Page 106 of The Beast Who Begged Me

Now I see it was respect.

“Thank you, Vito,” I tell him. “I won’t need you again tonight. Go home to Rosa.”

But he still waits by the car as I walk to the Obelisk door and look up into the camera above the entrance.

A moment later, that heavy metal door slides open silently, and I step into the Obelisk once more.

The man at the reception desk is the same man who was there last time Dami brought me in the front door. His white-blond hair is slicked back from a beautiful face with high cheekbones, and his wide-set blue eyes are fixed on me along with an icy smile.

“Mr. Clemenza, isn’t it?” he asks politely.

I take one step forward, and four Bratva security guards rush out with guns pointed at me. I stop and raise my hands, smiling like a man arriving at a party he’s been looking forward to all week. “It seems you’ve been expecting me,” I say.

This is the part where I’m most likely to get a bullet instead of a conversation. The whole plan balances on these few seconds. But there’s nothing I can do but trust in my own ability to read men like Daniel King, so I stand there and smile and let my heart hammer beneath my very expensive Lorenzo Benedetti shirt.

“Mr. Clemenza.” Daniel King strolls into the foyer from a side door. “How delightful to see you.”

“Said the spider to the fly,” I reply dryly.

He smiles and circles me, looking me up and down, and I remember once more the humiliations I went through for this man’s first auction.

I can be sure it would be a thousand times worse the second time around. But I’m here for Sammy. That’s the only thing that matters.

“I received an invitation,” I tell him. “From your men.” I reach for my inner pocket, slowing as every gun muzzle in the foyer tightens its aim on me. But they let me take out the card that was left at Sammy’s abduction. I hold it up in two fingers to show King.

“And you really came,” he marvels. “I would have thought Lou Clemenza’s grandson was a little cleverer than that. Where’s the thug who bought you? Has he tired of you?”

“I snuck out,” I say. Let him think I’m still trying to escape Dami. That Dami has no idea where I’ve gone.

For a moment, he thinks about it. “Yes,” he says at last. “I heard you tried it once before.” He gives a nod to one of the men. “Pat him down.”

The man lowers his weapon and approaches me to run his hands all over me, feeling in my pockets roughly. His thumbs press too long at my hips, his palms dragging over my waist and down my thighs with a deliberate intimacy that has nothing to do with searching for weapons. When I meet his eyes calmly, I see no humanity in them at all. Just blank stone and cruelty. It’s a look I recognize, since I saw it often enough in my grandfather’s face.

He steps back and barks one word in Russian, which I assume means, “Clear.”

“Not even the ring,” King says, his eyes on my hands. “A little birdie told me that you had gathered together the sad remnants of your family and made them crown you.” I say nothing. After a pause, he asks, “You did not bring the ring with you? I’ve had some inquiries about it.”

The ring. Someone has been asking King about it, and I’d love to know who. But I have to stay on mission. Get Sammy, then get out of here.

“I am as you see me, Mr. King,” I say.

“Destitute,” he agrees, a sadistic pleasure in his voice. And then his smile fades. “Remove his clothes. Search everything.”

My arms are seized by an enormous Russian on either side, and my clothes are torn from me, all of them, even socks and underwear. King’s eyes hover over the marks Dami left on me, and I lift my chin.

Wearing Dami’s signs of ownership, I’m not naked at all.

King watches the guards tear up my clothes, Lorenzo Benedetti’s beautiful work shredded like paper, until one of them finds what I hoped they would: the decoy tracker.

He hands it to King, who studies the little transmitter, then looks at me with renewed pleasure. “I wondered what was making you so brave.” He drops it beneath his shoe and crushes it against the floor.

I make myself look at the broken pieces and try to project fear. King turns toward the corridor. “My office,” he tells the guards. “We have things to discuss.”

They march me, naked, through the back corridors, past cameras and locked doors, my bare feet cold despite the plush carpets. In King’s office, they push me into a chair and cuff one wrist to its arm. King waits until they’ve left before taking his seat behind the desk.

“So,” he says. “You ran away from your owner and came back to me. What a touching little story.”

“I came for Sammy, Mr. King. At your own invitation.” I keep my free hand in my lap, even though I desperately want to hit the tracker. But I need to know Sammy’s whereabouts first. “Where is he?”