I could feel my heart starting to speed up. “Jesus, Kiera, you went there?”
“I did. To help. And then, when I went exploring, I saw—”
“When you did what?” The walls were closing in on me.
“When I went exploring, I saw the elevator. Are you deaf or something? Am I talking too fast for you?”
“You went exploring.” I was starting to shake. “I cannot believe you would do something so stupid.”
“I got information that we needed,” she said. “It wasn’t stupid. It was brilliant. I thought…” She furrowed her brow. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Because you’re being an ass, as usual.” She folded her arms over her chest.
I rubbed my forehead. “I’m not being an ass, I’m just a little confused as to why you thought it would be a good idea to go completely out of the bounds of what you’re supposed to do.”
“Because we needed the schematics, that’s why.”
I had visions of Kiera walking into that place, running into any one of a number of thugs who I knew by either name or reputation, and those men destroying her. Some of those men really liked hurting girls, and Kiera was the kind of girl that just set them off. She was cute. Sweet-looking. Adorable, really. And she had that body. Those hips. That ass.
God, they would use her and hurt her before they killed her.
She had no fucking clue what they could have done to her.
I had seen a woman once—her neck a gaping hole of gore like a second, sick smile.
“There’s nothing we need so bad that you do something like that.” I clenched my hands into fists to keep them from shaking.
“It wasn’t that big of a deal. No one saw me. Well, I mean, they almost saw me, but I ran really fast, and I—”
Before I knew what I was doing, I had grabbed her and propelled her into the wall. I had both of my hands on her shoulders, and I was holding her in place there. “You ran?” I growled.
She shrank in on herself, cowering from me. “Calm down.”
That was the way it was with women. They were frightened of me. And they should be. “You ran because you were in danger. Admit it.”
“I ran to keep myself from getting in danger,” she corrected in a tiny voice.
“You should never have been in there.”
She raised her face, a defiant look coming into her eyes. “I can do whatever I want. You can’t order me around.”
“I want to keep you safe. That’s all.”
“You act like the big brother I never wanted.”
“Well, you act like some idiot child who has no regard for herself.”
“Did you just call me an idiot?”
I didn’t answer.
“Let go of me,” she whispered.
“No,” I said, digging my fingers into her shoulders. I put my face right in hers, and that was when I realized how close we were. Her soft, small body was in my grasp, and I was inches from her. All I would need to do is smooth my hands down over her shoulders, and I could cup her breasts. They looked like they were the perfect size—round and firm and squeezable. I wondered about her nipples. Were they small and pink? Big and red? I wondered what kind of noise she’d made if I touched her. If I put my mouth on her. “What you don’t seem to understand is that bad men could grab you in just the way that I’m doing. And if you beg them to let you go, they won’t listen.”
“Let go of me,” she repeated. She was livid. She struggled against me.
I held her in place. And the sight of her body moving, of her tits jiggling under her shirt, made me hard.
I let out a tattered breath. This was a bad idea. I had to let go of her, or I was going to lose control of myself.
“You can’t call me stupid, and then… and then…” Now her breath was shallow and fast. She looked into my eyes. She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth and bit down on it. It plumped.
My cock throbbed.
“You have no idea what I could do to you, do you?” I said in a throaty voice. “You would be helpless against me. You could beg and scream and thrash, and it wouldn’t make any difference.”
Her lips parted. “Danger,” she breathed. “I…”
I dipped my face lower. I wanted to take those lips, capture them, and use them as the first sign that I had claimed her. I wanted to lift her legs and take her here, right against this wall. Fuck her until she screamed.
I pushed away from her. I turned and faced the other direction, and when I spoke, my voice wasn’t steady. “You are an idiot. You’re just lucky nothing happened. And you’re lucky that I don’t teach you a lesson.”
“Teach me a lesson? You do think you’re my big brother, don’t you?” But her voice was trembling too. “Well, newsflash, Demetrius, I am a grown up, and you can’t—”
“You’re an idiot.” I stalked out of the room before I did something I would regret.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kiera
I was crying in my apartment with a bottle of wine. I hadn’t even bothered to pour it into a glass. I was just slugging it right out of the bottle.
I knew that Demetrius did not deserve my tears. He was the idiot, not me.
But he’d been so horrible to me earlier. I didn’t get it.
And the really screwed up thing about it was that there was this moment—maybe a couple of them, actually—in which I felt really fucking turned on by the whole thing.
That was insane. He was a jerk, and I didn’t want to be treated that way. I didn’t find it sexy when a guy was rude to me.
Honestly, I kept sex very compartmentalized. If I found myself thinking about it too much, I would make sure that I spent some time reading some trashy books or even watching porn. Supposedly, women were not supposed to be as into porn as men, because women weren’t supposed to be turned on by visual stimulation or something, but I found that to be bullshit.
I liked watching porn sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes.
It did the trick.
Sometimes I didn’t need to read or watch anything. I’d just have my own fantasies.
