by Shandi Boyes
My uncle’s monarch sucks the blood out of the veins of the heirs born to rule it, so imagine the damage it will cause a man not programmed to jump on cue. Maddox may last a couple of months in this realm, perhaps even a year, but eventually, it would wear him down as it has me.
I refuse to let that happen.
I swung the bat.
I missed the ball.
Now I’m hoping like hell I don’t punch out.
After ensuring my face is half presentable, I pat down the hem of my floral dress before exiting the washroom. Like they do every time I’m in their vicinity, the men of my uncle’s crew wolf-whistle and call me derogative names. A handful of them even go as far as fanning up my dress like I have no rights whatsoever.
I’d slap away their hands, but since that only ever encourages them to badger me more, I act as if they’re not in the room with me. My focus is on one man and one man only, and when I reach him, I’m reasonably sure even more unwanted attention will be directed my way.
“You’re early,” my uncle says with a disgruntled grunt. “Is he done with you already? Why am I not surprised?”
“Can I speak with you? I-In private, please.” The stutter of my words is understandable. It isn’t every day a woman puts herself in this predicament, much less with a man who has the same blood as her. “Perhaps in your office? It’s quieter there.” I gather his hand in mine like mine aren’t shaking a million miles an hour before peering at him like he’s a saint, and I’m a sinner willing to do anything to be granted a stay of execution. “Please. I’m sure it won’t take more than a minute.”
Fear encroaches me from all angles when he drags the back of his index finger down my bruised cheek. He isn’t remorseful he hurt me. If anything, he’s turned on by the fact he marked me so well, my welts are still noticeable twenty-hours later.
Hurting women is a favorite pastime of his. It also explains where I went wrong last night. I exposed that my biggest fear isn’t him hitting me. His gentle touch is what scares me the most because I know it will only be gentle for so long before it jumps to maiming.
I don’t know whether to barf or silently cheer that my plan is working when my uncle mutters, “Everything with me, dear, takes longer than a minute.”
“Then perhaps you can grant me two?” I talk as if I’m a regal princess even with me feeling anything but regal. I feel dirty and disgusting, a stark contradiction to my emotional state most of last night.
Maddox. Oh. I never realized how much the world spun until the wee hours of this morning. The Walsh brothers are known for their playboy ways. They have a reputation almost every woman on the planet would happily ignore for a chance to occupy their bed, and after last night, I can confidently declare I’m now on that list.
Maddox was attentive, gentle, sweet, and mind-blowingly skilled. He heightened my sexual palate to a level I didn’t realize it could reach, then he catapulted over it with a second round that was even better than the first.
I don’t have much experience, but that won’t stop me from saying last night was perfect. It was brutally beautiful. A true occurrence I’d give anything to be a part of time and time again.
Sadly, mafia princesses don’t wear crowns.
We destroy them.
“Two minutes,” my uncle grunts out, drawing my focus back to him. “Then I must get back to work. Money waits for no one, not even someone as forbidden as you.”
His inappropriateness today is off the Richter scale. He’s always been a little perverted, and I often wondered why Ophelia feared him as much as she did, but I had no clue his level of sickness extended this far. Either Dimitri is closer to overruling him than even he realizes, or the agents Maddox mentioned are homing in on charges not even a dead spouse will stop from occurring. He’s making mistakes, many of them, and this one is about to cost him his life.
When we enter his office at the side of his compound, Col locks the door before he spins around to face me. “Where do you want me?” His tone is low and gravelly. It makes it hard for me to speak, but I push through, aware this must occur.
“In your chair.” When he moves toward his office chair, I push out, “Not that one.” I nudge my head to the two sofas in the corner of the cigar-hazed space. “One of those. We’ll have more room over there.”
It takes a conscious effort to move my feet when he plops onto the sofa closest to me. I’m not second-guessing my decision. I’m horrified when his hands automatically move for his belt. I’m his niece, for crying out loud. His flesh and blood, yet he still sees me as an object of pleasure.
