Page 66 of Wicked Mafia Beast
Twelve
Onyx
Kon left a small white pharmacy bag on the bathroom counter three days ago. I haven't opened it. I'm not ready to think about why. But I can’t find it in me to open it and take the pills.
Nor can I deny the man when he comes looking to make love to me.
Love.
I dash the word away. It’s too soon for that word to enter my brain. Not that L word. The other one works though. I am very much inlustwith Kon.
Fourteen days. Has it really only been two weeks since a Bratva enforcer bought me at auction? Fourteen days since I walked into a converted foundry expecting a cage and found a man who cooks breakfast at four-thirty in the morning and grows roses on his roof because they remind him of his grandmother.
Old habits die hard. That's what I tell myself as I open my laptop in the gray light of early morning, the screen casting a blue glow across the sheets still warm from Kon's body. He left for thetraining room twenty minutes ago. The muffled fall of his bare feet on the carpet carried through the quiet, followed by the careful click of the door, closed gently so it wouldn't wake me.
It woke me. Everything about that man wakes me now, his presence and his absence equally impossible to ignore.
I pull up the Syndicate files. The folder I created on my first real day at The Foundry, the insurance policy I told myself I needed. My fingers hover over the keyboard, the cursor blinking against the white screen, patient and accusing.
I start typing.
Rafael Milano: controls banking, judges, politicians. Launders money through legitimate institutions. Corrupt to the core.
I add everything I noted about Persia, about Katriana and Ilona. Then I add the limited amount of data I have on Massimo and Luca.
My fingers stop. The cursor blinks. And all I can see is a man in a tailored suit making airplane noises while his daughter smears pureed carrots across his jaw, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners, gray temples catching the kitchen light. The most powerful man in Chicago's underworld, undone by a toddler's giggle.
I delete everything and try again.
Drake Moses: controls unions, docks, infrastructure. Known for brutal enforcement of territorial boundaries.
But the words blur and I'm back in Rafael's penthouse watching Drake cross a room in three strides to cup his wife's face in both hands and kiss her with an unhurried tenderness that made the air leave my lungs. Katriana's crooked glasses. Charlotte's tinyfist wrapped around his finger. The way he carried his daughter out the door with the careful reverence of a man holding the only thing in the world that matters.
Fuck. Delete.
Luca Valentina: intelligence operative. Manipulative. Uses information as a weapon.
But Luca is the man who hovered near Ilona for an entire afternoon, gravitating back to her side every time he drifted, pressing his lips to the blue tips of her hair while their daughter slept against his chest. His gold-flecked eyes, sharp enough to cut, going soft as butter when Lucia grabbed a fistful of his long dark hair and yanked.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
I stare at the empty screen. My throat tightens. My fingers tremble over the keys. What the hell is wrong with me? This is my job.
One more. I have to try one more.
Konstantin Vetrov: Bratva enforcer. The most dangerous of the six. Handles "problem resolution." Body count unknown but presumed significant.
But my fingers won't type the next damning line because all I can think about is his hands in my hair last night, calloused palms cradling my skull with a gentleness that contradicted every scar on his knuckles. The way he whispered??????against my temple while I drifted off, the Russian syllables warm and rough and reverent. The garden he tends on the rooftop at dawn, coaxing roses to bloom in a Chicago climate that should killthem, because he refuses to accept that beautiful things can't survive harsh conditions.
I force myself to type in everything I deleted on the men, but I leave off anything about their wives. My stomach churns as I read through the material, but I leave it on the page. I have to. This is who I am as much as who they are, damn it.
I close the laptop. Press my palms against the warm surface and exhale through my nose.
The lie is getting harder to swallow. Every day, the distance between what I'm writing and what I'm living grows wider, and I'm standing in the gap with one foot on each side, the split threatening to tear me apart.
I grab my phone from the nightstand. Not the burner. My actual phone, the one Kon gave me last week with a number only he and his brothers have. I pull up a new message and type before I can talk myself out of it.
Can we meet? Just us. I need to talk.
