Heartless

by Jade West

  “Terence Kingsley,” the woman on reception repeated as the two security guards cast a glance in my direction. “She’s expecting you?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “Please alert her to my visit, and I’ll make my way up to her suite.”

  My actions could have killed me on the spot. Security could’ve killed me on the spot.

  They didn’t.

  The woman put on a smile and dialed up to Elaine’s suite, and I waited, deadly cool as the woman spoke.

  “Terence Kingsley is here for you. He says you are expecting him.”

  I waited.

  Every second stilled to nothing as I waited.

  There it was again, simmering down deep, that forbidden fucking thrill that set my heart on fire.

  The woman ended the call and gave me another smile. “Elaine says to go on up. She’s on level twenty-nine.”

  Interesting.

  Interesting and thrilling, right to the seedy fucking depths of me.

  “Thank you,” I said, and flashed the security desk one final look before I made my way through the foyer.

  The elevator ride was long and slow. My mouth was dry as I stepped out onto the top level suite and walked right on up to Elaine Constantine’s front door. I rapped my knuckles three times, my fist still held up in the air as my pretty little fool Elaine answered.

  She’d been crying.

  The tracks of her tears were fresh down her cheeks.

  “You’re insane,” she hissed as she swung the door open. “What the hell are you doing here? Have you lost your fucking mind?”

  I pushed past her without a word, taking a look at the opulence of the apartment around me. It was huge, cream, and sparse. Hardly a trace of personality in the place.

  “I’m here because I’m Terence fucking Kingsley,” I sneered at her. “I’m here to visit the troubled little bitch who nearly got herself fucked up in the back alley of loser town last night.”

  Just as expected, those pretty blue saucer eyes of hers widened.

  “You really are insane,” she said again. “You nearly got us both killed then, and that was stupid enough, but if anyone thought for one single second you were here . . . now . . .”

  She seemed different.

  Elaine seemed different.

  Scared to a whole new tune. One I hadn’t seen in her before.

  It was then that I looked beyond her to the coffee table next to her designer leather couch. It was then that I saw the concoction of sleeping pills and other bottles of meds waiting in a row next to a half-empty bottle of champagne.

  And more . . .

  A scrawled letter, complete with the fountain pen cast down at the side . . .

  I headed close enough to investigate and picked up one of the bottles. Diazepam. A whole jar full of them that I shook in my hand.

  Fatalistic little fool.

  “Going to bail out, are you?” I asked her. “This is how you’re planning on ditching your life, to save the Power brothers the effort?”

  “It’s got fuck all to do with the Power brothers,” she said in a stupid little fucked-up voice, folding her arms across her chest. “I’m doing what I want, because I want to.”

  But she was lying. Just like always.

  If she’d really, truly wanted to kill herself tonight she’d have told the security team that the Morelli heir was in the foyer in pursuit of her, and cast Terence Kingsley aside as nothing.

  She didn’t want to kill herself. She wanted me.

  She’d wanted me since she’d very first set eyes on me at Tinsley Constantine’s ball.

  We stared at each other, both of us sizzling with generations of family hate and vitriol. Both of us despising everything the other one stood for. Both of us knowing that anything other than malice between us was at odds with everything we stood for as human beings.

  I should’ve laughed in her face and watched her kill herself, choking her down with her medicinal stocks to help her along her way.

  I did nothing. Just stared. Seething. Seething and wanting. Seething and needing.

  “Leave me,” she told me, and this time her eyes flared with a new round of shame. “You can sleep happily tonight, knowing I’m saying my goodnight for good. See you later, asshole.”

  “You’re a self-pitying little bitch, you know that?” I said. “Really, you’re a silly little girl who should know better than to wallow in your own pit of bullshit choices.”

  “Thanks for that,” she snapped. “I’ll take a note of your wisdom, shall I, Terence Kingsley?”

  It was then that she noticed my bandaged hand.

  “What’s that?” she asked. “Get into a fight with some freak in your underworld empire, did you? Big, bad Lucian Morelli hurting his poor hand? Caught in the crossfire?”

  I stepped up closer to her and breathed in her scent. “Why are you such a sad, impudent little fool? What is it that makes you such a filthy little loser, aching so much for her own demise?”

  Her eyes were brimming with tears, even though her jaw was gritted tight.

  “Fuck you, Lucian. Fuck you, and fuck off. I don’t want anything the fuck to do with you, and never have.”

  I backed her up into the wall, pinning her tight.

  “Such a liar,” I snarled. “Such a dirty little liar. You can’t resist me. You’ve not been able to resist me since the very first moment you laid eyes on me at your sister’s sad bitch party.”

  “Interesting accusation,” she hissed. “Considering you’re the one standing in my apartment, even though you’d be dead if anyone so much as got a sniff you were here.”

  I saw that flash of need in her eyes, and it was the one that set me on fire. The one that always set me on fire.

  It was her masochistic need for hurt. The little girl who wanted to suffer at my hands.

  “Seriously,” she whispered. “Fuck off now. You don’t have to worry, I’m going to say my goodbyes. At least let me do them for myself.”

