by Jenna Rose
Chained to the Devil
Jenna Rose
Copyright © 2021 by Jenna Rose
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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About the Book
Anton Todorov, notorious Russian kingpin, has given me a choice: be his bride, or I’ll never see my mother and brother again. It’s the blackest of blackmail from the devil himself, but I can’t help but think I see something behind those cold eyes that no one else sees. Is this a glimpse of a good man lurking beyond the shadows, or just a monster waiting to corrupt me?
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Contents
1. Anton
2. Mia
3. Anton
4. Mia
5. Mia
6. Anton
7. Mia
8. Anton
9. Mia
Epilogue
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1
Anton
Gray. That’s all the world is now—shades of gray that fill my vision like cold ice that has slowly been working its way into my soul over these many years.
As a young man, I worked hard. Seeking my father’s approval, I obeyed his every command. Vicious, ambitious, I was the perfect son. A ruthless prince, I created a path of bodies in my wake, reinforcing the Todorov family empire and further establishing us as the dominant hand of the Russian mob in the United States.
I expected gratitude. Some expression of love from my father. But what did I get? A simple nod of approval like I was a trained dog simply doing what he had been trained to do.
If my heart had not gone cold and had still been capable of breaking, it would have shattered.
But there is nothing left there any longer.
Nothing to move me. Nothing but a muscle to pump blood through my chilled veins.
My father may be the kingpin, but I’m the second in command. While he’s smoking cigars and laughing from his office, I’m the one making the big moves, making the multi-million-dollar decisions that cause shifts in power behind the scenes that affect countless lives in our criminal empires.
Politicians at every level. Bankers, lawyers, accountants, bookies. Up and down the chain, everybody earns, and everybody pays. That’s how you maintain the order of things. That’s what my father taught me, and that’s all I know. The minute you slip up, that’s the minute you die. And I’ve spent my entire adult life preserving that mentality. Making sure I don’t slip.
But now, my father wants to retire. Move back to Moscow and leave me in charge. But there’s only one hitch.
He wants me to get married.
“You must settle down, Anton,” he told me last week, as though it’s just that easy. “It’s just not fit for a man like you to be seen running around with all these women. Find yourself a girl and put a ring on her finger. A good girl like your mother.”
My mother may be many things—she may even love me in her own way—but she is not a “good girl.” She’s an ex-stripper and an escort. My father bought her from her parents back in Russia before he moved here. I’m the only one who knows about her past.
“Oh, and make it quick, son,” he told me. He gave me until the end of the week. “Or the empire goes to your brother.”
If that doesn’t tell you all you need to know about my relationship with my father, I don’t know what will. When my father wants something done, he wants it done now. It doesn’t matter if it needs to be done today, tomorrow or next year. If he wants it, he gets it. And the price for disobeying him? Well, let’s just say it doesn’t matter if I’m his son. He gets what he wants.
My brother, Dimitri, is still in Russia. He’s a flat-out psychopath who uses the family money to indulge his habits of torturing and murdering women. If I had my way, I’d kill him myself.
So that’s why I’m here now, drumming my fingers on the armrests of my chair at Juicy Lucy’s, a trashy strip club in town where I’m hoping to find a girl who at least looks like she could wear a high-class dress without looking like she wants to take it off for money.
“Well, you look lonely, big fella,” a girl purrs, trying to ease her way past my men. She speaks the truth, but I don’t like the look of her, so I shake my head, and they escort her away.
“Fuck this,” I growl, rising from my chair. Flanked on both sides, I exit the club and head to the car. “Becky’s,” I tell the driver. “Step on it.”
Becky’s Diner is a dump—a converted train car going for that ‘50s charm and failing miserably, but the one place in town that makes a decent cup of coffee at this hour, and I could use one. I’ve been going at it all day trying to find a girl who I could bring around my dad without him finding something negative to say. And that’s the real catch. He wants me to find a girl now, but if I bring the wrong girl, it’ll be worse than bringing no girl at all.
Pretty much a no-win situation.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a way out of this life. But then I remember who my father is. He claims to love me, but I wonder if even he believes that anymore. The illusion of a happy, cohesive family matters more to him than the real thing I suspect.
The driver parks, and I get out and find a booth in the diner. A few people recognize me and avert their eyes as people normally do when they see me. I expect to see Donna, Bertha, or maybe the new old lady with the thick glasses come out of the back to wait on me, but instead, a new girl comes out of the swinging double doors to the kitchen, and something moves inside my chest that actually takes my breath away.
Jesus, who is that and what is she doing in a dump like this?
She doesn’t look like a waitress. More like an A-list actress, or an up-and-coming actress researching the role of a waitress for her next film. And if this is her audition, I’m the lucky bastard with a private viewing.
