by Jade West
He pushed the door open and looked back over his shoulder, and the hate in his eyes was tinged with something more. Something I felt all the way through to my core.
“Come and meet your fate, little girl,” he said, and it was insane, just how much of a little girl I felt under his stare.
I should never have considered it, not even for a heartbeat, but he beckoned me with his finger, and I found myself moving. My feet took on a life of their own as I stepped forward, my clutch still gripped tightly under my arm. I was shaking, from too much crappy beer as much as anything else, but shaking nonetheless.
I watched him swallow as he realized just how hard I was trembling.
He liked that.
I walked past him and into the cheap hallway of the cheap apartment block – my cheap escape from my expensive life. Jemma was away for the month, chasing down some environmental peace on some ocean liner somewhere, just as she had been doing on and off since we were teenagers.
I should’ve been with her. Once upon a time, I believed I would be. We’d planned to fix the oceans, and save the whales, and help anyone who needed helping, but I couldn’t do it. My life wouldn’t let me.
My family wouldn’t let me.
She should’ve been a close friend of Tristan’s rather than mine, both of them much more accustomed to trailer life than listening to my woes of billionaire existence, but that didn’t matter. She’d been my escape for over a decade and wouldn’t accept my cash handouts as an incentive; it was all from her heart. Still, I barely saw her.
I didn’t bother letting Lucian find the way upstairs to Jemma’s apartment, just snatched the keys from his hand and led the way. The other doors were all closed tight, no doubt their occupants holed up in bed. The door to number seven was right at the end of the upstairs corridor.
I pushed the key into the lock, opening the door and stepping in ahead of Lucian. I didn’t even attempt to shut the door in his face, only led the way in for him to follow.
He found the light switch as soon as he was in after me, his eyes checking out the neat little hallway around us. Jemma really was a sweet soul in her eccentricity. She had a handmade tapestry of a whale by a boat hanging up proud above my head, and a picture of her charity friends by the kitchen doorway. Hardly the surroundings I’d have expected to take my last breath in, but life is certainly weird sometimes.
I could see the questioning glance on Lucian’s face as he wondered about our surroundings. I answered him before he spoke.
“It’s my friend Jemma’s place. She’s away saving the world. Please don’t leave too many bloodstains on her carpet for her to come home to.”
He didn’t reply, just stepped in after me as I headed through to the kitchen. Jemma’s coffee machine was waiting ready on the counter, just like always, and I got it fired up without a word.
I dumped my clutch on the side and grabbed a mug from the cupboard, then held another up for the monster.
“Hey, asshole. How about a coffee before you kill me?”
I guess that pushed my cheek too far. He was on me in seconds, slamming me into the counter top as the mugs went crashing to the floor with a smash. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
But it wasn’t Lucian Morelli’s hands that attacked me next . . . it was his mouth. His lips. His breaths.
He was fierce as he ripped my coat from my shoulders and flung it aside. His fingers were savage as they tore at my dress, ripping it clean open, revealing my lace bra.
Kisses. Hot kisses. Deep kisses.
I wanted them. Oh, fuck, I wanted them.
“Don’t you ever fucking speak to me like that again,” he snarled, squeezing my face in one big hand. “Speak to me like that again, and I’ll cut your filthy fucking tongue out.”
I don’t know what consumed me as I wrapped my arms around his neck. I didn’t know what depths of insanity were possible until I panted into the next round of kisses and rode the pang of desperation for more.
This was doomed. Forbidden. Madness on every level.
“This sure isn’t you killing me,” I managed to hiss, but there was no impudence in my voice this time.
“Plenty of time for that,” he hissed back, and his voice was full of hate, but there was no true venom in it, not to the depths of him. Maybe, just maybe, I’d survive this night.
I should’ve been grateful for the chance to live another day. I should’ve been playing every card in my deck to tempt him to keep me alive, but I wasn’t. Part of me had always wanted to die. Part of me had always wanted to say goodbye to this world, farewell forever.
With another deep kiss, the beautiful monster yanked me away from the countertop and shunted me backwards into the hallway, charging us both through into the darkness of the living room. He threw me down onto the floor so hard I tumbled onto my knees and cursed at him, but that didn’t matter. He got the light and was down on me in a heartbeat, tearing at my dress.
The fabric let out one hell of a rip as it tore right open. He was strong. So damn strong I was just a ragdoll in his arms. I closed my eyes and let him strip me, knowing full well what would be coming.
Wanting what was coming.
I heard him groan under his breath as he tugged my tits free from my bra, seeing just how hard my nipples were straining for his touch. His fingers were savage as they gripped and twisted my flesh, but they didn’t stop there. They slid right down my ribs and over my stomach, hooking into my tattered tights to pull them down.
Oh fuck. My thighs. He’d see my thighs. He’d see the scars.
I bit my lip before he tugged the tights down to my knees, feeling the self-consciousness brewing under the harsh glow of the bulb, even in the face of the mortal terror I should be racked with.
Sure enough, he saw them. Brutal under the overhead light, he saw them.
The cuts were fresh, painful lines over scars. So many scars my thighs were a dance of them. Always high, out of view. Always deep enough to bleed nice and hard.
