“You don’t have to answer,” Sergei said. “I’m just curious.”
Dom’s Adam’s apple bobbed. After a moment, he opened his eyes, but looked up at the ceiling instead of at Sergei. “The short version is that my father was turning state’s evidence. He’d been arrested a few times, and the last time, he was going to prison for narcotics traveling. Which is a hell of a sentence.”
Sergei nodded. “So I’ve heard.”
“That’s exactly why the Mafia Commission back in the 1980s didn’t want the families involved in the drug trade.” Dom scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “Because drugs meant huge sentences, and huge sentences meant plea deals.” He turned toward Sergei. “The feds cut my father a deal. If he could get them bulletproof evidence tying my uncle and the rest of the family to the narcotics trade, they’d put him—and my mother and me—into witness protection.”
“But he got caught.”
Dom winced. “Yeah. I don’t know exactly what happened. I was twelve, so…” He lifted one shoulder in a heavy shrug. “I didn’t even know about most of this until years later. I just know he made a mistake somewhere, or… something. I don’t know. Someone caught on, and it got back to Corrado that he was talking to the feds. So my uncle…” He swallowed hard. “Took care of the problem.”
Sergei cursed in his native tongue. “When you were twelve?”
“Yeah. My uncle took in my mother and me, and then she died when I was fifteen, so he adopted me.” Dom again stared up at the ceiling, eyes unfocused and lips taut. A long, silent moment passed before he said, “If my father had lived, there’s no way in hell I’d be a made man. He even told me when I was a kid, that if the time came and my uncle wanted me to get made, that I shouldn’t.” He closed his eyes, letting out a long breath. “When that time did come, my father was dead, and my uncle had put the fear of God in me. He made me watch my father die, for fuck’s sake, so I was terrified of him, and I was terrified to say no.” His eyelids fluttered open again, and when he met Sergei’s gaze, Sergei swore he caught a glimpse of that fear, of that young, traumatized kid. “And now this is my life.”
Those soft spoken words shook Sergei right to the core. It wasn’t the first time Dom had expressed how much he would’ve given to be away from this world, but Sergei hadn’t known his backstory involved the same kind of deep-seated trauma as his. That his fate had been sealed in the blood of a parent murdered before his eyes.
Most of the made men in this town—or those doing everything they could to win enough favor to be made—embraced the Mafia life. This side of it, a man who’d been caught up as a child in wheels that were turning without his control, was nothing Sergei had ever seen before.
“I’m sorry.” Dom cleared his throat and shifted onto his side. Touching Sergei’s face again, he said, “Completely killed the mood, didn’t I?”
“Well. To be fair.” Sergei moistened his parched lips. “I asked.” He caressed Dom’s face. They weren’t much different, were they? All the hell they’d been through, the inevitability of getting tangled in all this because of what people before them had done…
Dom swallowed. “I don’t know if the guys who roughed me up outside your club would’ve killed me or not…” He smoothed Sergei’s hair. “But I’m glad they didn’t. At least I got to find out what it was like to fall in love.”
Sergei laughed to keep himself from breaking down, and pressed a soft kiss to Dom’s lips. “Now you’re just being sappy.”
“I don’t think most sappiness starts with ‘that time those assholes tried to kill me.’”
And it usually doesn’t end with one of us having to kill the other.
He banished that thought and leaned in for a longer kiss. “I’m glad it brought us together too. Even if things are…”
He didn’t know how to finish that thought.
He didn’t have to—Dom drew him down.
Kissed him again.
And held on.
*
For once, the nightmares didn’t come. It wasn’t a surprise, though—Sergei couldn’t dream unless he was asleep.
And sleep wasn’t happening. Not with Dom lying next to him, alive and well.
Every breath Dom took was dangerous. If he didn’t kill him, Sergei would find himself very high on the family’s shit list. Another day or two, and there’d be a contract on his head as well as Dom’s. These were orders written in blood and carved in stone—there was no rescinding a contract, and no backing out once accepted.
But the whole point of being a contractor for the Mafia was to take out those who’d killed his family. Killing the only person he loved besides Mama? He couldn’t. No way.
Question was, how did he keep Dom alive and stay alive?
Dom shifted, and then rolled on his side, facing him. “Still awake?”
Sergei turned toward him, just barely making out his silhouette against the darkness. “Not the only one, apparently.”