by Sienna Snow
Master of Control
Sienna Snow
Contents
Gods of Vegas Book 5
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Gods of Vegas Book 1
About Sienna Snow
Books by Sienna Snow
Gods of Vegas Book 5
By Sienna Snow
Copyright Page
Copyright © 2020 by Sienna Snow
Published by Sienna Snow
All rights reserved.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to the seller and purchase your own copy. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Cover Design: Steamy Designs
Editor: Jennifer Haymore
www.siennasnow.com
ISBN - eBook - 978-1-948756-19-8
ISBN - Print - 978-1-948756-20-4
Chapter One
Present Day
Sebastian
I was a bastard. I knew it. And within the next few minutes, so would she.
I’d spent the last months seducing and fucking the woman I was about to marry.
Most people wouldn’t see this as a problem, but then again, they hadn’t spent the past five months pretending to be someone else. Someone who wasn’t the devil she believed her fiancé to be.
I stared at my reflection in the holding room of Berlin Cathedral, knowing the minute her beautiful cobalt gaze landed on me, there would be only two possible outcomes. One, she would refuse to go through with the wedding, which would start a war neither of our families could afford. Or two, she’d marry me and hate me for the rest of my life.
Either way, I was fucked. And not the kind that left me coming deep in her cunt.
I wasn’t the type of man to show weakness or to care what happened to others. The ends always justified the means. Now I was going to lose the only thing that mattered to me outside of taking down the empire my father had inherited on the ashes of my dead mother.
“Sebastian, you ready, son?” a voice said in polished German from behind me.
I shifted my focus to the tall, dark-haired man who looked more like me than my own father.
“I’m ready.” I took a deep breath. “Wish me luck.”
My uncle Fredrik studied me and shook his head. “You made your bed, boy. Now it’s time to face the consequences. If you even want to think about taking the reins from your father, you’d better marry the Benz girl. Whether she hates you or not is insignificant. You hear me?”
Fredrik was the only one in my immediate family who knew what I’d done. I’d confessed the mess I was in after the last time I’d seen my bride. Guilt made a man do some crazy things. Among them was telling my uncle, who was a stickler for behavior, how I’d spent the last few months lying to the woman who owned my soul.
Now here I was, a man who hadn’t believed in love, who hadn’t believed in anything but the end goal, ready to face the fact he was about to lose the woman who made him want more than vengeance.
“I hear you. One way or another, there will be a wedding today.” I just hoped it wouldn’t be a forced one.
“Let’s go. Your Vater is waiting.”
Yes, it was always good not to keep the egotistical bastard waiting.
I followed my uncle through the ornately decorated halls of the cathedral and up the aisle to the front altar. Pater Joseph waited in his robes for me to approach.
I’d confessed all manner of sins to him since childhood. He understood the world my family encompassed and never batted an eye. He also gave me his unique style of pressure to get me to pursue things outside of the family businesses.
Near him stood my second-in-command and best man, Lucas Flynn. He shook his head as I approached, knowing the shitstorm about to take hold. I ignored everyone else in the packed church, accepting my fate.
Pater Joseph gestured to his left, which was the right of the church, and said, in his singsongy German voice, “The Lord is with you. It’s a good day to marry.”
If only the man knew the truth.
I took my position and waited. The music from the organs started and the doors opened.
The second my bride came into view, her eyes landed on mine. Knowledge and pain filled her dark-blue gaze.
I was well and truly fucked.
Chapter Two
Eight Months Until the Wedding
Sebastian
“You’ll marry her if it’s the last thing you do.”
I stared blankly at my father as he sat behind his giant desk with his hands propped on his bulging belly.
He glared at me as if he were the master of all he surveyed and I’d better fall in line.
The last thing I would do was agree to marry some prim, proper, over-pampered princess who would be more of a liability than an asset. For the past however-many generations, every marriage in the Weber family had been arranged by the patriarch. I’d believed I was home free, since Jonas Weber could give two shits about me or my future.
Besides, I wasn’t in the market for marriage, and I definitely wasn’t in the mood to indulge one of Jonas’s delusions of grandeur by resurrecting some archaic family tradition.
Yes, he was the head of Weber International, the construction conglomerate that could make or break any development project in Germany, but he hadn’t gotten there without my help.
Until I’d taken over the day-to-day operations using my connections and ties, Jonas Weber had been nothing more than a Berlin mob boss with limited reach outside his territory.
