"Hey." He nudged her. "Let's get some ice cream."
Gemma was eating ice cream while Willow was carnally tormented. This might have been the most perverse thing she had ever done. It was mint chocolate chip, though, so that made up for at least some of the depravity, she figured.
Across the kitchen table, Bobby was having the same.
She didn't think of him as the sort of person who ate mint chocolate chip ice cream, but she supposed everybody had to eat something sometime—even evil minions who did the evil bidding of a completely evil bastard.
The only sound was that of spoons occasionally clinking on bowls. She had nothing to say to him.
"Should have left me on the roof," she said, even though she had nothing to say.
"You know you'll never go back out there."
"Back out where? The roof?"
"The normal world. You're not part of it anymore. Angelo doesn't let people go."
"You're saying he's going to kill us?"
"Maybe. Maybe not. But he's definitely not going to let you go back to your normal life of pining after Willow."
He was obsessed with the lesbian theory, but she was not in love with Willow. They were friends. Close friends. Had been since boarding school. Bobby didn't know about connections that weren't perverted and sexual. He thought everybody who liked anybody wanted to fuck them. He didn't know anything at all.
Bobby thought Gemma was cute.
He wasn't used to thinking people were cute. Most people were irrelevant, some were threats, and one mattered. But this one. This one was definitely… cute. Maybe she reminded him of him in some blonde, female way, or maybe it was just the way Gemma seemed to inhabit herself completely. There was nothing reserved about her. She was exactly what she was, all the way through and back again. In a world of lies and deception and double, triple, quadruple crosses, that was very appealing.
“Hello, you two.”
Angelo strolled into the kitchen; his sleeves rolled up along his forearms. Willow was not to be seen. Gemma swallowed and stopped eating but kept hold of the spoon, just staring at him with great big eyes.
"Are you done?" Bobby asked the question.
"I don't think I'll ever be done, boy," Angelo purred, dropping a kiss on Bobby's head.
Gemma dropped the spoon aggressively into the bowl and stalked out of the room with her nose in the air. It took real balls to blank Angelo Vitali, but Gemma had balls for days. There was no doubt where she was going, to 'rescue' her 'friend.'
They let her go. Having Gemma was like having a spitting little kitten about the place, who alternately purred and obeyed - or hissed and spat.
"Did you break her?" Bobby asked the question. He quite wanted to see Willow broken. She had a bitchy attitude that rubbed him the wrong way, especially the way she seemed to think she was too good for any of them.
"I don't think so," Angelo smiled, retrieving some coffee from the machine. "That woman has even more of an appetite for pain than her brother."
In Control
"Are you okay? Oh my god, Willow, what did he do to you?" Gemma had run from room to room until she finally found Willow.
This was so weird. Digby was still out in the stables, a perpetual prisoner that everybody had more or less forgotten about. But she and Willow were being kept captive in the house with open doors. It was almost like they weren't really captive at all. It didn't feel like they were prisoners. It felt like they were guests at some kind of weird sex swinger's party she didn't recall being invited to.
She expected to find Willow a complete mess after what had happened to her, but Willow was sitting at the vanity. She had showered and changed and was elegantly dressed in a fine silk robe that did not belong to either of them. Angelo Vitali must have been shopping for her.
Gemma tried to pretend that didn't send a pang of something like jealousy through her for reasons she also tried to pretend not to understand. Bobby's words were chasing one another around in their brain, accusations of infatuation, and maybe even more.
"Are you okay?" She asked the question again. Willow was hard to read at the best of times. She was able to stone face her way through absolutely anything. "What was done to you was…."
"Nothing I couldn't handle," Willow said, tossing her hair over her shoulder.
She already looked so composed. It was as though nothing had happened at all. She was brushing her hair, reapplying lipstick, just generally primping.
"He had you tied down…."
"That doesn't mean he was in control."
As far as Gemma was concerned, there had been quite a lot of evidence that Angelo was in control, but what did she know? She was still a virgin. Willow knew all about sexual things, and kinky things, and generally dark things.