Page 37 of A Game So Reckless

I ignore the music and grab my bags, helping Mamma haul all the food into the large blue and white building that is our cottage. We haven’t been here all summer, but Papà must have a gardener come by semi-regularly, because the lawn area between the house and the trees is lush and trimmed, and the flowers along the driveway and path leading to the door are in full bloom.

Inside, we put away all the food, and I go upstairs to dump my bag in my bedroom. I check my phone, but service has always been spotty out here, and I barely have enough bars to check my email let alone load a webpage. With a sigh, I toss the phone down on top of the bag.

There’s a huge window in my room, and I go to it. It looks out over the back of the house, which is what faces the water. There’s another stretch of grass below, which leads to an incline of big boulders that were installed decades ago to help with erosion from the bay. There’s no smooth beach here with sand to wiggle your toes in. Just the jutting bulk of rocks and one long line of a dock that leads into water deep enough to dive into. Apart from a couple of boats, tiny as toys in the distance, I don’t see anyone.

Maybe it’s good Papà sent us here. Maybe I really did need to get out of the city.

And away from Darragh.

But even here, hours from Toronto, I don’t feel like I’ve escaped him. I can hear Darragh’s voice in my head. Feel the claim of his hands on my flesh. Feel the confused mixture of anger, fear, and arousal that descends on my mind, on my body, like blanketing fog whenever he is near.

Nearly two hundred kilometres between us and he might as well be in this very room.

Screw this. I’m not going to sit around here and let him take up this much space inside me. If he wants to live in such a permanent place in my mind, then he better start paying me some rent for the privilege.

Pushing Darragh – his tongue and his tattoos, his voice and fingers and eyes – to the back of my brain, I rip open my bag, grab a swimsuit, and stomp back down the stairs.

Chapter19

Darragh

It’s been three days since I saw Valentina at the club. Three days of replaying the feeling of cool damp silk beneath my fingers and hot wet silk against my tongue. Three days with her image fixed in my mind – curling black hair, soaked white dress, molten fucking eyes. Three days of getting nothing done. Three days of the wound on my lip splitting open and bleeding every time I speak or smile.

Three nights of no fucking sleep.

The sleep thing I can usually conquer. A good fight in the ring, or a really good fuck, almost always does the trick.

Only problem is, I’ve been boxing every night since then, and it hasn’t worked.

I’ve killed four men since I saw her last, and that hasn’t worked either.

I haven’t even bothered fucking anyone. I know it won’t do shit. Unless the pussy I bury myself in is attached to a hissing, biting, scratching Sicilian girl who hates my fucking guts, I’m not even convinced I’ll be able to get my dick hard at this point.

Which is fucking alarming, to say the least.

By the fourth day, I’ve resorted to stalking her online presence, raking my gaze over old, published photographs of her from various public events from the last year. I stare at her big, perfect smile and wonder if she’s let anyone else see her cry the way I did at the beginning of August. If anyone else knows what she looks like when she’s falling the fuck apart. Or if anyone else knows what her tits feel like when she’s driving them desperately into your hands, like a needy little slut, the second before she makes you bleed.

Probably not.

If she has any personal social media, I can’t find it, and that puts me in a far fouler mood than I want to acknowledge.

By the fourth night, I admit defeat, which is something that does not come naturally to me. The last time I had to admit defeat, it was to her cousin Elio when I gave up my vendetta against his wife Deirdre.

This time it feels so much worse.

These fucking Titones, always fucking up my plans.

This one particular Titone, fucking up every single aspect of my life.

But there doesn’t seem to be any escaping it. Two in the morning and I’m pulling myself up to her balcony. One glimpse is all I need. Just one look. And then maybe I’ll be able to get some bloody sleep.

But my pretty little pet is not in her bed.

I stare at the empty room beyond the glass. My teeth clamp down on each other so hard my jaw cracks. There’s a feeling of deadness in the darkness. Like no one’s breathed the air in this room for days. There’s no light shining in from the adjoining bathroom. There’s no phone charging on the nightstand. Not a wrinkle in the perfect pink bedspread.

She isn’t here. Shehasn’t beenhere.

An absurd thought sends my guts tightening with rage. The thought that she’s fled from me,specificallyfrom me. Or that someone’s tried to take her from me.

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