I twist her hair in my fist, giving her a little hurt, getting her ready. “You’re going to feel alarmed and choked when I shove my cock down your throat. It’s how I need it, though. You’re going to relax and let me do whatever I want to you. Got it?”
Warily she grunts her assent.
“It’ll feel wild and messed up, but you’ll see that it’s just another thing.” I nudge her head, thrusting into her mouth. She gags, and I pull out.
“Close your eyes. Relax.” I push in again, slower. “You’re gonna take me. Turn yourself over to me.”
She relaxes her throat. She’s getting it.
“See? That’s good.”
I fuck her face with more force, making her take me deeper. “That hand, it’s a little bit of a cheat, isn’t it? You need to let go of my cock now. I need you to take all of me.”
She lets go and grips my thighs. I tighten my fists on her hair and plunge in deeper. She makes a little sound, but she’s going with it. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel amazing.
I feel like a fucking animal, animated by some prehistoric madness.
It gets even more intense when she turns herself over to my total control. Like she gives up on dignity, on being anything but a thing for my use. It’s un-fucking-believable how hot she is, giving herself over to my control. Trusting a twisted motherfucker like me.
“Close your eyes. Concentrate.” I reach over and grab my phone and my gun. The phone is to record. The gun is to make it look good for the camera. To make it look like I’m forcing her.
She’ll hate me. But it saves her finger.
I hit record and set the phone on the side table, angled just right to get me fucking her face. “You love it like this, don’t you?” I thrust harder, in and out. Tears leak from the sides of her dark lashes.
I’m merciless—I have to be.
I push in harder, hitting resistance. She gags.
“Don’t you fucking gag, Mira. Take it like the whore you are.” Something in her changes, like energy ramping up, fingers digging into my thighs.
The phone records my hand twisting up her hair alongside the gun. It gets her tears. It gets my cock disappearing through her lips over and over.
“Suck harder, bitch,” I say. “You’re mine to use however I want. When I say suck harder, I mean it.”
She sucks harder. I groan.
It looks violent. Like I’m mauling her, like I’m really fucking her up. What that camera doesn’t capture is the energy stoking between us every time I say something. Like she actually likes that. I know I’m getting off.
“That’s right, you fucking whore. Take it!” I shove my cock in long and strong. “You’ll take it in every fucking hole.”
Her fingers tighten some more, tits rubbing hard against my legs.
I keep up in front of the camera, knowing I’m capturing the force, the ugliness, but so much more is happening, like a wave, swelling up, taking the two of us somewhere.
She feels like no woman ever has felt.
Like we’re both getting off on it, like it’s real for a moment.
But it can’t be real—no way.
“I’ll clamp you open and use you like the piece of cockflesh you are,” I gasp. “I’ll fuck everything out of you.”
I clench her hair with my other hand. She softens for me like she knows that’s what I’m needing now. She’s a rag doll for me, letting me have her completely. The feeling of it is un-fucking-believable.
My elbow knocks the phone off the table and onto the floor. I don’t care. I don’t care about anything but being lost in her, and she seems like she’s lost in me. I don’t care if it’s an illusion.
She’s beauty and goodness and home and everything I lost.
“Take it, bitch.”
I splay my non-gun hand over her head, stroking her, needing to touch her, fucking her face, moving with her, breathing with her.
She’s so perfect, she makes my skin hurt.
Chapter Six
Mira
The way he uses me is violent. Primitive. Demeaning. And all I can think is, don’t stop.
He warned me he was going to be rough. He warned me I’d feel alarmed when he shoved his cock all the way down my throat. I was ready for that.
I wasn’t ready for the names he would call me.
Or to be so wildly turned on by it all.
It’s as if we crossed over to the far side of wrong, and everything is too hot, and his cock is too huge, and I have too many clothes. I want him to lay me out and use me. I want him to do anything to me. Everything to me. I want him to lay me out and use me like cockflesh, like he said he would. Is that even a word?
I pull back, knowing he’ll shove my head back onto his cock—hoping that he will—and he does, fingers digging into my scalp.
My nipples rub on his legs, heating from the friction of us. I’m on the verge of coming. Seriously on the verge.
Usually I need a lot of help.
This is so wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
But this is Aleksio being Aleksio. He always went too far, and I always loved him for it.
I feel when he’s going to come.
“No teeth. Don’t you fucking…” He jerks into my throat, forcing me to swallow. The orgasm goes on forever. He holds my head firmly in his grip, panting.
I move my tongue a tiny bit and he clutches my hair. “God! Don’t move.”
I feel dazed. Heart pounding. This was the wildest and most powerful sexual experience of my life, and I didn’t even come.
Yet.
“Okay,” he whispers after a while, gently extracting himself from me. I sit on the coffee table, wiping my mouth and striking the tears from my cheeks.
His eyes shine, and I know he felt the power of what just happened. The mad connection. Deep down, I know that neither of us have been here before.
He reaches out and brushes my hair from my forehead.
That’s when I see the gun in his other hand, dark and cold and black.
He was holding a gun? Why? Why would he need a gun?