  “You’re really going to overdose for the sake of a debt to the Power brothers?”

  She shrugged, squirming her body tight against mine. Her breaths were in my face, and her eyes were still glassy. Hurt.

  “I’m going to overdose because I want to. I’m done with the whole sorry state of my existence.”

  I tugged her nightdress up around her thighs, and swallowed as I saw the beauty of the fresh slashes on her flesh.

  “An overdose would be such a waste,” I said with a snarl. “You have too much of a beautiful body to chow down some meds to say goodbye.”

  “Like what? You think I should slash myself to pieces on my living room floor?”

  And that’s when I knew it, above anything else. The one thing I should’ve known right from the beginning when I’d very first caught sight of the woman in gold and that mysterious, irrational web of want she’d snared me with.

  She wasn’t going to be slashing herself to pieces. I was going to be destroying her, one tiny petal at a time.

  “You won’t be slashing yourself anywhere,” I told her and took her throat in my hands. “You’re coming with me tonight.”

  Even though her throat was in my hands, she managed to choke a grin.

  “You’re planning on kidnapping me from my city center apartment, sneaking me down past the eons of security staff and right into the main street outside while the world is watching you, are you? Good luck with that.”

  But no.

  It was me who grinned right back at her. A grin that chilled her right to the bones.

  “I won’t be kidnapping you from anywhere. You’ll be joining me very fucking willingly. You can think of it as a far more interesting form of suicide.”

  That sparked something in her, some final flare of self-respect in that battered little heart of hers.

  “No!” she hissed at me. “I’m doing it for myself. My own final shot at my own fate, everyone else can get fucked!”

  She didn’t even ask me to fuck her this time. Her bod
y was rigid against mine, unmoving.

  Yet again, it only made me want her more.

  I kissed her once. Deeply. Nipping and tugging at her lips with my teeth.

  I nipped her lower lip so hard she whimpered, even though she was struggling for air. I tasted her blood in my mouth as I pulled away.

  It tasted fucking divine. Her blood. A delicacy I’d been keen to sample the whole fucking time I’d been chasing her.

  “You’re coming the fuck with me,” I said.

  I cast her aside and she fell to the floor, gasping for breath as I freed her throat. I strolled over to the table without giving a shit for the medication bottles. What I wanted was right next to them, the scrawled remnants of the letter she was in the midst of writing.

  Tristan.

  I should’ve known it would be pussy boy featuring in her last goodbye.

  “You really like that guy, don’t you?” I asked her.

  “You don’t know anything about Tristan,” she lied, and I smirked.

  “He really likes you too, you know,” I told her. “He was prepared to stick his neck well and truly on the line to save you from my grasp the other night. He wouldn’t tell me where you were, not even if it cost him his life.”

  She shrugged. “So? Yeah, maybe he does really like me. Just as well I’m leaving him a letter then, isn’t it?”

  I slipped it into my jacket pocket, and her eyes widened in the way I was coming to love too damn much to ignore.

  “He’ll be getting a load more than a goodbye letter from you if you don’t join me down at the back of this building in fifteen minutes,” I told her. “If you take your own life up here, I’ll be taking his. If you tell anyone I’ve been here, I’ll be sure to make sure he’s dead before I handle the drama.”

  Oh, those pretty eyes of hers. Widening even further.

  “No,” she said. “No. You can’t.”

  But yes. Yes. This was the answer. This had always been the answer. Taking her as mine with no exit and no limits was the prize I’d been chasing right from the start, without even knowing it.

  She was mine.

  She’d always been mine, from the very moment I’d set my eyes on her, the woman in gold.

  “I’ll be outside,” I told her. “In the shadows to the right of parking, under the rear awning. You’ll be there in fifteen.”

  “No,” she tried again, but it was weak. I didn’t even look behind me, just made my way out of her suite and back through her domain.

  I walked through a whole tower full of fools ignorant to the menace going on within their world.

  I still had a smirk on my face when I took a turn right at the foyer and followed the signs down for the rear parking lot. The security guards were around, and I could sense them, but I didn’t slow down in my paces, just kept my head up high. Terence Kingsley was leaving the building.

  And then I waited.

  I waited in the shadows for Elaine Constantine with a strangely hypnotic thrill rising up in my veins.

  I checked my watch, ticking slowly. I looked up at the tower block, counting the seconds.

  Waiting. Wanting. Planning.

  Planning all the filthy painful things I was going to do to that pretty little temptress as I made her mine.

  I was going to bind her, and brand her, and tear her apart.

  I was going to take her soul, and her heart, and her secrets. Every little last one of them until she was bleeding her sins on the floor and begging me to end her life.

  Elaine Beatrice Constantine was my paintoy little virgin, giving me every breath.

  And there she was. A flighty shadow in the shadows.

  Her wide blue eyes looked more scared than ever as she joined me under that awning with her arms wrapped tight around her chest.

  She was skittish. Terrified.

  Perfect.

  “Don’t hurt Tristan,” she said as she stepped up close. “Please, don’t hurt Tristan.”

  “You’d better be a good little girl for the devil, then,” I said, and took my little blonde dolly by the hand.

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