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A cataclysmic detonation.

My walls spasm and pulse around his fingers. Cum and blood flood his hand and coat my thighs as I drag in a ragged, choking breath.

With a desperate, needy moan, I grab onto Damiano’s arm like I’m falling off a building, eyes squeezed shut, forehead pressed hard to his shoulder. Every single muscle in me locks up and then gives out before reality suddenly resets itself.

By the time I come back to myself, I’m shaking.

My nails are buried so deeply in his forearm that when I finally loosen my grip, I see four angry crescents in his skin, two of them turning red.

With weak, unfocused movements I can barely control, I start to sit back from him, and shift as if to slide his fingers from between my legs.

Damiano, however, has other plans. He sinks his fingers deeper inside me as if to say “no, these stay right here”.

…Which is when the bartender, who’s mercifully ignored this end of the bar all night, decides to materialize in front of us.

His gaze flicks between us.

“You two settling in or heading out?”

I open my mouth.

No words come out.

“Coming or going, guys,” he asks again.

Damiano turns his head to him, calm as fucking death, his fingers still buried between my legs.

“Oh, going,” he says. “She already came.”

19

DAMIANO

“Check out Frank’s balls.”

As opening lines of conversations with Grandpa Vito go, this is par for the course.

I chuckle as I follow his finger pointing to the dog he just got a couple of weeks ago. My brow wrinkles.

“Jesus, Nonno,” I mutter, staring in horrified awe at the huge pair of nuts dangling between the dog’s hind legs. “You gotta get him neutered.”

“Hell no!” Vito chuckles, planting his cigar between his lips as he squats down to rub the six-month-old Husky behind his ears. “Don’t you listen to him, Frank,” he grins, running a hand through the dog’s fur. “I’ll never emasculate you like that. Be proud of those magnificent babies. Let ‘em swing.”

I tend to avoid pets. And yes, that’s a psychopath thing.

There’s an old forensic-psychology idea called the Macdonald triad, which suggests that there are three childhood behaviors which could signal an elevated risk of serious violence later in life: deliberate fire-setting, persistent bed-wetting, and cruelty to animals.

Movies and pop culture have blown it out of proportion, and modern psychology doesn’t consider it that reliable anymore.

Still, I’ve never wanted to get a pet. I mean why tempt fate.

To be clear, I have never had any sort of fucked-up urges to hurt animals. Nor was I bed wetter or a fire-starter. Meanwhile Cenzo was both, and he’s completely normal. So I don’t know why I let the pet thing stick with me, but I do.

However, exceptions can be made, particularly when in the company of an especially cute Husky puppy.

I squat down to rub Frank’s wriggling belly as Nonno re-lights his cigar and exhales a long plume of silvery-gray smoke into the Long Island afternoon.

Vito is my dad’s dad, and he once ran the Barone family, as I will one day. But much as I love them both, Vito is almost nothing like my father.