And I knew that having a sex life that involved no one except me and my vibrator meant that I was vaguely pathetic, but I just didn’t want to waste any time on trying to meet a real guy.
Not only that, it wasn’t as if I was the most appealing woman in the universe. I was a big geek, and I wasn’t exactly… girly. I mean, I tried, but a lot of stuff that women were really into, like manicures and wearing lots of makeup, I just didn’t understand. I guess you’d call me low maintenance.
So, I didn’t expect that I was going to find the perfect guy just waiting around for me somewhere.
Anyway, when I did find him, I wouldn’t want him to be a jerk.
But I guessed there was something that was kind of appealing about his being… commanding.
Like, the thing with Demetrius was that he was so big and burly and male. And he had that voice that could get all low and deep. And when he’d been angry with me earlier, it had done that. He’d been angry with me, growling at me, but it had still made me feel shivery.
So.
Maybe I was lying to myself. Maybe I was attracted to Demetrius after all.
On a purely physical level. It was all about biology. Had to be. He was built like a caveman, so the cavewoman within me wanted him. Some primitive part of my brain lit up when he grabbed me by the shoulders. I had ancestral memory of being dragged around by my hair back to his lair. A tall, hulking shadow of a man would slowly strip away the furs that I wore from my body before he had his way with me and forced me to be his…
God, even thinking about it was kind of turning me on.
But it was horrible.
I didn’t want that.
I didn’t want Danger. Not in any real sense.
And that wasn’t why I was crying. I was crying because I thought that I had done well. I had done something innovative,
gone above and beyond, and I had gotten valuable information for the job. But he’d called me an idiot.
Not once, but three times.
That hurt my feelings.
And even though I knew he was just a big jerkface, I wanted him to think well of me. I wanted to be the best damned hacker he’d ever worked with. I wanted to do this job perfectly.
I had to.
Because I had screwed up in the past. And not just a little screwup, either. An epic one. One that had destroyed everything. And if I didn’t manage to prove myself, then…
Well, I just had to prove myself. I had to be better than the best. I had to be perfect.
That was the reason that I put my job above everything. Because it was the only thing I cared about. Once I had reached that level—and I wasn’t sure exactly what that level was, but I knew I would feel it when I got there—then there might be time for other things. Not before.
I didn’t deserve anything else until I got to that level.
Right now, the shadow of that epic screwup fell over everything that I did, and it hurt so bad sometimes, it felt like I couldn’t breathe. As if my rib cage was slowly tightening, squeezing my internal organs, crushing me to death. I fought against that pain with every successful hack that I did.
This job that I was doing for Danger?
This job was a real job, with lots of different things that I would have to do. I had to nail this.
But I was off to a bad start, because Demetrius thought I was an idiot, and he was probably right.
I was probably going to fail spectacularly at this. And the worst thing about that was that another person’s life was on the line this time—an innocent girl from the Ukraine, who had never asked to be part of this. If I failed at this job, I failed Natasha.
I slugged down some more wine.
This thought process was only making me cry harder, because I wasn’t sure that I was up to it.
Deep down, I was pretty sure that I was a big, fat failure, and that hurt worse than anything.
* * *
Demetrius
I managed to keep busy for the rest of the day, but when I got back home, I didn’t have anything to keep my mind off of what had happened. I took a shower, intending to let hot jets of water pound over me and scald away any of my stupid thoughts, but I ended up jerking off in the shower.
I had this dumb fantasy about her, and I always caved to it, even though I had told myself over and over to stop thinking about her when I masturbated. It made it awkward whenever I saw her.
In my fantasy, I was alone with her, and she was lying down on a bed. I stripped her clothes from her, and she trembled.
She looked up at me while I undressed myself, but she didn’t help. Her eyes were big and wide.
When she saw my cock, she let out a little tiny breath, a sound of awe and dismay. “It’s so big,” she whispered. “It’s too big.”
Okay, so it wasn’t exactly the most creative fantasy in the grand scheme of things. It was pretty run of the mill, I guessed.
It got me off, though, and I returned to it over and over again.
It wasn’t just the idea that she was so impressed by the size of my cock. It wasn’t a fantasy that I was well-endowed, either. I had it on good authority that my cock was larger than average. And it was always nice to be big. People say stuff about size not mattering, but they have small dicks. If size really didn’t matter, no one would say that it didn’t, because it would be a non-issue.
Anyway, I did like fantasizing about her being impressed, but there was more to the fantasy.
In the fantasy, she was so innocent that she had no idea what was going on, and I had to… to teach her.
That really turned me on.
And the idea of her being a little bit afraid of me, but allowing me to soothe her, to show her that I would be gentle with her, well that was all part of it too.
But it was all just a stupid fantasy, because I would never touch her.
I couldn’t do something like that to her, couldn’t teach her about sex or about pleasing me or about any of those things, because then I would be taking responsibility for her, and I couldn’t do that.
