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Once we’re done…we’redone. I don’t emotionally connect with many people at all outside my immediate family. And Icertainlydon’t emotionally connect with women. So it’s just sex. And even if it’s a good time?
There’s always another woman, in another club, with another hopeful smile and twinkle in her eye, like she’s going to be the one who fixes me. Thatshe’llbe the one to keep me wanting more.
But there’s no fixing me. I’ll never want more. Not from the same woman. A repeat means attachment, and I don’t do that either.
I used to think there was something wrong with me because of this inability to be intimate in any real capacity outside the physical mechanics of sex. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that it’s not that the ability to feel or experience emotional intimacy is broken inside of me.
It’s that it’s completely walled off, behind barriers a mile thick and three miles high. Maybe part of it—or probably a lot of it—is what happened to me when I was young. But that’s only a piece of it. Somewhere deep down, I know I’ve always been like this.
For a while, when I first became friendly with Cillian Kildare after my brother married Cillian’s niece, I thought maybe I’d found someone else who’s the same kind of different as me. Cillian, after all, is a legit, certifiable psychopath. Or at least, he’s firmly on the scale somewhere. But it turns out he’s not entirely devoid of emotions or unable to have personal relationships. Not just because we’re friends—at least as much “friends” as you can be with a man like Cillian. But because he’s married to Una now.
They may the darkest, gothiest prom king and queen couple I’ve ever met. And I’m sure their intimate life involves drinking each other’s blood, or pulling the wings off bats or butterflies or some weird shit like that.
But they’re in love. EvenCillianis in love.
That’s never happened to me. And I don’t see that changing.
I doubt I’m actually psychotic. I think I’m just…tempestuous. Probably a little fucked up in some fairly profound ways that I have zero interest in examining. Or maybe I’m just a force of chaos, fucking, racing, and raging his way through the world.
Whatever the reason, here I am: approaching thirty without ever having had a meaningful or intimate relationship with a woman that’s lasted longer than eight hours.
I glance back to the spot my little kitten recently vacated and replay flashbacks of the evening in my mind, starting with the way she grabbed me and just fucking kissed me.
I’ve had woman throw themselves at me more times than I could ever count. But never like that. The other times, it’s felt almost pathetic—a desperate attempt for me to “pick them”. As if they’re “special”, or in any way different than any of the faceless, disposable women who came before them, or the ones who’ll come after.
But the little kitten who kissed me tonight wasn’t throwing herself at me. She wasn’t begging me to pick her.
Shewas pickingme.
And I’m fairly sure that that’s never happened to me before.
With a groan, I stretch my sore muscles again and sit up in bed.
Four times.
I grin.
Shit, that was good.
I stand, stretching again before I pad across the room to the bar cart. I pour myself a much-needed whiskey, knock it back, then pour one more and bring it back to the bed with me. I sit on the edge and glance at my watch sitting on the bedside table.
Shit. I’m supposed to be at Leo Stavrin’s office—well,surveillinghis office—twenty minutes ago. And I’ve already fucked up the first part of the plan involving him tonight.
My mind flashes back to the little kitten kissing me, but then I rewind a little bit further, to the girl I was talking to before Kitten came along.
The girl I actually came to Venom tonight to see. Not because I had the tiniest interest in fucking her, much lesstalkingto her. But because Ares asked me to, and family is one thing I will always doanythingfor.
Even seducing Leo Stavrin’s utterly brain-dead girlfriend.
It’s like this: Leo is Gavan Tsarenko’s top captain. Until a few months, he was working lower down the totem pole over in the UK, where Gavan’s co-head of the Reznikov Bratva, Konstantin Reznikov, runs things. But when the Russians’ war with the Albanians got Gavan’s top captain Artyom killed, his position needed to be filled. And it would seem Leo has filled the position well.
That, obviously, puts him close to Gavan. It also probably goes without saying that it makes him intimately familiar with whatever plans Gavan is cooking up when it comes to making a play for Serj’s empire.
But there’s something else about Leo that few people know: Leo’s a cuckold.
I don’t mean that as an insult. That’s legitimately his thing. Leo’s fetish is for his girlfriend Anya—the aforementioned brain-dead brunette with the ridiculously fake tits—to go out and get fucked by random dudes, and then come home and tell him all about it.
There may or may not be a part of that kink that involves, uh,cleaning herafterward with his tongue. And, hey, I’m not gonna kink shame anyone, even weaselly little shit-bags like Leo Stavrin, but fuckingew.
