Break me, p.1
Break Me, page 1
Also by CD Reiss
Manhattan Mafia
Sold to one man. Forced to marry a monster.
Take Me | Make Me | Break Me
The DiLustro Arrangement
Some girls dream of marrying a prince. I was sold to a king.
Mafia Bride | Mafia King | Mafia Queen
The Games Duet
Adam Steinbeck will give his wife a divorce on one condition. She join him in a remote cabin for 30 days, submitting to his sexual dominance.
Marriage Games | Separation Games
The Edge Series
Rough Edge | On The Edge | Broken Edge | Over the Edge
The Submission Series
One Night With Him | One Year With Him | One Life With Him
Copyright © 2022 by Flip City Media Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Which is a fancy way of saying don’t be a dick.
Cover designed by the author because she’s a control freak.
* * *
Paige Press
Leander, TX 78641
* * *
PAPERBACK ISBN: 978-1-957647-37-1
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-957647-13-5
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by CD Reiss
Paige Press
Chapter 1
DARIO
Underwater. Pressure from above. Thick, gravity-defying space.
A constant beep, distorted by miles of dense space. A beacon just above the aural threshold. Louder as the pain finds its way into my consciousness. And louder with the growing pulse of agony.
I’ve been here before. The pain will push me back under water.
There’s a lost thing. I have to know.
I locate the pain. My head. The soft flesh of my right side. My heart.
For the hundredth time, I reconstruct the last events as if I’ve never done it before.
The Colonia have led me into a parking garage under one of my buildings uptown. Sergio Agosti—the man Sarah was supposed to marry before I took her—is taunting me. He’s not even Colonia, but he he’s weaseled his way in.
He’s the dangerous one. It was never Peter Colonia. Never Massimo.
It was always Sergio Agosti.
And it was always Sarah. My wife. At the peak of my priorities—she dances like an angel on the head of a pin.
Every time I make a mistake, I know it’s the last time. And it is.
It’s the last time I make that mistake, but like whores turned out while they’re still virgins, new ways to fuck everything constantly present themselves, legs spread with cunts that smell like a fresh breeze off a rose garden.
Did I make a mistake with Sarah?
I called security away from the house to fight a war over my brother as he froze to death in the back of a truck, hallucinating a song about Junktown. Leaving her with only Benny, I would trade myself for Nico, trusting I had time to negotiate while he warmed up.
Stupid. I killed Peter Colonia.
Was there ever a trade to be had?
Massimo isn’t in the underground garage. Why?
Sergio Agosti isn’t one of them, but he has a stake in their cause. I should burn in hell for being this fucking stupid. I took my eyes off her. I saw my brother in pain and forgot that I couldn’t trade my life for anyone’s. She’s dead without me. She’s hollowed and sold.
Let him go. Memory-me sounds so sure of himself. Take me instead.
Put down the guns. All of them.
Nico for all the guns.
I lay down mine. I can kill Sergio after I save my brother
There was never enough luck, time, or speed to save Nico’s life.
The second after Sergio’s demand, the Junktown song stops. My sense of proportion gets sucked into the vacuum where my brother’s voice had been.
I take my eyes off Sergio and put them on Nico—hunched in the corner of the truck. Some fucker stands over him and says, “He finally bit it,” and pushes him over with his foot. My brother lies still with skin the color of new snow. Michelangelo never sculpted anything so perfect.
Mistakes never arrive alone. They always come to the party with Miscalculation on one arm and Hope on the other.
The back of the freezer truck is slapped closed, my brother’s body still inside. It sounds like a gunshot, and that’s enough.
My men never disarmed. Connor wouldn’t surrender his revenge for Jesus Christ himself, much less one mortal man, so the song of cracking guns and whizzing bullets starts immediately. His first shot sends a man reeling back. The rest is a blur of pops and shouts.
I regain my gun. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. I hit some, but Luck is fashionably late to the party while Mistakes are dancing on the bar.
When pulling the trigger gets me click-click-click, I drop it and stand, scanning the chaos for a weapon whose use has outlived its owner’s.
Connor falls like a sack of shit. I choose to have a feeling about it later and go for his Glock.
I feel an intense pressure on the back of my head. The world is suddenly on a rocking sea. I keep conscious, but whatever hit me once hits me harder the second time with more sound than pain.
This battle slips through my fingers and the war along with it.
Sarah. The house.
She’ll be fine.
When I fall—and I will—she’ll be on her own.
The world spins like a blender. A crack in my skull.
She’ll be all right. So says Hope on the left arm of my mistake.
From the other arm, Miscalculation shrugs.
