The Savage, page 14
There’s a hush to the air. It’s not sterile like the convent, but reverent… indulgent. As if every wall is holding its breath, waiting to see what we’ll do next before granting or withholding its blessing.
A woman with sharp cheekbones and a clipboard greets us in a smaller living room. ‘Signor Salvatore, I’m Caterina Vitale. Everything is as you requested. The rooms are prepared.’
Renzo nods. ‘The doctor and the medical crew?’
‘Installed downstairs in the east wing, sir. Fully equipped.’
‘Good.’ He glances at me, his gaze unreadable. ‘And the clothing issue?’
The woman pivots and gestures towards a pair of lacquered doors. ‘Six couturiers, present and next season. Exclusive selection. As requested.’
Renzo turns and I follow his line of sight.
The double doors to a smaller living room are open and inside, rows upon rows of clothing await inspection. Dresses, silks, and linens hang like a thousand whispered choices I’m not ready to make. And beside each row, tall towers of shoes. Delicate, strappy, decadent. Perfume bottles glint on a vanity table, faintly mocking the simplicity I once wore like armour.
A firm hand arrives at my back and I’m propelled towards the spectacle. ‘What is this?’ I ask, even though I suspect the answer.
‘Your new wardrobe. Whatever you choose will be relocated to your suite upstairs.’
I shake my head. Glance down at my habit. The only uniform I’ve known in six years. I grow dizzy with the shifting sands beneath my feet and I struggle to steady myself.
‘Renzo. This morning I was… I was… You can’t expect me to simply turn myself inside out, Signore. And even if I wanted to, this… this is obscene,’ I breathe.
Renzo’s lips twitch with displeasure. ‘You’ll need clothes, baby. And I love that you used my name. I look forward to hearing more of it.’
I shiver at the heat in his voice. ‘I have clothes,’ I snap, clutching at my habit. ‘God provides.’
‘Yeah?’ His gaze drags over me, slow, sinful. ‘When He sends Dior and silk to your doorstep, you might want to say thank you.’
I stiffen. ‘I will not wear—’
‘You will,’ he interrupts, firmly but not unkindly. ‘When you’re ready. No one’s forcing you, Benedetta.’
He says the name like it’s a private joke he’ll stop telling when I remember who I am.
‘But fair enough if you need time to acclimatise. We all do, it seems,’ he adds under his breath.
Then he leaves me standing in that room full of temptation, the click of his crutch on the marble a steady heartbeat until it fades away.
I spend the next few days trying to reconcile the contradictions of my new existence.
Every morning, sunlight floods the room through tall windows. The sea air curls into my hair and the sound of gulls replaces the convent bells.
The doctor visits with quiet efficiency, checking vitals, asking questions, noting how often I drift when I speak.
Renzo comes and goes like weather, sometimes silent and brooding, sometimes all fire and motion. He insists on daily physiotherapy, curses through every step, and yet somehow still manages to look like a man made of control.
I try not to stare when he goes through his motions, shirt damp with sweat, jaw tight with pain.
I fail more often than I admit.
The wardrobe remains untouched until the third day, when a housekeeper brings in laundry and leaves a soft linen dress on my bed. It’s white, simple and long enough to cover almost everything.
‘For the heat,’ she says kindly. ‘The Signore worries.’
I touch the fabric like it might burn me. It smells faintly of citrus and sun.
I wear it the next morning, convincing myself it’s practical. I tell myself I’m not surrendering. Just adapting.
Renzo notices. Of course he does.
He’s standing on the terrace, overlooking the sea, when I step out. His gaze slides over me, slowly and deliberately, filled with enough heat to power a small city. And as I watch, unable to tear my gaze away, something darkens in his eyes.
‘You’re shedding your skin,’ he murmurs.
‘I’m dressing for the weather. Apparently you worry.’
‘Sure, I do,’ he says, smirking, but there’s something softer under the tease, something like reverence. ‘About a lot of things.’
I turn away, pretending to watch the horizon, but my heart thunders like the surf below.
