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“Oh?” Drago will not let go of her breast and squeezes again, harder.
“It’s enough,” I repeat. “You’ve made your point.”
“And as I’ve stated, she is mine to do with what I want.” He is painfully clear. “Unless you’d like to play a little game. Make a bet with me, if you will. I’m willing to entertain the notion since you came all this way, and I’d hate for you to leave here utterly disappointed.”
My stomach flips and turns over itself. “I’m not going to make a bet with you.” I spit out the words.
“In this case, boy, you have no choice. If I win…I will fuck her.” He turns to Isabella. “Right here, in front of my men. In front of my servants. And in front of you.”
The breath whistles out of my lungs as the bottom drops out from underneath me.
“If you win…then you get to fuck her as a way to prove your combined loyalty to me and my house,” Drago continues.
“No.” Isabella rears back, but he still has a hold of her breast, and from the way his fingers dig into her skin, from the flash of pain across her overly pale face, she has to stop.
“I didn’t realize you were a horny old goat. Or good at sharing,” I force myself to say. “Why would you want me to fuck her? It proves nothing.”
She gets no say in this. None at all. But her eyes are pleading with me for even the smallest chance that she won’t be raped tonight.
“Right now, it seems to me there is no heft in your bet. You hold all the cards,” I tell Drago.
“I hold all the firepower, too.” It’s a not-so-subtle display to have his men step forward and show their guns. Guns that they will no doubt use if I don’t agree to his bet.
We’ve been outmaneuvered from the start.
Fuck.
14
ISABELLA
I’d been warned to expect the unexpected, that anything was possible tonight, and I needed to keep my mental walls high, my guard up, and my ears open. Right now, none of those things are possible. Fear tingles on my tongue, turning every wallow to something bitter and acidic.
I want to choke, to scream, to claw at the fat man groping me.
I do nothing, not when everyone in this room wants something from me, and it’s not something I want to give to them. What they want to do to me—I shudder, and only then does Drago release his hold on me. Pain shoots out from the tip of my breast and nipple and seems to shoot through my bone.
I should have known better.
I should have known better about all of it.
I expect Ricardo to argue that it’s a ridiculous bet with no purpose except to serve as a pissing contest. He’ll tell the fat fuck that he’s not going to agree unless he has the terms laid out for him in detail. I expect him to point out that we are at Drago’s mercy, so why would he want to play games with us?
None of those things occur in the next beat, two. There’s only the crackling of the fire and the rancid scent of unwashed skin coming from one of Drago’s friends. The small sip I’d taken of scotch is a phantom burn down my throat and into my stomach.
Everything is happening outside of me, in a fantasy land, to someone else as Drago reaches behind his back and pulls out a pistol. He clicks open the chamber and empties the rounds into his hand before sliding two of them back into slots at random. Then he simply tosses the gun over to Ricardo, expecting the other man to catch it.
And what good would screaming do? Or cursing?
None of it matters right now when the impossible choice is staring us in the face like a poisonous snake ready to strike.
“It’s simple Russian roulette.” Drago holds out his hand, and one of his men hands him a second gun. He does the same thing with the bullets in this one, spinning the chamber around before clicking it back into place. “You understand the rules, I’m sure. They’re simple enough.”
“Yes. There are no rules,” Ricardo says through gritted teeth.
Drago stifles a laugh. He looks exactly the same as I remembered him from the club, except instead of a suit, he’s wearing a simple sky blue button-up shirt and tailored slacks. Gold chains glint at his neck, and his fingers are covered with a handful of expensive rings. His eyebrows have been plucked so that the salt-and-pepper strands emphasize his features, and the facial hair gives a more masculine bend to his face.
There is nothing holly or jolly about him.
