by Liz K. Lorde
My legs are jiggling with anticipation my heart racing in my chest.
I’ve waited for this moment for so long, my pussy aches for him.
He positions himself between my legs, spreading them widely around him.
“Are you ready?” He asks, his eyes sparkling down at me.
I can only nod, words seeming to fail me.
He brings himself towards me, his cock now only a hairsbreadth away.
BANG!
I yelp in surprise, the sound of the front door slamming open echoing down the hall towards us.
Suddenly, all amorous thoughts are lost.
Cas looks manically around, lowering me back to my feet and pointing in the general direction of his room. We run towards it together, a small whimper leaving my lips as I quickly wrap myself in one of his silky sheets.
Not already. They can’t have found me that fast.
Almost on impulse, he reaches underneath his bed and produces a TDI Vector Kriss Super V .45.
“Cas—“
He doesn’t give me a chance to finish. He puts his index finger on his lips, gesturing for silence. Still naked, he creeps his way towards the bedroom door.
“Caspian!”
We hear his name from the living room at the same time, and while I breathe a sigh of relief, Caspian snarls and shakes his head.
“Fuckin’ idiot,” he mumbles, “out here trying to get himself killed.”
He puts down the gun.
“In here, Nico!” he calls. “Don’t come in here! We’re not dressed!”
“Oh, yeah?” Nico says, laughing. “Well, get some clothes on and get out here. Ana, you can stay naked if you want, nobody minds looking at you, beautiful.
I laugh and put on one of Cas’ shirts and a pair of his sweatpants as he roughly tugs his own pants pack on.
Nico comes into the bedroom a moment later, his usually cheerful expression turned sour. Panic surges back through me at the sight. Clearly, something isn’t right.
Nico nods in my direction.
“Big brother,” he says, “you gotta come with me. Now.”
Cas furrows his eyebrows. “What’s the problem, Nico?”
“We got a situation,” Nico says. “Outside. Now.”
Cas growls in irritation, turning back towards me.
“I’ll be right back,” He says, “stay here.”
I ignore the command, noting that he tucks the gun into his waistband rather than putting it away.
What is going on?
His eyes seem to take on a new depth, his expression dangerous.
I stare confusedly across at him.
Up until now I’ve been pretending that Cas was the same boy I knew years ago. Looking at him now though, it’s clear that he’s changed.
I wait for him to leave the room before standing to follow.
Stay here my ass.
I walk quietly behind them as the exit, needing to know who Cas has become.
Chapter 11
Cas
I strap up with the TDI Vector Kriss Super V.45 again, then throw a black coat over my shoulders and follow Nico downstairs.
Before I can even stop her, Ana is hot on my heels, looking adorable in my shirt and sweatpants.
“What, Ana—what the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demand angrily.
“Coming with you.” she says simply.
I side-eye her. “Ana baby, listen. You know I love you, but you don’t need to be with me for this.
The elevator continues to shoot down, my mind racing as it goes.
“Oh, come on.”
I hold up my gun.
“You think this is a movie prop, cuore mio?”
She stares fiercely across at me, her gaze telling me all I need to know.
She won’t be sent scurrying back to my loft like some delicate flower. Normally, I love that about her, but right now I wish she’d listen.
We reach the ground floor and storm outside, where six of our finest henchmen are surrounding a white limousine.
I take stock of our motley crew and mentally ring their names off in my head: Giuseppe Gambino, “Big Joe” Lamberti, “Sally Dogs” Mazzurco, Vito Bruschetta, and the duo known as “Cookies’n’Books” (but whose government names are Luigi Biscotti and Paolo Libretti).
This, clearly, is the worst of the worst. I only call these henchmen when things reach totally fubar in status.
I turn to Giuseppe, my most trusted of henchmen. “Giuseppe, what the hell brings you here? Can you not see I’m in the middle of…something?”
The six of them eye Ana warily.
Giuseppe scoffs. “Doesn’t look so important to me.”
Ana gives me an icy stare. “Cas, ‘many others’?”
I hiss back and glare at Giuseppe. “Gio, paisano, Ana’s my wife. Or about to be.”
At this comment, the six henchmen break out in peels of ribald laughter.
“That’s a good one, boss! That’s a good one!” Vito says between laughs.
“I’m gonna tell you for the last time to shut the fuckup, Vito, and not disrespect my wife,” I say, tipping my gun towards him.
But Vito—never one to obey a simple command, let alone show an ounce of respect to any woman who wasn’t his mother—continues. “Please, Cas. You don’t think I know who this Russian puttanais? What would your father say if he saw all this? È un disonore!”
I growl. No one, least of all this idiot, is going to take my father’s name in vain.
“You know what the commandment reads, Vito? ‘Honor thy father and thy mother.’ You notice that father comes first, right?”
He looks abashedly downward, seeming to finally notice he’s gone too far.
I grind my teeth, willing myself not to go ahead and shoot the stupid fuck.
I turn back to Giuseppe. “Now, Gio. What is the problem?”
He scoffs, opens the trunk of the limousine, then rustles around in the trunk a little bit.