“Don’t worry, the safety was on.” He puts it aside, eyes averted, and then he swipes his phone off the floor. He presses something. A red light goes off.
My mouth falls open. “What the hell? What did you do?”
“Saved your finger.”
Red. A record light.
He tucks himself in, zips himself up.
He recorded us? Why record us like that? With him holding a gun? Why would he want to make it look like he was being a violent asshole, forcing me to do that?
Suddenly everything in the room gets too bright, too real. “No!” I go for the phone.
He grabs my wrist, hauling me up onto the couch with him. “Leave it.”
“You’re going to show that recording to him? No!” I try to twist free. “You can’t!”
He can, and he will.
I’m flooded with shame for how much I enjoyed it. And Aleksio made a movie out of it! To frighten Dad!
“Fuck!” I jerk and twist, trying to get at the phone. “You can’t! Please.”
“Sorry.”
“Oh my God!”
That’s when Viktor comes in. He regards us calmly, like it’s no big deal Aleksio is manhandling me. Aleksio tosses the phone to his brother. “Play it.”
“No! Don’t!”
Viktor taps the screen.
“Don’t watch it!” I go for Viktor now, but Aleksio has me.
“You can’t send Dad that clip.”
“We’re not sending him your bloody finger. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Aleksio. So cool, so smooth. Like it meant nothing to him. And me like an idiot, getting off on his rough treatment. Making myself vulnerable to him. Showing him something I never even showed myself. I want to die.
Viktor pockets the phone. “Her severed finger would be more extreme. More urgency. But this is more pain for the old man.”
“You guys are animals!”
“You have to erase it!”
“You prefer the finger? That’s what you’re saying here?”
I trusted Aleksio. I followed him somewhere extreme, and he ripped my heart open. Cutting off my finger seems tame in comparison.
“You’re thinking about it? Fuck! No. Fuck that.” He turns to Viktor. “Call and see if the sack of shit’s awake.”
Viktor takes out his own phone.
Aleksio finally has to bear-hug me to keep me still. I try to push him off. I want nothing to do with him. No go.
“Aleksio,” I whimper. Imagining Dad seeing that makes me want to vomit. It will quite possibly be the last thing he sees before he dies.
Viktor’s speaking in Russian. He sounds upset.
“What’s wrong?”
“Aldo is out cold,” he says. “He’ll be out hours more.”
“What the hell?” Aleksio says.
“They had to give him something. He was making trouble.”
“Fuck!” He lets me go. “Don’t make me gag and handcuff you. I mean it,” he warns.
“Has he taken his meds?” I ask Viktor. “He needs them. He keeps them in a plastic thing in his pocket.”
Viktor holds up a finger. More Russian. Then he nods at me. “He had his meds. He is fine. Just not awake.” He clicks off.
“Fuck!” Aleksio kicks a leather trash can across the room. “He tried to get away?”
Viktor nods.
“You’re sure he took his meds?” I ask.
“Yes,” Viktor says.
He’s out. There’s still time, then. “Let’s track down the employees. My plan. We’ll do my plan. Don’t send it.”
Aleksio looks at Viktor.
“Six hours he will be out. Minimum,” Viktor replies to his unspoken question. “Probably through the night. They screwed up.”
Aleksio closes his eyes.
“I’m sorry, brat. My guys—”
“No, I know. They responded to the situation in front of them.” Aleksio goes to the window and takes a breath. Worried about Kiro.
“You think Lazarus cares about anything besides finding my dad and me?” I ask. “He’s not going to be caring about your brother.”
“Lazarus is a fucking hyena, Mira. I think he cares about a lot of different things.”
“We can’t stay the night here,” Viktor says.
“Agreed.” Aleksio makes a call. I’m wondering whether it’s Konstantin. I was always a little frightened of Konstantin—everyone was. He had a scarred face and a military attitude. A retired killer who ran the boys’ bodyguard detail.
Aleksio makes another call and gets an investigator on the case. “I want the names and addresses of everyone who worked there—call me as soon as you get them—I don’t care if the shit comes in at two in the morning. We get ’em and vet ’em.”
He clicks off.
“Merry Christmas. We go at it your way. At least until Daddy wakes up. Not that we have any choice.”
I turn and look out at the dark lake, wanting for him not to ever see my face again. Wanting to never give him any bit of truth ever again.
Chapter Seven
Aleksio
It’s just before dawn when we get out to the house we took off a stockbroker who owes us. It’s a place that was owned by one of our loan shark clients up until six months ago. A nice spread in the middle of a lot of trees maybe an hour out of the city.
A good place to lie low.
Best of all, nobody knows about it, which is good, considering the kind of firepower that’s out on the streets right about now.
Our investigator checks in soon after. He’s tracked down the retired Worland Agency director to a farm in western Illinois, and he’s going out there. He feels sure this person has the key. He’ll do what it takes. I send one of my guys to help him.
We give Mira the nicest bedroom—the master. It has a sliding door to a patio, and she’s allowed to go out there as long as she behaves.
