by Stacy Gail
And they were both mine.
“You feel so good, Dasha. Fuck. My every fantasy come to life.” The words caressed my lips, his mouth still on mine as he spoke. The hands at my back pulled the tissue-thin silk blouse I wore out of my skirt where it was tucked. Then his palms slid against the bare skin of my lower back, making my breath catch. “Love those pretty little hands on me, beautiful. Touch me anywhere, I don’t care. Just keep touching me and don’t ever stop.”
“Thank you for the invitation. I gladly accept.” My fingers bunched in the silkiness of his hair—God, I just couldn’t get enough of the feel of it—before my mouth was caught by his once more. Excitement quivered deep in my belly as his tongue stroked against mine as if he couldn’t get enough of my taste, and the urgent bloom of achy, needy wetness between my legs made me whimper.
That faint noise seemed to have a profound effect on him. One of his hands moved around my rib cage to boldly possess my breast, and I hated that my bra acted as a barrier between us. Frustration to get that skin-on-skin contact swelled in tandem with hunger, and I tried to undo the first few buttons of his shirt one-handed—no way could I make myself completely let go of his spectacular hair. Finally I became so ravenous for the feel of him that I pushed through the partial opening, so I could revel in his skin gliding beneath my exploring fingers.
Yes.
His chest was magnificent—warm flesh wrapped tautly over living steel. The texture of his skin went from smooth satin to the faintest abrasiveness of hair that made my palms tingle with the need for more. More touching, more exploring, more him.
More.
“I love knowing you want to feel me.” His murmur was like a purr in my ears, and it kicked my internal temperature up into the volcanic zone while everything womanly inside me melted. In that moment, if he’d wanted to, he could have molded me into anything he desired. “Feeling me, tasting me. You do want to do that now, don’t you? You want to put your hands on me. Your mouth on me. Your tongue on me. Everywhere.”
“Yes.” Just the thought made me shiver, and suddenly my tongue needed to know the taste of his skin in the worst way.
“You want to fuck me, Fearless? You want me to fuck you?”
My eyes opened, though when I had closed them I had no clue. My stomach dipped in giddy delirium when I found he was already looking at me, watching me with a hunger that was overwhelming, and every instinct I had told me that this wasn’t a teasing question or a cute part of foreplay.
My answer mattered to him.
“Yes, Polo.” It was just a whisper, but it seemed to echo between us as I stared into the dark depths of his eyes. “I want you to fuck me.”
A shudder ripped through him, as if his internal world was shifting, tearing apart, becoming something new. Then his mouth was on mine again while the arm around me tightened, his hand coming to clamp onto my butt to grind me into his body. The blatant hardness of his cock against my pelvis was unmistakable, and the evidence of how aroused he was sent a thrill of excitement coursing through my veins. This man, this amazingly complex man I’d known for almost half my life, wanted me. No excuses, no games, no playing it slick and pretending otherwise.
This man wanted me.
And he was going to get me.
The insistent buzzing of his cell phone burst the bubble of isolation around us, and I felt his mood alter even before his mouth left mine.
“That’s Yuri’s ringtone.” The hand he had under my shirt pulled out to dig for his phone, but I was pleasantly surprised when the hand he had on my ass stayed right where it was, grinding me against that rock-hard bulge that had my already-slick cleft aching with need. “I forgot I was expecting him to call about a meeting with the new security team for River Styx in—” he checked his watch and grimaced. “Less than an hour.”
It nearly killed me not to swear out loud. “This is twice now he’s interrupted us. That man is so off my Christmas card list, I’m not even kidding.”
“I’m sure he’ll be crushed.”
“Yeah.” I was the one being crushed with disappointment, but I tried to soldier through. “It’s okay, I understand.”
“Do you? Do you now understand why it is that you can always count on me to protect you?” He still hadn’t put the phone up to his ear, ignoring it as it rang again. “Even when it’s not my job anymore to do it?”
