I missed my family.
They hated me now, but they would get over their anger. Bash would eventually come around.
He always did.
Alex was in Eva’s studio with Marcello. He hovered over her, leaning forward in the chair to get a better look at her painting. She laid on her stomach on the floor on top of a tarp with a paintbrush in her hand.
She was so fucking talented. A natural like Bastian, with a real gift for bringing out all of our strengths and weaknesses. She was painting one of us, but I couldn’t tell who. Her paintings often resembled Luca or Marcello, but lately, when I checked on her, she was painting Bash with a golden crown and horns. I was a little disappointed she hadn’t painted me yet.
Maybe someday.
Flipping between the screens, I scanned the feeds for Bastian. He was in our shared office on the second floor. It was large enough to accommodate two large oak desks, a boardroom table, and a big fireplace.
He stood between the French doors that overlooked the bay, dressed in a suit with his hands on his hips. He looked deep in thought, and I wondered if he was thinking about me.
Does he miss me, too?
It was only a few days, but I needed him. I would probably always need him to help me translate the world around me. He was the one who handled clients and business associates, while I usually dealt with foreign customers, since I spoke seven languages fluently. Bash never wanted to learn more than Spanish and Italian, a necessity in the Salvatore home.
A loud beep snapped me back to reality, and my secretary’s flowery voice floated through the speaker. “Mr. Salvatore, I have Dr. Lansing on the phone for you.”
I hit the intercom button. “Put him through.”
The phone rang, and I raised the receiver to my ear. “Dr. Lansing, thanks for calling me back.”
“You sounded upset, Damian,” the older man said, his voice trembling. “Is everything okay?”
I scared him.
That much was true about most people. But he was the best in his field and never passed up on the thousand dollars per hour I paid him.
I would have paid him more if I could have legally divulged the truth about my addiction without him running to the cops. But if he did that, then I’d have to kill him, too. Which would have been a shame because I liked the old man. He’d helped me a lot over the years.
“No,” I admitted to the doctor. “I lost control a few days ago.”
“What happened?”
I explained how I choked Alex, without mentioning the man I killed, or why I got so carried away.
He breathed deeply into the phone. “Damian, you can control your urges. You need to want this for yourself. Alex is too important to you to chase her away over a misunderstanding.”
Dr. Lansing didn’t know I killed people. That I lived for the moment when I drained the last breath from a person. He thought I had compulsions and that I could control myself. I had self-control with most things, especially in the bedroom, but not with my cravings.
After years of fighting the urges, I gave into them when I was in high school. A man tried to kill my father. It wasn’t the first or last attempt on his life. So I slit his throat, splashing blood all over me, staining my clothes.
I went home afterward and stared in the mirror. At all the blood on me. Thinking about what I did, I whipped out my cock and stroked it so fucking hard I rubbed it raw by the time I’d finished. I had never been so fucking turned on. And after seeing Alex covered in another man’s blood—the man I killed to protect her—I wanted to do it again.
I wanted to kill someone.
I wanted to wrap my hands around their throat and squeeze. But I was too out of my mind to realize it was Alex. I didn’t mean to hurt her. It was as if my body was physically in the bathroom with her, while my mind was some place else.
“I’m fine now,” I assured Dr. Lansing. “But Bastian won’t talk to me. Same with Alex and Marcello.”
“Alex is important to you,” he said in a firm tone. “You talk about her a lot.”
I stared out the windows at Central Park, watching all the normal people live their normal fucking lives. “She’s the most important woman in my life.”
I couldn’t give Alex a normal life. None of us could. We didn’t know how to conform to societal norms. All of us were lucky to grow up with money, to have everything come easy, because we had too much darkness inside us to survive with everyone else.