KNOX: Volume 2 (3 page)

Then I remember the last time I saw Marco in my living room when I was fifteen. The day he got out of prison and left Bensonhurst to become Knox Savage.

I enter the date 041806. April 18, 2006.

The elevator doors slide open and I step out in amazement. I can’t believe it. I haven’t even seen him yet and he’s already succeeded in manipulating my emotions. I’m now less angry than I was when I stepped into this building.

Fortunately, knowing that I was manipulated ratchets up my anger once again. I stride across the plush carpet toward the redheaded receptionist with the phony smile.
 

“Good morning, Miss Veneto. Mr. Savage has asked me to inform you that he is in a meeting, but he will be out very soon. May I offer you some coffee, tea, or champagne while you wait?”

“Stick your champagne and your nasty little smirk up your ass. Where’s his office?”

There are two doors on the wall behind her on either side of the desk. Left or right. Which should I choose?
 

This is not a riddle, Rebecca. Just make a choice.

I head for the door on the right and the receptionist head me off. Her face is almost as red as her hair. She’s pissed. Good.

“You can’t go in there.”

We struggle for a moment as she attempts to prevent me from reaching the door handle. Her skinny fingers are latched onto my right forearm like crab claws.

“If you don’t let me go right now, I’ll make sure Knox doesn’t just fire you. I’ll make sure he destroys you.”
 

Even as the words come out of my mouth, I’m horrified. What’s come over me?
 

I’m turning into my father’s daughter.

She immediately lets go of my arm. She’s terrified.
 

“I’m so, so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” She reaches for my arm. “Oh, my goodness. Did I hurt you? Oh, no. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. I reacted very badly. Please, please,
please
don’t tell Mr. Savage.
Please
. I need this job.”

She doesn’t need this job. She needs to get the hell away from Knox Savage before this job ruins her life. But I don’t tell her that. I pity the girl, but I’m also still sort of pissed at her.

“Just take me to his office and Knox will never know what you did.”

She nods and opens the door. She holds it open for me to enter. And now my stomach is acting up again as the picture on the
New York Times
website flashes in my mind. It was a picture of the bottom half of Charlie’s body dangling above the place where he and I shared a meal four months ago. And it finally hits me.
 

Charlie’s dead and it’s all because of me. It’s all my fault.

The tears come so fast. My hands tremble as I wipe them away. We walk down a long, nondescript corridor lined with dark-gray steel doors. At the end of the corridor, the receptionist turns to me.

She’s stunned by my tears, but she manages to find her words. “This is his office. He’s not really in a meeting.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Please don’t tell him.”

“I won’t.”

“Thank you,” she whispers, then she heads back in the direction we came.
 

I wait until she’s out of sight before I reach for the door handle. But the door swings open before I even touch it. Knox is standing just inside the door wearing one of his many tailored Dolce & Gabbana suits. He looks impressed.

“Good morning, Rebecca. That was a sexy little scuffle you got in back there.” I try to catch him by surprise with a hard smack to the face, but he grabs my wrist. “Looks like you still have some fight in you. Come in.”

He yanks me inside by the wrist then slams the door shut.

“How could you do it?” I shout at him, landing a hard thump on his rock-hard chest with my free hand. “You killed him!”

But he quickly takes that wrist and presses my wrists together. His fingers are my handcuffs.

“Keep your voice down.” He issues this warning in a deadly whisper that raises the hairs on my arms. “I did what I had to do to protect you.”

“Bullshit! You did what you had to do to protect yourself! And your stupid plan! It’s all about your fucking plan!”

“I said keep your voice down!” he roars.

“What are you going to do? Kill me. Am I getting in the way of your revenge? Is it time for me to down a bottle of pills or something? How do I die, Knox? Or Marco? Or whatever the fuck I’m supposed to call you? You’re not the Marco Leone I used to know. If your mother knew the things you were doing, she’d be turning over in her grave.”

His chest is heaving with animalistic rage. His eyes filled with a fervor to strike out at me. He’s spent ten years working on this plan to avenge his mother’s death. He won’t let me get away with bringing her up.