“I think so.” I put a hand to my head to keep it from spinning as he boomeranged back to our original conversation. “You’ve decided you’ve got the hots for me, and that we’ll probably be such dynamite in bed we should be listed on the no-fly list of dangerous materials.”
He didn’t laugh, or even smile like I’d expected him to. Instead he rolled his hips slowly against mine, making me gasp even as he looked into my eyes. “I decided a long time ago that we’d be dynamite, Fearless, so that doesn’t come into play here.”
Excitement built like a living thing inside me, making the ache between my legs a sweet agony to bear. “Then what does?”
“Maybe you should think about the first time I protected you. I wasn’t being paid then, either. But I did it, and I did it for the same reason I’m doing it now.”
Instantly my mind was back in the kitchen garden at the family estate, avoiding the two dead bodies across the path as I followed Polo, a knife held in my sweaty hand... “The first time?”
“If you don’t remember it, it was the first time I spoke after your old man brought me into the main house. It was the first time I’d spoken to anyone in years. And the person I chose to speak to was you.”
With that, he let me go, turned away and took the call.
Chapter Ten
I would never forget the day I met Polo.
For weeks preceding my memorable meeting with the young man who would become my greatest protector, my father went out of his way to tell me stories about him—the broken boy, the youngest Scorpeone who had come to be a Vitaliev hostage.
At first, my brother and I had little sympathy for this unknown boy. To no one’s surprise, Knives had had a borderline-insane drive to obliterate all things Scorpeone right after we got back to safety, a bloodthirsty drive my father had shared. For at least six months after we’d burned down that cabin, obliteration was apparently what the Scorpeone family got. Chicago’s streets ran with blood, as much as they ever had in Capone’s day, and while the news outlets whipped up the fear to hysterical levels pondering who would be the next to die, the underworld quietly pulled into whatever bolt hole it could find, held their loved ones close, and cowered in the face of my father’s incandescent fury.
But all things, even wars, eventually come to an end.
My father had brokered some deal with the Scorpeones that rendered them powerless, but it wasn’t until two years later that I learned Polo was at the heart of that deal. At the time, a deal of any kind hadn’t been what Knives had wanted; he wanted to burn all the Scorpeones to the ground and salt the earth.
Considering what had been done to Polo, an ending like that would have been more merciful.
But the deal wasn’t about mercy. It was about business, and war between the Vitalievs and the Scorpeones was bad for it. A deal that ensured stability was what the great Borysko Vitaliev wanted, so it was up to my brother and me to accept that we’d been properly avenged, and move on with our lives.
So we did. For two years we went about the everyday business of going to school and being with friends and growing up, all the while unaware that Polo Scorpeone, the innocent hostage whose life was forfeit if his family stepped out of line, was slowly losing his will to live.
Come to find out, torture could break even the strongest of spirits.
It shamed me to say it, but my father had forgotten about Polo. It wasn’t until Polo killed his handler, a vicious torpedo known for his sadistic cruelty, that he was finally remembered. At that point, most people might have run to keep their freedom, or maybe returned to their family despite being so heartlessly betraye
d by them. Polo didn’t do either. Instead, he presented himself immediately to my father and said the only words he was capable of speaking.
“Please kill me.”
Those hauntingly familiar words had gotten to my father the same way they’d gotten to me years earlier. My father even admitted that hearing those hopeless words mumble out of a seventeen-year-old boy had snapped him out of a rage for the Scorpeones that had lingered on despite accepting Polo as a hostage. In that moment, my father saw that he’d done a terrible thing in allowing this innocent boy—innocent no longer—to be dragged into a game that had nothing to do with him.
But it was done.
Worse yet, the damage could never be undone. The genie couldn’t be put back in the bottle and the good and decent boy Polo had once been was gone. He was now a cold-blooded, efficient killer, and not just of his handler. For two years, he’d been the favorite fucktoy of a sadist who liked to play games, his two favorites being Russian Roulette and something called Kill Or Be Killed. These “games” broke strong men, and they certainly broke Polo.
