My mind blanks out and my whole body screams in terror. As I’m thrown face first into the wall, my brain finally connects with my vocal cords. “No!” I squirm and whimper as I try to get loose. A huge, hard body presses against me from behind, pinning me against the wall, a gloved hand comes up to cover my mouth.
“Shut up,” growls a voice so deep, it vibrates through my body, a scent of whiskey on his breath.
I mewl into his palm, going slack with fear as tears fill my eyes.
“Nothing’s gonna happen. I’m just gonna ask you some questions, and you are not going to scream, are we clear?”
Nodding eagerly, I hope I can get him off me for a second so I can run. He slowly removes his hand, and as soon as I can take a proper breath, I scream.
“Help!”
My head connects with the wall so hard I almost black out. Once. Twice.
“Fucking bitch!” he snarls and grips around my throat.
“Please don’t hurt me,” I whisper into the dark, to the rage that has fallen upon me. I’m nauseous and wetness trickles from my nostrils over my lips.
He throws me to the floor, his hand still gripping my throat too hard. I can just about get air, but not enough to do more than wheeze. “Who are you?”
A part of me already knows. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This has been my fate ever since I set foot in Kerry’s house that night and found her beaten, ever since I made her tell me her secret.
“I can be a very brief visitor.” He leans in close, nose to nose. I only see him as a vague shape in the dim light that comes from the streetlight outside. “Or I can be your worst nightmare. Your choice.”
My chest heaves as I try to breathe, and my throat hurts immensely from his bruisingly hard grip. I wait for him to say more as terror spreads through my veins, filling them with ice so cold it burns. I have a horrifying feeling I won’t be able to help him and that it is really bad news for me.
“Where is Kerry Jackson?”
Yeah. That.
“I don’t know,” I whisper, then I scream as he grabs my hair and slams my head against the floor so hard that I bite my tongue.
“Bullshit! Where is your friend?”
Tears stream down my cheeks as I push against him, trying to break free from his grip. He changes position and straddles me, pinning my arms to my sides. I have no leverage, I’m stuck under this terrifying mountain of muscle and raw, vicious strength.
“Please!”
He slams my head against the floor again, making it explode in pain, and leans in, his whiskey-tainted breath fanning my face. “Tell me, you fucking bitch, or you’re in for a world of hurt. Trust me, girl, you don’t want to know what I can do to a human body.”
I breathe in short gasps, my heart beating so hard it’s choking me. “What—What do you want with her?”
He clutches my hair harder. “That’s none of your concern.”
I wish I knew where she is, and I’m eternally happy I don’t.
“You’re the one who tried to kill her. It’s you she ran from.”
He scoffs and suddenly lets me go, getting off me. “See, I knew I was right. She told you. Be good to yourself and tell me where she is.”
I shuffle back, but I don’t dare get up. My eyes dart between the shadow of a man and the door opening, then I throw myself toward it, on hands and knees. A boot-clad foot connects with my chest and I fly several feet before I hit the wall as the door slams closed.
“Chloe, Chloe. Do you wanna do this the hard way, or the easy way? Before I leave, you will have told me. It won’t do you any good to prolong the pain.”
I swallow hard and fight the searing new agony in my ribs that flares up with every breath. I didn’t know I could hurt this much. My head, my throat, my chest. I’ve never experienced this level of pain. A new bolt of fear clutches my throat as I remember how bruised Kerry was. From this man.
“Please, don’t hurt me,” I whimper, then I scream as he pounces on me and pulls me around so I’m facing the floor. My mouth tastes of thick, nauseating iron, and my whole face and chin is wet from tears, snot, and blood. He grabs my arm and pushes it up on my back. I cry as I arch and try to relieve the strain on my shoulder.
“Where. Is. Kerry. Jackson,” he snarls.
“I don’t know!” I scream as I kick and squirm.
“I know you fucking do!”
He pushes my arm up higher and I wail, unable to even form words. He’s going to break it!