I go out for a run to clear my head. I should be getting new ideas to find Kiro, but all I think about is the feel of her mouth on my cock, and the way her hair felt in my fist.
Never have I felt this kind of connection to a woman before. The way she stands up to me. The way she peels back my layers.
I fucked her face, but I’m the one who got invaded.
I head back into the kitchen afterwards. Viktor’s in there. He tells me Aldo Nikolla is still out cold, and the investigator is still in transit.
The sound of her laughter jolts through my chest.
I look out the kitchen window and see her sitting out on the patio with Yuri and a couple of the other Russians.
She’s in jeans that are a size too large and a T-shirt knotted at the waist, thick hair in a ponytail high up on her head, cheerleader style. She and Viktor’s Russian guys seem to be joking around. She smiles at one point.
“We should put a stop to that.”
“She’s under control,” Viktor says.
Control isn’t the issue.
But I don’t have a good explanation for what the hell the issue is, so I turn away. “Did you offer her coffee? In the mug we brought from the mansion? And food?”
“She took coffee—in her mug. She says she won’t eat.”
“She needs to eat.”
Viktor shrugs. “A person can go weeks without food and be just fine.”
Of course he would say that. Even now, he sees three meals a day as an extravagance. “Not somebody like Mira.”
“Yes, somebody like Mira.” Viktor turns to me. “What a person can’t go without is sleep. You need to sleep.” He walks out.
Right. Sleep. A peaceful sleep for me is never going to happen. Not in this life. Every time I close my eyes, I’m right back there with Konstantin’s cigar-smelling fingers sealing my mouth like my life depended on it, keeping me quiet. The way my mother screamed when Lazarus caught her. Her terrorized eyes, reflecting in the window. The flash of the blade in Aldo Nikolla’s hands.
More laughter. They’re teaching her Russian. She repeats a phrase, trying to get it right. Her eyes are so big—they sometimes remind me of those Egyptian drawings from those tombs, except not fucked up and wrong. Her eyes are perfect.
I decide to make a proper breakfast. I inspect the refrigerator and identify all the ingredients for frittatas.
I dump paprika into the bowl, turning my attention to the meal I’m making, but she’s still a ghost on my skin. The gouges she made in my thighs burned while I ran. A good burn. She almost seemed into it. An act, I know. The human animal will do anything to survive, to help its own kind.
I slice a lemon and squeeze it into the mix.
Viktor comes back in, and I know what he’s going to say the second he looks at the meal I’m cooking up. “Seriously, brat? When I see all this”—he waves his hand around the kitchen—“I do not think that this is a man who plans to show that video to a girl’s father as she cries.”
“Have I ever not done what I had to do?” I give him a hard stare. It’s simple to do the hard, bad things. You learn to turn something off. Make yourself dense, like cement, and just do it. This is knowledge we share.
One nod. “Okay, then.”
I go back to work. “And there’ll be frittatas for you, too.”
He watches me work. His silence doesn’t fool me.
“What?” I ask.
He nods in the direction of the patio. “You can never have her. She’s so far out of the game…”
I know he’s right, but all I can think of is how she looked up at me while she sucked my cock. The tightness of her lips, the slide of her tongue, the way all that derision cranked the temperature to nine hundred degrees. Pure hot flame.
And then I made it ugly.
“You can never have her,” he continues. “If you let yourself think it, it is only pain.”
���Are you questioning me here?”
“I am watching you make frittatas.”
I made them for him once when one of his top guys was killed. I told him it was my magic meal.
Viktor takes his gun and cleaner out. “Princess in the castle. Her father took our things and gave them to her. She does not deserve anything good. You should tell her what he did. What you saw.”
He saw it too, of course, but he was just two. “We’re taking enough away from her,” I say.
He starts taking apart the action.
“Not near the food,” I say, waving at Viktor’s gun oil. “I don’t want it picking up the smell.” I slice the cherry tomatoes into halves. They’re easier to eat that way.
“She is the enemy.”
“Your guys out there are chummy enough with her.”
He snorts. “They’re teaching her lines from Russian gangland movies. They think it is funny.”
I go near where he works. They’re all out there twirling their weapons now, teaching her how to do it. “What the hell are they giving her a weapon for?”
“Relax. They would not give her something loaded.”
Of course not.
“They’re teaching her to be Sergei Kazan. In the movies, he twirls his gun like that and says, ‘You go ahead and try it, baby, and I’ll fill you so full of lead it’ll be coming out of your ass.’ It’s funny if you know Sergei Kazan. Very brutish. Teaching her these lines. Like teaching a cat to talk.”
I glare.
He smirks. “What? They’re bored. You want to let them fuck her instead? I’m sure they would like to make a movie for her father, too.”
In a flash I have him out of his chair and against the wall.
“You see?” he says, panting. “You let yourself think you can have her.”
My blood races. I watch myself acting messed up, putting him against the wall, nose to nose with my brother.
His gaze is steady.
Damn. I lay off.
He stands, not bothering to straighten himself back up. “Konstantin did some things very wrong, I think. He should not have shown you so very many pictures of that girl. You watched her grow up.”
“So?”
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