But in a weird way, they also created him.
At least once a week, Polo had been locked in a fighting cage with whatever evil piece of filth his handler could find—a meth-head junkie, a pedophile, or a new recruit eager to show how vicious he was. There was only one way out of that cage, and that was to beat the other person until they were unconscious, or dead.
After that, anything could be done to the prone body.
Anything.
In the beginning, Polo lost. A lot. I suspected that was around the time he’d also lost his voice, except to beg for death. After all, what was the point of begging for life, or mercy, or screaming for someone to help him? It was his family that had voluntarily delivered him to this hell, just so they could be saved. Who else was there that he could possibly call out to for help?
No one. There was no one.
Polo Scorpeone had been the most alone boy on earth.
Fortunately for Polo, his handler made three mistakes. Number one was not realizing that every time he put a gun to Polo’s head and pulled the trigger in his cruel Russian Roulette game, he inadvertently trained Polo to become numb to the fear of death. Number two was not understanding that whenever he threw Polo into the cage to fight for his life, over time he’d trained Polo how to be both brutal and without mercy. By the middle of his seventeenth year, Polo began killing whatever opponent he faced with a stone-cold ease that unnerved the men who’d once jeered him. Too late, it occurred to them that this boy was a Scorpeone, and they always wound up being deadly one way or another.
But his handler hadn’t been afraid. To prove how much control he’d believed he still had over his fucktoy, that sadistic torpedo stepped into the cage with Polo.
Mistake number three.
My father had been a lot of things, and in the eyes of many he was considered a monster. But when the broken, vacant thing that had been Polo sank to his knees in front of him and begged for death—the only phrase he had left in his traumatized mind—even my father was horrified. So much so that when my father told my brother and me about Polo, he had tears in his eyes, and his head had hung in shame.
I’d seen a lot of things in my time as a Vitaliev, but that was something I would never forget.
My father oversaw Polo’s slow recovery personally. He’d installed Polo in the guest house on the family estate, and eventually he reported that Polo stopped begging for death. But sadly, that meant he’d stopped talking entirely, and no one could get another word out of him. After Papa had prepared Knives and me, he decided to move Polo into the main house to keep a closer eye on him, and perhaps he secretly hoped that being around kids his own age might help him climb out of whatever catatonic nightmare that was going on inside his head.
For my part, I avoided Polo like the plague. I didn’t want to feel sorry for any Scorpeone, not even a badly abused one. But to my surprise, Knives did his best to befriend Polo, along with Alex Rodin. Miracle of miracles, it was my brother who managed to make Polo smile for the first time, an accomplishment that Knives talked glowingly about to this day.
Still, no one had been able to make the broken boy talk.
I told myself I didn’t care.
Most days I even believed it.
Then I came home from school one day to find myself alone in the Tudor-style castle my father had designed. Papa was almost always busy with work and my brother played rugby after school, so not seeing them wasn’t a big deal. But to not be greeted by our housekeeper Etta, or by Yuri or one of my father’s men, had never happened before.
Something was wrong.
Dangerously wrong.
The fear that had pumped through me had sent me into action. I dropped my school bag where I stood and crossed to an antique mahogany highboy off to one side. From its depths I pulled a .9mm Glock from the array of weaponry available, and checked to make sure it was loaded. All but the handgun had too much kick for a fifteen-year-old girl, but I was Annie freaking Oakley with a .9. Then I headed straight to my father’s office, all the while assuring myself that I was overreacting and that I’d be laughing about this later. But that calm logic didn’t stop me from entering without knocking, gun leveled, and safety off.
That was when I saw him, the boy I’d been avoiding.
Polo.
Back then, his silken fall of dark hair had been an even chin-length, and so perfectly straight it seemed unreal. Only the sides were pulled back to reveal those shocking, dead-blank eyes that to this day unnerved me whenever they made an appearance. He didn’t show any fear of having a gun pointed at him, nor had he jumped at my abrupt entrance. If I hadn’t seen him breathing, I would have thought he was a mannequin.
