Twisted Cravings by Cora Reilly

Until I saw Adamo again the next day, I wasn’t sure how I’d react. If I’d try to bring our relationship back to a less intimate state. Yet, the moment he joined me in the morning with his own bowl as I ate my oatmeal and quietly ate beside me, I knew I didn’t want to take a step back. I wanted more.

“Are you okay?” Adamo asked eventually.

I narrowed my eyes. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

Adamo shrugged. “I thought you might avoid me now. But it seems I was wrong.”

“Would you prefer if I ignored you?”

“I’d prefer if you’d join me at my car tonight again.”

I stifled a smile. “Deal.”

Adamo and I didn’t waste much time when I arrived at his car. We kissed as if we were long lost lovers with limited time to enjoy each other. Maybe that wasn’t too far from the truth because time was definitely not in our favor. I was Russian. He was Italian. And even if the racing camp might have blurred some lines, our families were at war.

Adamo moved us backward toward his car and hoisted me on its hood, never ceasing his kiss. His fingers found my piercing then he tugged the shirt over my head and pulled out of the kiss only to lower his lips to my breast. His tongue teased my nipple, flicking the piercing back and force. I released a sharp breath, my legs parting out of their own accord. Adamo pressed a palm against my crotch. I wondered if he could feel my wetness even through the layers of fabric.

My fingers pressed into the hood, my breath coming in short bursts. Every muscle in my body tightened and my heart pounded wildly in my chest. Adamo stepped back and I almost protested until my pride snapped my mouth shut.

Adamo opened the button of my jean shorts then slid them down together with my panties and squatted in front of me. He looked up at me. His face was shrouded in shadows but I knew he was waiting for me to give my okay. After yesterday, his actions had been more cautious. I didn’t want him to hold back. I wasn’t fragile.

My throat was dry, too dry to speak. I parted my legs wide. I wouldn’t half-ass this. I was sopping wet for the man before me. His tongue traced a wet line along my inner thigh, raising goosebumps and making me shiver. I wondered if he could feel the ridges from the past on my skin. So far he hadn’t mentioned them. A man with as many scars as he had might have learned to not ask questions about other people’s marks.

The night air felt cold against my sopping wet center. I didn’t take my eyes off Adamo, didn’t lean back. This position gave me a sense of control even if Adamo would soon rip it from me. He moved on to my other thigh and dragged his tongue along my sensitive skin there. “When are you going to lick me?” I asked, but my voice lacked the sarcasm and bravado I’d wanted to put into it. I wanted to feel his tongue on me, in me.

“Soon,” Adamo rasped, and his following exhale ghosted over my wet pussy. I bit my lip, tense with expectation and anxiety. The idea of losing control like last time still tightened my chest but my body was calling for more, louder than any doubt and anxiety.

And then Adamo’s tongue swiped over my slit slowly, tracing around my clit before he nudged apart my folds with just the tip of his tongue. My teeth sunk into my lower lip as his tip caressed my sensitive flesh, slowly delving deeper until he reached my entrance. My head fell back for a moment, my eyes wide in awe at the sensation Adamo created with a brush of his tongue. He circled my opening, his breathing now more audible.

His lips closed around my sensitive folds, sucking, and I inhaled sharply.

“Do you like it?” Adamo murmured after a while, his voice heavy with desire. As if to emphasize his question, he swiped his tongue upward and nudged my clit.

“Don’t talk,” I gritted out. “Lick me.”

His fingers cupped my ass cheeks and he really dove in. Less gentle, louder. His tongue parted my folds, seeking my entrance, diving in. He flicked up and down, awakening every nerve ending. My lust trickled out and Adamo lapped it up, making me moan. “Do that again,” I whispered, almost delirious from the sensations.

Adamo parted me wider and slowly ran his tongue along my opening. My fingers tugged at his hair as I watched him draw out more of my juices and feasting on them. My hips shifted restlessly. Adamo looked up, meeting my gaze as he kept eating me out, his lips shiny with my lust and his eyes hungry for more. My grip on his hair tightened further as my core began to spasm. Adamo closed his lips around my clit as he pushed two fingers into me, and a tremor barreled through my body, taking any semblance of control with it. I cried out, shoving my pussy harder against Adamo’s face who accepted the invitation with a growl, sucking harder and plunging his fingers even deeper into me. I rode his fingers and face, almost weeping from pleasure. I didn’t care who heard, didn’t care about anything but this sense of freedom I felt.

I fell back, completely exhausted. I ran my fingers through Adamo’s tousled hair, gentler now as he peppered my pussy with kisses. I blinked up at the sky, wondering what this was. Adamo appeared in my line of vision. I swiped my palm across his beard which was wet with my juices. His expression brimmed with lust and the bulge in his pants was impressive. “Turn around,” Adamo said.