Over the next three days, more layers fall away – the heavy stockings, the veil, the starched undershirts. Piece by piece, I begin to resemble the woman in the mirror more than the nun in the chapel.
Yet one thing remains: the wimple. I can’t let it go. It’s the last thread between who I was and what I fear becoming.
He never mentions it. Not directly. But I catch him watching sometimes – the way his eyes linger on that simple strip of fabric as if it’s both a barrier and a promise.
One evening, I find him in the palazzo’s courtyard.
The sun is melting into the sea, gilding his skin in light. He looks up when I approach, and for a heartbeat neither of us speaks. The silence hums with everything we can’t say.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ I whisper.
He smiles faintly, gaze softening in a way that terrifies me. ‘Because I’m fucking dying to see you,’ he says. ‘All of you.’
My breath catches. ‘You already can.’
‘Not yet.’ His voice drops to a husky rumble. ‘Not until you take that off. Not until I see your hair. I’ve imagined it a thousand times, running my fingers through it, wrapping it around my wrist. Gripping it tight when I take your mouth or you take my cock. It’s driving me fucking insane.’
The bluntness of it steals my words. Heat rushes up my neck, my fingers trembling where they touch the hem of my sleeve.
‘You can’t say that to me.’
‘I can. They’re not offensive. They’re the truth. And you’re on shore leave from piousness, remember? You can do whatever you want. Including kissing and fucking. And for the sake of every man in the thousand-mile radius and be-fucking-yond, the only person you’ll be fucking and kissing is me. Because if someone else so much as dreams of you, I’ll hunt him through every church and alleyway in Sicily, slit his throat… and I’ll still come home to lift your skirt like the world didn’t just bleed for us. Because I’m the one who found you. I’m the one you melt for. And if some bastard even looks at you like he’s worthy, I’ll send him to meet your God myself.’
I feel my mouth gaping with every dirty, raw word. ‘You’re… crazy.’
‘I’ve been telling you that for days, baby.’
‘And I cannot… will not… do those things you speak so disgracefully about,’ I whisper.
He takes a step closer, slow and careful, the after-effects of his physio making him move with a kind of rough grace. ‘You will,’ he murmurs. ‘When you’re ready. Not before. But when you do, cara mia’ – his eyes flare gold in the dying light – ‘it’ll be beautifully dirty and holy. The kind they’ll sing about beneath the Sistine Chapel.’
He’s demented. I should turn away. I should pray.
Instead I stand there, the wind teasing the edge of my veil, thinking that maybe holiness and hunger aren’t opposites after all.
That night, I can’t sleep. I lie awake listening to the sea and the rhythm of his footsteps in the corridor outside my door.
I tell myself it’s wrong. That I am being tested. That the ache low in my belly is temptation, not truth.
But when I close my eyes, all I see is his hand lifting the edge of my wimple, his voice a sin I’ve already half-committed.
And for the first time since my life was turned upside down, I want to remember everything. Just so I know how to fight this hold Renzo Salvatore has on me.
10
GIADA
Afternoons in Ortigia feel like being held between two heartbeats. The sea hushes and the courtyard glows. Even the gulls seem to take their quarrels elsewhere.
I curl on the chaise with the linen throw to my chin and try not to watch the clock that tells me when Renzo will limp back from physio, wrung out, jaw locked, anger tamped down to something that makes the room feel charged.
He’s pushing too hard. I’ve told him so.
He only smirks and says, ‘I don’t do half-measures, bella,’ like that’s an answer and not a threat to his tendons.
Lately, it’s the silences that worry me more.
The way his eyes go distant when I prod at the shape of my past – my family, their lives, their desires. Even simple things like what they do for a living.
He sifts what he says like a jeweller grading stones, keeping the sharpest ones for later. I asked for the tablet he promised; he gave it to me with a smile and a kiss pressed to my knuckles that did not feel benign.
It holds a library’s worth of books, puzzles, language games. And as I suspected, it does not have the internet. No browser. No search. No easy answers. I told myself it was for my recovery. I told myself it was prudent. Today, it feels like another soft lock on a gilded door.
