Page 156 of Sins of Arrogance

She stops but doesn’t turn to face him.

“I re­ally am sorry. You are my daugh­ter and I love you, even when I do a ter­ri­ble job of show­ing it.”

“I’m not sure it’s love if you can’t show it,” she says qui­etly be­fore leav­ing Bro­gan’s of­fice.

I send a text to Brice to pick up Dier­dre and put her on ice un­til I’m ready to deal with her.

“I’ll take care of Dier­dre,” I tell Bro­gan.

He nods. “She has to die.”

“Aye.”

“Kara de­serves a bet­ter fa­ther than the one I have been.”

I won’t ar­gue with that. He’s a strong mob boss, but he has never val­ued his daugh­ters like I value my son.

And I’m a so­ciopath.

He’s not.

Or so I have al­ways as­sumed.

I stop at the door on the way out of his of­fice. “I will burn down this mob and ev­ery­one in it be­fore I let my wife go.”

“Good. My daugh­ter de­serves to be loved that way. But I’m not the one you have to con­vince.”

Loved? I don’t do love. But I need her.

And she needs me.

For a man like me, that’s more pow­er­ful than any ephemeral emo­tion.

Bro­gan thinks I’m go­ing to ro­mance his daugh­ter into stay­ing with me, but that’s not how a man like me works.

I keep what is mine no mat­ter what the con­se­quences.

Chap­ter 39: The Kid­nap­ping Clause

KARA

The room is pitch black when I wake up. I blink and then blink again, try­ing to make out shapes in the dark.

Usu­ally, af­ter I’ve been asleep, my eyes are ad­justed enough to see the dresser on the far wall, the darker rec­tan­gle that is the en­trance to the en suite.

Then I re­mem­ber. I’m in my old bed­room. But I don’t re­call it be­ing this dark when I went to sleep.

Try­ing to pen­e­trate the sty­gian dark­ness, I turn my head and that’s when I feel the con­stric­tion. I’m wear­ing a sleep mask. That’s right.

I put it on in an ef­fort to fi­nally get to sleep. I don’t take sleep­ing pills. Ever.

I lift my hand to take the mask off, but in­stead of free move­ment, I feel a tug against my other wrist.

There are cuffs on my wrists. The wide leather kind with a silk padded lin­ing like the ones Mick uses on me when we get kinky be­tween the sheets.

Panic should be my first re­ac­tion, right? But it’s not. Arousal hits me right be­tween my legs, mak­ing my thighs clench.

Ig­nor­ing the sen­sa­tion, I try to sit up. That’s when I re­al­ize my an­kles are cuffed to­gether too.