“Erg Ungersturghhh.”
“Good. Squeeze your tits.”
I hesitate.
“Put your fucking hands on your tits and play with them or I’ll blow your head apart.”
Minotaur.
The word spits out of the back of my brain as I cup my breasts through my dress. Minotaur. The cursed son of a goddess and a bull, charging around a dark maze and killing for fun. I suck hard, suck until my cheeks are scraped and my mouth is full of cuts and blood and my brain is a white blur.
“You’re almost done,” Adriano snarls. “Make my Glock come in your mouth.”
Does he mean he’s going to shoot me? Fear fuzzes my mind but my mouth keeps moving, sucking, and swallowing.
“Enough.”
He’s barely got the word out before I’m pushed backward and I crumple on the floor.
“You’re an embarrassment.” Adriano wipes his gun on his pants and returns it to the holster. “You try to con your way out of here, I’ll do worse than kill you. You’ll find yourself in a dirty hole, pissing into a bucket. I’ve got a tattoo machine. I’ll mark you up. Your face. Your tits. I’ll put my name all over you. Pierce your nipples, cut your skin and then, if you’re lucky, I’ll kill you.”
I gag, tasting bile and cheese and eggs. Adriano smiles like it’s the sweetest thing he’s ever seen.
“You want to know why you’re still alive? Because my brothers want your pussy. But as soon as they’re done with you, I’ll end your life and I won’t bother fucking you first.”
I nod, but I can see the front of his pants is still swollen. He doesn’t think I’m ugly. Or if he does, he still liked doing that to me.
“You think I want your worthless cunt?” He says it so quietly he might be talking to himself.
“No,” I whisper.
He presses his face between the bars, his eyes cold as outer space. “Let’s be clear, little girl. You’re not worth raping.”
The words ring in my mind like broken bells, shattering my insides. I’m too scared to cry, too hurt to breathe.
He turns his back on me. “Enjoy the last days of your life, Pryntsesa.”
I lie in the dark, listening to the water drip from the ceiling. I count three thousand nine hundred and thirty-three drops.
Money.
Freedom.
Marriage.
Death.
These are the four choices my future holds. The only paths I can hope to walk.
Chapter Ten
Elliot Morelli
The truth ofbeing a boss means waking up every morning to maintain a thousand-part machine that despite constant upkeep is one mistake from exploding. I should be happy. I should be fucking ecstatic. Everything following the cathedral has gone perfectly. Minimal underworld complaints, minimal police interference, enough journalists greased to keep a pretty debutante’s disappearance out of the news. I expected trouble from the outside—Parker’s supporters, rival families, the Whitehalls funneling money into ex-Mossad agents. Instead, the chaos is coming from inside Velvet House.
I thought January would break like a wave on the shore. She was to be a pleasurable inconvenience. A way to torment Parker before we ended him in fair retribution for what he did to us seventeen years ago. But every day I hold the girl in my basement, she becomes a larger thorn in my side.
She should be begging to leave the cage by any means necessary but she’s eating and sleeping well and her moods are stable. Meanwhile, my brothers, the men I need focused and in fighting form, are tearing each other apart. Day and night they argue about what to do with January Whitehall. Twice, Adriano physically separated Bobby and Doc. Three times Bobby’s headed Adriano away from the basement, sure—as I am—he was planning to kill the girl. And on four separate occasions, Adriano has hauled Doc away from the security monitors where he’s passed out drunk, watching her. The last time he had a lit cigarette between his fingers. The fucking idiot could have burned Velvet House to the ground.