Christ, my heart is pounding, and I haven’t even had a cup of coffee yet. I’ve only just caught a glimpse of her, and I’m fascinated. Doing what I do, I’m damn good at sizing people up, but she’s the first person I’ve seen in years that I haven’t been able to read in seconds.
I may not know everything about her, but right then, I know I’ve found my wife.
“You,” I bark. Her eyes, beautiful, a deep almond brown, snap to mine, causing my heart to palpate. I motion to her. “Come here.”
“Sir, I just have to give this gentleman his peach cobbler and—”
“Now.”
The girl clearly has no idea who I am. Confused, she glances around at the other patrons. They do know and give her the look that lets her know she should obey. I watch her as she moves, my eyes glued to her body.
I can see she has a pair of baby-making hips on her.
Her face is beautiful.
I wasn’t hungry when I came in, but her body has me famished.
Even beneath the hideous waitress outfit, the ratty apron, the second-hand dress, I can see her curves. The old thing does a terrible job hiding them, which doesn’t matter. I’ll be getting her naked anyway.
My pants start to feel tight around my thighs, and I realize I’m getting hard underneath the table just by looking at her. Now that’s something that hasn’t happened to me since…well, I can’t remember the last time.
I’m actually anxious waiting fo
r her to get to my booth. I want to snap my fingers and yell at her to hurry up. It’s a strain to keep my cool. By the time she sits down, her chestnut hair spilling down across her delicate shoulders, her big brown eyes looking at me with such innocence, I’m ready to bust in my pants.
“What’s your name?” I ask her.
“Mia,” she replies, in a voice made of music as she sets a plate of peach cobbler between us.
“Mia. I’m Anton Todorov. Do you know who I am?”
She starts to shake her head, then I see the recognition in her eyes, and she stops. “Y-yes.”
“Good.” I smile. “Now, Mia. I want to tell you something, and I want you to listen carefully. You, Mia, are going to be my wife.”
Mia, bless her innocent soul, takes one look at my men, looks back at me, breathes a long sigh, then faints and falls straight down, face first into the plate of peach cobbler.
2
Mia
I wake up to Anton Todorov wiping my face with a napkin.
Anton-fricking-Todorov cleaning peach cobbler off my silly mug like a father wiping mac n’ cheese off his toddler son.
I blink a few times and pinch myself on the thigh just to make sure I’m not dreaming or that Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t incepting me. But when I look up, sure enough, there he is, staring into my soul with those piercing blue eyes.
Anton Todorov.
The Boss. The devil. Lucifer in the flesh. I don’t know how I didn’t recognize him earlier.
“What, are you my nurse?” It’s the only thing I can think to say.
Anton doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t kill me, so that’s a start.
“Comedian,” he replies, not giving anything away.
He’s like a robot—a robot built for two things: murder and sex, and I’m not sure which one he intends to do to me. His face looks like it was built by an algorithm designed to penetrate past a woman’s conscious brain and go straight to that primal spot inside her that makes her forget everything like common sense and caution.
He brushes a bit of creamy hair from my face, and his fingertips drag across my cheek. Rough, like a carpenter’s.
“Calluses,” I remark. “Shouldn’t your hands be soft like a Wall Street broker’s?”
His eyes briefly show something like amusement. “You don’t get to where I am by having other men do your dirty work.”
“Is that a sex joke?”
“Would you like it to be?”
“I have to get back to work,” I say. But as I try to get to my feet, he places a firm hand on my shoulder.
“You must have missed what I said, Peaches.”
“Peaches?” I laugh. “Is that my name now?”
“I need a wife, Mia. And by the looks of it, you need money.”
“Wow, all that and brains too?” I reply, gesturing to all of Anton and the obviously chiseled physique hiding under his expensive, pinstriped suite. But he doesn’t smile. Of course he doesn’t smile.
“A simple transaction. We marry. You quit today.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I reply. “I’m not a whore.”
So what if he’s the sexiest man I’ve ever met in my life—a man who could grace the cover of any magazine in America. And so what if he could kill me right here with a snap of his fingers? He just spent five minutes wiping dessert off of my face. He isn’t going to.
At least…I don’t think he will.
“Mia, if I wanted to, I could fuck you right now,” he growls, his voice low. “I could take you to my car, pin you down in my back seat and fuck you over and over and over again until you could no longer walk. I would ravish your little cunt until you were screaming my name. I would pound you into submission and force your body to be mine. Even if you did not want to, I would force you to come so many times that you would fall in love with me—”
Jesus…
“But that is not my way. So when I tell you that when you marry me, I will not force myself on you. I am not a monster.”