“Please!” I don’t even recognize my voice anymore. The pain increases unbearably and then I both hear and feel the snap as he breaks my arm.
I can’t even scream, it hurts so much. He lets me go, but I can’t move. Waves of agony send rushes of heat and chills through me. His steps come and go as if he’s pacing back and forth. I crane my neck and glance at the closed door, then up at the door handle. I have to try and get away or he will kill me. I can’t give him what he wants, and in the end he will realize he has no use for me. I suddenly fully and completely realize why Kerry ran, and why she kept running.
Salvatore is behind this. That fucking monster is behind all this. It might be his goon who is hurting me, but the mob boss is the one who ordered Kerry’s death, who ordered this. Dark, ugly hate rises in me as his features flash before my eyes. I’ve seen him a few times, long ago, I fawned over how hot he was. I never knew he was the Devil in the shape of a man.
I flinch when he suddenly speaks.
“I won’t hurt your friend. I just want to talk to her.”
“Bullshit,” I wheeze.
He crouches before me. I see him better now that my eyes have adjusted a little to the dark, but I still can’t make out his features.
“I don’t know where she is,” I whisper. “It’s the truth.”
“Well, you’re out of luck, Chloe Becker, because I don’t believe you, and I don’t give up.”
“Please.”
My head rocks back as he slams his fist in my face. My nose cracks and blood fills my mouth.
“Fucking tell me,” he roars.
When I come to, I’m alone in the room. Everything is silent. It’s still dark, but there’s a faint gray light outside. Through the ever-present San Francisco mist, dawn is approaching. The door stands ajar. After one single blissful moment of confusion and numbness, a freight train of pain crashes into me. Involuntary sobs hitch in my throat and I can’t control the shivers. I’m lying on my back, my face feels dry and too tight. I panic when I try to open my eyes and only get a slit open on one of them. Raising my arm to touch my face I scream when pain shoots through my shoulder. It begins to come back to me. The man in the dark. His questions. He hurt me. Bad. He started punching me and my memories after that are fragmented. I don’t know when it stopped. Maybe he thought I was dead?
Suddenly a pair of boot-clad feet appear before me and I wail hoarsely. I thought he had left.
“Please,” I whisper to his feet. I don’t dare to look up. My lips are so swollen that the word comes out thick and wrong ‘Pweesh’.’
He crouches, resting his forearms on his knees, holding one gloved hand over the other, then he reaches out and pulls the hair away from my face. I whimper and try to scramble back.
“Chloe. I will find Kerry. I will never stop. Do you understand?” His voice is like a dark void, filled with emotion I can’t interpret, can’t understand, don’t want to know about.
For the first time I see his features. He looks grim, and not sorry at all. His eyes are black and hard like opals. I can’t stop shaking. I can’t stop the sobs. He drops a bag, my brown leather bag, on the floor and then he sighs heavily and stands. I stare emptily in front of me, praying he’ll leave. The sound of his footsteps recedes and then the front door slams closed.
I lie unmoving for a long time, listening to the silence as pain pounds heavy in my head, my face, my arm, my chest. The room spins as soon as I try to open my eyes. When nothing else happens, I reach for my bag with my good ar
m, screaming from the agony as I move. I feel through the content until my fingers close around my phone. Curled up in a fetal position, I force an eye open and manage to unlock the phone and call 911. It takes a few tries, but finally I get the numbers right.
Luciano
At first I don’t know what wakes me. Then the phone chimes again and I groan as I pick it up and check the time. Four fucking thirty in the morning. Christian.
I kill the call, turn off the sound, and turn on the other side.
“Motherfucking sonofabitch!” I grab the phone that now buzzes against the bedside table and tap open the call. “For fuck’s sake,” I roar, then I kill it again. He’s probably drunk out of his ass.
My sheets reek of sex and my mouth is dry. I kicked out the redhead hours ago, limping and whimpering, her backside flaming red. The memory of her hot, tight little cunt makes my cock twitch to life again. I sigh and push the comforter off me, hitting the intercom button.