I can hear grunting and groaning, with Gio landing a punch on something and saying “shut the fuck up!” in his thick Northern Sicilian accent. Finally, he produces the bounty.
It’s Roger Cunningham, a man we call “Roger the Worm” and the owner of the local pawn shop. He’s been having trouble, as of late, with paying his bills.
It’s not that I wasn’t patient with him. In contrast, I gave him more time than I would to most others in paying what he owes for the privilege of our protection. But now, he was starting to get on my nerves, and finally, my boys decided they were going to do something about it.
I grab Roger by the collar and whisper in his ear. “Didn’t think we’d come to collect, eh, Worm?”
Tears began to roll down Roger’s pudgy and oily face. “Caspian. Please. I have a family to support. I got six kids. A wife. You know my boy Ryanhas cancer.”
I curl my upper lip. “Have I given any indication that I give a shit, Worm?”
I look back at Ana and see, to my surprise, that she’s giving me a look of judgment, fear, even—dare I say it—hatred. The look on her face now is a world away from the look on her face just a minute ago, and suddenly, I feel guilty for exposing her to this part of my life.
I push Worm to the ground, give him a square kick in the ribs, and spit in his face.
“A dead man can’t pay his bills,” I say. “So get the fuck up, put your goddamn healthy kids to work, and pay what you owe. Otherwise, the next time I see you, I’ll wipe out your whole fuckin’ family and then ‘the cancer’ of Ryan’s will be the least of your problems.”
I turn back to Gio. “Get this trash off the street and put it back where it belongs.”
The five surviving henchmen untie Roger and, shaking their heads, put him in the limousine, ready to take him back to his pawn shop.
“You’re a disgrace, Cas,” mumbles Gio.
“A fuckin’ pussy, Cas,” shout Cookies’n’Books, in unison.
The limousine speeds away with the henchmen still cursing m
y name.
I sigh, re-holster my gun, and turn back to Nico and Ana.
“Let’s go back upstairs,” I say.
But as I turn to go back inside, I catch Ana’s face, and suddenly, I feel nothing but guilty.
She didn’t need to see this, I say to myself.
I try to take her hand.
“Ana baby,” I say, gently, “please. I’m sorry you had to see that.”
But she pulls away from me, and I suddenly feel like she’s become as distant as one of Neptune’s moons.
“Nice job, Prince Caspian,” Nico remarks sarcastically.
I push the button for the elevator and side-eye Nico, noting with major disappointment that Ana is still frowning, looking down at the ground, with tears welling up in her eyes.
“Yeah, okay, Nico,” I snarl. “Fuck you, alright? Fuck. You.”
The elevator doors open, and Ana and I step inside.
“Take your ass back home, Nico. I don’t want to see you for the rest of the night.”
The doors shut in Nico’s face before he has a chance to say anything.
I try to reach for Ana, again, but she pulls away.
We ride the rest of the trip in total silence.
Chapter 12
Ana
“You were actually gonna kill him,” I say as I follow Cas back inside his penthouse. “You looked at that poor man in the eye with full intention of blowing his brains out.”
Cas doesn’t reply as he heads towards his bathroom and turns on the cold water faucet in the sink. He bends over and washes his face for what feels like an unnecessary amount of time before finally drying himself off with a white fluffy hand towel. The quality of it actually surprises me, given the current bachelor pad status of his apartment.
It is only then that he turns around to face me.
I don’t like the look in his eyes.
“Ana,” he begins, “after your old man murdered my dad, who do you think was expected to take over the family? Because it sure as hell wasn’t Nico.”
“To be fair, given that I thought you were dead, that’s a pretty reasonable assumption, Cas.”
He rolls his eyes.
“Semantics. Point is, you know it’s not all sunshine and roses in our line of business. As much as you wish it was, it just isn’t.”
“You don’t have to tell me what this kind of life is like!” I bite back. “It’s what I wanted to get away from—or have you forgotten that, Cas? I thought it was what you wanted to get away from.”
Cas’ eyes immediately soften. He walks over and takes hold of my hands, running soft circles over my palms with his thumbs.
“I did want to get away from it. And a large part of me still does. But sticking with my family was the only way I’d have access to all of the resources I needed to track you down. And besides…”
Cas glances out of the window.
“I love my brother. And I love the members of this twisted, extended family of mine. They were all I had when I lost you. They never judged me for wanting to run off with you in the first place. They literally saved my life. So I need to be the boss that they need me to be.”
He sighs, breaking away from me to run a hand through his hair in agitation.
“You don’t have to accept it, Ana. And given what’s happened to you so far, I wouldn’t blame you, but you need to know. You need to understand. This is part of who I am now, just as those scars and bruises on your skin are a part of you, too.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence for a few minutes as I take in everything Cas has said.
I can’t really blame him for how he’s chosen to live his life over the past three years. And I do understand. I just wish it hadn’t happened.
But I spent three years thinking the man I love was dead, and now, I have him back. Changed or not, we are both fundamentally the same people at our very core.
I walk over to Cas and stroke his face with the back of my hand. He nuzzles against it, eyes closed. When he opens them again, I give him a smile.
