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Carina gasps, tearing me out of my memories. “He killed someone for you and you shrug it off like it’s not a fucking…I don’t even know, Celia.”
Even now, three years later, the day I killed Keith March is vivid. Peter texted, warning me if I wanted to be the one to kill him I had to come immediately as he was hours away from death.
It’s been since I avenged my father almost a decade ago that I killed a man. While I did intend to kill Sonny for striking Celia, Peter talked me into letting him handle it. All I cared about was he suffered—and he did for three days.
Aspakhanme killing someone wasn’t worth the risk of a murder conviction. That’s what I had soldiers for. I’ve tortured more than a few, turning my clothes bloody as I worked them over. I had done things that made people wish they were dead, yet none of the things I did would leave someone dead, unless it was through loss of blood if I walked away. The kill shot was always delivered once I was far away with a beautiful woman on my arm, or in the presence of several people who thought I was a civilized businessman.
I’m pissed I’m being called away from Celia’s side to kill the fucker. I’m not angry I have to kill him—no, that honor belongs to me alone. It’s because it was supposed to last longer. I wanted him begging for the torture to stop until he lost his voice. I wanted his body so broken and ravaged anyone who saw him would pray they never made the same mistake he did. The mistake of touching my Celia. The mistake of hurting her. It didn’t matter he left her before he took her innocence or killed her.
He had taken her innocence away in the respect of believing there was good and she was safe from the bad. I had failed her. All the things I put in place weren’t enough. Sergei felled by the flu undid all my planning.
Mine. Celia was mine. Mine, to have and hold and protect, to make happy, to give everything she needed…and I failed her.
Shame burned bright at my failure. This piece of shit didn’t deserve to breathe air, but I wanted him to for a few more days—only if with every breath he took, he prayed he never took another.
Entering the cement room kept for this reason, I’m disappointed Keith March is already slipping into death. I look to Peter.
“Sorry, the fucker wouldn’t break. He started by saying he was only going to rape Celia, then finally the truth came out. He wanted to kill her for looking through him. How dare someone as fat and ugly as Celia look through him? She should have been thankful anyone even wanted to rape her. I couldn’t control myself. In the end I left him in his piss and shit for several hours.” Peter apologizes as he stares down at the shell of a man in disgust.
Peter’s words have me pulling my knife, refusing the gun he offers me. A gut shot from a .22 would have caused him to bleed out. It’s not close enough for me. I close my eyes, exhale and step into the darkness. Then I inhale and let inky black fill me.
Opening my eyes, I unsheathe my knife and step in front of him. I send the knife into his liver and twist. He screams, throwing his head back.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, for the love of god I’m sorry. Please, please,” he begs.
I pull the knife out, aim for a kidney and close my eyes as he screams again.
The words are an incoherent babbling. They flow over me like rain washing the shame of my failure away. I might not have been able to stop him hurting Celia, but this fucker was made to hurt women. During torture he admitted to Peter he’d been raping his little sister since she was nine, raped six other women. A month ago he’d killed a woman for the first time. He called her a woman, but at fifteen she was a girl who was easy to overpower, rape, and suffocate when she fought back a second time.
I could use those rapes and the murder as justification for killing him. They aren’t the reason why. He touched what is mine, hurt my woman; it’s the only reason I care about.
If I stopped now he would live for maybe another hour, all of it in agony. I don’t want to be away from Celia for that long. I want to see him take his last breath. I stab him in the lungs, I want him to choke on his blood.
In seconds my wish comes true. I back away, watching him writhe. Minutes later his head goes down and there is no more movement.
The darkness clings to me as I look down at the blood on my hands. It isn’t crimson, it’s the color of rust. As if it happened long ago and dried already. It might have been a decade since I killed. I wanted to believe it was all behind me. Only if I needed to, I would do it. But the satisfaction, the fucking pleasure I felt as I stabbed him and heard him scream says I was wrong if I thought all this was behind me. It’s right there inside me, waiting for the time to be released.
I should be unnerved. I’m not. I accept who I am. Levin, lion, Bratva, death, destruction and power.
“Holy fucking shit! You gave him a blow job?” Carina’s exclamation pulls me from my thoughts and has me chuckling at her astonishment.
Celia has gotten to the day, the day I thought everything had changed. Finally, she was on her knees for me. My cock was in her beautiful mouth. She hummed with pleasure as I warned her I would kill any man for finding out what her mouth felt like. This was the night, I would have her at last.
Then everything went to shit. The funeral was hit by gunfire, four were dead. I spent all night dealing with it. After only three hours of sleep I woke up to Celia telling me to take her home. No, she was home. Her home was wherever I was. Did she see my fury? That I wasn’t going to let her go?
Her throwing down Tony Sabatini’s name was a gauntlet I was willing to pick up. Did she really not know as much as I liked and respected Tony Sabatini, if he dared to take her away from me I would kill him? It didn’t matter if it started a war. It didn’t matter if I endangered my family—she was mine. I would never let her go.
Following her into the closet, I was prepared to tell her that, until she asked about her books and computer and there it fucking was. I would start a war with the Outfit, but it wasn’t the Outfit I would end up fighting—it was her. Celia would be my woman and my woman could not spend the next seven years away from me.
I gave in. Taking the helicopter was necessary. I didn’t trust myself in the back of a car with her for two hours. There was nothing I could say or do in the helicopter my men could not hear. By then Aleksander alone knew of my obsession with her, and I needed to keep it that way. No one could know that if they wanted to hurt me, all they needed to do was hurt her.
For an incredibly long year I existed on the videos and Sergei’s report every night. Then Sergei called me. She was freaking out, having a full-blown meltdown. Something had shifted within her, changed. Celia did not want to become a veterinarian. What would make her most happy would be to start a cat rescue like the one she used to volunteer with here in Chicago. What should he do? She was terrified the scholarship wouldn’t pay if she changed to a business degree.
Since I was the scholarship and I had never heard better news in my whole fucking life, I told him to talk her into calling the scholarship entity and asking them. I would ensure it was approved. I had no idea what reason I would come up with, but I would find one.
I watched as Sergei calmed her down. Then I made a call. She would keep receiving the scholarship based on the reasoning that at the end of the day she still wanted to help animals. The purpose of the scholarship was to keep students in school so they could help animals; it didn’t matter how they were doing it.
Then I began to make plans. I was going to go get her and bring her back to Chicago. She could finish her business degree here. I’d pay for it, whether she wanted to go to the University of Illinois at Chicago, DePaul, Northwestern. Wherever the fuck she wanted to get her business degree, she would get it.