I didn’t protest. Instead I rolled over until my stomach rested on the warm hood of the car and my ass propped up for Adamo. He stroked my ass cheeks before he rubbed his tip over my opening. I arched against him. “Fuck me, Adamo. Fuck me like you mean it.”

Adamo leaned forward, tracing the bumps of my spine with his tongue. His fat tip dipped into me. I tried to move back but Adamo’s grip on my hips kept me in place as he thrust into me slowly with only his tip. “Deeper,” I gasped.

“Patience. I make the rules.”

I reached back, cupping his balls and squeezing. He hissed low in his throat. “That’s how you want to play it?” he growled.

“Yes,” I rasped as he kept teasing me with his tip.

Adamo retreated and then without warning he slammed all the way into me, filling me to the very brim.

I cried out at the stretchy feeling, on the verge of being painful. Adamo was incredibly thick and long. His tip nudged the sweet spot deep within me.

“Is that what you want?” Adamo asked in a raspy voice.

I twisted my head around to look at his face. “I want you to fuck me until my legs give out and I come all over your car.”

His eyes flashed with raw lust and then he slammed even harder into me. His car shook under our fucking and for once I lost all sense of control and it didn’t scare me.

On occasion I thought I’d figured Dinara out but then something happened that threw me off completely. Like her panic attack when I’d been on top of her when we fucked the first time. We hadn’t talked about it, and it hadn’t happened again in the two weeks that followed, even though we fucked every night. I was never on top though. Or the fine scars on her upper thighs, I’d first felt with my fingertips then my tongue. When her shorts rode up and the sun hit her skin right, I now saw them too.

Dinara was an enigma I was desperate to understand. I hadn’t asked Remo for more information again. For some reason now that Dinara and I got closer, it would have felt wrong to prod around in her past without her permission. She obviously didn’t want to share things with me. Maybe she would eventually.

The heat in the tent was almost unbearable. The sun had been relentless during the day and even the night hadn’t delivered much reprieve.

Dinara rolled off me and stretched out on her back, breathing harshly. Our bodies were covered in sweat from sex and the heat.

“Will you ever tell me why you’re really here?”

Dinara rolled over on her side, bringing us closer once more. I twisted around to face her. Strands of her red hair stuck to her cheeks and forehead. “I’m surprised Remo didn’t tell you everything.”

“Remo has a strange set of rules and he likes to play with me,” I said, then shrugged. “But I haven’t really been trying to extract information from him since this began with us.”

“This?” Dinara asked, tracing my disfigured Camorra tattoo. She did so every time after sex, obviously fascinated by its looks or maybe just the story behind it. She cast her eyes up. “What is this between us?”

“You tell me. I think only you know what you really want.”

“What do you want Adamo?”

I pushed up on my elbow and traced her cheekbone. She let me, for once not pulling away, not seeking the safety of her own car after we slept together. “I want to get to know you better. Not just your body, but your mind, your past, your darkness.”

Dinara smiled bitterly. “No, you don’t. Not if you like the version of me you’ve met so far.”

“Let me decide that for myself. I doubt there’s anything that could make me see you in a different light. And if its darkness you harbor, I have more than enough of my own, so I don’t shy away from it.”

Dinara looked up at the tent ceiling. I stroked her belly and played with her piercing.

“What exactly is it?”

She gave me an appalled look. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what a Fabergé egg is?”

“It’s a Russian egg.”

She shook her head in exasperation. “It’s art and history. Intricate design.”

I bent over her belly to take a closer look at the tiny egg dangling from her piercing. It was red with gold décor. “This is an original?”

“It was custom made for me by the same manufacturers who create the bigger Fabergé eggs.”

“But why did you choose that for a piercing?”

Her brows crinkled. “It’s part of my history. My father gifted a Fabergé egg to me every year since my birth and I keep them in a glass cabinet in my room.”

“I’d never pegged you for an art enthusiast, especially this kind of traditional art. You seem more like the Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollock kind of girl.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Because you don’t tell me enough about yourself.”

“You aren’t exactly an open book either.”

I inclined my head. “What do you want to know?”

“There are so many things, it’s difficult to pick only one,” she said but then her gaze darted to my forearm. “Your burn scar. Why didn’t you have it lasered and your Camorra tattoo redone?”

Dark shadows from my past took shape. I held out my arm so she could see my tattoo, the knife with the eye and the Camorra motto in Italian. But most of the words were unreadable, twisted and distorted by the burn marks just like the eye. “That day changed me. It awakened a side of me I thought didn’t exist. The tattoo in its disfigured state is my reminder and also a warning of what lurks beneath.”

