I watched him kill. Watched him fuck. Watched him nurse his pain in silence. And each time, the draw to him was omnipotent, warning me I’d be wasting my time if I tried to walk away. It yanked at every unhinged nerve in my brain, sang to every bloodthirsty bone in my body and tugged at every wicked pulse in my pussy.
While I assumed he had no idea I stalked him, there were times he paused to scan his surroundings which hinted otherwise. Only, he’d done nothing to look deeply into it or mention it to anyone.
Something about him seemed to calm the raging storm inside me, his presence quieting the chaos in my head and the unrelenting shadows blurring my thoughts. What that was, I had no idea, only that I felt some bizarre sense of safety around him, as though I didn’t have to hide who I was, what I was or what I planned to do.
If last night was any indication, perhaps he’d feel the same way about me someday, or maybe he’d prefer to kill me for making him come in his sleep.
My lips twitched.
Even the toughest men were as shaky as Jello with the right manipulation, his cock an easy handicap. Yet for all intents and purposes, I knew Remo’s vulnerability lay in his nightmares.
Judging his body language now, he was in full form and pissed, nowhere near to the weak man last night. In the time it took me to discover details about him, I’d learned that very little affected him unless it came to family. Then all hell would break loose.
Eyes fixated on him; I held my breath.
That feral smirk, a promise of sin, came first. Then his arm swung out in a wide arc, the black machete glinting its intention before it sliced through a man’s neck in a quick, sharp swoop. Blood sprayed, adorning Remo in its magnificent color, pulling a smile from me and escalating that enthused thump to my heartbeat I usually experienced when I took a life.
I steadied my breath, inhaling deeply through my nose and out through my mouth, arousal scorching my body like hot embers, anticipating the moment we’d consummate the perfect pairing. And that we were.
Damaged. Deranged. Heartless.
Our first kiss would taste like fury and our first night, would resemble war.
Smiling, I returned my focus to the bloodbath he started that I’d end.
five
. . .
Remo– 36 years old
Three days after I sliced off Tony’s head, I expected a showdown from Elio, but nothing. Like the others, this morning was insultingly ordinary. Sunlight poured through the office windows, warming the desk while I worked through shipment ledgers, numbers lining up clean and predictable under my pen, the only things in my world that ever behaved. Coffee cooled untouched at my elbow, gone bitter the way I enjoyed it. Across from me, Gian was hunched over the accounts laptop like it had personally betrayed him, jaw tight, fingers stabbing at the keys with the same aggression he usually reserved for breaking kneecaps.
“This thing’s broken,” he muttered.
“It’s not broken,” Luca, one of the soldiers involved with the books, said calmly from the couch without even glancing up from his Tablet.
“It is,” Gian insisted. “I subtracted six from fourteen and it gave me eight.”
“That’s correct,” Luca replied.
“No, it’s not. I did it twice. It gave me eight both times. That’s suspicious.”
I paused mid-signature and looked up slowly, once more wondering why the fuck I was given a child as my right hand.
Luca pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s called math, Gian and it’s fucking correct.”
“Well, it’s stupid,” he snapped, jabbing the screen harder. “Why the hell am I doing this anyway? I’m supposed to be learning under Remo, not arguing with a calculator like it owes me money.”
“You are learning.” The other man sighed. “If you can’t track numbers, you can’t track shipments. If you can’t track shipments, you can’t track bodies. And then Remo kills you instead of the other guy.”
Gian went quiet for a beat. “Okay, that feels excessive.”
I held his stare just long enough for him to straighten in his chair and stop touching the keyboard.
He cleared his throat. “Still think it’s broken though.”
The scratch of my pen resumed, their bickering fading into the background noise of the room. Most men assumed revenge fell with a clang. In my life, though, it usually arrived between bad coffee, paperwork, my right-hand man losing a fight to basic arithmetic or a threatening text filled with the confidence of someone who didn’t know me as well as they thought they did.
