The Devil's Beauty (Crime Lord Interconnected Standalone Book 2)

by Airicka Phoenix

  She didn’t really want Penny. She wouldn’t know what to do with her, truthfully. But the fact that he would let her, made her kiss him. Her fingers brush the side of his face where a five o’clock shadow had begun to prickle her fingertips.

  “Is it over?” she asked quietly.

  The line his mouth formed answered even before John Paul did.

  “Not yet.”

  Ava peered at the other two at the table. “What happened? I thought Elena was caught.”

  “Elena’s dead,” Dimitri told her.

  “What?” She glanced from one to the other. “How? When?”

  “She’s been dead since Puerto Rico,” Dimitri said. “It’s been Ivan coming after you.”

  “But I don’t know Ivan,” she protested. “I mean, I didn’t know Elena either, but…” she broke off with a shake of her head. She focused on Dimitri. “Are you okay?”

  He only gave a nod. She didn’t push. He wouldn’t tell her in front of everyone anyway.

  “So, what now?” she asked. “Where’s Ivan?”

  “We don’t know,” John Paul said. “We’re looking for him.”

  Her shoulders sagged as the meaning behind that became clear; she was still under lock and guard until they found him. She didn’t say as much, but the idea made her want to face plant on the table.

  Penny arrived then, phone still in hand. She offered the group a sheepish smile.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but I have Judge Clausen on the phone regarding Robby’s conditions and he’d like to speak to you, sir.”

  Ava rose without being asked and watched with bated breath as Dimitri accepted the phone and moved away from the table.

  “It’ll be okay,” Penny assured her, catching Ava’s apprehensive frown.

  She walked away when Ava could think of nothing to say.

  Frank checked his watch and heaved himself out of the chair. He tucked it in and gathered up his crossword puzzle and magazine.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” he told her with an inclination of his head.

  Ava nodded and watched him head for the door.

  Then it was just her and John Paul.

  “You look like you could use some fresh air,” he said, studying her face. “Come.”

  He climbed from his seat, circled around the table and guided her onto the terrace.

  She hadn’t been out there. Part of her had been afraid Elena had some snipper waiting on a nearby roof, waiting to put one between Ava’s eyes. She still worried, even though the possibilities were limited considering how high up they were. Nevertheless, she stayed away from the ledge.

  “How are you, Ava?” John Paul asked.

  Ava shrugged. “Exhausted. I just want all of this to end.”

  He nodded like that made perfect sense. “It will end. Soon. We’re doing everything we can.”

  She ventured a step closer. “How did Elena die?”

  It didn’t really matter, she told herself. The woman was dead. She was one less problem. But part of her still wanted to know.

  “Ivan killed her.” John Paul glanced at her. “At least, that’s what we think.”

  She thought about the stories Dimitri used to tell her of Ivan’s unwavering and blind adoration of their mother and found that impossible to believe. But what did she know about it? Maybe he did. Who really knew the workings of a madman’s mind?

  “How are you?” she hazarded carefully. “I know there’s no love lost between you two, but…”

  She didn’t know how to finish that. She wanted to say, but you had a son together so at some point … but she didn’t.

  “My only regret is that I wasn’t the one who got to see her end,” he said in a tone one normally reserved when the last chocolate bar was snatched up by someone else. “However she died, it wasn’t slow or painful enough.”

  Ava winced. “That’s a little … harsh, isn’t it?”

  Golden eyes cut into her. “No.”

  There was a tightness in his jaw that warned her not to push the matter. She opted to temporarily let it slide.

  “Any word from Mom?” she asked instead, realizing it had been three days and Charlotte had still not made an attempt to see her.

  John Paul cleared his throat, something he did frequently when he was preparing to lie for his wife, and it hit her just how tired that made her, even before his mouth opened.

  “Dad…”

  He sighed. His shoulders sagged. He turned away from her and walked over to the railings and folded his arms on the golden bar.

  “I wasn’t entirely honest with you the last time we talked, Ava.” He paused until she’d joined him, her fears of getting shot overwhelmed by her concerns. “Your mom isn’t in France. I mean, she very well could be, but I truthfully don’t know where she is. I wanted to tell you, but you’d already been through so much and I thought it could wait.”

  “What?” The word burst out of her, high and explosive. “What do you mean—?”

  He put his hand up to calm her. “She’s fine. That much I am sure of. She’s upset with me and she does this when she thinks her absence will change my mind.” He drew in a gulping lungful of air that lifted his chest. “But it won’t. Not this time.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He hesitated. His head lifted until their gazes clashed. He stared into hers, apologetic.

  “I asked her for a divorce.”

  Ava’s jaw unhinged.

  “Please don’t be upset,” John Paul hurried on, mistaking her stunned horror for anger. “I did my best to be supportive and a loving husband, but everything that has happened and her clear lack of moral compass, it was the breaking point for me. I can’t do it any longer. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” She threw her arms around him, taking him completely by surprise. “I have been wanting this for you for years!”

  “What?”

  The puzzlement in his tone had her drawing back to peer into his face, her own bright with a wide smile.

