Consumed by the Mafia (De Salvo Family #5)

20. Family Lost

twenty

Family Lost

Abby held tighter to his arm as his words hung in the air of the dimly lit room. She didn’t look away, didn’t rear back, didn’t even furrow her brow in disapproval.

Ryōma felt the unusual need to lick his lips or fidget in his seat. He fought the restlessness down, curled his fingers over hers, and let himself walk back through the old, dusty, better-off-forgotten memories. “It started when I was little,” he said, quieter than he’d consciously meant to. “I was the middle child, with one older brother and one younger sister. My brother, Mitsuaki, was a hot-head who thought our father’s affiliation with the Harada-kai made the entire family untouchable. He started picking fights and getting into trouble, and when he was seventeen, he got himself killed.”

Abby’s brow pinched but she remained quiet.

Ryōma swallowed. “I was nine when we lost him. It hit the family pretty hard. That was a big part of why we were chosen for the move overseas.”

“When you moved to Hawaii,” she said, as if speaking her realization aloud.

He nodded. “I started being indoctrinated into the ways of the Harada-kai when I hit puberty. We were in California by then. My mother had withdrawn, basically taking full responsibility for raising my sister, Fuyuko.” His throat constricted on his baby sister’s name and he paused.

Visions of her frightened, tear-stained face lingered in his mind. That was the last way he’d seen her. Terrified and heartbroken.

Abby’s hand lifted from his arm and settled over his chest, pressing firmly enough to catch his attention. To ground him. “Ryōma. What happened? Is Fuyuko—”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, the words escaping him in a rough exhale that felt like defeat. He held Abby’s hand tighter and tipped his weight toward her. “I was blind, for too long. I went through an angry, rebellious phase of my own because I didn’t know how to handle my grief and everything about adjusting to a new culture. So I went along with being allowed to learn violent things, barely kept up with school, and I didn’t learn what was going on under my nose until it was too fucking late. ”

“What do you mean?” Her question was soft, encouraging without pushing or poking too painfully. Or maybe that was her touch.

Ryōma dragged in a hard breath, pushed it out again, and tried not to get lost in the details of that last fight. The yelling, abuse, the tears. He tried not to remember the impact of his knees on the floor or the sight of his mother’s blood spilling in waves over the platform edge where the leader of their group usually sat.

Finally, he found his voice. “When I was twenty-five, and Fuyu had just turned twenty-one, my father had the family gather for a big dinner and announced, proudly, that Fuyu was to be married. She had been promised years earlier, but our parents had never said a word—to her or me.”

“Seriously?”

Ryōma nodded solemnly. “But it wasn’t just that they were marrying her to a man she didn’t choose,” he said, his voice tightening with unresolved anger. “It was who .” He felt the tension coiling his muscles and tilted his head back to glare up at the ceiling. “The man who was acting as our local boss, the younger brother of the Harada-kai’s real boss. He was fifty-eight-years-old, a two-time widower, and our father was handing Fuyu over to him on a silver fucking platter.”

He couldn’t see Abby’s reaction, but he felt it in the way her hands tensed. The way her weight shifted at his side. The way her forceful exhale rushed down his arm before she turned her head to press her forehead into his shoulder. “That’s bullshit. Why—how—could they do that? ”

He willed some of his own remembered aggression to seep from his muscles. There was nothing else he could do with it, anyway. “If I understood the answer to that, I might not have reacted the way I did,” he whispered.

Abby was silent for several seconds. “What … did you do?”

“I lost my shit.”

He didn’t even remember the words anymore, not really. Just the yelling. Raised voices, screaming, glass and ceramic shattering as things flew through the air and shattered that weren’t meant to be thrown. A general sense of frenzy. It was still a haze, even so many years later. He remembered Fuyu had pressed herself against the far wall and eventually slid to her knees, crying uncontrollably. He remembered that. He remembered her watching him, somewhere between hopeful and horrified. He remembered thinking, at the time, she was rooting for him.

What a fool he’d been.

Ryōma blinked away an unfamiliar burning and straightened. “We fought, for real, so loud that it drew attention. It was late and eventually we all got hauled in front of him .” He refused to speak his former boss’s name. The man had stripped him of everything— everything included any respect he’d ever held for the Harada-kai and its masters. “Fuyu was escorted from the room like a captive princess, and when the situation was explained, I was offered one chance to apologize for my transgression.”

“Your what?” Abby interrupted, her tone aghast.

He huffed. “Yeah. I think I told him to fuck off or something.” Part of him did sort of regret that, but he couldn’t fully regret the separation. He could never have endured watching his baby sister be shackled to that wife killer. Ryōma swallowed hard. “I expected they’d demand my pinky, or toss me in the bay, or some shit. But it was so much fucking worse than that.”