Or will he?

He lets go of my wrists and my arms flop to my sides. His eyes close as he hangs his head and suddenly I feel guilt creeping into my psyche. How could I bring up his mother?

“I’ll never know what my mother thinks of who I’ve become. And that’s why I can’t let Tony get away with it. He took everything from me. Her life. Her love. Even her disappointment with my mistakes.” He opens his eyes and looks up at me. “I can’t let him take you, too. I have to finish this and I have to keep you safe.”

The tears come again as I’m flooded with a sickening relief. Charlie’s dead and I’m to blame. And I’m relieved.

Knox takes me into his arms as I weep. My tears soak his collar as my body is wracked with sobs of grief and guilt. Finally, I compose myself and pull my face away from the crook of his neck.

“This is very difficult for me to accept,” I whisper through my dying sobs. “And this is even more difficult to say. But… thank you. Thank you for protecting me.”

He smiles and kisses my forehead. “Now I just have to find a way to protect you from yourself. You caused quite a scene out there. Not that I didn’t expect it.”

“You always know what to expect, don’t you?”

He gazes into my eyes for a moment, pondering this question. “I never expected to find you again.”

I wrap my arms around his shoulders and he kisses me slowly. He wraps his arms around my waist and lifts me gently off the floor then carries me to his desk. With one swift swipe of his arm, he clears the entire left side of the desk and sets me down. All the while, his lips never losing contact with mine.

He takes my face in his hands. He infuses a bit more passion and urgency into his kiss and instinctively I wrap my legs around his hips. His hand finds the button of my black skinny jeans I wore to work this morning. He undoes the button and unzips my pants in two seconds then I kick off my heels.

Pulling his mouth away from mine, he quickly lifts me off the desk to stand me up on the floor again. He yanks down my jeans and my panties then tosses them aside. Then he sets me back on his gleaming glass desk. The surface is cool against my bare ass, sending a thrill straight to my pulsing core.

He shoves my knees apart as he kneels before me and plants a soft kiss on my clit.

“Oh, God.”

“Lie back, baby.” I lie back as his tongue takes another blissful swipe at my aching nub. “And you don’t have to keep your voice down anymore. I want to
hear
you come all over me.”

6

Charlie’s funeral service is scheduled for next week. The same day that Knox plans to take me to visit my father. I don’t know where my father is hiding out. Or, rather, where Knox is hiding my father. But I know that the captain will understand why I don’t want to attend the service.

No one has any reason to believe that Charlie’s sudden trip to Michigan or his suicide had anything to do with my father’s case. They all believe he committed suicide because of me.

By some merciful twist of fate, Charlie’s suicide email got caught in my spam filter. I don’t know if Knox engineered it that way — to spare me the anguish. What I do know is there is probably nothing Knox doesn’t know about me. Which means he was able to log in to my email account and erase the email before I even knew it existed. When he told me about this I was livid.

“It’s an invasion of my privacy! How can you not see that?” I shouted at him from the kitchen sink where I was busy washing the dishes from the meal I just cooked for us.

Oh, I saw the resemblance. As if I were channeling my mother’s spirit. Standing there bitching at Knox about his shady business practices. As though my childhood wasn’t just haunting me; I was reenacting it.

“Would you rather have stumbled across that email yourself? I did it to protect you. If it weren’t for me you’d be in a fucking cell or blaming yourself for Charlie’s suicide.”

“I
do
blame myself!”

It didn’t take long for Knox to win this argument. And I wound up nestled against his warm body. My muscles stretched and warm like pulled taffy. Clinging to him. My heart pounding and hair tousled like a desperate child. The after effects of another earth shattering
lesson
.

If someone recorded a video of me in these moments of passion, I doubt I’d recognize myself in the footage. I become someone else when I’m with Knox. I surrender myself to him. Not just my body. I surrender my choice. There is no choice but to do everything and anything he wants in those moments.
 

