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“You will be sorry if even a hair on her head is misplaced,” Matt said, fuming into the phone.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Miller. We are not stupid. Like I have told you before, we do not want any unnecessary trouble with you Americans. Keeping in alignment with that, we have made sure your wife and her two bodyguards are kept out of harm. The bodyguards are currently sleeping their way to heaven. Pretty comfortable if you ask me. My men didn’t even break a sweat in giving them a whiff of the chloroform, and they went right under, but we have made especially sure that your wife, Jessica—that is her name, right? We have made sure she is perfectly safe.”
“If you even dare to just-” Matt started, but Lucio cut him off.
“I know, I know, blah blah. Do not waste my time with your puny threats, Mr. Miller. We intend to have a hostage for as long as the collateral takes to successfully give us the money, which, for your information, has not reached us yet. We will let you have Jessica after you have transferred it to us successfully. I see no point in engaging in meaningless conversations with you. As you can guess, I am not into small talk with Americans, and now, have a good day.” With that, Lucio hung up the phone. This time, Matt really did throw his phone away and roared in rage.
I will make them regret doing this. I will make them pay for taking Jessica.
He bellowed into the room, trying to let the rage off his body. He punched the pillows and, finally, perched on his bed, heaving, and putting his head in his hands. This day could not get any worse.
43
Matt was lying on his bed with a girl hovering over him. His breath came in quick huffs as he felt her body press down on his—her soft curves were hugging his sharp edges. She ran her hands over his chest and his back, and the sensation that swept across his whole being when she dug her nails into his flesh was almost enough to bring him down to his knees. He was entranced in her presence, completely caught under her spell. He kissed her mouth, face, neck, and jaw. He nibbled softly in her ears as she giggled and squirmed at his touch. She moaned into his lips, and that made him hard under the constraints of his pants. The girl slowly lifted herself up and pulled off her shirt. Matt sucked in a breath as she lowered herself on him, shirtless. He grabbed her breasts and heard her sigh of pleasure.
“Yes, baby,” she cooed into his ears. He unhooked her bra, took one nipple into his mouth, and sucked. She threw her head back and gasped out his name. Her hands were holding his head to her chest, fingers tangled in his hair, and he sucked on one nipple, then the next.
“Bella, I need you right now,” he whispered.
As an answer, she tugged at his shirt. Matt took it off in one swift motion. She watched him with wicked eyes and laid her palm flat over his chest.
“Let me take control today,” she said, biting her lower lip. Matt nodded. She trailed her hand down over his chest and torso, then stopped at his belt. She unbuckled it and twisted it in her hands, looking at him mischievously. Matt was breathing hard, feeling impossible desire almost to the point of pain. She understood his reaction and looked to be pleased with it. With this, Bella pushed him down over the bed and held his hands over his head. Using the belt, she tied his hands to the headboard. Matt lifted his face to hers and kissed her. She kissed him back with a hunger that surprised even him. He was allowing himself get lost in the kiss and under her touches all over his body. He was so lost that he didn’t notice when she opened her eyes and made sure that his hands were securely tied. He didn’t notice when she slowly reached out her right hand to her bag that sat on the bedside table and silently opened the top chain, and he didn’t notice when she took a small pocketknife. What he did notice was the sudden sharp pain in his side. His eyes instantly flew open, and for a moment, he was utterly confused about what he was feeling. His body was so aroused that it was confused with this interruption. He couldn’t even process what was happening when she stabbed him again. This time, though, he let out a yelp. Bella’s face had changed from a sensual seductress to a contorted glare. She had the pocketknife held at his throat now.
“Don’t fucking move a muscle, or you will be bleeding through your neck,” she hissed. Matt was sure he couldn’t, even if he wanted to. He was going into shock. His brain was not thinking clearly, and he couldn’t grasp what had changed in a matter of a few seconds. One moment they were making out, and the next, she had stabbed him twice and was threatening to slice his throat.
“Be-Bella?” he stammered.
“Where’s your wallet?” she asked, pressing the knife into his throat with force. Matt was wide-eyed but managed to move his head to point toward the dresser where his wallet lay. Beside it sat the Rolex watch he had taken off after bringing her home. Her eyes lit up at the sight of these things.
