Hurting women is a favorite pastime of his. It also explains where I went wrong last night. I exposed that my biggest fear isn’t him hitting me. His gentle touch is what scares me the most because I know it will only be gentle for so long before it jumps to maiming.
I don’t know whether to barf or silently cheer that my plan is working when my uncle mutters, “Everything with me, dear, takes longer than a minute.”
“Then perhaps you can grant me two?” I talk as if I’m a regal princess even with me feeling anything but regal. I feel dirty and disgusting, a stark contradiction to my emotional state most of last night.
Maddox. Oh. I never realized how much the world spun until the wee hours of this morning. The Walsh brothers are known for their playboy ways. They have a reputation almost every woman on the planet would happily ignore for a chance to occupy their bed, and after last night, I can confidently declare I’m now on that list.
Maddox was attentive, gentle, sweet, and mind-blowingly skilled. He heightened my sexual palate to a level I didn’t realize it could reach, then he catapulted over it with a second round that was even better than the first.
I don’t have much experience, but that won’t stop me from saying last night was perfect. It was brutally beautiful. A true occurrence I’d give anything to be a part of time and time again.
Sadly, mafia princesses don’t wear crowns.
We destroy them.
“Two minutes,” my uncle grunts out, drawing my focus back to him. “Then I must get back to work. Money waits for no one, not even someone as forbidden as you.”
His inappropriateness today is off the Richter scale. He’s always been a little perverted, and I often wondered why Ophelia feared him as much as she did, but I had no clue his level of sickness extended this far. Either Dimitri is closer to overruling him than even he realizes, or the agents Maddox mentioned are homing in on charges not even a dead spouse will stop from occurring. He’s making mistakes, many of them, and this one is about to cost him his life.
When we enter his office at the side of his compound, Col locks the door before he spins around to face me. “Where do you want me?” His tone is low and gravelly. It makes it hard for me to speak, but I push through, aware this must occur.
“In your chair.” When he moves toward his office chair, I push out, “Not that one.” I nudge my head to the two sofas in the corner of the cigar-hazed space. “One of those. We’ll have more room over there.”
It takes a conscious effort to move my feet when he plops onto the sofa closest to me. I’m not second-guessing my decision. I’m horrified when his hands automatically move for his belt. I’m his niece, for crying out loud. His flesh and blood, yet he still sees me as an object of pleasure.
My lips quiver when I say, “Let me.”
I brush away the invisible tear I stupidly believe is rolling down my cheek before pacing to his side of the room. There’s no stopping this now. His responses the past five minutes assure me I have no other option but to continue with my plan.
“Close your eyes,” I suggest, confident a normal man would struggle to maintain a rational head when their niece kneels between their splayed thighs to undo the zipper in their trousers. “It will be more enhanced this way.”
I beg my eyes not to let any tears fall when he does as requested. They’d be more in relief than dismay, but I still don’t want them to fall. I refuse to let him win.
After swallowing down the bile surging up my throat, I ask, “Are you ready?”
When my uncle hums out an agreeing murmur, I raise to a kneeling position, creep my hand into my bra, remove the boxcutter I borrowed from Caidyn’s Jeep, flick it open, then slash it across my uncle’s jugular from one ear to the next.
His eyes pop open in an instant, and his hands move even quicker than that. One shoots up to caress the wound that’s no more than a papercut while the other one backhands me hard across the face. I fall to the floor before instinctively rolling into a ball to protect my face and body. In my shock, I forget about the hair I purposely left down. My uncle likes his women to look feminine. All his whores must wear their hair down. If they forget, he shaves it off before he hands them to his understudies for a month. They never make it out of that punishment the same woman. They’re beyond scarred.
“You ungrateful little bitch,” he sneers in my face after he drags me from the floor by my hair. “I fed you, clothed you, and kept my hands to myself even when the scent of your needy cunt begged me not to, and this is how you repay me. I should cut you up into little pieces. Hack you so badly, no one will care how sweet your cunt tastes. Or better yet, I should leave you in a room with my dog. I’m sure he’d do more damage than the knife you borrowed from…”
Shit, shit, shit, I inwardly scream when he reads the name engraved on the boxcutter. “Walsh Construction and Architectural Design.”
After roaming his eyes over my face, I’m no longer worried about his dog ripping me to pieces. I’m petrified his teeth are about to get in on the act.
My worries are left unfounded when he drags his nose down the throb in my throat. His growl is immoral, so I won’t mention his tone when he says, “I thought you smelled different.”
While grinning like a madman, he pushes me back until I’m at an arm’s length. “He got it out of you in one night.”
He isn’t asking a question. He’s summarizing.
“I don’t know if that makes you easy or if he’s now at a point he’ll do anything to stop you from getting hurt.” The air in my lungs leaves in a grunt when he tosses me onto the sofa across from him as if I’m a rag doll. “I guess we only have a couple of hours to find out.”
When he shouts his second-in-charge’s name, Mario enters the room a couple of seconds later. He must have a key as he didn’t kick open the door. “Watch her. If she gets out of line, pretend that’s a dildo.” My uncle’s eyes drop to the box cutter at his feet during the last part of his statement. “I don’t care how fucked up you make her, just ensure she’s alive. Some guys get off on scars.”
While smiling like I just made his life a shit-ton easier, he paces out of the room, his steps swaggered and slow.
Col Petretti is on a warpath, and I just put Maddox’s family at the top of his list.
17
Demi
I should be dead. My plan was to murder my uncle, then turn the knife on myself if his goons’ bullets race across the room weren’t fast enough.
Instead, I’m sitting across from him in an SUV careening down a dusty road.
In a way, I’m upset my plan didn’t work, but I’m also content. Once Maddox fails to arrive tonight, I’ll go to heaven instead of hell. Surely, God can forgive me for a measly paper cut. I’ve been to hell and back. That alone deserves a little bit of forgiveness, doesn’t it?
My grin is way too smug for a woman about to be tortured to death, but what can I say? I get cocky when my greatest wish comes true. There isn’t a single motorbike in the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town. Nor is there any sign of Caidyn’s flashy Jeep my uncle’s goons dumped a few miles out of town. There are Bentleys, Porsches, a handful of Audis, and many other foreign cars of which I don’t know the names.