Page 13 of Ruthless Sinner
He ignores me. “You should have concerned yourself with her virtue last night when I had her naked on my bed, pumping into her sweet little pussy until I filled it with?—”
Tommaso stands up abruptly, his face turning beet red. The maneuver forces his stomach to collide with the table, which tips his water glass. “Fuck you, Terlizzi. You made the wrong fucking enemy. You hear me? You’ll regret this.”
Dante grabs his fork and stabs another piece of his salad. He brings it to his mouth and chews slowly, drawing out the tension of the moment. My father is still breathing heavily and looks murderous, and he is forced to sit through this play until Dante is ready to give his performance. “Do your worst, Tommaso. Or pay your debt. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
If my father pays the debt and I’m handed back over to him, I have no doubt he’ll make good on his promise to cripple me.
“You’re a whore,” Tommaso points at me. “And you’ll die a whore’s death because of it. I’ll make sure of that.”
I meet his gaze with unwavering confidence. I have never bowed to him before, and I won’t start today. “So be it.”
If it comes to pass that I will be returned to my father’s hands, I’ll kill myself first. If our history is any indicator of what my future holds, killing myself will be quicker and less painful than however he plans to do it.
Chapter 13
Dante
After Tommaso is escorted from the property, the chef quietly sneaks in to bring Adalina a plate of food. She remains at the table with a stoic expression. “What’s this?” Adalina asks.
The chef flashes her a kind smile. “Minestrone soup, miss.”
Adalina’s eyes lift from the plate and meet mine, her gaze filled with a mixture of surprise and curiosity. Then she turns to the cook, who stands in front of us with a proud smile on her face, eager for a reaction to her dish. “Thank you.”
The chef nods before backing out of the room, silence permeating the space she leaves behind. I finish my salad and watch out of the corner of my eye as Adalina eats.
Her eyes narrow, and a flicker of suspicion crosses her face as she takes in the bowl of steaming soup. The rich aroma of hearty vegetables and savory spices tickles her nose, but she remains wary. Yet, she must trust the woman serving it. If someone kept me prisoner and offered me food, I would wonder if it was poisoned. But Adalina trusts the chef.
“Your father is very dramatic,” I comment after she’s a couple of bites in.
She swallows what’s in her mouth while nodding. “He certainly is. One year at Halloween, one of my father’s friends asked if I could go trick-or-treating with their kids. My father thought I put them up to it, but I knew to never ask for someone else to do my bidding. It didn’t matter though. My father didn’t talk to his friend for a month, he gave me a lecture on taking responsibility for my actions, and I was forced to write a five-page essay on the origins of Halloween and how my attendance was cultural appropriation.”
My mouth pops open in surprise. “Cultural appropriation? To dress up and ask people for candy?” I am stunned into disbelief.
Adalina nods in response, eating another spoonful of soup. “I was nine years old. He said I should have known better.”
Fuck this guy. Everything I hear about him makes me sick to my stomach. I know I’ve done some fucked up shit in my day, but this takes the cake. “Can you tell me what it was like growing up with him?”
Adalina’s spoon hovers in the air, suspended between the bowl and her mouth. For a long second, it remains there, unmoving. With deliberate movements, she takes a small sip and lets the flavors dance on her tongue before slowly chewing and swallowing. “What do you know about him?” She asks with a tentative quiver in her tone.
I could easily coerce her into sharing her stories with me. After all, she is my captive, and I have complete control over her. But as I study her expression, I sense that her question is born out of curiosity and not an attempt to defy or deceive me. “It is very well-known within our community that he beats you.”
Her actions never falter. She continues to eat her soup while listening to the breakdown of her life from the eyes of an outsider.
“No one has ever been quite sure why, though many suspect it’s because he gets off on seeing you hurt. Men are strange,” I admit. “I know several of my own who are like your father. I also know a few families have offered their sons to Tommaso in exchange for your hand in marriage, but all requests have been rejected.” My father once considered arranging a marriage between Luciano and Adalina, but he had ears. He heard about all the men who were turned down and knew he would be no different.
I press on. “Guards from the Martinelli estate have bragged about beating you black and blue. They’ve been found in bars talking about how they punished you with canes and belts, hitting you until you couldn’t get up. Our sources say they boast about being given full reign to torture a mafia princess, that they’ve been doing it since you were a child.”
I keep the gruesome details to myself, knowing she doesn’t need to relive her traumatic childhood with me. The scars covering her back are a brutal reminder of the harsh environment she was raised in, one that I can never truly empathize with. My father was not a kind man when I was growing up, but he never put his hands on his children the way Tommaso puts his hands on Adalina. He only abused his wife… until I made him stop.
“Then you know most of it,” Adalina admits calmly. “Except the why, anyway. My father hates me, that’s true. He gets off on seeing his bodyguards abuse me; that isn’t a lie. But it’s only because he blames me for the loss of his wife. She died giving birth to me, and he’s never forgiven me for it. He sees me as a burden, so he treats me like a burden.”
“He treats you like an animal,” I correct.
Adalina pins me with a glare. “No, he treats his animals better than he treats me. There’s a horse stable on my father’s grounds, and I’ve seen him touch his horses with more tenderness than I’ve ever received. I would love it if he treated me like one of his animals.”
“Why do you stay?” There has to be a reason. The headstrong woman I met last night had a filthy mouth and didn’t take shit from anyone. She was fearless. What makes a woman do a complete 180 and endure decades of physical and psychological abuse?
Adalina sets the soup spoon in the bowl with a loud clang as the metal hits the porcelain. The lines on her face tighten with tension as she meets my eyes. “Because I ran away once when I was fifteen. I escaped for a grand total of thirty-three hours. I was on the streets with nowhere to go, which made it easy for my father and his guards to find me. When they caught me, I was forced to endure a beating that cracked three of my ribs, fractured my wrist, and dislocated my shoulder. It was the first time my father threatened to cripple me if I ever did something like that again. Between having no place to go and the threat of what I’d be dragged home to, it was easier to stay there than figure out how to make it on my own.”