“Good, now stay where you are,” she said and carefully got out of the bed. She didn’t even bother to put on her bra as she pocketed the wallet and the watch from the dresser, and then she looked around the room and caught sight of the closet door, which was left a bit ajar. Matt was a messy kid like any other teenager and didn’t bother closing every door or keeping everything locked in his room. She walked across the room and pillaged whatever she could from his closet. Only after she had packed the loot inside her bag that she hastily put on the bra and her shirt back on. Matt was steadily feeling more fatigued. He was losing a lot of blood, and the shock of it all was making his pressure fall dangerously low. He felt every fiber in his body just wanted to shut down. There was this force over his body that kept dragging him down. Even as he lay on the bed, he was feeling like he was falling deeper. His vision started to blur and darken. Eventually, he lost his senses. The last thing he saw was her grabbing her backpack as she ran out the door. She didn’t even look back at him, and then everything went black.
Matt was enraged beyond words. He couldn’t think properly. He was having flashbacks of that fateful night that had changed his life forever. His first love, Bella, had tied him up to the bed, made him completely vulnerable and unable to protect himself, and stabbed him before stealing his money.
Fuck, why am I thinking about that night right now? I need to get my thoughts straight.
Even as he said these words to himself, he knew why. He knew there was a pattern to all the bad things that were happening to him right now. Jessica was kidnapped because he had been the one who had messed up. He knew it was because of Spencer, but that was only the end of it. The whole thing was much bigger than that. Jessica had no idea what was even happening. She had no part in this dark and dangerous game they were all playing, and yet she was the one bearing the damage. He felt terrible. He was the one who had been involved with Spencer. He was the one in business with him. Matt had a keen eye for judging people. He always made sure not to enter into any kind of business with anyone who he wasn’t absolutely sure about. Spencer had never struck him as the solid and reliable kind, so why had he agreed to be his collateral in the first place? What was the reason behind this faulty judgment on his part? What had made him forget his usual sharp senses and intuition and still go into business with Spencer?
Jessica.
The voice inside his head seemed to mock him. It was all about Jessica, all for Jessica. She was the thing that had been on his mind when he had agreed to partner up with Spencer. She was the one he had been pining for all this time. He hadn’t admitted it to himself all this time, but he had felt it in his gut that he just needed to get closer to her somehow, and that had made him break his own codes. Now, she was the one in the line of harm, and she was the only one completely innocent in all of this. If something happened to her, Matt could never live with himself. He was the one that got her tangled up in this mess. The Coretti brothers didn’t want anything to do with her, but it was all just to get back at Matt. Matt felt the bile rise in his throat. It wouldn’t be the first time he would lose the woman he loved over dangerous men. He had lost Bella to the likes of these people, but also, Bella was the one who had gotten herself tangled up in the dark side, while Jessica was completely uninvolved. She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve him.
Shit.
He got more flashbacks of the past. He remembered how he felt the night Bella had stabbed him, but even worse, he remembered how he felt when Bella was eventually been killed in the mess. Back then, he hadn’t been the one responsible for these, but he had lost her all the same. It didn’t matter who was to blame. He had lost her. He couldn’t save her, and God forbid he had tried.
That day, Annabeth had found him unconscious in his room. There was a lot of blood. She had screamed in horror at the top of her lungs, but Matt had been oblivious to the world. When he had woken up, he was in a bed in a private cabin at the ER. His mother and Annabeth had been sitting on both sides, faces streaked with tears. His mother hadn’t started dating Joseph back then, so it was just the three of them. Annabeth had only been a child of fourteen. She had been shaken after the death of their father, but one look at her face and Matt knew that she could never take the loss of her big brother. He had felt his heart break in so many different ways. It was the pain of being betrayed by your first love and the even worse pain of putting your family through such hard times after everything they had been through already. It had taken a few weeks for Matt to fully recover from his wounds. The stab wounds were deep and done by an unprofessional, which caused the knife to cause even more damage to his tissue. The doctors had told him that he was lucky no major veins were cut, but Matt didn’t feel all that lucky. He felt like he had the most miserable luck that any seventeen-year-old that could have ever exist could have. When he was discharged from the hospital and marked as recovered, he didn’t feel recovered at all. The damage done to his heart and his mental state would go on to haunt him for the rest of his life. It did haunt him to this very day. He would never be able to be himself in bed without the ghost of Bella stabbing him. He would never be able to trust anyone completely with his heart or his body ever again, but he had felt like he could have that with Jessica, or at least he had hoped for it. Now, if something were to happen to her because of him, it would completely break him beyond repair. Not even Bella’s untimely and painful death held an inkling of the damage he would take if he lost Jessica.