In the first few weeks and months after my capture and the torture, I’d woken with nightmares every night. I’d never had my power stripped from me like that before, rendering me at the mercy of someone else. Before that day, I’d thought I was at Remo’s mercy and subject to his moods. But afterward, I realized how wrong I’d been. Remo never meant to hurt me. He took care of me in his own twisted way. It took being in the hands of the enemy to realize it.

“Did you never seek revenge for what’s been done to you? The pain inflicted on you? The Outfit targeted you to punish your brother. You were still young.”

It didn’t surprise me that Dinara knew details. After all, Grigory knew all about it, and he obviously didn’t mind sharing information with his daughter. Maybe Russian mob bosses didn’t coddle their daughters as much as Italians did.

I had occasionally dreamed about revenge, especially in the beginning. I’d spent hours imagining how it would be to have one of my tormentors in my hands and do to them what they’d done to me, but eventually I had stopped obsessing over revenge. “I left the past behind me. I don’t need revenge. I don’t care what happens with the Outfit. Nino and Remo deal with them. I don’t think revenge helps anyone.”

“I can’t believe you aren’t furious,” she whispered.

“I am. But I’m channeling whatever anger’s still left from that time into racing and fighting. That’s enough.”

It wasn’t quite the truth. That day had awakened something I had more and more trouble suppressing. My dark side—a side I still feared and despised often. The rare moments of acceptance and the peace they’d brought me scared me even more, however.

She traced my burn scar. The skin there wasn’t sensitive to touch or pain but the one around it all the more. When Dinara’s fingertips trailed higher, discovering a small scar on my bicep and then the scars on my chest, goosebumps rippled across my body. “Are these from your torture as well?”

“Not all of them. A couple. The rest are from fights and my time in New York with the Famiglia.”

“I think it’s strange that your brother trusted another family enough to send you there. Even when my father makes peace with others, that doesn’t mean he trusts them enough to send someone he cares about there.”

“I asked Remo to send me there. I needed to get away from my brothers, from their shadow and their protection. In New York, I wasn’t treated special in any way. I was a nobody. I had to do the dirty work and their Capo punished me when I messed up.”

“No matter where you go, you are never a nobody, Adamo. Even if you’re away from your brothers and Vegas, your name carries weight, like mine does. We carry our names as burden and shield. The only way for us to be anonymous is to take on a new name and become someone else.”

“Have you ever considered doing that? Leaving your father and the Bratva behind? Starting new?”

Dinara shook her head. “It’s in my blood. It’s part of my life. I don’t like all aspects of the life but I don’t want to run from it,” she said, tracing my scars.

I told her about every scar and when I finally fell silent, her face was inches from mine. I ran my palm over her upper thighs and the thin scars there, a silent question.

Dinara sighed, turning her face to the ceiling once more. “Sometimes we are our own worst enemy.”

I nodded because it was a truth I’d learned in the past. I’d suspected the ridges were self-inflicted. They reminded me of the scars some of my junkie acquaintances had had on their wrists from cutting. “Why?” I asked.

“I took drugs to cover up old pain. But they made me numb in every sense and so I tried to feel something, even if it was pain, as long as I decided what it was.”

Something about Dinara reminded me of myself when I hadn’t been clean for very long. Drugs were a thing of her past like they were in mine, but I wanted to know the reasons for her addiction. “What kind of old pain?”

Her expression closed off. “The truth about me that your brother hides will change the way you look at me. But tell Remo, I gave him permission to share it with you, if that’s what he needs.”

Remo never asked for permission, not from anyone. I doubted that was the reason why he’d been holding back the truth from me.

Dinara climbed on top of me, letting her hair curtain my face. “One day you’ll have to take me to Vegas with you and show me your city.”

“You mean lead you to your mother?”

Dinara’s lips brushed mine. “And if I said yes?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, not unless Remo allows a meeting.”

“He won’t be able to keep her from me forever.”

I sighed, raking my hand through Dinara’s hair. “I fear you’re using me against my brothers. You should know that I’m loyal to them.”

“I know,” she said simply and kissed me.

I pulled back. “You won’t be able to sway me, even if part of me wants to do whatever you ask.”

“Shut up,” Dinara murmured.

I allowed her to silence me with her lips. I wasn’t sure what secret Remo would reveal about Dinara. I hoped it wouldn’t make me waver, wouldn’t make me want to help her even against Remo. My brother had done some twisted shit in his life, and I feared the thing with Dinara’s mother was another on that list. I often disagreed with what my brothers did but I stood by them. What if Dinara’s secret made that impossible? Maybe that was why Remo had kept the secret to himself, and maybe now that I was closer to Dinara he’d reveal it for the very same reason. To test my loyalty.