Abby stroked her hand over his chest, probably feeling the way his heartrate had spiked. “Baby, whatever it is, it’s already done. You don’t have to talk about it if it hurts too much.”

Ryōma had no idea what sound escaped him, but he hauled Abby up into his lap and found the warm, tantalizing line of her throat with his lips. “It’s always gonna fucking hurt, baby girl,” he murmured as he folded his arms properly around her and let himself taste her skin. “But it’s my story. You should know it.” He licked up the underside of her jaw as her arms circled his neck.

Abby teased her fingers into his hair, her hips rocking gently over his. “You were exiled … because you couldn’t accept the engagement?”

He rumbled, pulled away from the temptation of her, and moved a hand to cup her face. “Yes, and no.” His thumb swept along the curve of her cheekbone absently. “I was exiled for threatening to gut him like a fish if he laid a hand on my innocent sister. But only after—” His voice choked for just a moment. A singular moment in which Abby leaned forward and pressed her lips to his forehead.

“You’ll gut me?” A single wave of his hand was all it took for another soldier to haul Ryōma’s quietly sobbing mother off the floor and up to the monster’s side. The man who intended to marry and defile his sister took hold of her by the back of her throat and produced a blade from within his other sleeve. “Like this?”

Ryōma’s heart dropped to his feet as his knees hit the hard concrete floor.

His father’s wail filled the room.

The monster dropped Ryōma’s mother like a sack, letting her gurgling, bleeding, still twitching form crumble to the floor. “Your mother is dead now because of you, boy. That is the only thing you will take with you into the world from this night forward, do you understand?” Even as Ryōma’s father raced forward to cradle his wife, the monster continued. “Take a good, long look, for this is the last you will see of your family.” He stepped slightly aside, as if not wanting to obscure Ryōma’s view.

And stare Ryōma did. He couldn’t look away. All he could see was his mother’s lifeblood, running everywhere, and his father kneeling over her.

“If you have any last words for your failure,” the monster said, speaking to Ryōma’s father, “say them now.”

Ryōma couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. He didn’t care anymore if they killed him next. His mother was dead … because of him.

His father lifted a tearful, furious glare at him. “It should be you on this floor!” He spat viciously in Ryōma’s direction, then turned his shoulder.

The monster let out a low, dark laugh before sweeping his arm forward. He still held the blade that dripped with his own subordinate’s blood and locked eyes with Ryōma. “I hereby banish you,” he said. “You are unwelcome, forever more. You will discard everything the Harada-kai has ever given you or enabled you to gain. Empty your pockets, step out of your clothes. You have nothing, neither tangible or otherwise. You are nothing.”

Ryōma dragged himself back to the present before he could relive that devastation yet again. The order had been expanded to include a specified warning that if he should ever return, even only close enough to be seen, every single blood relative he had remaining would be slain. Including any children Fuyu might birth.

It was the visceral guilt over his mother’s death, and the very real threat to his sister’s future, that had compelled him to cooperate that night.

“Ryōma,” Abby whispered, sadness coloring her voice, when he explained the rest. The details. She lowered herself enough to nuzzle against his throat. “I’m so sorry. That’s … I can’t imagine. And just this morning I had such a stupid pity-party.”

He scoffed and held her tighter. “Abby, my grief doesn’t negate yours. You had your own shit. Don’t think I don’t hate that for you.” He did. He’d been through enough for the both of them as far as he was concerned.

He felt her draw a breath, but she didn’t speak again for over a minute. Finally, she sat up enough to meet his gaze, her fingers teasing the back of his neck, and quietly asked, “Can I ask you one thing?”

He managed a small grin. “You’d ask even if I said no.”

She pouted.

Ryōma arched up and licked at her lips, catching her off-guard and sending a jolt through her. “Of course you can ask, baby girl. But make it quick. ”

Laughter lit her eyes, but she didn’t tease him. “Are you … satisfied, with the name you have now? Do you like it?”

He clicked his tongue. “That’s two things.”

She huffed. “You know what I mean.”

He rolled her words around in his mind. In many ways, he supposed he really wasn’t the person he’d been back in California. A different name was appropriate for that. “Yes,” he said. “It suits me.”

She smiled, the expression almost too soft. “I think so, too.” She leaned forward and kissed him. “Ryōma. Thank you for sharing all of that with me.”

He grunted and shifted his hold, tangling one hand in her hair and dropping the other to her ass. “I’ve hit my sharing capacity for the day.” He dragged his lips across hers. “Need you naked.”

