“You know, forget I asked,” I say and leave for the door. “I think I need a moment to process that.”
Salvatore laughs.
I lie in my bed, half an hour later, door locked because I trust none of them and can’t sleep.
I am staring at the ceiling, restless. I don’t scratch the itch very often, but when I do, I need a vibrator for it.
“Meh,” I say at some point and get up to sit at the desk and look outside into the darkness of the Sicilian countryside.
Right this moment, I miss London. The buzz. The lights. Everything is within arm’s reach. I mean, Palermo is a bigger city, but it’s not comparable to London.
And right now, I am not in Palermo but in the nothingness of nowhere.
Because I have to lead an empire.
“I have to lead an empire,” I repeat my thought. “I am the Capo. I can do whatever I want.”
Well, almost.
I take my phone and call Salvatore.
“Do we own a residence in Palermo?” I ask when he answers.
“Yes, several, why?” he asks sleepily.
“I want one. Tomorrow. The countryside is making me sick.”
“I’ll schedule a visit for tomorrow after breakfast,” he says. “Now sleep, this is an ungodly hour.”
I laugh and hang up.
Morning comes, and I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. I couldn’t fall asleep until a glimpse of the sun lurked on the horizon, and the few hours of sleep I got were restless.
I kept tossing and turning until I sat up straight from the sound of a slap that happened entirely in my head. A nightmare where I was in that BDSM room with Rosalia, where she attached me to the pet trainer, and she slapped me with a paddle until my ass burned in pain, just like in her torture chamber.
I am sweaty and gasp away the memory of it.
Fuck.
I draw my shoulders back.
“I am not my past,” I tell myself as a random affirmation, and get up and shower. The images of the dream, however, don’t vanish. They even worsen. The darkness. The pigeons. Rosalia’s voices. Flashes of a gun. Dead people.
“Urgh!” I curse out. I’d rather scratch my eyes out than see any of it. Which would make no sense, because everything is happening inside my head.
My heartbeat feels like I just ran five miles as fast as I could, beating against my chest and into my throat.
I need to get out of this room.
I need to—forget.
When I step out onto the sandstone terrace with a view over the landscape of dry Sicilian nothingness, the breakfast table is set with fresh fruit, coffee, and everything else a person could desire.
But all I see is an apple that looks like the one Rosalia had in her house, the one I ate, and somehow, this apple triggers more images to run through my mind.
Slap.I even feel the pain in my ass as if I were spanked right now.
“Urgh,” I groan again.