My lips quiver when I say, “Let me.”
I brush away the invisible tear I stupidly believe is rolling down my cheek before pacing to his side of the room. There’s no stopping this now. His responses the past five minutes assure me I have no other option but to continue with my plan.
“Close your eyes,” I suggest, confident a normal man would struggle to maintain a rational head when their niece kneels between their splayed thighs to undo the zipper in their trousers. “It will be more enhanced this way.”
I beg my eyes not to let any tears fall when he does as requested. They’d be more in relief than dismay, but I still don’t want them to fall. I refuse to let him win.
After swallowing down the bile surging up my throat, I ask, “Are you ready?”
When my uncle hums out an agreeing murmur, I raise to a kneeling position, creep my hand into my bra, remove the boxcutter I borrowed from Caidyn’s Jeep, flick it open, then slash it across my uncle’s jugular from one ear to the next.
His eyes pop open in an instant, and his hands move even quicker than that. One shoots up to caress the wound that’s no more than a papercut while the other one backhands me hard across the face. I fall to the floor before instinctively rolling into a ball to protect my face and body. In my shock, I forget about the hair I purposely left down. My uncle likes his women to look feminine. All his whores must wear their hair down. If they forget, he shaves it off before he hands them to his understudies for a month. They never make it out of that punishment the same woman. They’re beyond scarred.
“You ungrateful little bitch,” he sneers in my face after he drags me from the floor by my hair. “I fed you, clothed you, and kept my hands to myself even when the scent of your needy cunt begged me not to, and this is how you repay me. I should cut you up into little pieces. Hack you so badly, no one will care how sweet your cunt tastes. Or better yet, I should leave you in a room with my dog. I’m sure he’d do more damage than the knife you borrowed from…”
Shit, shit, shit, I inwardly scream when he reads the name engraved on the boxcutter. “Walsh Construction and Architectural Design.”
After roaming his eyes over my face, I’m no longer worried about his dog ripping me to pieces. I’m petrified his teeth are about to get in on the act.
My worries are left unfounded when he drags his nose down the throb in my throat. His growl is immoral, so I won’t mention his tone when he says, “I thought you smelled different.”
While grinning like a madman, he pushes me back until I’m at an arm’s length. “He got it out of you in one night.”
He isn’t asking a question. He’s summarizing.
“I don’t know if that makes you easy or if he’s now at a point he’ll do anything to stop you from getting hurt.” The air in my lungs leaves in a grunt when he tosses me onto the sofa across from him as if I’m a rag doll. “I guess we only have a couple of hours to find out.”
When he shouts his second-in-charge’s name, Mario enters the room a couple of seconds later. He must have a key as he didn’t kick open the door. “Watch her. If she gets out of line, pretend that’s a dildo.” My uncle’s eyes drop to the box cutter at his feet during the last part of his statement. “I don’t care how fucked up you make her, just ensure she’s alive. Some guys get off on scars.”
While smiling like I just made his life a shit-ton easier, he paces out of the room, his ste
ps swaggered and slow.
Col Petretti is on a warpath, and I just put Maddox’s family at the top of his list.
17
Demi
I should be dead. My plan was to murder my uncle, then turn the knife on myself if his goons’ bullets race across the room weren’t fast enough.
Instead, I’m sitting across from him in an SUV careening down a dusty road.
In a way, I’m upset my plan didn’t work, but I’m also content. Once Maddox fails to arrive tonight, I’ll go to heaven instead of hell. Surely, God can forgive me for a measly paper cut. I’ve been to hell and back. That alone deserves a little bit of forgiveness, doesn’t it?
My grin is way too smug for a woman about to be tortured to death, but what can I say? I get cocky when my greatest wish comes true. There isn’t a single motorbike in the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town. Nor is there any sign of Caidyn’s flashy Jeep my uncle’s goons dumped a few miles out of town. There are Bentleys, Porsches, a handful of Audis, and many other foreign cars of which I don’t know the names.