“Okay. I understand, Cas. I don’t like it, but I understand. And it doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
He holds my gaze seriously. “I swear I’ll keep you out of everything mob-related as much as I can. It’s the least I can do for you, after all this time. I’ll shield you from it all. I just…”
“You just needed me to know. I get it.”
Cas gives me a grin, and it makes him look altogether more like himself. “I am a motherfuckin’ crime boss, after all.”
I gently swat my hand against his face. “That was so uncool. Never say that again.”
“Aw, it wasn’t even a little bit cool?”
“Nope. Not at all.”
“Well, I guess we can’t be perfect all the time.”
“Ha! What a suggestion.”
And just like that, we’ve returned to regular old Caspian Andreas and Ana Rachmanoff. We banter, and we flirt, and we find any excuse to touch each other. It’s so easy.
But then Cas takes out the gun he had originally intended to use outside, and I can’t help but flinch a little.
Cas gives me a sideways glance as he checks for a round in the barrel and deftly unloads the magazine. It's oddly mesmerizing.
“I’m just cleaning it, Ana,” he says as he puts the gun down on a table and retrieves a box of the required cleaning supplies. “Feel free to watch.”
I’ve seen men who work for my father clean their guns before. Hell, I saw Yuri do it far more often than was necessary. But something compels me to watch Cas perform the inane action all the same.
He inspects the inside of the barrel, then disassembles the gun into its component parts and gets to work.
It frightens me a little, to see Cas work his way around the gun with practiced hands: the way he efficiently soaks the inside of the barrel with a cleaning rod, the way he thoroughly scrubs it out with a bore brush, and the way he carefully applies lubricant to a cotton rod and inserts it into the barrel, methodically sliding it up and down.
Oh.
I feel a stirring in-between my thighs that I most definitely never felt when watching any of my father’s men clean their guns.
I shift my legs slightly and lick my lips. There’s no denying it: Cas cleaning a gun is hot.
Then Cas glances up, takes one look at me, and has his fingers entwined in my hair and his lips upon mine in a second.
He bites my lower lip slightly. His eyes are heavy with desire.
“How can you expect me to work when you’re looking at me like that?” he growls softly.
He sounds so raw and masculine when he says that. It kicks in some primal desire and instinct to trust him.
I lean back in to return the kiss, allowing it to linger and grow until we’re in danger of letting it become something more.
Eventually, I pull away and saunter towards the bathroom.
I hear Cas stutter in disbelief behind me. “You can’t do that and just—walk away!”
I pause to look over my shoulder at him, grinning maliciously. “But you have some cleaning to return to, Mr. Andreas. And I wouldn’t want to get in the way of your work. I’ll be in the shower.”
It is unbelievably satisfying to hear him chuckle, “You’ll be the death of me,” as I close the bathroom door, strip, and head into the shower.
I let my imagination run a little wild—just a little—as the steam envelops me.
I know that it’s only a matter of time before my imagination becomes reality, and that is a very appealing prospect, indeed.
Chapter 13
Cas
I step through the door, the warm air from outside filling my lungs as I stand in contemplation.
The last few days with Ana have been like traveling through time. From the moment I laid eyes on her, wedding gown pooling at her feet and dagger clenched in her hand, I’ve been fooling myself that the last three years never happened.
Not for us anyway.
Even while
I’ve thought about Yuri, about Ana’s father, and what’s been done to us, I’ve been pretending that she and I are still the same people we were back then.
Today is a startling reminder that nothing could be further from the truth.
I am not the kid who nearly bled out in that chapel three years ago. And Ana, my sweet Ana, she’s not the same girl who watched it happen.
Too much has transpired between then and now. We’ve changed.
I run my hands briskly through my hair, groaning in frustration at my current situation.
Thinking of the way she looked at me, fear filling her blue eyes, makes my heart ache.
I can protect her from many things, but not this. I can’t protect her from seeing the man that I now am, any more than I can protect her from the woman she’s become.
“That went well,” a voice chimes, pulling me roughly from my spiraling thoughts.
I look over to find Nico, reclining against the building like some bully in an ‘80s movie.
“Thanks.”
He stands upright, walking quickly over to me. His face pulls into a scowl as he nears, eyes thinning in disapproval.
“Seriously, man, what the fuck was that?”
“Don’t start with me,” I say simply, hoping that will be the end of it but knowing better.
Nico isn’t one to sit on his thoughts. If he has an opinion about something, you’d better be damn ready because you’re gonna hear about it.
He holds his hands up, palms flat towards me.
“I just think you need to know, Cas, that didn’t look good.”
“That’s because it wasn’t.”
“It’s Ana, right? Look, man, I get it, but you can’t be pulling that kind of shit. You looked weak, Cas. How the fuck are these guys supposed to respect you if you let people off with a warning?”
“It wasn’t that much money.”
“It was enough. You know damn well that any other day, that asshole would have caught a bullet.”
“Well, I guess it’s just his lucky day then, huh?”
He rolls his eyes, gesturing dramatically in irritation.
“Is this how it is from now on then? You’re gonna go soft so you don’t upset your little sweetheart?”