I read until the words blur and I doze.
The sleep is quick and hot, the kind that steals you without asking permission.
In the dream I’m not in Ortigia.
I’m barefoot on cold stone, a church smelling of lilies and sharp-smelling oil and candle smoke. A choir is singing the Kyrie as if the notes can sew time back together.
Someone is shouting – Run! – a woman’s voice, sharp and urgent, love and terror braided into one thread. I look down. My hands are wet. Red slicks my palms, sliding through my fingers like a sacrament I might not fully deserve.
I open my mouth but no sound comes. But I reach for it, frantically.
And the sound that drags me up from the dream is not mine.
It’s Renzo’s roar, rough and furious, ripped from somewhere primal. I’m already moving when my eyes open, knocking the throw aside, feet hitting cold tile, the world narrowing to the corridor and the door at the end where the therapist sets up every afternoon.
I burst in.
The therapist with kind eyes and soft hands is hovering with a resistance band and the kind of soothing voice that would have calmed me and does nothing for a man built to go to war.
‘Out,’ I say, breathless but firm. ‘Please. Give us a moment.’
The man hesitates, glances at Renzo, then nods and slips past me.
The door eases shut.
Renzo’s half-sat on the treatment table, chest heaving, cast glaring white against tanned skin and bruises. Sweat slicks his throat and his eyes are too bright. He looks like a storm ready to boil over.
‘You can’t keep doing this,’ I say, crossing to him. ‘You’ll tear something.’
‘I’m racing in a few weeks. I want my life back,’ he snarls, and it isn’t for me, not quite; it’s for God, fate, anyone foolish enough to hold the other end of his leash.
‘What life?’ The question leaves before I can soften it. I plant my hands on my hips, because anger is easier than fear. ‘The one where you bleed on asphalt and call it glory? The one where you make men jump when you lift a finger? The one where you decide who breathes near you?’
His mouth twists. ‘All of it,’ he grates, then reaches out, lightning fast to snare but surprisingly careful with it. ‘It’s what I know and what I love, what I’m fucking good at, and I won’t apologise for it.’ His fingers close around my wrist and tug; I stumble forward, catching myself against the table, caught between his knees.
‘Renzo,’ I warn, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine.
‘That’s it. You want to soothe me, baby? Say my name again.’
I press my lips together to resist the fierce temptation to give him what he wants. And as if he knew my response would be to deny him, his lips twist.
Before his eyes rise to linger for an age on my wimple.
But then he cups the back of my neck, palm hot, thumb at the hinge of my jaw. It straddles hunger and cruelty. It’s a claiming, and I should hate it. Instead, every muscle from my scalp to my toes tightens as if remembering choreography.
‘You want to know why I’m fucking impatient, bedda? Because I want the life that includes this,’ he says, low and lethal, and pulls me down.
The first kiss… my first kiss as memory will permit, is a catastrophe.
Even with no basis to hang it on, I know it’s messy, wild, too much and not enough. We collide. We breathe each other’s breath. My hands, fuelled by a distressing dream and its own uncontrollable hunger, go useless for a second before they grow frenzied, clutching at his shoulders where the muscle flexes under sweat-slicked skin.
He tastes like sweat and oranges and relief.
He groans, an awful, beautiful sound that goes through my chest like a blade and hooks something soft behind my ribs.
And I free fall.
I don’t mean to. I’ve spent days arranging my virtue like flowers in an austere vase. He knocks it over with the tilt of his mouth and a simple, decadent slide of his tongue, and I’m scrambling for fallen petals that dissolve under my frantic hands.
His lips coax then command; mine answer with a hunger I can’t overcome and which I’m shocked to register is annihilating me this quickly.
This completely!
When he nips my lower lip, I gasp, and his hand fists in my wimple like a man at the end of his tether. He doesn’t pull. He holds it with his breath shuddering, restraint a miracle visible on his face.
It undoes me worse than force ever could.
I kiss him back like I’m trying to find the name he insists is mine at the back of his teeth.