Gunshots have turned into a constant, droning beep. The spinning stops. I open my eyes.
The ceiling bulb glows behind a cage and gets farther and farther away, until it’s the size of a single star in a sky that keeps getting wider and blacker until it’s as big as the head of a pin that not a single angel dances upon.
I’m awake now.
Pain isn’t keeping me conscious, nor is the constant beeping.
It’s not knowing.
And Sarah?
And which of my men made it out?
Is Sarah all right?
When am I?
And where?
People in the room. Shuffling. Talking. Man and woman. The beeping, of course. The echo is hard and hollow. A room of solid walls. No sound from outside means no windows. Sealed door.
My eyelids resist opening all the way, showing only a horizontal blur of light crossed by lashes. Then the light is dimmed when something blocks the bulb.
“You were right, Clara.” A man’s voice. Close to my face. Older. Sixties. Stale stink of coffee on his breath. “The pain woke him.”
Sarah.
As loudly as my mind shouts, no sound comes out of me.
“Thank you, doctor.” The woman’s voice is one I recognize from another hard-walled room—a park toilet. Aunt Clara. “I’ve started the Pavulon. Should we cut the morphine drip?”
Her words aren’t keeping the scream alive.
It’s knowing.
I am trapped with the Colonia.
Nico is dead.
Sarah is in danger, and I cannot help her.
Sarah. Is she…?
“Yes. I don’t want to waste any more on him.” The light comes back when he stands away. “If I had my way, I’d just let him get sepsis.”
And why doesn’t he? Why bother healing a man they’re probably going to kill?
Sarah.
The inability to speak is a blessing. Until I know where I am and what they want, her name should not pass my lips. They’ll use my love as a weapon against her.
My vision clears. The light above me is the same bulb in the same cage. The beeping is some kind of monitor. It speeds up as I grapple for consciousness.
“I think he’s coming around, doctor.”
“Hm,” he says decisively. “I know he’s awake because he stopped bellyaching.”
“Should I fetch—?”
“You can go.” With a squeak of metal on concrete, his voice moves to my side. “Close the door behind you.”
I can’t move. Can’t turn my head or wiggle my toes.
Like a good Colonia woman, Aunt Clara doesn’t question him. She’s the kind of woman I thought I wanted. Her feet shuffle past the foot of my bed. The door closes. The doctor sits at the left of the bed. I can feel the angle and smell his breath… but I can’t turn my head to loo k at him.
“We started a Pavulon drip with the morphine. It’s a paralytic. For surgery. So you don’t move or twitch when a doctor cuts you open and rearranges you. And the government uses it when they send murderers into the dark night. Can’t say I’d be that gentle.”
I can swallow. Breathe. Blink. I can do all the things a body does without thinking. But I can’t use my mouth to tell him to fuck off.
“Yes, yes. Prima, prima. It’s almost worth keeping you alive to watch you suffer over the thing you didn’t do first, hm? Or whatever you’re crying over. Prima, prima. I almost had the nurses tape your mouth shut.” He takes my face in both hands and turns it toward him. He’s got a long face, wide at the temples and pointed at the chin, with a thin brown moustache that has only flecks of the gray that he’s taken over most of the hair on his head. “I’ve been waiting so long to meet you, Mister Lucari. And now that you’re here”—he lets go and sits back, crossing ankle over knee—“and helpless, I’m a little frustrated that you’re so darn valuable to so many people. It limits me.”
He regards me, squinting his dark brown eyes and crossing his arms.
The stark concrete room is bright. The caged bulb above my head is one of three. The light hurts my eyes.
The room has one exit. A metal door with a square window. One bed. A panel of medical instruments. Cabinets with absorbent things next to sharp things.
The plaster on the wall to my left has a smoother rectangle in the center. They bricked in a window there, yet it’s freezing in here.
This is how Nico died. Cold.
“You don’t know where you are. Last thing you knew, your brother was in a box, your men were getting mowed like a lawn. So I heard. None of them made it back here.” He uncrosses his leg and leans his elbows on his knees. “Your brother came in after all our brave Colonia men. They almost forgot to get his body out of the back of the truck. Fucking morons.”
He shakes his head. My brother died sculpted from ice, and he’s irritated by the display of incompetence.
Connor. Danny. Remo. All dead. Have to be.
And Nico. They left his body in the back of a refrigerator truck.
I should have brought him home when Oria demanded it.
I wish the doc would scratch my nose, because my entire face has gotten itchy. My head is one big mosquito bite. It’s worse than pain.
The doctor stands.
