The Dangerous Man Beneath My Bed

chapter 9

DOMINIC

The scent of s*x and damp towels clung to the air in the bedroom, a thick, musky perfume that should have revolted me but instead acted like a sedative.

Naomi was asleep. Finally.

She lay sprawled on her stomach across the center of the mattress, naked, the duvet kicked down to her waist. The moonlight painted the smooth curve of her spine, highlighting the faint, reddish marks on her shoulders where my fingers had dug in too hard in the tub.

I stood by the window, looking through the sliver of space between the heavy curtains. The street below was quiet. Just a lone taxi cruising for a fare, a drunk stumbling home from a late-night bodega run. Normal life. Ignorant life.

Inside here, time had stopped. I had stopped it.

For weeks, I had existed as a ghost in this room, subsisting on the scraps of her life until the hunger became too demanding. Breaking the seal, emerging from beneath her bed, had been inevitable. It was a detonation I had craved.

But I had miscalculated the fallout.

I thought possessing her body would be enough to sate the obsession. I thought breaking her spirit, snapping the neck of that cello and watching the light die in her eyes, would be the climax. It wasn’t. It was just another hit of the drug, and now I needed more. I needed to keep her here, in this suspended reality I’d created, where I was God and she was my unwilling devotee.

I turned back to the bed, watching the gentle rise and fall of her back. She was broken. I could see it in the way she slept—too still, exhausted not just physically, but elementally. The fight had drained out of her in the tub, replaced by a terrifying, hollow compliance that fed something dark and possessive in my gut.

I was lulled by it. The silence. The ownership.

My burner phone vibrated against my thigh. Not the work phone. The emergency line. The one only three people had the number for.

The vibration felt like a seismic tremor in the quiet room.

I didn't answer immediately. I watched Naomi for another second, a sudden, violent wave of protectiveness crashing over me. It was a new sensation, foreign and uncomfortable. I didn't protect collateral damage. I used it. I discarded it.

I walked out of the bedroom, closing the door softly behind me, sealing her in. I moved into the living room, stepping over the wreckage of the cello I still hadn't cleaned up. The snapped wood was a grim monument to the reality of what I was.

I answered the phone in the kitchen, keeping my voice a low monotone. "Yeah."

"You're getting comfortable, fantasma."

The voice belonged to Salvatore, the Underboss. Sal didn't make social calls at 3:00 AM. He was a sadist in an expensive suit, a man whose brutality lacked the calculated precision of my own. He enjoyed the mess.

A cold spike of adrenaline pierced the fog of my post-coital satisfaction. "I'm working on the asset."

Sal chuckled. It sounded like dry leaves skittering on the pavement. "Working her? Word on the street is you're living with her. You're f*****g the leverage, Dominic. And you haven't produced the father."

My grip on the phone tightened until the plastic creaked. The bubble had burst. The outside world, the violent, transactional world I belonged to, had peered inside my sanctuary.

"The father is deep," I lied smoothly. "She knows less than we thought. I'm breaking down her resistance."

"You broke her cello," Sal murmured. "We heard about that. Nice touch. But the Don is getting impatient. And when the Don gets impatient, I get creative."

The threat hung heavy in the air. Creative. I knew what Sal’s creativity looked like. It involved pliers and blowtorches and weeks of agonizing work in soundproof basements.

"She's mine to handle, Sal." The possessiveness in my voice surprised even me. It was raw, territorial.

"She's Moretti property," Sal corrected sharply. "And she's sitting in an unsecured location that half the city knows about now. You've got forty-eight hours to get a location on the father, Dom. Or I come down there and finish the interrogation myself. And believe me, I won't be f*****g her in the bathtub first."

The line went dead.

I stood in the darkened kitchen, the silence now roaring in my ears. The apartment, once my fortress, my private hunting ground, suddenly felt flimsy. Exposed.

They knew. They knew I was here. They knew what I was doing to her.

The realization hit me with sickening clarity: my obsession hadn't just ruined her life; it had endangered it far beyond the initial scope of the job. By keeping her here, by indulging in this twisted game of house, I’d painted a target on her back that was bigger than her father's debts.

Sal wouldn't just kill her. He would unmake her, piece by piece, just to punish me for my indulgence.

Panic, cold and sharp, began to coil in my gut. Not for me—never for me—but for the woman sleeping in the other room.

I needed to move. I needed to secure the perimeter. I checked the reinforced locks on the front door three times, my movements jerky, fueled by a new, desperate energy. I went to the windows, checking the street again. Every shadow looked like a threat now. Every car that drove by was Sal’s hit squad.

I couldn't stay out here. The air was too thin. I needed to see her.

I returned to the bedroom. Naomi had shifted, rolling onto her side, facing the door. Her eyes were open, watching me in the dark. They were dull, resignation etched into the corners, but they tracked my movements with wary intelligence.

She sensed the change in me. Animals always know when the predator in the room gets spooked.

"What's wrong?" Her voice was rough from screaming earlier, a scraping whisper that grated on my frayed nerves.

I didn't answer. I couldn't tell her that the monster she feared was currently the only thing standing between her and true horror.

I walked to the bed, shedding my clothes as I went, needing to strip away the suit, the armor of the outside world. I needed skin. I needed heat.

I climbed onto the mattress, looming over her. The moonlight caught the fear spiking in her eyes, the way her breath hitched in her throat. Good. Let her fear me. Fear kept her docile. Fear kept her alive.

"Dominic?" she breathed, shrinking back against the pillows.

I didn't have the patience for seduction. I didn't have the patience for the slow, mind-breaking games I’d played in the tub. The clock was ticking now. Forty-eight hours before Sal came to take my toy away.

I grabbed her ankle and dragged her down the mattress, ignoring her gasp of protest. I spread her legs, moving between them with frantic urgency.

"Mine," I growled, the word tearing out of my throat more like a plea than a demand.

I needed to verify it. I needed to feel her sheath around me, grounding me, proving that she was still here, still breathing, still my possession and no one else's.

I thrust into her dry, unprepared body. She cried out, a sharp sound of pain, her nails scraping uselessly against my shoulders. I didn't stop. I couldn't. I f****d her with a desperate, bruising rhythm, trying to drive the image of Sal’s "creativity" out of my mind with friction and force.

I watched her face in the dim light, drinking in her pain and her reluctant arousal, needing to imprint every detail of her onto my brain. Because the sanctuary was gone. The walls were closing in. And I knew, with a terrifying certainty, that this twisted, dark paradise I had built on her suffering was about to burn to the ground.