“Sir?”
One of my staff answers almost immediately.
“Send someone to fix my bed. It stinks.”
“Yes, sir.”
I push my fingers through my mess of hair and find a pair of track pants in a drawer. A little further down the hallway lies my gym. An hour with the weights should take some of the pressure off. There’s always something. Eric’s planning a hostile takeover of the Crimson Clubs and that’s gonna make us some new enemies to keep an eye on. We need to find good staff pronto to not lose income. There’s the issue with one of my men making contacts in Vegas. He’s been taken care of, but we need to weed out whoever else might have been involved, and we need to sort out what the motherfucker disclosed about us.
My head hurts as I work the barbell. Pecs. Deadlifts. Lunges. I’m sweating profusely, feeling how the booze from last night leaves my system.
Then there’s my nephew, Christian. He’s fucked up royally. He shouldn’t have gotten involved with his hit, even though I admit she’s a one-of-a-kind lady.
My mind spins as I drop the barbell to the floor with a heavy thud and head back to my bedroom and a shower. It’s early morning. My bed has been made and a window stands ajar. The first birds have started singing hesitantly and the ever-present fog lies like a carpet over the vast lawn. The sun will chase it off in a couple of hours, but right now it mutes the world, embraces it. I like the heat and the sun. It’s a wonder I chose the city of fog to settle in, but here we are, and my network is too intricately woven into the community on the West Coast. I can’t tear it up now.
As I shower and let the cool water re-energize me, I think of the woman who made me set foot here in the first place. Elena Wokowska. She was forty. I was twenty-four. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. We were never a real thing. It wasn’t love. But with her being a masochist, and completely uninhibited, she awoke the sadist in me. I was already ruthless. I killed whoever got in my way without a second thought, but it wasn’t until then that I knew what I wanted. Sex before Elena had been an uninteresting push them down, spread their legs and fuck them until I got off. Sex with Elena, and after her, became my own savage art form. I know I hurt them, and that’s exactly how I want it, how I need it. It makes me invincible, above everyone, puts fear in the men and the women who pass through my life. I’ll never again have to go back to being cold, hungry, dirty and abandoned. I take, and everyone else gives.
My cock grows and I wish I hadn’t sent off the redhead. I should have just chained her to the wall and gagged her. If she’d sat out there right now, I’d have pulled her up by her thick, lush hair and pushed her face first to the bed, ravaging her tight little ass.
I turn the faucet until the water is ice cold and finish the shower. It’s six, and I probably didn’t sleep more than a couple of hours, but I might as well start the day.
The house is silent as I leave my wing and walk through the rooms until I reach the kitchen. There I stop flat. At the table sits a hulking Christian, disheveled, hunched over, nurturing a large cup of black java. The scent of coffee is enticing. The sight of my nephew isn’t.
“What the fuck are you doing here? You woke me, you piece of shit.” I cross the kitchen and turn on the espresso machine, waiting for the pressure to rise. Placing a cup of water in the microwave oven I let the thick china preheat as I drop beans into the grinder.
“I’m a bad man,” mutters Christian.
I raise an eyebrow and turn to him, unsure how to respond to that. Apart from his loyalty to the family, and his admirable protective instincts of his sister Angela, there’s not one good fiber in him.
Preparing my cup, I then take it to the table and sit opposite my mess of a relative.
“No, I’m really fucking bad. I went to Kerry’s friend.”
“And?”
“I beat her up. Bad.”
“And?”
“I don’t have a habit of beating up girls. I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me, Luci.”
“Dude. If you don’t get ahold of yourself, I’ll fucking throw you in chains. Does she know who you are?”
Christian sighs. “I think she understood that pretty well. Kerry told her more than what was good for either of them.”
“You need to go back and finish her. Who is she?”
His lips tighten as he meets my gaze. “I’m not gonna execute Kerry’s best friend.”
“Chances are you’ll never see your Kerry again anyway, so worrying about what she’d think is moot. This is about protecting the family.”