But to hear the man speak, he made it seem like he’d singlehandedly created the empire he proudly ran. Left to his own devices, the family would have fallen to one of the rival organizations vying for position in Berlin before I hit twenty.
If my grandfather, Opa Steven, hadn’t made me promise on his deathbed to keep the family going, I would have turned my back on the whole thing before I’d started college in America. Nothing was holding me to the city, family, or country of my birth. My grandfather was dead, my mother was dead, my sister was dead.
All because of the bastard sitting across from me.
My vow to Opa Steven was the only reason I was willing to put up with my father’s bullshit demands. How someone so great as my grandfather could have sired a loudmouth know-it-all for a son, who sat on his ass instead of getting his hands dirty, was beyond me. It would shock me if Jonas Weber even knew how to shoot a gun.
“The last thing I need is a bride. I won’t have some debutante kidnapped as a way to get back at our family.”
“Don’t argue with m
e, boy. This is done. You will do as I say.”
“I run the business. I call the shots. What makes you think I’m going to fall in line because you ordered it?”
A calculating gleam entered my father’s eyes. “I know you’ll do as I say because you want the glory. Everything you’ve done to date is in my name. And if you ever want full control, you will marry Russo Benz’s daughter.”
“I will not.”
He slammed his fist on the table. “You will, and you will do it with a smile. I don’t care if you marry her and only fuck her one time to get the deal sealed, but you will marry her.”
“Give me one good reason I should comply. I don’t need you.”
“You want me to step down. I’ll do it within a month of you taking your vows.”
This was too easy. There was something else he was up to.
“I don’t buy it. You’d never give up the power. You like it too much.”
A scowl marred his face. I was the only one around who told him like it was and wasn’t afraid of him ordering a hit on me. The men he would order to take me out were loyal to me and would turn a gun on Jonas before even thinking to do anything to me.
“Any man who says he doesn’t like power is a liar.” He paused. “I have a deal for you.”
“I’m listening.”
The smirk on his face said he believed he’d gotten my compliance. “You’ve spent the last ten years trying to find out who murdered your whore of a mother. Well, I’ll give you the name.”
I clenched my jaw, holding in the urge to punch him.
“And you’re the pussy who allowed his wife and daughter to be raped and murdered.” I struck his ego with deliberate coldness.
The best way to get under Jonas’s skin was to deliver a blow with calm calculation. He’d never had the discipline or the skill to counter these kinds of blows.
Opa Steven had taught me the only way to manage the family was to keep emotions locked away, never reveal any weakness, and most of all, never, ever let temper guide decisions.
Jonas’s face grew red. Bringing up my baby sister Hannah always struck a nerve. She was his one love, not his wife, or me. Hannah had been a light in a house full of anger, full of demands, and full of hate. I never begrudged Hannah for escaping the “discipline” Jonas had wielded on me in order to turn me into a man. Hannah had been the one to hide me when Jonas was pissed off about one thing or another. She would find some way to redirect Jonas away from me.
“It was your mother’s fault Hannah was with her that day. She’s to blame.”
“And you did nothing to protect either of them.”
The day my mother and Hannah were taken, their usual security detail was on assignment for Jonas. In their place was a group of new recruits into the family. Sending anyone without experience to protect the wife of a mob boss was beyond stupid, and yet Jonas viewed his wife’s life as expendable. The fact Hannah had decided to go along on their shopping trip wasn’t anyone’s fault. From everything I’d learned after I’d returned home, it was Mama and Hannah’s biweekly outing that Jonas should have known about.
“There was no way to know she wasn’t meeting her lover.”
Jonas would constantly accuse her of cheating. Everyone knew it wasn’t true. Mama was watched day and night because of Jonas’s paranoia.
Mama had been originally promised to my uncle and my father’s older brother, Andrew. The two had been friends since they were teens and fell in love as they grew older. The match had been a perfect way to align neighboring families. When Andrew was killed in a territory war with a rival, Opa Steven rearranged the marriage contract for Jonas. In the beliefs of the families, one son was as good as another when it meant keeping the peace.
It wasn’t until after the marriage that Opa Steven and everyone realized what a fucked-up, sadistic bastard Jonas was. The vibrant woman people would describe my mother as being disappeared, and the only important things in her life became Hannah and me. Even if she were having an affair, I wouldn’t have faulted her for seeking some semblance of comfort in the world of abuse she lived in.