  “I don’t know why you stayed with her. She’s a terrible human being and she never deserved you.”

  “For you,” he said softly. “I stayed for you. I knew she would take you and I would never see you again if I let her walk away. And she knew it too. It was why she never let me adopt you and give you my name. So long as you were underage and she was your legal guardian, she knew she had me. Once you became an adult, the decision to stay with me was entirely up to you. By then, it was just easier to deal with it.”

  “Dad…” She touched the side of his handsome face. “Do you honestly think I would have let her just take me away from you?”

  He shrugged. “It was a risk I wasn’t willing to take.”

  She pulled him to her again. “I’m sorry. You have had to deal with so much crap because of me.”

  “You, mon cher, were never burden. You were a gift.”

  She drew back and dabbed lightly at her eye with a bent knuckle, wiping away the tear clinging at the corner. She swallowed past the lump and offered him her best smile.

  “But you’re free now, right? You can take off to the Bahamas and find yourself a hula dancer.”

  John Paul burst out laughing, the kind of laughing that had his head flinging back with the force. It was a sound she hadn’t heard in so long and it made her wonder just how miserable he’d been the last sixteen years because of her.

  “I think you mean Hawaii,” he said once he’d sobered.

  Ava shrugged. “Get one from there, too.”

  He chuckled and shook his head. “Ah, my darling Ava.” He touched her arm lightly. “What would I do without you?”

  “Well, you are never going to find out, so … what?” she asked when his smile faded.

  His gaze slanted away from her towards the French doors. He studied their gleaming sheets of glass and trims of gold with a sigh.

  “You know I would never intentionally hurt you, don’t you?”

  The question made her blink. “Of course.
”

  His chin tipped towards her. “Everything I’ve ever done, it was because I love you and I have this deep, primal, parental need to protect you.”

  An anxious gnawing had begun in the pit of her stomach. She rubbed at it, but the sensation didn’t calm.

  “Yes?”

  John Paul hesitated, and the longer he said nothing, but more anxious she became.

  “Dad…?”

  “I saw him that night,” he said at the same time she spoke. “I couldn’t sleep and I was walking the gardens, and I saw him climbing out of your window.”

  “Who … oh!” She inwardly cursed. “Dad, I can—”

  He put his hand up, stopping her.

  “I panicked, initially. I thought he’d done something terrible to you. I was about to shoot him, but something stopped me. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but later, when I thought about it, I realized it was that I always knew. It wasn’t entirely a sense or a feeling, but there were nights I would hear things, talking, laughing … other things…” Neither met the other’s gaze. “I always thought it was your TV or me imagining things. But that night, it dawned on me that I had been completely oblivious to the goings on in my own house—”

  “Dad—”

  “Let me finish, Ava.”

  She pressed her lips together and fell silent.

  “I told him to stay away.” He said the words quickly, like the faster he ripped that band aid off, the faster the burden would be lifted off his chest. “I told him he was putting you in danger. I told him a lot of things. Most of it I can’t even remember now, but I am the reason he left you.”

  She had always known something about Dimitri’s abrupt departure wasn’t right. She knew it wasn’t entirely because she’d wanted children. For everything that he was, Dimitri wasn’t a coward. He didn’t … he wouldn’t simply leave her without a word like that.

  “I thought he was dead,” she whispered, more to herself than him. “For weeks I kept searching the papers, waiting for his body to be found.”

  He had the decency to lower his gaze. “I know.”

  She remembered him being there, always just in the background, watching her. She’d thought it was because of the way she’d been behaving. She thought it was concern because she wasn’t eating or sleeping.

  “You let me just fall apart.”

  “You were young,” he justified. “I thought you would grow out of it, move on. And you did. You went to Paris. You traveled. You started getting better.”

  Only after the first video feed of the Devil. She’d seen the blurry, grainy silhouette, the man in the mask holding a rose, standing framed in a halo of blue light from some bay window, and she’d known—Dimitri was alive and he’d left her. What was she supposed to do? Sit at home and weep?

  “You could have told me.”

  He shook his head. “I was trying to protect you, Ava.”

  Anger rocketed up her veins in serrated coils of fire and steel.

  “Protect me? From what?” Her voice rose. “Dimitri was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I loved him. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. I wanted to have a family with him.”

  John Paul physically recoiled. He tried to mask it by turning away, but it was too late.

  “Why do you hate him? How could you hate him?” She was yelling now. It was loud and there was no wind to mask the words, but she didn’t care. “If you could just sit with him, just once, just for a second and talk to him, really talk to him, you would see how amazing he is, how much he loves me—”

  “I know.”

  Ava balked. “What?”

  “I know, Ava.” He met her eyes, resigned. “I know he does. I know he did.”

  “Then why…?”

  “Because he can’t be trusted.” Those same eyes that always filled her with calm crackled with ice. “Because he is a monster.”

  “He’s not!”

  “He is!” he roared back. “It’s in his blood, Ava. It’s inside him. You can’t erase that kind of poison.”

  “This is about Elena, isn’t it? You hate Dimitri, an innocent little boy who barely knew evil existed because of … what? Something stupid his mother did? What does that say about you?”

