Ari’s eyes darken. He loves nothing more than when I take my frustrations out on his body. He lives for it. It’s one of the only ways he can truly feel anything. I dig my nails into his neck and wait for him to suck in a breath before letting him go.
He straightens and fixes me with a hot look, but he doesn’t move yet. He lets me drink him in. The young teen—barely out of adolescence—that stood in my manor, letting out a scream that would never be heard, is nothing like the man who stands here now. Years have passed, and though his voice is gone—stolen by Guido Romano’s arrogance and ego—he has become something else.
A monster, yes, but also a lover. He’s become steadfast and perfect with all of his broken pieces glued together by a lifetime of promises that I will always continue to make. It doesn’t matter that he can’t love me the way I love him. It doesn’t matter that he feeds off chaos and blood and violence.
What matters is that he—like all of my other misfits—is mine.
I rise, tugging him by his shirt until our chests collide, and I kiss him again. My teeth dig into his lip until I taste copper, and I lick the drops of blood away before pulling back. “I’ll make it hurt tonight,” I promise him.
His eyes are dark and narrowed, and his lips are slightly parted on his panting breath. He collects himself for a moment, and then a small, arrogant smirk tightens his mouth, and he steps back with a half salute. His erection is visible through his jeans, and it fucking does something to me that he doesn’t bother hiding it as he strolls out of my office and leaves me for the afternoon.
“That display,” comes a voice from my office doorway, and I turn to see my uncle, Aldis, strolling in, “was grotesque.”
He’s flanked by his son, Rhys, who is probably my closest confidant. At least, one that I’m not fucking. I’m not foolish enough to trust anyone, but Rhys is loyal, and I plan to do everything in my power to keep it that way.
His father, well…
Aldis always did have a sliver of hope that he’d get the keys to this empire after my father died, but I know he knew better than to truly believe it. I have given him power, though, and the respect that comes with it. And the money, which doesn’t hurt.
Gesturing to my two chairs, I sit back down and refuse to address his comment. I know many of my men look at me askance with the choices I’ve made. I’m unmarried, and there’s no heir on the horizon, and considering who my lovers are, I don’t know that anyone expects one.
What they don’t know—no one except James, Phoenix, and Ari—is that I don’t have the ability to produce one, even if I’d changed my mind about it. On my twenty-second birthday, Guido Romano sent a woman to me. Someone he knew I would be drawn to. She charmed me, whispered promises into my ear, and the second I dropped my guard, she slipped something into my drink.
I woke up with my pants around my ankles to her being dragged off me by Phoenix, and I don’t actually know what happened to her after that.
Phoenix told me she broke quickly under my father’s hand, though. She confessed who had sent her and why. Romano wanted the Walsh heir under his thumb as payment for what I’d done to him, and it was in that moment I knew I would make him pay. I just hadn’t realized how deep it was about to go.
A year later, with Phoenix at my side, I stepped into a clinic and took care of the problem forever. Should Guido try it again—should he ever be foolish enough, should I ever drop my guard enough—it wouldn’t matter.
He would condemn that soul to torture and torment for no reason at all.
And one by one, I began making my list of the ways to hurt Guido. And one by one, I begin ticking those items off.
I don’t know what the end game is going to look like exactly, but right now, I do know it involves the woman on the now darkened tablet, And eventually, Guido Romano on his knees, begging without a tongue after I let Ari rip it out.
“Gentlemen,” I say when I realize I’ve been quiet too long. I fold my hands on my desk and give them a look. “Let’s go over the quarterly reports.”
* * *
Ari’s playroomis lit up when I get home, but I bypass it. He can wait. He’ll enjoy how long I draw this out, and I make my way up the stairs and into my bedroom. It doesn’t take me much time at all to strip down to a T-shirt and lounge pants, and as I’m ruffling some of the product out of my hair, I reach down and flick on the tablet again.
The screen loads immediately to Alice’s room. She’s not brave enough to sneak out yet…but she will be. I watched her all afternoon, and I could see the way she was eyeing the fire escape every time she thought someone wasn’t looking.
Of course, she has no idea we’re always looking.
My eyes take in her form on the bed, stretched out with her back against the headboard, the toes on her right foot pointed. Her left leg is crooked up, and she’s got her new book resting against it while her hand absently strokes over the flower petals.
It gives me a strange, hot feeling to see the way she treats our gifts like they’re something precious, and the piece-of-shit bit of costume jewelry is forgotten, lost to the mess of her dorm. My fingers touch the screen just to the right of her.
She’s young, and I know she’s innocent and untouched. Her father’s kept her like a fucking pheasant under glass for most of her life, and even here with the torture of everyone else’s freedom, she’s bound. She never had a chance, this girl.
She never had real hope.
She doesn’t look much like her father at all, and I suppose that’s some kind of saving grace for her. She’s everything like her mother, though I only met the woman once at a party. She was stunning and she was charming, and resisting the urge to seduce her where Romano would find us was almost impossible.
I’d had him once—just before his entire world and his faith shattered.
And I knew it would break him to have her and make him watch as she fell apart under my tongue the same way he did.