Page 60 of The Prices We Pay
I stare up at him, slightly taken aback and turned on by the aggressiveness that’s taken hold of his deep voice.
“The Bratva knows who you are, Josephine.” And the use of my full name causes a rush of wetness to pool between my thighs.
Fuck, why is this so hot?
“They know who you are, and they will not hesitate to use you to get to us. We have no idea why they are fucking with us, which means we have no idea what their plan is.” He lowers his face to mine, and I shiver as his beard rubs against my cheek. “So until we say so, you will go nowhere without us. Is that clear?”
Under normal circumstances, I would quite literally kick a man in the dick for speaking to me that way, but when Dante does it… Jesus, fuck. “Crystal.”
I watch as Dante’s stare moves from my eyes to my mouth. His hazel eyes darken as he leans in closer. Parting his lips slightly, he brushes them lightly against mine. A touch so feather-light it hardly constitutes a kiss, but it’s not nothing either. Neither of us move, and I watch as Dante wages some kind of internal war within himself. Every fiber of my being wants to move that extra half-inch—to steal a kiss that I didn’t realize how badly I was craving until this very moment. But his hold on my face remains, and I know that even if I wanted to, there’s no way I’m moving until he’s ready.
For a fraction of a second, I swear I see his face relax. Like he’s finally willing to give in. Like all he wants on this planet is to be mine. But then his eyes narrow, and the clench of his jaw returns. With a heavy sigh, he speaks against my lips, “Come on, Amore Mia. Let’s get you some food.”
As I said, it took all of fifteen minutes for us to walk across the street, order our lunch, and return to my office. Yet, regardless of how mundane the trip out of the building was, Dante remained on high alert the entire time. The second we were in my office, though, his entire body relaxed.
The two of us are now sitting on the two black suede chairs on the opposite side of my desk as my chair, scarfing down our delicious bowls of ramen. Every time I look at him, I stifle a laugh at the sight of his ridiculously large frame in a rather small chair.
He’s wearing a black short-sleeved button-up shirt that looks like it’s about to bust at the seems around his biceps. His black dress slacks haverisen up as he’s sat down, and I can see the makings of a large tattoo covering his lower leg. My eyes trail up his leg, silently wondering if the tattoo continues further north. I just about choke on a noodle when I get to his crotch. I don’t know if it’s just because he’s so huge and his pants are so tight while sitting, but Dante DeLuca has what looks like the biggest package I’ve ever seen. And he’s not even hard.
Dante coughs, effectively pulling my attention away from what I’m sure is his impressive dick. And the second I look at his face, I know he’s fully aware of what I was doing. But what surprises me most is what comes out of his mouth next: “If you want a better look, I can just take the pants off.”
This time, I really do choke on a noodle. Once I’m finally able to breathe again, I can’t help but nervously giggle. “What’s so funny?” he asks.
“Sometimes I think I have you pegged, and then you go ahead and say something like that.”
“I live with Lorenzo. Sometimes it just slips.”
Realizing that this is as good of a chance as I’ll get, I decide to ask him something I’ve been dyingto know since Monday morning. “Can I ask you something?”
He sets his food on my desk and turns the chair to face me, giving me his undivided attention. “You can ask me anything, Joe.”
I give him a warm smile. “What did you see? When you had the flashback… What did you see?”
I worry he won’t tell me, which I would completely understand if he didn’t. He obviously went through something traumatic, but it also very clearly helped shape who he is as a person. And I know that he is a person I want to know as much about as I possibly can. Dante leans forward, resting his forearms on the tops of his legs, looks up at me through his long black eyelashes, and says, “I grew up a lot like you.”
30
Dante
Worry instantly flashes across Joe’s face. “What do you mean?”
“I’m originally from a small town in Upstate New York, right on the Canadian border. It wasn’t anything like Billings, though. It is one of those tiny rural towns where nobody ever leaves. There was no opportunity. No room for growth. It was a nowhere town; I knew it from the moment I was old enough to understand the concept.
What there was, though, was a rampant drug problem. You wouldn’t think it would be the case in such a tight-knit community, but I think that was part of the problem. Because there was quiteliterally nothing better to fucking do, everyone turned to drugs and alcohol. You would have been hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t have at least one vice—my parents included. Even though I had two parents, I was all on my own. Both of them were too high to remember that I even existed half the time. I constantly went hungry. I was dirty because they never paid the water or electric bills. And I remember—even at an early age—wondering if it’d be better if I just didn’t wake up the next morning. If it would have all been… easier. But I always knew that I didn’t want to end up like them. I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to have a purpose in this world. To mean something. To make everything that was happening to me worth it.”
Mirroring me, she sets her bowl of ramen on the desk and turns the chair to face me head-on. She doesn’t waste a second as she reaches out and wraps her soft hands around mine. She doesn’t say anything, though, as she waits for me to finish my story.
“School felt like it was my only safe haven. It was the only place that kept me warm. The only place I didn’t have to worry about where I was going to find food. The one place I could forget about my shitty life, if only for a few hours. The summer between my junior and senior years, I was working at a local mechanic shop, and I remember this guy bringing in his car that broke down during a road trip. He wound up just sitting around the shop all day, waiting for the repair to be finished. But the entire time he was there, I felt his eyes on me. Not in a creepy way either, but like he was studying me. Till this day, I don’t know why he did it; maybe he saw something in me—the desire to want more than what that shit town had to offer. But during my lunch break, he saw me sitting outside, eating a shitty excuse for a sandwich, and came to talk to me. He told me that he was in the Navy. He told me a couple of amazing stories about his career and some of the things he got to experience. He told me about the men and women he has met since he joined who have become his family. But the thing I remember most vividly is the expression on hisface when he told me the Navy changed his life. I could tell he meant it with every fiber of his being.
“And when my lunch break was over, he clapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘If you want more out of this life, all you have to do is reach out and take it.’”
Joe’s thumb strokes the back of my palm, and I sink into the feeling. “I spent my final year of high school getting into peak physical condition. I worked hard in school. I picked up as many hours at the shop as I could to save as much money as I could. And I spent as much time away from my parents as possible. Despite my shitty life, and by some miracle, I graduated high school that year with honors. I had never been so proud of myself. Until the very next morning, when I drove two hours to the nearest recruiting station and enlisted in the United States Navy.”
She hits me with a mega-watt smile, equally as proud of me as I was of myself that day. “A month later, I was walking out the front door of the hell hole I grew up in to head to boot in Chicago. They couldn’t even be bothered to say goodbye to me.Hell, they probably didn’t even know I was leaving for good. That was the last time I saw either of them, and they were passed out in our living room with a coffee table of drugs in front of them.”
A small sniffle fills the room before a lone tear falls from Joe’s eyes, landing on our interconnected hands. Yet… neither of us move.
"I graduated at the top of my class in boot camp and became a Navy SEAL recruit. After 62 of the most excruciating, exhausting, and rewarding weeks of my life, I was officially a SEAL. As hard as it all was… I had never felt like a more authentic version of myself. I knew I was doing what I was meant to do all along. Years went by, and I went on countless missions. Some are widely known, and some are still a secret to this day. I traveled the world more times than I can count and saw things I never could have imagined. Both beautiful and horrifying. I was making a life for myself—a career—and my brothers had become my family. Being a SEAL was who I was.