Wow. No one has ever spoken to me like that before. And I think he knows it. The fact that he is who he is and is telling me that he’s not a monster is making him even more scary. The things he must have done in his life—what would he have to do to think of himself as one?
“You wouldn’t want me anyway,” I tell him. “All I’d do is disappoint you.”
“Not with a body like that, Peaches.”
He can see my body underneath this terrible dress and matching apron? The boss makes us wear this outfit as part of the ‘50s diner panache. None of us like it. It’s beyond frumpy, and I don’t need any help in that department.
“What do you know about my body?”
Before I can react, Anton is in the booth beside me. He reaches out and touches my waist with a cold hand. “I can see your hips, made for breeding,” he explains with a voice that makes me think of a wolf. “I see the way the cloth of this dress is stretched over your breasts and the way your hair falls over your delicate shoulders. And I know how soft and warm your body would feel beneath mine, Peaches.”
God, he’s turning me on. This just doesn’t happen to me. Men don’t have this effect on me, but I’m prickling all over. There’s something going on between my legs right now too, and he’s just planted a seed in my mind that I’m finding hard to ignore.
“And that’s why you want to marry me?” I ask, puffing a piece of sugar-coated hair from my face. “To feel my warm body beneath yours?”
Anton examines me with his eyes. “You have not much experience with men.”
It’s almost a question.
“I...have had as much as I’ve wanted.”
“Which is none. You are virgin.”
I half expect him to get up and leave, but to my surprise, his cold blue eyes almost sparkle. Almost.
His hand on my waist tightens possessively, then moves down my hip to the hem of my dress. I suck in a breath, expecting him to slide his hand where it’s not supposed to go, but he keeps to his promise of being a gentleman. Sort of.
His fingers trail down the exposed skin of my thigh, sending shivers up my spine. Goosebumps break out all over my body, and I pray he doesn’t notice. I feel my nipples go hard beneath my dress. Things are happening all over that I’ve never felt before.
Arousal. Deep arousal.
“Wouldn’t you love a husband like this, Peaches?”
He’s making it clear how much he wants me, and he’s not even shy about it. It’s like he’s found something inside of me to touch, to awaken, and he’s going right for it. He knows something I don’t, and whatever he’s doing, it’s working.
I work. That’s what I do. I have to make money, and not just because I’m one of those girls trying to “get that bag.” I have a mother and a brother to take care of, and they need me. I’ve pushed aside things—things like men—so I can focus on the things that really matter. But whatever dark place inside me I’ve hidden those things that a woman should feel, Anton has discovered, and he’s quickly pushing his way into.
“I don’t even know you…” I mutter as he reaches my knee, dragging his fingers with such sensuality that I can only imagine what else he could do to me.
“I will take good care of you, Peaches. Now come. I have a car waiting.”
He takes me by the wrist, and I realize I’m so deeply under his spell that I almost go with him. But just as I’m about to get to my feet, I come to my senses.
“No!” I blurt out, collapsing back down into the booth and scurrying away from him. “I’m not going anywhere with you!”
Right. This is the right decision. But not to Anton, who glares at me with eyes of ice.
“Women do not deny me,” he says slowly.
“Well, my mom always calls me a girl,” I reply. “So just think of me as a crazy little girl, and your record remains untarnished.”
“Your mother,” he muses, leaning down over me. “And where is she?”
“In Mexico,” I reply indignantly. “So if you�
��re going to try and threaten her or something—”
“I understand now.” Finally, Anton smiles, which causes a chill to grip my chest. “You work here to send money to your family, yes?”
I try my best to keep a straight face, but the son of a bitch sees right through me, and his smile grows.
“You want to bring her here. Perhaps more of them. A father. A brother maybe…” Anton stands and adjusts his watch, thick and obviously expensive. “Peaches, do not make an enemy out of me. You accept my offer and be my wife and I will help you bring your family to America. If not, I will make sure you never see them again.”
Like a dose of pure liquid nitrogen injected straight into my chest, my body goes cold. I stare into the monster’s eyes for what seems like an eternity. It’s like staring straight into a black hole.
The arousal I was feeling before now feels like pure betrayal from my body. How could I have been so stupid? The kingpin has backed me into a corner without even having to lift a finger or raise a gun.
And there’s nothing I can do.
I believe every word he’s just said.
But I’m not going to let him see the pure fear in my eyes. This man wins every day. But he’s not going to win with me.
“You know what, baby?” I smile, rising to my feet like an obedient woman. “There’s nothing I’d love more in the world than to be your wife. What do you say we head to Vegas right now?”
3
Anton
I’ve never had a woman in my private plane before. Well, that’s not entirely true.