with more concern than I’ve ever shown anyone. Maybe that’s why she fucks with my head. She’s nice. She might be the first actually nice person to exist.
“I’m fine. Sorry about your Zia. She shouldn’t have gone like that.”
More tears roll down her cheeks. “No, but at least she was unconscious. She always said that’s how she wanted to die.”
“She said that?”
January smiles. “All the time.”
“Well, she was an old Italian broad.”
“She was.” January dips a gentle hand in the water as though to touch me. “I’m really sorry Mr. Parker killed Alessia, Nico.”
Everything inside me goes still. “What did you call me?”
Her shoulders creep to her ears. “I don’t know. I feel weird saying Doc sometimes. And if you don’t want to be called Domenico, I could maybe call you Nico? It’s shorter and it’s nice.”
My insides feel like I’ve eaten a bunch of butterflies. God fucking dammit what’s wrong with me? I liked it better when I wanted to lock her up and breed her. “You can call me whatever you like, Tits. Name-calling’s a two-way street.”
She makes a ‘whatever’ face and even that makes my chest go all fluttery. I shove the feeling aside. “Thanks for what you said about Alessia… or whatever, but you’re not allowed to feel sorry for me.”
She blinks back more tears. “But Iamsorry, Nico.”
“Huh.”
I tread water a couple of feet from her and think about what’s coming next. Once Morelli’s done with Parker, he’s going to move onto the topic of who January belongs to. I know him well enough to guess how his mind will work. He won’t want us to keep fighting over her. Some kind of share-January compromise is on the horizon, which means I won’t be able to have her to myself. I’m not opposed to keeping her for all four of us, but I’ll be damned if that sleazy fuck Morelli thinks he’s getting a kid out of the first woman who ever made me feel this way. Or if Basher thinks he can marry her. I’ll cut off his ring finger first.
“Do you think Eli will let me stay here?”
I glance up at January. “You mean… live at Velvet House?”
“Yeah.”
I laugh. “You try to leave and find out what happens. There’s no other life for you now. You’re ours.”
Color floods her face. She’s practically glowing. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means you’re ours.”
She looks down at her hands, her cheeks and forehead brick red.
“Do you like that?”