I find myself fantasizing about him all day. When will I see Knox again? When will feel his energy lighting up my insides? When will I find my solace in the sweet surrender? Because he knows exactly when to push me harder and when to ease off. When to lay on the punishment and when to soothe my wounds.

Now, as I sit in Central Park watching the world pass me by, the guilt over Charlie’s death sits at my side casting a dark shadow over me. All I can think is that I need to be punished. And there’s no one who can do it better than Knox.

The walk back to my building is invigorating. I bound up the steps to my apartment buoyed by my excitement. I’ll text Knox the usual message:
The birdie got out of her cage again.
I won’t even have to cook or order in tonight. We’ll dine on each other.

I love having a day off in the middle of the week!

Turning the key in the lock, I immediately notice the lock is loose. It’s unlocked.

I take a step back. I’ve lived with my father long enough and watched enough movies to know that you don’t enter your home in cases like these. I glance around the short corridor at the other two doors on this floor.
 

My heart is jackhammering against my chest. But through the thrumming of my pulse, I can hear movement inside my apartment. The door swings inward suddenly and I nearly jump out of my skin.

7

August is wearing a puzzled expression. As if he wasn’t expecting me.

“You asshole. You nearly gave me a heart attack.” He chuckles as I shove my way past him. “What the hell are you doing in my apartment? I thought you gave me all the copies you had of my house key.”

“Your landlady let me in.” He shuts the door and follows me into the kitchen. “I brought you something.”

“August, you have to leave. You shouldn’t be here.”

I grab a glass from the cupboard and fill it up with water from the tap. He watches silently as I guzzle half the glass. I slam the cup down on the counter and glare at him. He’s not leaving.

“What did you bring me?”

He smiles and I feel a slight pang of longing in my chest. Apparently, the last four months of my relationship were a sham. I was furious about this initially. But I still find myself missing the lazy Sundays in my apartment. Him complaining about his blog partners while I indulged in hours of bad reality TV.

He grabs a cream-colored box tied with a black ribbon off the breakfast bar. Then he sets the box down on the counter next to me. He looks so pleased with himself.

“Open it,” he says as he picks up the new cat figurine Lita gave me and smirks.

“What is it? A severed head?”

“Just open the box.”

I untie the ribbon and lift the lid. It’s the red scarf I saw in Vogue magazine last month. On one of those lazy Sundays. I didn’t even mention it to August. He must have seen me admiring it while I was reading. Typical August to notice me coveting a scarf.

“It’s vintage Hermes,” he says, pulling the scarf out of the box and laying the cat figurine on top of the cushiony tissue paper. “It will look stunning with that vintage sheath dress you bought a couple of months ago. Very Jackie O.”

I shake my head as he drapes the scarf over my neck. “You shouldn’t have bought me this. I can’t accept gifts from you anymore, August.”

“Why? There’s nothing wrong with a simple gift between friends.”

He’s still holding each end of the scarf. The way his eyes keep shifting to my lips is making me nervous.

I remove the scarf from around my neck and push it into his chest. “Take it back.”

“Becky, it’s just a scarf. It’s not a ring.”

I march around him and make my way to the dresser near the foot of the bed in my studio apartment. “Just leave.”

“Fine. I’ll take it back.”

He follows after me and I turn on my heel before I reach the dresser. “What do you want? Are you trying to get me back or something? What is this?”

“I want to fucking apologize, okay!”

August has never raised his voice at me. He’s always so agreeable. Even when we did disagree, we never really fought. He believes in talking things out calmly. So this outburst is both shocking and exciting.

“You already apologized.”

“Not properly.” He wiggles his fingers as if he’s itching to hit something. “I messed up. I know. But it was only once.”

“August, I don’t want to know how many times you’ve cheated on me.”

“You’re not being fair. Just hear me out.”

“I’m not being fair? I’m not being
fair
? Was it
fair
for you to fuck someone behind my back?”

“I never
fucked
her!” His green eyes are desperate with a need for me to hear him out. “Yes, I took her to my apartment, but I never had sex with her. As soon as she left, Knox showed up and threatened me.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that you never fucked her because…?”