Page 75 of Until You Break
The question had been in my chest since that night, and I let it out now. “You fought for me, he fought for me—how the hell did Salvatore even get that far? Onto the roof?”
“He dangled something we couldn’t ignore and climbed higher than he should have. He hasn’t shown all of it. But he was right about one thing—someone is on the case.”
“Digging up corpses,” I muttered. “Looking where they shouldn’t.”
“Then they’re not ordinary rivals,” Damiano answered. “Ordinary rivals don’t waste time with ghosts, they want cash,shipments, men on corners. This is someone who already knows too much. An insider, or someone with an insider feeding them.”
“Which means a snitch.”
“Which means rot,” he corrected, his hand closing warm at the back of my neck, firm enough that my pulse tripped. “Rot spreads if you don’t cut it out. That’s why betrayal ends in basements, tied to chairs, bones broken until the mouth remembers who it should have served. You want to sit beside me? Then understand that the danger is real, and it’s close.”
My breath caught, but I forced myself steady. “Do my brothers know who this person is? Who’s digging where they shouldn’t?”
Damiano’s eyes sharpened with approval. “Good. Ask the right questions, and you’ll get the right answers. I’ll allow your brothers in, not because I need what they’re carrying, but because family is blood, and because you asked it.”
Damiano’s eyes sharpened with approval. “Good. Ask the right questions, and you’ll get the right answers.”
“And you’ll still allow my brothers in?”
“I will. Not because I need what they’re carrying, but because family is blood, and I respect that. And because you asked it. You want your brothers near the table, then you’ll be the one to seat them.”
Heat rose in my throat—weight I wanted, not weight I feared. “Then that’s what I want. To stand beside you. To have them see me that way.”
Damiano’s thumb brushed over my jaw, his mouth curving faintly. “Then that’s how they’ll see you.”
He didn’t let go immediately. His hand stayed at my throat, pulse under his thumb. “You talk about standing beside me. What does that mean to you,piccolino? My chair? My name?”
“Not your chair,” I said. “Beside you. So when they look at us, they see Bellandi and Valenti, not enemies, not history. Twonames at one table instead of knives under it.” Images of dinners past flashed in my head: mothers crying in kitchens, men shouting behind closed doors, hands hidden under tablecloths where steel waited. “I don’t want that anymore.”
His eyes sharpened, weighing the truth. “Then you’d bleed for it, if you had to.”
“I would. For you. For us.”
The words left my mouth and filled the gallery like a vow. My skin buzzed with the weight of it, his hand still at my throat, the echo of rain against the glass, the scent of wax and smoke thick in the air. Gratitude curled with the fear, because he had pulled me from silence into something louder, fiercer. For the first time, I wanted the future not only as survival but as conquest, his beside mine, the city beneath us.
The rest of the gallery hushed around us. Rain slipped down the windows in silver threads, candlelight licking the frames of paintings that looked like confessions. I felt the weight of the future pressing in, not as burden but as promise. We had spoken it into the walls, into the canvases, into the silence that chose us both.
We moved toward the exit, glasses still in hand, the city waiting wet and restless beyond the doors. Our footsteps echoed over marble, the sound swallowed by velvet-dark corners. Candle wax dripped slow, thin rivers glinting like gold against the floor. The windows showed only rain and the faint scatter of stars drowned by city light.
I thought the night was finished until the words pressed out of me.
“At the party… from all the mafia families crowding the room, my eyes kept coming back to the Soriano twins. Charming, too handsome, too practiced. They smiled like they owned the room, but their eyes were looking too hard. Too long. Like they were measuring debts.”
I remembered how they’d stood, hands loose, laughter too polished, eyes never quite matching their smiles. They watched me while pretending to watch the room. One of them toasted too late, as if waiting for me to look his way first. It hadn’t felt like attention. It had felt like calculation.
Damiano’s mouth tilted. “Charm is cheap. Eyes like that mean something else. Remember them. They’re not done circling yet.”
The weight of his warning pressed down harder than any toast I’d endured earlier.
Damiano stilled, studying me with a heat that wasn’t champagne. His voice was low, rough velvet. “You noticed.”
“I did.”
His thumb pressed under my jaw, lifting my chin. “Good. I told you to look, and you did. Even drunk on applause, you saw the right men. That’s how you’ll stand beside me.”
Pride coiled sharp in my chest, heavier than any toast I’d been handed earlier. “Then I’ll keep looking.”
“You will.” His mouth brushed mine, slow and claiming, then deepened with hunger that had nothing to do with wine. His hand closed at the back of my neck, heat searing through me. “You surprise me,piccolino. Makes me proud. Makes me want more.”