“There was no lover. It was your paranoia for the fact your wife loved your dead brother more than she ever cared for you. You had the chance to get them back, yet you sat in this office and let them be slaughtered.”
“Webers do not negotiate. Arabella knew the danger of going out in the middle of a war.”
The peace, or relative peace, the family had enjoyed for twenty-five years under Opa Steven had disappeared within months of Jonas taking over.
“That’s right—you like to pretend you had no choice by blaming the victim for your lack of balls.”
This was getting boring. It was our normal interaction. Jonas ordering me to do something and me ignoring him. For some reason, he hadn’t thrown me out of his office by my second retort.
Might as well end it now. I had an assignment to get to, and sparring with this asshole was keeping me from preparing. If only I could tell this dipshit that in addition to running the business he had neglected, I worked as a spy for Interpol, the very organization looking to take him down. My connections and position gave me access into areas it would take others ten times the manpower.
I was just about to stand and tell Jonas to fuck off with his plans and digs, when he pulled out a gun and pointed it in my direction.
His face was determined, but he wouldn’t pull the trigger. He needed me too much. I held his glare.
“You will marry that girl. You will expand our holdings. And you will fall in line.”
“As I told you. Give me one good reason why I should do anything you say. The way I see it, the only one benefiting from this is you.”
“No, boy, it’s about you. How badly do you want to find out who killed Arabella and Hannah?”
“Why would it matter to you now? You never tried to look before, and by the time I could, the trail was cold.”
“That’s not true. I damn well looked. I lost my little girl. I used every connection to find the bastards who did it.” His voice cracked, surprising me.
That was the first I’d ever heard about him looking. But then again, I’d been away at university in the States. Finding out Mama and Hannah had been killed after being kidnapped had nearly destroyed me. If Opa Steven hadn’t kept the knowledge of their deaths from me, I would have been on the next flight back to Germany instead of finishing my exams.
When I’d finally gotten home, there was nothing I could do. Jonas had raged about how Mama deserved everything she got but not his Hannah. He’d shown no inclination to find the killers, only laid blame on everyone, including me.
“Let’s just agree to disagree. Your efforts were more than likely half-assed, in the exact way you run the family.”
“You watch your mouth, boy. I’m still in charge here.” He waved the gun, his movements erratic, making me think he may shoot me by mistake more than intention.
“Boss.” One of Jonas’s security shifted toward him. “You need him, sir.”
Even his own men knew without me running things, they wouldn’t have a future.
“Go ahead and do it, old man. Remember, if I survive, one word from me and your life will take a very dramatic turn for the worse. Who do you think our allies are going to align with? You or me?”
Jonas set the gun on the table, gesturing for one of his men to take it. The man immediately complied and wrapped it in a handkerchief.
“To put your plan into play, you would go against your dear Opa’s wishes? Or do deathbed promises mean nothing to you?”
How the fuck would he know about the promise? I’d been the only one in the room when he’d asked me to vow to keep the family intact. Which in Opa’s world meant keeping Jonas in charge until the next generation was born. Then and only then would I get the reins, even if I ran everything behind the scenes.
“You bugged his room. The man built you an empire and you showed him no respect, even at the end.”
“T
he man, as you say, wasn’t the saint you want to believe. His hands were as dirty as the rest of ours. People only respected him out of fear.”
And Jonas was probably the shadiest of us all. One day soon the world as he knew it would collapse. I was laying the foundation, piece by piece.
“We’re going around in circles. My answer to your proposal is no.”
I rose from my seat and moved to the door.
Right when my fingers circled the doorknob, Jonas said, “I’m not the one who arranged this marriage, I’m the one to enforce the contract.”
I turned, not believing a word coming out of his mouth. This whole conversation had been a waste of my time. I was due in Italy for an assignment, and my jet was ready to leave as soon as I made it to the airstrip.
“And who arranged it?”
“Arabella and your Opa. The proof’s here.” He pulled out an envelope and tossed it across the table.
I walked back to the desk, grabbed the envelope, and opened it. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
Ten years ago, only months before Mama’s death, Opa Steven with Mama as a witness had signed a betrothal contract between Eloisa Benz and me. It was also an agreement to combine all of the Benz territories running from Berlin to the Baltic Sea and west to the North Sea with the Weber holdings. The marriage would create the largest-held territory in Germany.
I ran a hand through my hair. This couldn’t be happening. There had to be a way out of it. It was the fucking twenty-first century.