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When he finished, he let go of me. I slumped to the floor, messy and crying.
Violated.
Satisfied. So, so satisfied.
Before I had wondered if I was in heaven or hell.
What a stupid question that was.
Two
She was wearing the Pavoni pendant.
Beast would have to kill the person who put it in there. He’d said to put in some extra jewels, shit they had lying around, stuff that was either too hot to sell or too worthless.
Not the goddamn Pavoni pendant.
The sun was rising over the city now, indicating that Beast hadn’t slept since the moment he’d taken the girl. It streamed into his home office as he fingered the diamond, light refracting in waves on his Brazilian rosewood desk. He hadn’t laid eyes on it in years, not since Lucio entrusted it to him. He’d put it safely into storage and forgotten about it. The rules Lucio made were clear: it was for safe keeping.
Not to sell.
Not to give to his wife, as is customary for the patriarch.
A knock sounded and Beast closed his palm, crushing the pendant. The ridges of the elegantly cut diamond sliced into his skin.
"Come in,” Beast said, looking up from his palm and to the door. A young man who appeared no older than eighteen, with a mess of curly golden hair, popped his head in cautiously. Nikolai, the Beast’s driver and everyman, was a bit like a personal assistant. He ran most of the Beast’s errands and organized most of his schedule, but the job parallels fell flat when it came to negotiating calls with a sex trafficker.
“Shall I make arrangements for Francesca Notte’s delivery?” Nikolai asked.
Only my friends call me Frankie.
Francesca was a beautiful name to match a beautiful woman. With luscious chocolate hair that fell next to her crystalline eyes, she was the rarest thing he’d ever seen. Beast hadn’t planned to call her Frankie—hadn’t given much thought to calling her anything—then she’d goaded him by ordering him to call her Francesca. He’d taken the challenge and a bonus had been seeing how much it pissed her off. Her cheeks had flushed with anger, her honey skin turning a beautiful shade of rose.
In that moment he remembered thinking how determined he was to call her Frankie, just to see her skin turn that color.
“No.” The Beast tightened his grip. “That will not be necessary.” Nikolai bowed his head and was nearly out the door when Beast added, “Have another driver prepared. You are to stay here with Frankie.” There was a slight, nearly imperceptible widening of Nikolai’s eyes, but all he did was nod. A jagged scar ran beneath the boy’s light green eye, serving as a reminder to him that there was a finite amount of patience the Beast had. Bowing again, Nikolai stepped out of the office.
Beast watched the door close with a quiet snick, locking back into place. The way to pay off the sizable debt Notte managed to accrue—and it was sizable—would have been to sell Frankie to The Institute. A beauty like her would have broken them even and then some. Dr. Wyatt had confirmed his suspicions: she was a virgin—or at least, had been a virgin.
Fuck.
Beast ran a hand through the thick black waves of his hair. The previous night had been an anomaly in every sense of the word. From the minute he’d seen her at Notte’s, he’d known she was going to be something different. She had a fiery nature. It wasn’t just the way she met his stare eye for eye, she demanded her own space in the room. She even called him an asshole, for fuck’s sake. She had a soul of steel, something he had yet only encountered among fighters, those grown up swaddled in blood instead of blankets. It wasn’t his job to break her, though, there were those at The Institute for that. He’d planned to get Dr. Wyatt’s confirmation and send her off.
Instead…
Fuck.
Not only would her rare beauty have brought in a high price, but virgins went for millions. The minute he’d slid into the town car, The Institute had had a contract ready to go for her. They were chomping at the bit, multiple buyers ready to bid. She would have been sold, out of his life, and living with whatever psychopath paid the highest amount.
So why had he fucked it up so badly?
Nikolai’s seemingly innocuous question sounded like a bell that couldn’t be unrung in the Beast’s skull. As he uncurled his palm and stared into the face of the now bloodied diamond rose, Beast couldn’t ignore the fact that she was in his bedroom, and not on her way to being sold. As she should be.
After Nikolai prepared the other driver, Beast left dressed in the same suit he’d worn the night before. When he’d taken her. Now in the sitting room of Lucio Pavoni’s Upper East Side townhouse, he was wrinkled, unkempt, and chewing Frankie around in his mind like a dog with a bone.
It was a mistake, taking her like he did.
He should never have brought her to his home in the first place.