Abby moaned briefly before wrenching from his lips and pressing her fingers into his collarbone. “I swear to God, if you don’t let me come this time, I won’t let you touch me for a week.”

He grinned, the expression feeling feral on his face, and shoved to his feet without releasing her. The motion forced Abby to choose between hanging in his arms like a doll or wrapping herself around him—and of course she chose the latter. With one hand remaining clamped over her tight ass, Ryōma started toward the bedroom. “Baby girl, it’s called a punishment for a reason. But that’s done. I’m gonna make you feel so good tonight, you can’t ever come without me again.”

Abigail stepped quietly back into the bedroom the following morning, the sun still low in the sky and her bladder blissfully empty. She would have preferred to sleep for one more hour, but apparently it wasn’t to be. On the bright side, her unexpectedly early rousing had given her an equally unexpected gift. It was the first time she’d woken up before Ryōma—the first time she’d gotten to see the way his face relaxed in sleep and the first time she’d realized he didn’t let her go after she passed out. Not until he climbed from the bed, at least. She’d nearly humiliated herself trying to wiggle from his hold.

He was still in bed. The quilt was pushed halfway down his bare, muscled chest, revealing all the ink that sheathed his upper arms and curved over his shoulders. His hair had come loose, creating a beautiful mess behind his head. In the silvery white lighting that slipped through the edges of the drapery, Abigail could almost see traces of some of the scars that emphasized the hard life he’d lived. Wounds that looked like he’d suffered more than a little at the end of some kind of blade, and others that she knew came from bullets. None were fresh, though he did have a couple of bruises he’d shrugged off as from the car accident.

Abigail studied him for long seconds, appreciating the view and debating her best course of action. If she did nothing, he’d surely wake in the next thirty minutes or so. Just as surely as she herself would not be able to get back to sleep before they were due to be starting their day. Well, if I’m up… She carefully slid back into her vacated spot, shimmying her way up to his side and watching to see if he woke.

His head rolled in her direction, but the rhythm of his breathing never faltered.

Slowly, Abby scooted herself down, taking enough of the quilt with her to keep from feeling smothered. Until she found her target and licked her lips.

Ryōma’s cock was half erect and fully exposed, since they’d both slept nude. Abigail flicked her gaze up his body one more time, seeing he hadn’t moved, and reached out to give him a long, squeezing stroke. The action earned her an immediate, throaty groan. She rolled her thumb over his tip, teased her fingers in a circular motion around the crown, then pumped him again twice more.

Ryōma stirred as his cock stiffened.

Abigail adjusted her weight and lowered her head, this time letting her tongue glide across his tip. She angled her head and trailed her tongue down, following the vein, then licked her way back up. In the back of her mind, she thought she heard him groan, but she didn’t look up again until she was swallowing the length of him properly into her mouth.

“Oh, fuck ,” Ryōma said on a low, husky growl. His hand tangled again in her hair and he shifted his hips as if struggling not to thrust. “Goddamn. That is a helluva way to wake a man up.”

Abigail lifted her lips without releasing him and hummed .

He cursed again. “Dirty girl. Do that again and you won’t even get to enjoy your breakfast before it’s over.”

She swore her skin tingled with the way he talked to her when they were intimate. Or any other time, if she were honest. Definitely not the time to be thinking about that. Abigail rubbed her tongue against his length, taking him as deep as she could, and sucked a little. Then she pulled back part way, tasted him some more, and swallowed him again. She repeated this process intermittently, enjoying the way he groaned and the way his hand trembled just faintly as he fought to keep control.

“Fuck, Abby,” he finally grunted. “Decide now. Wear it or swallow it.”

Her body pulsed. She wanted both. She wanted him in a very different hole. She wanted him everywhere. Instead of trying to articulate any of that, Abigail stretched her hands over his skin and filling her mouth with his twitching cock until she couldn’t, until tears leaked from her eyes and she felt like she couldn’t breathe. Then she hollowed her cheeks on a long, hard suck and rolled her eyes up his form once again.

Ryōma roared, his hips jerking as hot cum fired down her throat.

Abigail held the suction as long as she could, working her tongue to maximize his pleasure, until she was sure she was either going to black out or truly choke. She pulled back, just enough to suck in a breath, and chased his slackening cock with her tongue as it slipped from her lips.

“Get the fuck up here,” Ryōma growled, his hands landing on her arms a moment before he hauled her bodily up him and rolled them over. Her head hit the pillow and he kissed her jaw, trialing kisses up to her ear. “Fuck. That was hot. Never imagined I’d wake up to your sweet little mouth on my dick.”

