Her voice is excruciatingly soft, revealing to me why I need her so much. She is the opposite of me, good and untainted and being with her last night felt like I was being cleansed from all my sins. Now I am going to bathe in her every single night for the rest of my life, have her strip everything that is rotten in me and make my existence worthy. She sharpens my world, brightens my eyes and makes my heart feel no heavier than a feather.
My little ballerina has unchained me. The outside will always know me as a ruthless mobster. But with her...with her I will finally get the chance to be the man I want to be. It is settled then. All that I need now is for her to say yes.
I enclose on her a little harder when terror flares in me at the thought of her saying no.
“You will take me as I have taken you,” I rasp and she gasps. “You will be mine.”
Her eyes seem to try to search for my depths, almost as if she thinks this is a joke. As if she doesn’t think I am a man but a boy who is playing around.
“Alec,” she replies, licking her lips. “We barely know each other.”
Fuck, does that matter? All I care about is having her as my own, spoiling her, caring for her and having her care for me.
Pinning her wrists harder, I growl, “I said be mine.”
Looking up at me she twitches, a smile crossing her lips. “Why do you make everything sound like a threat?”
Grinning at her, I force myself to turn serious. She needs to know how important this is to me.
“Feel my heart,” I say, putting her palm on my chest and her eyes flare when she feels it moving around in there like a fighter trying to fight for something he cannot lose. “It is acting like this because it is trying to give itself to you.” I lower my voice, anything to coax her, “Will you take it?”
She hesitates but only for a second. “Yes.” Her face glows up like she doesn’t know what she is doing but she knows she wants to do it. “Yes, I will take it.”
11
Lyla
One month later
We ended up marrying.He made me fall into him, like a dream you never want to wake up from and when he popped the question I was unable to say anything other than yes.
Standing in the shower, I soap up until it looks like I’ve turned into a white cloud and I throw a glance at Alec who’s standing by the mirror, shaving his face. He notices me watching him and he grins, before his gaze drops further down my body and he lets out an appreciative groan.
I can’t stop smiling and I blush like he’s a stranger who chatted me up on the street yesterday. But I suppose that having been husband and wife for a month is nothing in the span of a life. And sometimes, during glimpses throughout the day Alec still feels like a stranger.
Though I know a lot more about him than I did in the beginning. I know that he doesn’t know who his father is and that he was born in a prison to a mother who had been set up by criminal friends to his dad.
They are still in contact today but she lives is Russia in a house that he bought for her. His backstory makes me feel for him and every morning that I wake up beside him I fill with empathy, grateful that Alec is alive and well.
Once or twice he has vaguely mentioned wondering what his life would have looked like, had he not been drawn into the mafia. But then he always shakes his head, smiling and acting as if that life was too far out of his reach to begin with.
It makes me sad but he tells me not be sad. He tells me that despite his life being hard it has brought him many rewards, me being his biggest reward of all.
When it comes to my own life, Alec hasn’t met my family either. We didn’t travel down to Florida to meet them and they didn’t come to New York, not even for the wedding. It’s not that my family doesn’t love me or that they’re not happy that I got married.
They’re just very different from me and prefer sticking to the Everglades and hunting crocodiles, that’s all. And maybe it’s for the better because both my mom and dad have sharp eyes. They’d quickly see that Alec is not like other men and I don’t think we’d be able to hide that he is in the mafia, no matter how much we try.
Stepping out of the shower, I cocoon myself in my robe, sighing at the sight of Alec bare chested like this. He’s steel and brutality, carved in ice and making other men look like they’ve been carved in styrofoam. And I love it how he shaves every day, his cheeks always smooth when he bends down to kiss me.
And don’t get me started on his cologne. I love that cheap, green bottle he uses, the scent both aromatic and spicy and sometimes when he’s gone during the night, I splash a little bit on his pillow to feel like he’s still close.
Thing is though, that he’s not always close. He works a lot, especially during the night. Sometimes I worry that something could happen to him but then I’m comforted by the fact that he’s the head of the brotherhood.
Nobody would dare to touch him. But whenever Alec comes back from work, I always act like he’s been gone for years. He’s become my whole world.
A mobster I never would have met had fate not wanted different.
Running a comb through my hair, I walk out into our bedroom, tossing the robe on a chair and Alec stands to watch in the doorway, his face frantic at the sight of my naked body and his eyes dark and hungry.