It also let me fight internally to get Sarah fucking Carpenter out of my mind. I’d have my hands full with her in two days; I did not need those forty-eight hours to be filled with her.
Yet thinking of her… her body… fucking her… taking her under my grip… controlling her…
It was more intoxicating than the bourbon in my hand. And that made this game very dangerous for me. There were very, very, very few things in this life I could not control.
My brothers.
The memory of Virgil.
Apparently, the Black Reapers.
And now, for some reason I could not yet figure out, the presence of Sarah Carpenter in my mind.
Well, with the first two, I was fine. The third would eventually bow to me and my family, one way or another.
And the fourth?
I’d wrangled her once before. With age, maturity, and an awareness of the broader goal to destroy her—yes, that was still the plan—I could handle her in her mind.
Maybe that’s how I’d spend the next forty-eight hours. Plotting in a bit more detail how to bring her down in a way that didn’t come back to bite me.
An hour or so passed, the four of us chatting about business, about traveling, about stories of the past that weren’t quite so emotionally sour as Virgil’s death. I couldn’t say I was fully invested in the conversation or fully focused, but that was actually a luxury. Sometimes, I needed to be in a room and not have to focus on every little detail, lest something slip past me that I’d need to use later. Sometimes, it was good to just relax with an expensive drink, my closest people, and the Las Vegas evening around us.
Shortly after that hour passed, Adrian said he had to go. I was not really in the mood to talk further; I’d gotten what I wanted out of the meeting, which was a palette cleanser from Sarah. She wasn’t gone from my mind, but the lingering excitement mixed with disgust for myself had subsided. I walked Dante and Lucas to the elevator and thanked them for coming.
“And Cassius,” Dante said after embracing me. “We’ve got your fucking back. If something’s troubling you, don’t fucking hide it from us. We’re blood. Understood?”
I nodded. I knew very well. I trusted my brothers more than my security guards. Dante, especially, would take a knife to the neck for any of us. What he’d taken in the past to secure our family’s power wasn’t that far removed from that image either.
“What he said,” Lucas said with a smirk.
“Get the hell out of here,” I said, although I returned the facial expression.
Seconds later, the elevator doors closed. I sipped the last of my bourbon, sighed, and let my shoulders gently sag.
It had been a very interesting early evening and a very relaxing evening.
And now, it was time to turn my attention to vengeance.
Destroying Sarah Carpenter’s life for the way she fucking destroyed ours.
6
SARAH
One thing had become readily apparent.
I wasn’t going back to Phoenix anytime soon if I was going to theRed Courtin about 48 hours.
Actually, truth be told, even if I wasn’t going to that gala in two days, even if Cassius had simply said he’d see me soon enough without giving details… I probably wasn’t going back to Phoenix anytime soon.
The threat of the King’s Men was gone. The Black Reapers MC as they existed wasn’t nearly as violent as prior iterations had been. I was safe in town, especially if Cassius kept an eye on me from afar. I knew some women would find that unnerving, that a billionaire would have eyes on them at all times, even if it wasn’t their own literal eyes. And had it been anyone else, I probably would have agreed with them.
But Cassius Vale… that man was something else.
I put on a pretty face for the rest of the night. Part of me kept looking over the patrons’ shoulders, wondering if Cassius might come down. Even if one of his brothers might appear, that might be something. But though there were a few notable patrons who were well known in our community, almost all of them were well over the age of fifty, mostly sixty in some cases. None werecertainly as alluring as Cassius or even as intense as his brothers. I had never had any interest in any of his brothers, but at least they kept you on your toes.
There was mild disappointment that Cassius did not appear again. But disappointment slowly morphed into anticipation at what was to come in two nights. Cassius knew this about me, of course; he was smart enough to string things along. He would not say a word to me between now and the absolute last second.