“Where’s my father?” I kept the gun on him, checking the corners of the room automatically before entering and shutting the door behind me. I leaned against it, listening hard. “Where’s Borysko Vitaliev? Or Yuri Rodin? Where is everyone?”
No answer.
Of course.
Until he’d smiled at my brother, no one had even been sure that Marco Polo Scorpeone had retained the ability to comprehend basic language.
But right then he didn’t seem to understand what was going on around him, or that he should be freaked out like I was. He just sat there, dead-eyed and blank-faced, staring at me without expression, without blinking.
A sad and broken doll.
In that moment, the last of my fury toward the Scorpeones died, and in its place swelled a warmth of compassion that overflowed my heart and flooded into every part of me. Since this boy’s mind had been shattered by all the violence that had been done to him, I figured the last thing he needed was more of the same. With that in mind, I quickly lowered the gun, took a calming breath and tried to smile at him.
“Look, um, sorry about bursting in here like that. Really. Uh, I came in here like that because... well, don’t get upset by this, but I think there’s something wrong going on in the house. But I don’t want you to worry, okay?” I rushed on, horrified that I might stress him out and knock him into some kind of hysterical coma or something. “Please, please don’t worry. I’m here now, and I’m gonna take care of you, so everything’s going to be all right. I’m going to make super-sure you’re safe, I promise.” I just wasn’t sure how I was going to do that.
I thought I heard something in the hall beyond the door, and I turned to press an ear to the wooden surface, listening hard. When I didn’t hear anything else, I turned back to the boy and found that he hadn’t moved, hadn’t even blinked, as far as I could tell. It was like the lights were on but no one was home. I sighed, trying to figure out what the next step was.
“All right,” I said, lowering my voice to a near-whisper. “Here’s the problem. I think there might be some unwanted guests in the house, so I’m going to go out there and, uh... ask them to leave.” Shoot them, kneecap them, demand to know where my father was. Whatever worked, I’d do it. “I need you t
o help me keep you nice and safe here in my father’s office by locking this door behind me. Do you understand? You,” I pointed at him, trying to use sign language in the hope that something—anything—I said was reaching him, “stay. Stay in here. You stay safe. I’ll protect you. Wait until my dad or Nizhy or I come to get you, but don’t open the door for anyone else. And please don’t worry about a thing, okay? You’re going to be fine, because I’m going to keep you safe.”
He didn’t answer, but by then I wasn’t expecting one. I didn’t hang around, instead moving back through the door before I lost my nerve. I saw him move as I began to shut the door as quietly as I could, then gasped as he yanked the door open, grabbed the gun out of my hand and put a hand over my mouth while backing me up into a wall before I knew what was happening.
“No.” His whisper was so low, so guttural, I could barely hear him. “You’re... fearless. But no. That’s not how this works. I protect you.”
I was so stunned he’d spoken that at first his rusty words didn’t register. Then he grabbed my hand, and together we moved through the house, finding neither my father nor any of his men. We found Etta the housekeeper unconscious in the pantry, sending me into a near-panic, but for Polo it was as though we’d found nothing more interesting than a knocked-over sack of flour. He took a couple knives from the butcher’s block, gave one to me and stuffed the other one in the back of his jeans. As he did so, his dark eyes looked right into mine like he was unable to see anything else.
“We stay together, no matter what. Yes?”
Since he seemed like he wasn’t going to move until I responded, I nodded. “Yes. We stay together.”
“Good. Together.” At last he turned to move, and I was in awe of how silently he did so. “The only way I’ll ever leave your side is if I die. We’re going to try to get off the estate and get help.”
It sounded like a great plan, except for one thing. “Please don’t die. I’m cool with everything else you said, but it’d be great if you stayed alive. So please do that for me, okay?”