“Your chariot awaits, m’lady,” she says, all pompous like.
Giggling about my immature tongue poke, Estelle races around to the driver’s side door. Because I forever admire her animalist grace, my eyes follow her trek partway around. My stare is incomplete because I’m looking at a pimped-out Range Rover parked across from the passenger loading bay. It’s not often you see flashy cars like that in Erkinsvale, and very rarely is there a pair of piercing blue eyes glancing out of the crack in the driver’s side window.
“Roxie…” Estelle stammers out in confusion when I hotfoot it across the street without checking for traffic.
I almost get wiped out by a car traveling in the opposite direction. The whoosh of its outdated metal whizzing past my face is strong enough to add an extra hobble to my shaking strides, but it isn’t to slow me down.
“Hey.” I race faster when the engine of the Range Rover fires up. “Wait!”
It darts out of its parking space so quickly, the smell of burning rubber lingers in my nostrils long after it rockets out of the hospital’s parking lot.
“Who the hell was that?” Estelle asks, out of breath. She isn’t gasping because she followed my sprint. She runs miles every single day. She’s as breathless about the eerie unease ridding the air of oxygen as me.
There’s only one time I’ve felt this restless. It was when I was in the alleyway with Eddie. Not the time he ran me over, but three months earlier, when he brought me to ecstasy under the watchful stare of a pair of vividly beautiful blue eyes.
The pair that just rocketed away were nowhere near as engrossing as the ones that stared at me almost seven months ago today, but they were most certainly just as dangerous.
The knowledge shouldn’t excite me, but for some reason, it does.
Chapter Ten
Dimitri
When Rocco places down his phone to make a quick getaway, I drag the timer on his live feed back a couple of seconds. I don’t want the image of Roxanne Juniper Grace when she spotted Rocco’s gawk half a block down from her apartment building, I want her reflection in the side mirror of the Range Rover Rocco’s manning at my command when she chases him down like she did outside the hospital three months ago. The second in time when her big green eyes are wide and unconcealed.
Restless edginess thickens my cock when I find the footage I’m seeking, which is utterly ridiculous considering I’m in a boardroom with thirty of my father’s closest confidants. He believes I’m in Sicily strengthening foreign ties. I’m here because it’s the last confirmed place the tracker on Rimi’s private jet was pinged. The Castros are either here, holed up at an unknown location, waiting for the heat to die down after their operation killed thirteen FBI agents and two CIA officers, or they took a secondary jet to another location.
Rimi’s crew has been silent for over six months now—double the length of time Roxanne was an inpatient at Erkinsvale Private Hospital. I don’t fucking like it. A ransom payment for Fien hasn’t been requested in months. That makes me edgy because if I’m not paying to keep her safe, how can I be assured she is?
Although I understand the reasoning for the silence—Rimi now has both sides of the law chasing him—usually nothing stops business from progressing in this industry. Not even having my wife kidnapped and my daughter forcefully removed from her stomach saw me awarded any leeway. I work or die. I don’t have any other option, so why isn’t it the same for Rimi?
After grinding my jaw side to side, frustrated by the world I was born in, I restart the live feed just as Rocco’s face fills the screen of my phone. “Satisfied?” he asks, sounding anything but.
Even with the eyes of thirty men on me, impatiently awaiting my verdict, I jerk up my chin. I don’t know why I needed to see Roxanne move into a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the middle of Erkinsvale anymore than I needed to watch her walk out of the hospital three months ago, but for some reason, the urge wouldn’t pass no matter how hard I fought it, so I gave in and let fate play its hand for once.
Will my indecisiveness see me scolded for the third time in my life?
Only time will tell.
“What now?” Rocco mutters, aware one task never ends without another one taking its place.
Hummed whispers bounce around the room when I reply, “Organize the jet to collect me. It’s time for me to return home.”
The sternness of my jaw doubles when Rocco mutters, “For your girl?”
His smile tells me his comment had nothing to do with my daughter, but I act stupid. “If you’re referencing Fien, yes.”
“What?” He pushes out a few seconds later, incapable of ignoring the wrath of my glare for a second longer. I’ve always been a temperamental prick with a short fuse, but it’s grown substantially worse over the past six months. “You’ve had me stalking that girl for months. Justine’s recovery didn’t even get this much heat, and you take the blame for what happened to her.”
I didn’t think my mood could get any worse, however it just did. My father’s verdict for Justine’s ‘supposed’ disrespect was an hour in a room with a dog trained to kill. Maddox moved fast after I called him, but he was still minutes too late. Justine was torn to shreds.
I asked Rocco to keep me updated on the progress of her recovery. That surveillance wasn’t as easy for him to conduct as it was Roxanne’s because Justine has an army of people propping her up. Roxanne has no one. From what Smith tells me, her parents are alive, but she hasn’t seen them in years. Her grandfather passed away a year before her grandmother, and she has no known siblings.
Do I feel sorry for her? Not. At. All. There are far worst things she could have faced than being forced to live with her grandparents. Her daddy could have sold her to his friends for the night like he has her mother multiple times when his drug supplies get low.
If a man pays to fuck you, he’ll take it with or without your permission. Nearly every man around this table has done so in the past. The sex slave industry is rife at the moment. It’s right up there with baby-making factories.
That’s what my meeting today is about. A new baby-making facility is hoping to place footholds in the Sicily region. They want to take sex slaves, impregnate them, then sell their babies to the highest bidder.
Although this scheme isn’t close to my predicament, I can’t help but source similarities from it. Fien wasn’t sold to the highest bidder, but is that because I can afford to keep her safe? What would happen if that changed? Would she be passed on to the next candidate? Or killed like her mother?
Just the thought has my mood souring to the lowest it’s been. “Organize a meeting with my father within hours of my return,” I say down the line after standing to my feet, hopeful the table’s height will hide the raging pulse of my cock not even a bad mood could slacken. “I have some questions I’d like to ask him.”
Rocco scrubs at the stubble on his chin. “I don’t think it’s wise to mingle with him right now, Dimi. He’s knee-deep in some murky shit.”
“Murkier than this?” His silence speaks volumes. The only time Rocco is ever quiet is when I’m right. If I’m wrong, he shouts it from the rooftops. “Although the journey to my takeover is miles away, at one stage, I must take the first step. That time is now, Rocco.”