Christian stands so abruptly the chair topples and falls to the floor with a crash. “Go fuck yourself,” he growls.
I dart up and grab his collar, pulling him to me. “You better mind your fucking attitude. This is your final warning. I’ll do the girl. Forget about her. Clean yourself up and don’t show your face around here until you’re back to the Christian we know and love.”
He scoffs and shoves me off him. I let go of his shirt and straighten as I stare him down.
Downing the last of his coffee he sets the cup down too hard on the thick wooden table. “Fuck this shit,” he mutters and storms out of the kitchen. Half a minute later I hear the front door slam.
I sigh and sink back on the chair, making a mental list. One more thing to do today. Find the girl and off her.
Chapter 4
Chloe
“I don’t know,” I moan as they wheel me past my broken front door. I heard them knock. I couldn’t even scream. I’ve never felt so helpless in my life. I kept whispering to the dispatcher that I was here, that they had to break in, that I couldn’t move. Finally, after a loud crash, cops and EMTs seemed to be everywhere.
“Who did this to you?”
“I don’t know,” I slur hoarsely.
What else can I say? Tell on the mob and die.
In the elevator, things begin to get weird. The ceiling spins, the walls expand. Their voices seem to come from farther away. I feel weightless.
“What’d you give—,” I try to wet my lips, “me.”
“A shot of morphine, hon—”
She keeps talking, but I float off. Being in not-so-much pain is amazing.
“I don’t know.” That’s my mantra the next couple of days. I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was dark. No, he didn’t speak. No, I don’t know anyone who’d want to hurt me.
I cry when I look at myself in a mirror for the first time. My face is blue and swollen beyond recognition. My right arm is wrapped in a thick, warm, itchy cast and sits in a sling. My broken nose has been straightened out and I’ve got bandages both across it as well as in the nostrils. Not being able to breathe through my nose is more panic inducing than I’d have ever thought. My mouth dries up and I feel like I’m choking. It doesn’t help that I have several broken ribs. Standing is hell. Lying down is hell. Sitting is a nightmare.
My emotions are all over the place, my mind a cacophony of images, voices, happy times, horrible times. One moment I long to talk to Kerry. She know
s. She’d understand. The next minute I loathe her existence. It’s not a pretty feeling, the darkness that creeps into my heart when I think about my former best friend. It’s not her fault, but my rational side has given way to primal fear, and in that void she’s the root of this evil.
I don’t sleep. I feel his hands on me, hear his low voice in my ear, his promise that he won’t give up. I don’t know why I’m alive. Does he still think I know where Kerry is? Is it even safe to go back home? The realization chills me to my core. It isn’t. Of course I can’t go home. Oh my God. I can’t talk to anyone about this. I don’t have anyone.
If it hadn’t hurt so fucking much I would have curled up and cried. I cry anyway, flat on my back, the tears wetting my temples in floods before they soak the pillow.
I have a minor brain hemorrhage and they want to make sure it disappears, a small amount on the surface of my brain. My arm will heal, my bruises and swellings will subside as time goes by. The body is an amazing organism. If I’d have been a car, they’d have just dumped me in a scrap yard and dismantled me. I don’t know if I wish I’d have been a dead thing, or if I really want to be alive. I beg them for sleeping pills, but I still wake up around two a.m. from my own whimpering until I realize I’m not at home, and that I’m not being beaten.
One day they release me. I’m not ready. The hospital bed, the staff outside my room, they’ve become my safety blanket. I don’t want to go out there! Kerry was stupid. She went home. I can’t go home.
I call a cab, giving him directions to a hotel downtown, fighting the panic that’s clawing in my chest. There are too many people on the streets. My enemies can be anywhere. I need to plan how to proceed from here. I think of my friend, of her fear. She must have felt exactly like this. Or worse. That man, that monster that came after me in the dark night, in my own home – he befriended her first, he fucked her, he made her believe there was something going on between them. Then he tried to murder her. The only person I could have talked to about all this has disappeared because of him. I live in terror every minute because of him.
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