Dominic (Benedetti Brothers 2)

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I need you to keep your shit together if we’re going to get the bastards who killed Mateo and branded you.”

I took in his words, studying him, his face, his eyes. He gestured once more to the tub and released my wrist when I climbed in. And I remembered something.

“You have a daughter.”

He stopped, as if that were the last thing he expected me to say. Then he nodded once and brought over a bottle of body wash and a washcloth. He sat on the edge of the tub, dipped the cloth inside, and rung it out before squeezing body wash onto it. He began to lather my neck and back.

“Effie. She’s eleven now.”

His face looked so sad right then. It was like the man I’d glimpsed last night, the one who hurt. The broken one.

“I haven’t seen her in a long time. Almost seven years.”

“Why?”

He looked at me, and for a moment, I thought he was going to say something other than what he said, but then, as if he’d just given himself over to it, the truth came out.

“Because I’m a coward.”

He dropped my gaze, dipped the washcloth into the water, and brought it back to me.

“She’s better off anyway.”

“What happened that night?”

He knew the night I meant. There was no other night.

“I shot my brother,” he said flatly. “I almost killed him.”

He refused to look at me. I reached for his hand the next time he dipped the cloth into the water and held it, then reached up to cup his face, seeing the scratches I’d left yesterday, thinking I should have bandaged them for him.

Dominic met my gaze, the look in his eyes strange, dark…empty. As if he’d used the last seven years to create a gap so wide, a hole so big, he’d never be able to cross the chasm.

He shook my hand off and resumed washing me, his attention wholly on that as he spoke.

“Don’t misunderstand, Gia. I’m not good. Being a father doesn’t make me good. Missing my daughter doesn’t make me good. When I say she’s better off, I mean it. I know myself. I know what I’ve done, what I am. I know what I’m capable of.”

He hated himself. I’d accused him of that very thing in the beginning, and it was more true than I’d realized then. And some part of me, hell, not some part, not any part. My heart…it broke for him.

“Tell me about that night,” I said after a while, once he’d started shampooing my hair.

“Salvatore finally figured out what was going on. Roman—hell, Roman had been looking for shit all along, I have no doubt of that. Anything to discredit me. Although, it’s not like I needed much help with that.”

“From the beginning. Please.”

“Salvatore and Roman figured out I was the father of Isabella DeMarco’s little girl, Effie. The DeMarcos were our biggest rival then.”

He paused, giving me a minute to absorb.

“We’d met when we were both young—well, she was young, and I was stupid. Didn’t know who she was at first, and she didn’t know who I was. She got pregnant, and the night we’d agreed to tell our families, I chickened out. She didn’t. She told. And then, she disappeared. It was either that or old man DeMarco wanted her to get rid of the baby.”

“I remember the war between your families.” It came back vaguely. I’d been too young to really pay attention all those years ago. “Lucia was given to Salvatore like she was restitution or something.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“It would have been her older sister if you hadn’t gotten her pregnant?”

He nodded.

“Well, they figured it out,” he continued. “Luke, her cousin, an imbecile if you ask me, managed to get himself shot by another imbecile. It’s what triggered everything. Roman, my fucking uncle,” he spat the words, “tried to pin it on me, but Salvatore, my brother who can do no wrong, just wanted peace. Well, fuck peace. This is the fucking mob. You don’t get to choose peace.”

He stopped shampooing for a minute and looked off into the distance. I was glad for it. In his growing anger at his family, the massage had turned a little rough.

“You know what you get if you’re the last-born son in a mafia family, Gia?”

I waited, eyes on his when he turned back to me.

“Nothing. You get nothing.”

He picked up shampooing again, and I bit my tongue to keep quiet and let him tell his story.

“And if you’re a bastard—”

“Bastard?”

“I was pissed that night. Salvatore, he could never be boss. Never. Hell, he didn’t even want it. But he was getting it. He called a meeting at his house, and my uncle dragged me to it. I admit, I was half drunk when I walked into the dining room with a loaded gun.” He shook his head. “Then my father called Isabella a whore. Called my mother a whore. I couldn’t take it.”