I could let her rest, but I can’t execute a perfectly laid-out plan with patience.
I also need to shut her blinds before anyone gets a sneak peek of the luscious thighs exposed by the high rise of her skirt.
The rusty hinges on Justine’s door would buckle under the force of my boot in no time, but then I’d run the risk of waking her, so, instead, I carefully apply pressure to the door handle until the mechanism stopping it from twisting warps.
Just before the foldable chair Justine placed under the doorknob collapses with a bang, I push open the door enough I can catch it in my hand. Word to the wise: if you want to keep a bad man out of your room, don’t barricade your door with a foldable chair. You may as well leave it open and pretend you locked it.
Once Justine’s curtains are closed, I move to the side of the bed she’s sleeping on. She stirs when I track my finger over a mottled scar on the back of her right knee. It doesn’t replicate any of the burns and marks my body holds. It’s angry and stretched, as if her skin was shredded by an immense amount of force.
The span of her scars and their odd shape keep me fascinated for several long minutes. I’m not surprised. Scars tell a million stories, and I’m dying to hear hers.
“You’ve just got to be brave enough to share them with me,Ahren.”
While staring at her angelic face, I count backward from ten, knowing I should leave when I reach zero, but aware that’s unlikely to happen. Vladimir is already watching, so now I must watch too. I watch the way Justine’s lips part when she takes in shallow breaths, and the paleness of her cheeks since she is unaware she’s caught my eye. I watch a red blush creep from her knees to her nape when the desire to touch her becomes too much to bear, and how her breathing grows along with her body’s hue when she senses my touch. Then I watch her some more just for the hell of it.
I should wake her so I can finish what I started on her front door. I should spread her thighs wide, snap off her no-doubt still soaked panties and eat her cunt as if I’ve never been fed. I should fuck her until her body is so flushed with heat, her scars will fade in its fiery red coloring, but I can’t. Not only must I remain alert in preparation for Vladimir’s next move, there’s something so surreal about seeing an angel in the flesh, I can’t act on any of the inane thoughts in my head.
Rico said years of misery would be undone by a reward I’d never anticipate. I assumed it would be of monetary value. I had no clue it would be in the form of a person.
Chapter Eight
With the sun risen and Roman on guard outside, I make my way from Justine’s room to her guest bedroom in preparation to have a shower. My head is throbbing due to a lack of sleep, but I’m still hyped with adrenaline. I had a perfect cure for my restlessness directly in front of me, but instead of acting how I was raised to be, I let Justine sleep.
Don’t ask me why or I may be tempted to slit my own throat.
Although pissed I spent my night watching Justine instead of tasting her, it granted me the perfect opportunity to truly look at her. Her features are so unique, several hours flew by within a second. With her long red hair twisted off her face, I saw how her little nose screwed up anytime she murmured in her sleep, how she sleeps in a ball like she’s adept on protecting herself even while she’s sleeping, and although her sleep was mostly restless, my touch was capable of settling the occasional murmur.
While watching her sleep as if she was working a pole on a dollar bill littered stage, I realized she isn’t the type I usually go for. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. She is gorgeous, but her beauty is compliments to good genes instead of a surgeon’s scalpel—a stark contradiction to the whores and strippers I’m surrounded by every day.
Her natural, unenhanced features have me so fascinated, instead of demanding for Roman to unearth a way out of my predicament, I’m conjuring ways to prolong my stay without my extracurricular activities being placed on Vladimir’s radar.
Only yesterday I would have said it wasn’t possible.
Today, I’m feeling optimistic.
While moving for the bag of clothes Roman arrived with hours ago, I notice a single file sitting neatly on the bed in the middle of Justine’s guest bedroom. My motives shift for the third time the past twelve hours. Instead of heading straight for the bathroom to wash off the funk making me restless, I read the dossier Roman complied on Justine at my request.
Excluding the last three dot points of the one page transcript, it is as clean as a whistle. Mere weeks after Justine was hospitalized for a ‘personal’ matter, her brother, Maddox, was charged with first degree murder. In an endeavor to keep their son out of jail, Justine’s parents sold everything they owned to fund his legal expenses.
It did them no good.
Even in lieu of a body, Maddox was found guilty by a jury of his peers, and his family lost everything—including their only daughter, who switched her major from architecture to criminal justice so she’d have a chance to work alongside the number one defensive attorney in the country, Carmichael I’m-going-to-gut-him-alive Fletcher.
Justine’s file unveils the reason she’s in Las Vegas, but if it is thesolereason she’s here, she’ll face more issues than a long weekend sleepover with a mob prince. Maddox isn’t just in one of the most gang-populated prisons in the country, he’s also under the Petretti’s watch.
Despite me sharing their blood, the Petrettis are rivals of the Popovs. Their former founder, Col, was killed a little over three years ago. Rico murdered him in vengeance for organizing the death of his mother before making out she died of an overdose. My mother helped Col in return for gifting her the son she desperately craved—aka me.
Now can you understand Vladimir’s disdain? I’m not just the byproduct of his wife’s infidelity; my veins carry the blood of his mortal enemy.
My mother believed Vladimir was none the wiser about her deceit. She was wrong. When Rico brought it up at a family dinner two months before his death, and only a week after Vladimir convinced me to organize for his wife to be killed as brutally as his mother, it was clear Vladimir knew all along I wasn’t his son.
He played along with my mother’s ruse with the hope I’d be the final piece of the puzzle he’d been struggling to complete the past three decades. In some ways, I was. Not only did my brother kill my father, my mother chose death over a life without Vladimir.
I knew my mother’s decision long before she pulled the trigger. It didn’t make it any easier to swallow, though. For years, I’d wondered if I was a gimmick she used to toy with Vladimir. Her suicide proved I was. It was always about her and what she lost when Felicia, Vladimir’s favorite whore, gave birth to Vladimir’s first son instead of his wife.
Hating that I’m allowing the ghosts of my past to haunt me, I snag a change of clothes out of my bag before making my way to the bathroom Justine hid in for almost twenty minutes last night. I don’t need to alert Roman to my whereabouts. He keeps watch no matter what I am doing—and yes, that was meant to sound as perverted as it did.
Don’t let Roman’s worldly eyes, fatherly face, and fit body covered by a fancy suit deceive you. He’s a killer in every sense of the word.