He remembered, back when he had recovered, that he had taken some time off from school to settle down—to not jump out of his shoes every time someone unfamiliar came close. When he finally went back to school, he had gotten the news that Bella was no longer coming to hang out at the park anymore. She had moved to the darker parts of the city with even worse people. Matt had thought that he wouldn’t care what happened to her anymore, but he was not very surprised to find that he still did. Even though he couldn’t get closer to her, he still couldn’t help keeping tabs on her on where she was staying and what she was doing back then. He had used his family’s spy network to keep tabs on Bella. He didn’t know why he did that. Maybe it was the only way for him to cope because he didn’t know how to let her go. That’s how he found out that she was dating an underworld drug lord. Matt had looked up his profile and felt disgusted. The man had to be in his thirties and dating multiple young girls all at the same time. They were all underage. Bella was only sixteen. Matt didn’t even know if he could call that dating or just keeping underage girls at his side. Sex in exchange for drugs, and all of those girls were deep into the addiction. He felt sorry for all of them and wished there was a way he could save them, but what could he have done, being only seventeen himself? Still, he had tried to save Bella. He had watched her lose her dignity again and again, and at one point, he couldn’t bear to watch from the shadows any longer. He had tried to reach out to her, to make her see reason and to help her in any way he could, but all his efforts had been in vain because the drug lord had high security around him at all times. Other than that, Bella didn’t want to be saved because the moment she had gotten the hint that Matt was trying to contact her, she had made sure that he wouldn’t be able to. The message was loud and clear.Leave me alone.Matt didn’t know what to do. Eventually, he stopped trying so hard. However, he had always kept some sort of intel on her whereabouts, just in case. It had been three years since the incident of Bella stabbing him. His life had almost come back to normal, with the exception that he was still haunted by her memories. It had changed him in ways that couldn’t be seen from the outside, but the wounds were deep within his soul. Soon, he graduated high school and got into college. He had almost forgotten about and gotten over Bella—almost.
Matt had gotten the insider news that Bella had become pregnant. It was the drug lord’s baby. He couldn’t understand the emotions he felt when he got to know about it. Jealous? Angry? No, he was just a little sad, but nothing compared to what he felt about what happened after. Within a few weeks of the pregnancy, Matt’s spy network reported back to him that things had gotten very bad with the drug lord and another gang in the area with a younger leader. It was predicted that trouble was stirring between the two gangs. When they threatened to harm Bella, her so-called boyfriend didn’t even bat an eye and told them to do whatever they wished and that he didn’t care. The gang members weren’t kidding, and Bella was shot dead right on the spot. The father of her unborn child didn’t even flinch when her body hit the floor. Hearing this, it was as if someone had shot Matt instead. He still hadn’t been able to process the fact that Bella was pregnant with the drug lord’s child, but the news of the death was too much for him to take. He broke out in a fit of rage and smashed his hand into the hardwood of his door. The pain did little to put him out of his anger.
They killed Bella and her unborn baby. They will pay for it.
And pay, they did because Matt made sure the drug lord and the gang they were in a conflict with were completely decimated from that area. Until that point, Matt had only used his family’s connection just to assign a spy to keep track of Bella’s whereabouts, but this time, he was done playing. He would destroy these dangerous men who had no regard for not one but two innocent lives, so Matt had done everything in his power to make sure they could harm no other lives this way and that no more young girls like Bella could get themselves trapped in a similar situation. His family was one of the biggest names in the underworld, and even though Matt’s father died when he was very young, Matt was no stranger to what kind of power he wielded, but he soon realized that wiping out two gangs did not bring him any sort of mental peace. It did not help him feel any less sad for Bella, even though she had refused him at every turn of the way. This revenge felt disappointing and only drove Matt into a deeper state of keeping his feelings suppressed—until Jessica. He was starting to get out of his suppressed state with her around. He was finally starting to feel like he was capable of loving someone and maybe even being loved back. He had bartered a part of his soul when he had ordered those gangs to be destroyed, and for Jessica, he would do it all over again. He didn’t care what it did to his soul. He would make them regret ever taking her in the first place.
44
Matt was still fuming with anger when he urged himself to get up and do something about it. He wracked his brain again for the best possible thing he could do in this situation.