I’d been hurting myself since I was young, and I needed it. I needed the hurt in my body to free me from the hurt in my head.
“What the fuck–” Lucian began, but he knew when he looked into my eyes. He knew exactly what the fuck was going on with me.
I took hold of my tights and tried to pull them back up, but he wouldn’t let me.
“Why the fuck would you self-harm?” he asked, and I should’ve given him a shrug and kept my silence, since it was none of his damn business, but again, I guess I had the beer and the coke to thank for my loose tongue. The words flowed from my mouth like they’d never done in my life, gushing free with no restraint before I could try to stop them.
“Maybe because I’m a drug addicted failure whose family looks at her with nothing but disgust. Maybe because I hate myself and everything I am and will be grateful if you really do finish me off tonight, since I’m done with all of it.” I took a breath. “Maybe it’s because nobody will ever love me. Nobody will ever really touch me. Nobody will ever let me know what it’s like to have a man fall in love with me for all time. Because they wouldn’t, would they? No man would ever fall in love with a freak like me, even if my family would let them.”
His eyes widened on mine, and I saw more than hate. Worse than hate.
Pity.
I saw damn pity.
“You need to get some fucking therapy,” he said, his hands still gripped tight on my wrists.
“Yeah, so I keep hearing. Therapy, therapy, therapy. Like it’s ever going to do me any good.”
He stared at my cuts, and I felt ashamed of them, so fierce in my pain. I was wearing a slutty lace thong, but he barely even noticed. His attention was fixed on my flaws and not my strengths, just like the rest of the world’s always seemed to be. Even the people who gave a shit.
“Do it,” I said again. “Just do it.”
His stare tightened on mine. “Do what, exactly? Finish off your self-hate attempt? If you feel that fucking bad, you should finish yourself off, you
know. Save all the goddamn wallowing. It’s pathetic.”
“Yeah, well maybe I’m a failure at that, too.”
I knew the tears were pricking at my eyes, and I despised myself for it. I forced my jaw up in the air, trying to look as proud as I could manage, even though my bottom lip was trembling.
Shhh, secrets. Secrets.
Never tell your secrets.
He dropped my wrists and pulled away from me, and the pity was worse, his eyes still struggling to take it in. I pulled my tights up, but didn’t attempt to squirm away, just gathered my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.
“Finish me off,” I whispered.
“You seriously need to get some damn therapy,” he said. “It’s not as though you can’t afford it. Spending the rest of your life in therapy might be a good idea. Better for you than snorting coke every minute of the day.”
I was tired of hearing the same old bullshit, so I scowled at him.
“Last time I checked, you weren’t my personal advisor.”
He smirked at that, letting out a chuckle.
“I use that line plenty myself, darling.”
The atmosphere in the room had flatlined enough to make me feel useless. The tension between us was gone – any of the good tension, at least. If there could even be such a thing as good tension between the Constantines and the Morellis.
Lucian got to his feet and brushed himself down, clearly feeling as though anywhere with less than a million-dollar decor value was obviously infested with cockroaches.
“At least fuck me before you go,” I said, and I meant it. I truly meant it.
He sneered at me. “I wouldn’t want to fuck a Constantine, just strip them and hurt them.”
“That’s not what your dick is telling me,” I said and gestured to the bulge in his pants.
It was then that he came to his Morelli senses and came charging back to me, gripping my throat in his hands. “I will hurt you,” he snarled. “Don’t fucking push it!”
“Good,” I said, and I meant it. “You’ll save me the work.”
We glared at each other with more spite than you could put into words, both of us seething on waves of malice built up over decades. But it wasn’t spite that was making my heart race.
“Do it,” I rasped through his grip on my neck. “Hurt me.”
His eyes were slick with evil, and I saw it. Felt it. Sadism . . . cruelty . . . brutality . . . just like I’d known from so many men, so many times.
I felt like that again. I felt it deep. I felt it in him. In the monster in front of me.
But this monster was different.
This monster made me flutter in a way no other man had ever done.
Lucian Morelli wanted to hurt me, and it wasn’t just because of my bloodline. It was because he wanted it. He wanted to see me suffer. He wanted to see me lose myself in my pain.
Oh God, please, I wanted to lose myself in my pain too.
I wanted the perfect monster to make me hurt for him.
Please, give it to me. Please.
But no.
Like a switch had flicked inside him, his fire turned to ice.
“I have no time for your worthless shit,” he told me. “You’re nothing but a sad little bitch from a cesspit of a family. All of you can rot in hell, and I’ll help you get there.” His pause hurt me more than his hands ever could. “But it won’t be today. Not while you’re asking for it.”
My lip kept on trembling, and the cold in his eyes chilled my bones. I was silent as he backed away from me, his sneer blooming on his lips.
“Enjoy your breaths, little girl,” he said. “I’ll be coming for you one day. In the meantime, keep playing your pathetic little games of self-harm.”
I wanted to beg him to stay, even though it was insanity piled on top of insanity, and made no sense to my soul. I didn’t beg him for anything. I summoned enough pride from the scrappy little pits of my heart and stayed silent as he walked away, watching him leave with my sobs battling in my chest.