  “It says I’m just as much of a monster.”

  “What happened between you two?” she demanded. “I need to know. I need to understand how the man who raised me, a man I love more than life itself, a man who took a scared, lonely little girl and gave her more love than she knew what to do with, how he could be … this!”

  John Paul said nothing. The wind whistled around them, blowing wisps of dark strands across his narrowed eyes, eyes that stared at the city skyline in the distance without blinking. The only hint that he’d even heard her was in the grinding of his molars.

  “It’s never as simple as that, Ava,” he murmured so quietly, it was nearly snatched up by the breeze. “Some things are just never that simple.”

  “What happened?”

  His gaze lowered to the railing beneath his folded arms. “I knew Elena since I was a boy. Our fathers were in the Syndicate and we were forced to spend more than our share of time together. I never liked her.” His lips curled back over his teeth in disgust. “There was always something about her that made my insides crawl, a cruelty that couldn’t be masked no matter what she did. She reeked of it.

  When we claimed our territories, I knew I had no choice but to be civil. I may not have liked her, but we were essentially partners. I accepted this new reality. I let my guard down. It was my own fault.”

  She waited as he took a shaky breath. Something in his face made her want to stop him from telling the rest of the story. Whatever happened next had an anguished darkness creeping into the hollows of his cheeks and pooling in his eyes, and the sight of them wrenched her open.

  But he was talking before she could tell him it was okay.

  “It was a charity event. All the important people were present. It was mandatory I attend, so I did. Elena was there with her late husband—Ivan’s father. I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t even remember drinking very much, but I woke up with her…” He broke off. No. He choked. He choked on whatever he was about to say and turned away from her.

  “Dad?” Ava reached for him, but he shook her away.

  He raised a hand to his mouth. She caught the tremor in them and something in her shattered.

  “She was on top of me. I…” He gasped for air. His shoulders caved with the jagged sound.

  “Daddy…?”

  “I couldn’t move. I was awake. I could see … I could feel everything, but I couldn’t…”

  Ava tried not to make sound. She chewed into her cheek, tearing out a chunk of flesh, but still the pitiful, no, croaked out.

  “I couldn’t stop her.”

  Her hands flew up to her mouth, mashing back words, the tears threatening to break out of her. Her own memories of being helpless to Elena tangled with his and she knew how he must have felt, knew how terrified he must have been. But the reality of it was so much worse. It was the thing everyone feared, but no one talked about. That cold sensation women got when crossing a dark parking lot late at night. It was the crawling scuttle along the nap of a woman’s neck when she catches someone watching her that makes her uneasy. It’s that feeling of being violated and dirty at just the brush of an unwanted touch.

  God, she didn’t want to hear anymore. Why had she asked? Why couldn’t she just leave it alone?

  But John Paul was still talking.

  “When it was over, she just sat there, me still inside her and smirked.

  “See how good it is with a woman?” she said. “Maybe you don’t really like men. Maybe you just need a woman to make you fuck properly.” she moved, using my chest to push herself up and over me, again and again. “Your cock is still hard inside me,” she moaned, this filthy sound I can sometimes still hear.

  She came on me and I could feel her.

  I
almost threw up. I wanted to cry.

  She just laughed and patted my cheek. “Next time, don’t be such cold fish, yeah?”

  Then, she left, and I just lay there, the room so fucking cold against my naked skin. I can still sometimes feel it at night. I wake up and I can’t move and it’s so cold.” He sucked in a ragged breath, like the chill had seeped into his very marrow. “I remember looking down at myself, at all the parts of me that still held the remains of my own body’s betrayal. I remember thinking that the second I could move again, I would set myself on fire. I would drown myself in bleach. I hated my skin and all the places she’d touched me.

  And the whole time, her words kept repeating in my head, next time.” His chin lowered to his chest. “I have never felt so dirty, so … violated. I hated myself. I hated that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. I couldn’t tell anyone. Even if I did, who would believe me? Who would take me seriously? What happened to me doesn’t happen to men, especially not men in my position. Men don’t get raped. Men aren’t supposed to be weak. Men should want to get fucked. Some would even call what she did a favor. She was only trying to set me straight.”

  Somewhere in the roaring in her head, Ava realized something she never once in sixteen years ever realized, and as soon as it dawned, she couldn’t believe she never saw it.

  The separate bedrooms. The lack of sexual interest, the absence of a spark when he was with her mother. He’d always been loving and attentive, but there had always been something missing. She always thought it was Charlotte, and it probably partially was, but she’d just been the perfect scapegoat to hide who he really was. It suddenly made sense why he’d been so upset about the things Charlotte was saying about Robby, true or not.

  Why hadn’t she seen it?

  Maybe because it didn’t matter to her, she thought. He was still John Paul. He was still the same man who dropped everything to bake cookies with her. The same man who took her shopping for her prom dress and waited hours until she’d found the right one. He was her dad. Nothing else mattered.

  She went to him. Her arms slid around his middle and she held him from behind, her cheek pressed in the place between his shoulder blades.