Being near me would only hurt her.
I might hurt her.
Maybe that was the darkest part of the fantasy, the part that I didn’t even like to admit to myself. But I was aroused by the idea of being too big for her, of taking her tiny, tight pussy even as she flinched under me and struggled to accommodate me.
That really got me going.
I was some kind of sick bastard, that was what I was.
I would never hurt her.
I just…
Fuck it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Demetrius
“What are you doing here, Matteo?” I stood at the front door of my house. My hair was still wet from the shower.
Matteo was standing on the front stoop. He had a messenger bag slung over his portly frame. “I wanted to show you some stuff.”
“Look, it’s not really a good time—”
“You got a girl in there or something?” Matteo tried to peer around me into my living room.
I blocked him. “There’s no one here.”
“Then why you trying to keep me out?”
I didn’t answer. It was basically because I wanted to be alone with my thoughts about Kiera. Maybe dial up my sick little fantasy again, rub another one out.
That was pathetic.
I stepped away from the door and let Matteo inside. “Come on in,” I said.
He grinned. “Thanks, man.” And he stepped inside.
I shut the door after him.
He made himself at home, sitting down on the black leather couch in my living room. He opened up his messenger bag and took out a laptop. “Come on over here.”
I sighed. “What is it that you want to show me?”
“It’s just some stuff about Natasha.”
I groaned. “Jesus, Matteo, what more do you want from me? I’m on this stupid job for you. We’re going to get her back.”
“Are you?” He looked up at me, and his chin was trembling a little bit. “When?”
“This stuff takes time.”
“Well, it shouldn’t. It should happen sooner rather than later. Because I don’t know what they’re doing to her in there. She could already be…” His voice cracked and he turned his attention to his laptop.
I sighed again. God damn it. I went over to the couch and sat down next to him. “She’ll be okay.”
“No, she won’t. I know what these men do to girls like her. She’ll probably come out addicted to heroin and afraid of any man touching her ever again.”
I licked my lips. He was right. His little girlfriend was probably being raped viciously by all of the men in the Mikailhov family, and no matter what kind of person she was, she didn’t deserve that.
I had made no secret that I didn’t approve of Matteo trying to get a bride from Russia. I told him that these sorts of things were generally scams. The women would flirt with him, make him promises, and then ask for money, which he—being besotted—would shell out, and then abruptly, she’d disappear when she’d bled him dry. These women were con-artists, as far as I was concerned. Sure, maybe there were a few of them who were genuinely looking for love.
But even so, a woman who was willing to leave everything behind and marry some guy in America, even if he looked like my cousin, well, she was an opportunist, at the very least.
I had said all of this to him.
And when he first showed me the picture of Natasha, I was even more convinced it was a bad idea, because she was gorgeous. Thin and blond and tall. Her only “flaw” was a quirk that only served to soften her and make her more attractive, a gap between her front teeth.
She spoke English badly. In order to communicate with her, Matteo paid ten bucks a pop for an email translation. He paid to translate his emails and hers.
He had spent a fortune on emails with th
is woman.
I thought of her as a sunk cost, one he wasn’t yet willing to give up on.
Still. She was a human being, and—
Hell, the thing was, though, I couldn’t stop the Mikailhov family from doing this. They shipped in women and they sold them as sex slaves. It was disgusting, but what the hell was I supposed to do about it? The world was disgusting. There were terrible things happening every minute.
I rubbed my forehead. “I’m going to get her out of there.”
“You promise?”
“Listen, I think you should consider the fact that when Natasha is released, she’s not going to be pleased to see you. She might only want to go home.”
He drew back. “That’s why I came over here to talk to you. You don’t understand anything about what is between us. I need you to understand.”
I raised my gaze to the ceiling. “Matteo, I know that you think that there’s some kind of love story between the two of you, but—”
He shoved the laptop in my face, and pointed at the screen. There was a picture there of him with Natasha somewhere in the Ukraine. They were outside, the sky behind them, the wind blowing her hair over her face. He had his arm around her, and she was looking at him and smiling. “This is after I asked her to marry me.”
I wrinkled my forehead. The truth was that Natasha looked pretty much sublimely happy in the picture. So did Matteo. That went without saying. But she had this glow about her, her skin red-tinged from the wind and the brisk weather, and the look in her eyes…
It was adoration.
I slammed the laptop shut.
“I have more,” he said. “I want to read you some of the emails she sent.”
“Those are translated, and you don’t even know if the translator is actually translating what she’s saying.”
“Oh, please, Demetrius.” He glared at me. He opened the laptop again. “I can’t wait to see you again. I am counting the days until we can be together forever,” he read.
“Stop it,” I said. “I’m getting her out. I don’t know what more you want from me.”
“Let me find the one where we talk about how many kids we want to have.”
I got up from the couch and faced him down. “You don’t have to do this.”
Rough: A Hitman Romance Page 4