He didn’t even look back.
I flinched as the front door slammed closed behind him, and then the sobs burst their way free from my lungs.
Predictably, the cocaine burst its way free from my clutch soon after.
11
Lucian
The temptress had twisted me up inside, so tight I didn’t even know my own mind as I left that slum of a building. I marched out into the street, hoping that a random lowlife freak would come chasing after me, just so I could slam my fist into some fool’s flesh and make them suffer.
They didn’t. It was me, alone, wandering through downtown in the early hours of the morning, barely aware of my surroundings as I paced through the city.
It was all on her. Her pathetic little soul begging mine for peace. Her burning heart flaring up to lash out, even in her weakest moments. Her fear, so pretty. Her eyes, so wide and hurt.
Her need for touch and pain, blurring together to take her to the heights.
She was a masochist, and I knew it, even if she didn’t truly know it herself.
She put her need for release through pain down to whatever traumas she’d pushed into her depths, but she was wrong. I’d seen enough paintoy sluts to know what she was. She was one of them. I’d put every ounce of my fortune on it.
It was the swell in my pants that told me just how desperate a paintoy she really was. She had potential to be the best of the best, and I felt it with every single beat of my filthy heart.
But no. NO. She was a Constantine. Her pain had to be about my pleasure, not hers.
I knew Violent Delights would be empty, and even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have scratched the itch that Elaine Constantine had triggered in me. I could’ve summoned up a fresh girl to hurt, picking any type of slut of my choosing, but that wouldn’t have scratched it either.
I could’ve even picked up a woman from the street and played my cash purchase game with a total stranger, but I didn’t.
I did nothing, just kept walking through the night until the sun finally poked its head above the towers, thinking about Elaine Constantine and the hellfire I needed to rain down on her family.
I wished I’d never seen her up close in the first place. I wished I’d have pursued Tinsley Constantine like I’d set out to do that night. Hurting a girl on her birthday in the Constantine compound would have been a stab in the heart to her whole family tree. A crazy one, but one long overdue.
NYC was bustling with Sunday morning life when I finally came to my senses and called Hunter Sparro up on my cell. He was still in bed when he answered, his voice slurred with a clear hangover from the night before. I could read him a mile off.
That’s what friendship does to you after the best part of a lifetime, of course. It allows you to read each other as well as you can read yourself.
I heard a woman’s voice next to him, moaning out a who is it? and realized it must be a repeat conquest considering that she was asking the question with such a groan. Familiarity. Hardly a usual occurrence for a playboy. He rarely petted the same pussy twice.
“I’m coming over,” I told him, and he grunted a sigh.
“What the fuck, Luke? It’s barely eight a.m.”
“I’m coming over now,” I said. “Get that rando out of your bed, will you?”
“Sure thing, whatever,” he said, and hung up.
I hailed a cab, knowing full well the slut would be gone from his apartment by the time I got there. Sure enough, Hunter was padding around his living room, dressed in nothing but some low-slung pants as I stepped across his threshold.
I dropped myself onto his sofa and let out a breath as he rubbed his eyes and stared down at me.
“What the fuck brings you here on a Sunday morning?” he asked, and I spat it out before I came to my senses.
“Elaine fucking Constantine brings me here on a Sunday morning.”
He looked at me like I’d taken a knock to the head since he’d last seen me.<
br />
“Why the holy crap would Elaine Constantine do anything to you? Please tell me you’ve stayed away from her. Your dad will lose his shit. Her family will start a war.” He paused. “I mean, if you’ve finished her . . .”
I almost wished I had done. It would save the embarrassment and absurdity of what I’d truly been doing to her.
Predictably for Hunter, my one true friend in the world, he read my mind.
“You fucked her, didn’t you? You fucked her and left her breathing.”
“Not quite,” I told him, and cursed myself under my breath.
He crouched down in front of me, eyes searching for signs I’d taken a battering to my brain. “Not quite as in what? What the hell’s going on?”
I shouldn’t have told him any of it. I should’ve put it to bed in my mind and turned my back on it for all time, or at least until I had some method to hurting her and making her family pay. Yet, I didn’t. I was still twisted up enough from her bullshit ways that I didn’t.
“Tinsley Constantine’s masked ball,” I said, and he pulled a face.
“Yeah, what about it? Everyone’s been raving about it. Tabloids have been lapping it up.”
“I was there,” I told him, and he laughed at me. Actually laughed at me.
“What in the living fuck were you doing at Tinsley Constantine’s ball?”
My eyes were daggers. “Plotting ways to execute her demise.”
He scoffed. “Sure thing, but that’s madness, right? How the fuck would you have made it out of there alive? And what the fuck has that got to do with Elaine?”
I wished I was a smoker, just to take a drag on a cigarette and break up my own damn mood.
“I saw her there, coked up and trashed, barging around the place like she owned it.”
“Yeah, I think the whole world knows she’s a cokehead. I heard she was in debt to the Power brothers last time the Constantine gossip was going around the Regent.”
That pricked my interest – one small sliver of Constantine intelligence that had slipped my ears.