The richest of the rich are here to watch the ultimate blood sport.
Fight-to-the-death boxing.
“Stay at my side.” My uncle’s voice exposes he too has noticed an absence of regular folks. “If you so much as move half an inch from me, the first cut I make will be to remove your clit.”
“Like you’d know where that is.”
It dawns on me I said my comment out loud when he grips my face and thrusts me backward until my back is one with the SUV we just exited. “You’re just like your fucking mother. Give you a little bit of dick, and you think you rule the world.”
He digs his fingernails into my cheeks so firmly I’m certain he will leave a mark when defiance darts through my eyes. Nothing about Maddox was ‘little,’ and I was seconds from announcing that.
“Don’t make me show you what it took to bring her into line. It drove your father so crazy, he walked straight off a fucking cliff.”
I’d spit in his face if he weren’t holding mine so firmly I can’t get my lips apart. His rough handling is nothing new, but he’s never taken it this far in public before. You can’t emulate a man in control if you don’t have your subjects scared enough to follow your every whim without prompting.
“Stay. At. My. Side,” he reiterates, speaking slow.
He doesn’t wait for me to nod. He simply walks away, leaving the heavy lifting to his men.
“Move it.”
“I’m going,” I assure Mario when an inch gap between my uncle and me sees the muzzle of a gun being shoved under my ribs. He’s pissed I didn’t give him an excuse to hack me up with the boxcutter. He’s a sick fuck like that. He’d rather my uncle’s seconds than an untouched woman because he knows they’re already half-broken.
Several eyes shift our way when we enter the warehouse. It’s set up similar to the underground fight circuit my uncle runs with the only surviving member of his family, Dimitri, but the clientele is sleazier-looking, and the smell of corruption almost outranks the scent of death lingering in the air.
I’m shocked by the number of revered stares my uncle is being given. It’s rare for him to be admired. He makes these fools money, but more times than not, it costs them just as much in respect. You can’t side with him and expect to come out with your dignity intact. If you want to deal with the devil, you better be willing to face the consequences of your actions.
My heart plummets into my stomach when it dawns on me why we’ve secured the eyes of many. They’re not peering at my uncle in awe. They’re struggling to work out why his inflamed knuckles are the same size and width as the bruises on my cheek. They’re evidence my uncle is an abusive tyrant and the very reason he is being gawked at from all sides.
It’s rare for my uncle to leave evidence of a crime. His slip-up this weekend shows how unhinged he is becoming. Hopefully, when he kills me tonight as punishment for Maddox’s no-show, the evidence Maddox captured before I fled will see him convicted of murder. The Petrettis never leave a body—corpses talk, even the mutilated ones—but you can convict a man without a body. I overheard my uncle mention that only last month.
My eyes float up from the floor when my uncle’s deep Italian timbre fills my ears. From what I learned from my father, the Petrettis haven’t lived in Italy since the thirties. However, their accents are as thick as foreigners. They’d hate to be mistaken as the American now running their sanction. Henry Gottle, Sr., the boss of all bosses, is of mixed race. He has inky black hair like mine, eyes just as blue, yet, my uncle treats him as if he’s a fraud.
“How much?” my uncle repeats when my eyes land on his face. “I don’t usually bet on the underdog, but tonight, I can’t lose.” The crowd mingling around us hovers in close when he digs his finger into the cut in my cheek. He wants the world to know he hurt me, and he refuses for a little bit of foundation to steal his victory. “If he dies, I lose money but gain so… much… more.” His last three words are expressed in a way that makes my stomach recoil. “If he wins, which I highly doubt, I pocket a nice bit of coin that will have no issues finding me a young cunt to keep me warm for the night.”
He speaks so poorly of women, I have to force my reply out of my mouth. “And if he doesn’t show up, what happens then?”
The dress I wore to look ‘pretty’ for him is ruined when he yanks me forward with a brutal clutch on the dainty material. The top two buttons pop open, exposing the cleavage he swears I inherited from my mother.