I kiss him like I’ll be punished for it and decide I’ll pay when the angels come to collect.
I kiss him because the dream is still bleeding under my skin and he is the only thing in the room that feels solid and alive and mine.
He slows. He always knows when to stop before I break, as if some part of him is listening to a metronome in my pulse. He softens the pressure, breathes against my mouth, rests his forehead to mine.
‘Breathe,’ he says. ‘Just breathe, angel.’
I drag air in. It shakes on the way out. My hands are still on him, one at the nape of his neck, one braced on the hard plane of his chest, and my body remembers a thousand unsanctioned things. I feel his heartbeat under my palm like a drumbeat I know the rhythm of. It terrifies and steadies me, this raw and daunting familiarity.
I pull back another inch. Then two as the room swims.
His eyes are heavy-lidded and bright, his pupils blown, his mouth kiss-bruised. It’s indecent, what looking at him does to me. It’s indecent, what I’ve done to him.
‘No,’ I whisper suddenly, shoving at my own treacherous ache. ‘No – this is wrong.’ I step back, fingers flying to trace the sign of the cross before I even think. ‘Forgive me,’ I mumble to heaven, to myself, to the woman in the mirror who keeps blushing like she’s on fire for something unholy.
He watches. The corner of his mouth crooks up; not cruel – amused, fond, wicked. ‘I’ll remind you again. You’re meant to be on a break,’ he says, voice husky with satisfaction. ‘From the nunnery.’
‘God still hears my prayers,’ I say, a little desperately. ‘And that doesn’t include—’ I falter, heat roaring to my face.
‘It includes the world,’ he counters. ‘Drink, sun, sea, laughter. Fast food, faster hands from a man who desires you. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, in case there’s an ambiguity, that man will be me and only me, bedda. And most definitely hot, unhinged, and probably unholy sex. As often and as hot and vigorous as you want.’
‘I don’t want,’ I rush to say. It comes out breathless and unconvincing. Even my pulse calls me a liar.
He tilts his head, eyes narrowing with the kind of patience that’s new on him and infuriating on me. ‘You can pray the ache smaller,’ he says softly. ‘Doesn’t mean it will go away. And aches like that, ignored, just tend to get bigger.’ His hands dig into my hips, pulls me closer until I feel the imprint of his… his manhood. Sweet heaven. ‘And bigger.’
‘Stop. Please. I am trying to be good,’ I hiss, more to myself than to him.
‘Maybe this is good,’ he says. ‘Maybe someone tried to convince you that pleasure and sin were synonyms. They’re not. Not always.’
I bristle. ‘So now you’re a theologian.’
‘No,’ he says simply. ‘I’m a man who’s been half-fucking-dead and knows exactly what like feels like.’ His hands mould my hips tighter and why oh why don’t I move away? Place some distance between myself and this iniquity?
His gaze drops to my mouth and I feel his manhood jump.
Then he releases me but only so he can reach out again, but slower, palms up like he’s asking, not taking. I don’t give him my hands. I don’t pull away either. It’s the worst kind of permission, silent and trembling and waiting. A lamb to slaughter.
‘Tell me about your dream,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘You came in like a woman chased by wolves.’ He nods towards the couch. ‘The housekeeper mentioned you were napping in the living room. Sit. Tell me.’
I sit because my knees don’t trust me. He shifts off the table with a hiss, manoeuvres himself beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch. I keep my eyes on the terrace door and the slit of blue beyond it.
‘There was a church,’ I say, the words tasting of copper. ‘Lilies. Choir. Someone shouting “run”.’ I swallow. ‘My hands were bloody.’
He goes very still and I feel the echo of certainty in my veins. He knows. I feel him bank himself like a pilot in a storm. ‘You know what my dream means, don’t you?’
His lips firm, but when he speaks it’s not the answer I want. ‘You’re safe,’ he says, like a promise he intends to keep even against physics. ‘You’re here. With me.’
‘And I… wanted to scream but I couldn’t,’ I whisper. ‘And then you did.’