Abigail swallowed again, her tastebuds still overwhelmed by him. She reached up and traced her fingers over his back. “I had a craving,” she heard herself saying.

He snorted and proceeded to suck a hickey into her neck. “Didn’t get enough dick last night, huh?” He ghosted the fingers of his hand down her side, reaching between them.

Abigail gasped as he slipped two fingers past her folds, quickly finding her clit. “W-we don’t have time!”

“We’re making time.” He rolled his thumb over her clit, then plunged two fingers inside her. “I can’t let you leave this bed so fucking wet, now, can I?”

Her fingers dug into his back. She ought to be arguing. She should have been far too sore. Is there something wrong with me? It sure as hell didn’t feel wrong. It felt very much the other thing.

Ryōma trailed his kisses back up her neck, to her jaw, and murmured, “Such a dirty girl. You got so turned on by sucking me off, didn’t you?”

She opened her mouth, panting for breath as he continued to pump his fingers in and out of her. “Y-yes,” she gasped. “It’s—you’re— fuck —so hot.” She clung to him tighter. “Ryōma, please. Please make me come.”

Ryōma stretched up to nibble on her earlobe. “Not yet, dirty girl. I want you desperate .”

“I am,” she blurted, rocking her hips in time with his hand movements in an effort to hasten her release. “I am . Ryōma, please.” Fuck. He’d worked her up in a matter of seconds and she felt crazed.

Ryōma hummed against her skin, his thumb teased her clit as his fingers moved, and he hovered his face over hers. “Kiss me,” he said. “Let me taste myself on you.”

Holy shit. She craned her neck to meet his descending lips, the kiss immediately sloppy and wet as his tongue dominated her mouth. She wasn’t sure why any of that was so hot. She only knew that she literally felt her body convulse, as if merely kissing him would be enough to push her over the edge. It could have been. But Ryōma’s fingers retreated, denying her that necessary bit of friction. She whimpered.

He chuckled a moment before her leg was hauled up to his shoulder. “Gotta make room,” he said, voice husky and breath hot on her skin. “It’s time for your morning orgasm.”

Ryōma twisted her onto her side, her one leg remaining raised along the length of his torso, and she felt his rehardened cock push at her entrance. He groaned low. “Such a greedy fuckin’ pussy.” One of his hands clamped around her leg, the other holding her in position over her side, and he thrust his full length into her aching center.

Abigail cried out, her body singing even as the air rushed from her lungs. It was like relief and some strange, too-hot torture all at once. It was addictive.

He wasted no time picking up a hard, deep rhythm that had her scrambling for purchase even as she worked to keep up with him. She wasn’t sure which of them kept cursing, or if they were both muttering pleasure-hazed curses under their breath. Then he moved the hand from her side to one of her breasts and tweaked her nipple, as if realizing he had another toy he hadn’t played with yet that morning. The sharp zing of pleasure had her back arching.

“You’re so fucking beautiful, dirty girl.” Ryōma’s voice was thick, rough, and delightful as it washed over her. “Come for me. Come apart for me, Abby.”

She barely even heard the last of what he said. As soon as she registered his words, it was like that invisible button had been pressed and she was flying. Soaring through bright, hot, all-encompassing euphoria. Her body writhed as a scream wrenched from her, the orgasm she’d been chasing burning in waves through her blood.

Ryōma pumped into her one more time before groaning loud and following her over.

He silenced her preset alarm when it went off a few minutes, or more, later, but it was several more minutes before he released her from his arms.

“I’ve never been one for showering before bed, and then again first thing in the morning,” Abigail said as they stepped into the shower.

Ryōma chuckled and pressed a kiss to her shoulder, his arms curving around her waist. “Well, if you weren’t such a sex fiend, maybe we could limit ourselves.”

She twisted around to swat sharply at his chest. The motion made a wet, splashing sound and he grinned shamelessly at her. “I will not accept that accusation from you,” Abigail said. “You are the most—”

“Irresistible, charming, sexy?”

Abigail heaved an exasperated sigh and reached for the soap. There was a part of her that felt embarrassed at his words, but she suspected at least half that embarrassment came from the shameful recognition that—at least as far as he knew—he wasn’t wrong. She was behaving so unlike herself. It was like she was addicted to him. She couldn’t resist his kisses, and when he pulled her close, she only wanted to be closer. It was nothing she’d ever experienced before.

Aloud, she only said, “Let me wash you.”

He waggled his eyebrows but obligingly released her. “You have to behave, you know.”

She brought the soaped-up towel to his skin. “How do you say shut up in Japanese?”