“You don’t want me to answer that.” He waits for me to absorb the threat in his tone before he drags his eyes over the men loitering even closer. “Or perhaps I should tell you. The men are so eager, they might spoil the surprise.”
“I’m your niece,” I remind him like he may suddenly grow a conscience. “Your flesh and blood.”
“I know.” He taps my nose before he brings out the smile that shows blood will never come before his bank balance. “Why do you think they’re so keen? It’s not every day a civilian gets to bed a princess.”
I scoff. There’s nothing regal about me.
It appears as if my uncle heard my inner monologue when his grin turns blinding. “Right now, your blood is nobler than mine.” He steps so close, our noses almost touch. “Because I’ve granted them permission to spill yours. They can’t touch mine.”
He chuckles at the paling of my face before he places a five-thousand-dollar bet on Maddox on my behalf. When he takes a seat ringside, wordlessly announcing that the event is about to commence, bids come in hard and fast. The money tossed into the bookie’s hat exposes why my uncle was so desperate to sign Maddox as his fighter. Just his surname scribbled at the top of a portable blackboard fills the front row of seats that usually sit half-empty during the regular Friday night fights. They don’t come cheap in a standard exhibition, so I’d hate to think how much these suit-clad men have forked out for an up-close visual of a murder.
I shouldn’t smile at the fact they’re wasting both their money and time, but I do. Even if Maddox has a photographic memory, he’ll be a no-show tonight. I ensured the card my uncle scribbled on was out of Maddox’s sight at all times, even going as far as asking if I could store it in his wallet for ‘safekeeping.’ I felt horrible when he granted me his trust without so much as a second blink, but the moment he entered me the first time, I knew I had made the right decision.
The Walsh brothers protect those they love, and the consummation of my relationship with Maddox placed me high on their list. Since that wasn’t a part of my plan, I was forced to make another. Was it stupid of me to do? Most likely, but when you’ve got more to lose than you ever thought possible, you must think outside the box.
“You should watch,” my uncle suggests when two women in gold spray-on bikini’s announce the first fight is about to commence by prancing around the ring like their knees aren’t knocking. “Then perhaps you can give Maddox some tips when he arrives.” He bou
nces his evil eyes between mine. “You’ve watched him enough times the past year to know his strengths, so you can either help him benefit from that or let him die. The choice is yours.”
I don’t retort his comment that I’ve done everything in my power to keep Maddox and his brothers off his radar the past two years, but I do accept his invitation to sit in the seat next to him. I’m shaking so much I can’t trust my legs to keep me upright.
Over the next several minutes, the first two fighters keep the men ringside entertained. From what I took in before I diverted my eyes to my feet, the fighters stand at a similar height, and they look as rough and ready as the other. The knowledge they’re fairly matched won’t have me watching the sickening event unfold, though.
Just knowing one of them will leave the ring in a body bag makes me immensely ill, so I won’t mention the sickening crunches and grunts that come from their part of the warehouse over the next forty minutes. It’s horrific, although it has nothing on the flip my stomach does when I spot a man who should be far from here entering the west entrance of the warehouse.
“Ha!” my uncle pushes out with a chuckle when he too spots Maddox. “I didn’t think you had it in you.” He isn’t referencing Maddox. He was glaring at me when he said his comment. “Your mother should have taught me otherwise.” I don’t realize I’m crying until he wipes the salty blobs off my face with a rough scrub and a smile. I hate that my tears are making me look weak, but I’m too shocked to hold them back. “I should have killed her like I did your sister. Alas, I have an addiction for needy brunettes with fuckable lips.”
Sister? What sister? I’m an only child, aren’t I?
I lose the chance to ask my questions out loud when Maddox arrives ringside three heart-thrashing seconds later. He’s dressed to fight in black running shorts and a white sleeveless tank that showcases the cut ridges in his arms. He’ll be forced to take off his running shoes if he’s here to fight. All parts of his body must be up for manipulation in the ring.