Is he going to leave without telling me where Sarah is? I can deduce what happened to most everyone else, but he hasn’t dropped a single breadcrumb I can follow to her. I exhale past a tight tongue, making a long sss.
“What’s that?” He bends, hands on his knees to meet my gaze as one would a child. “You’re trying to say something?”
“Sssaaa…” The rest comes out like a long nnn, and I hear her inside the sound. N is for noble. N is for night song. N is for north star. N is for the nick of time.
“Sorry, I don’t hear well out of this ear. Go again?”
His smirk implies he knows exactly how desperately I need the answer, but there’s no recognition of what, exactly, I’m asking.
N is for nothing. What I have without her.
N is for never—when I’ll see her again if I don’t get my shit together and think.
The strategic part of my mind wants me to shut up. Don’t say her name. The rest of me picks up the bludgeon of love and uses it to beat the strategist to death.
“Hm,” is all he says. I have no idea what he means by that.
I swallow and try again, only to make the same strained sounds. The full force of my panic isn’t enough to push her name from my heart, through my throat, and into the world.
“We don’t have any of that.” He sits next to me again, relaxed, legs crossed, and one arm slung over the back of the chair. The itching spreads to my neck. It’s torture. “Whatever it is. What we do have—let me tell you—is time. Lots of it. Was it you who killed Peter Colonia? These apes brought him in here with his guts trailing on the floor like a bag of dead snakes. I could have put that mess back together, but you got his heart. Nicked it just enough. The strength it must have taken to pull the knife up like that.” He pats my shoulder to commend me for a job well done. “Well, I’m just a humble trauma guy. I’m no heart surgeon. All I could do was keep him alive long enough to notice his son was nowhere to be found. Called Massimo a worthless pussy and that wasn’t even the strongest term. His own son. Imagine.” He pauses to let me imagine giving a shit. I can’t. “Then… last breaths… he put Sergio Agosti—who’s not even one of us, really—he put him in charge. So, the great thing… for us? You and me?” He leans his elbows on the bed to whisper close, points at me, then back at him. “None of them have time for you right now. It’s just Dario Lucari and me, in a room.” He glances at the IV tower above me. “Morphine’s out. You should have a nice case of the itchies by now.”
Casually, he scratches my nose. It’s the nicest thing anyone has done for me. Then he reaches down to my right side.
I can’t see what he’s doing. Playfully poking? Gently prodding? All I know is the pain is like a vise crushing the bone. It travels up my spine and lights my brain on fire. I can’t even scream.
He pulls back and puts his hand under his chin, staring at me like an artist before his masterpiece.
At least my face stopped itching.
“You took someone from me, many years ago. I need to know where she is. My name is Doctor Rosario Palmeri.” He pauses again, scanning my expression. I’m paralyzed. I can’t tell if my face betrays that I know the name, and I don’t have the control to hide it. “When you can move your face, we’re going to talk about my daughter, Rosemarie.”
Chapter 2
SARAH
Dario’s Buick Skylark smells like raw meat and gunpowder. My brother Massimo’s in the back seat. He’s not screaming anymore, but he’s grunting loudly or breathing in that way that makes a noise come from his throat. Sometimes he says words like fuck or why?
I wish he’d be quiet so I can think. I’ve had one driving lesson in my whole life. My fists are clamped around the steering wheel at ten and two, slipping on sweat when I turn around the curves of the narrow road, trying to keep close to the yellow line in the center.
There’s a white SUV in the rearview. Are they following us?
What do I do? What would Dario do? Would he pull to the side, get the rifle from under the seat, and shoot them? Massimo’s handgun is in my lap. It was easy to take from him while I got him in the car, but I don’t think I should shoot anyone with it.
The road goes straight for a while. The SUV swerves, crosses the yellow line—which went from solid to dotted—and speeds forward.
“Massimo,” I gasp as if he can help me. He can’t. He won’t. I put my hand on the gun in my lap. “Are they yours?”
“Who?” he barks. “Sarah, what did you do?”
I glance back at him. There’s blood all over the seat. “Who came with you?”
I face forward. The white SUV slows down, swerves, and comes astride me. A woman leans out the passenger window, brandishing her middle finger.
“Learn to drive, you fucki…”
The rest of an insult that Willa taught me is lost in the wind as the driver takes off. The back tires spit dust that clicks on the Buick’s windshield.
“No one,” I exhale. “No one came with you. Right? Not them at least?”
“I came by myself.” He’s holding his leg right above the wound, breathing hard, looking away from it. “I was going to get you and send you back to the old country to protect you. Before they got to you and…”
