He doesn’t interrupt me unless it’s urgent. Saving Roxanne from a man who’d cut her up like an animal was urgent. It better be the same case this time around as my patience is stretched as thin as the thread struggling to hold my cock’s reaction to Roxanne’s moans.
My fucking God, my cock twitches just recalling how delicious they sounded. They’re as delectable as the scent of her skin mingled with mine, and the very reason I need to put more distance between us than I have the past three days.
Pulling Roxanne into my chest four days ago was one of the stupidest things I’ve done. Ever since then, instead of my focus remaining on freeing Fien from her nightmare, it continuously shifts to ways I can eradicate Roxanne’s. I’m not prioritizing my time on the right person, and the injustice is both souring my mood and worsening my daughter’s chance of survival.
That’s why I stepped into the room with guns blazing. I was mid-conversation with a man who knows the whereabouts of every gangbanger in the country when Smith updated me on Roxanne’s location. I tried to tell myself she’s a big girl who can get herself out of the riskiest exchange, but the longer the movie on how that would go down rolled through my head, the higher my blood pressure spiked.
It was within danger territory, only two stomps away from the man who could possibly know Roberto’s location, and it wasn’t going to settle until I took my annoyance out on the person responsible for its incline.
A public spanking seemed like the ideal punishment.
Roxanne’s multiple sketchpads should have told me differently.
If I was being honest, I’d say a part of me knew how she’d reply to my arrogance. Her willingness to please would usually stop my eagerness in its tracks. However, there have been a handful of times my cock has overruled my head. Roxanne has been in the picture for every one of those days, so who’s to say it wouldn’t have been the same this time around?
“Roxie was right—”
I hold my finger in the air, halting Smith’s update midsentence before shifting my eyes to Rocco. He’s standing in the corner of the command center. His fists are clenched at his sides, and his jaw is tight, wrongly believing I used Roxanne’s fucked-up childhood against her. He’s all for fucking, has been from the age of thirteen, but if it involves marking a woman’s body with anything but his cum, it’s a no-go for him.
He wasn’t up in the viewing chambers watching Roxanne’s punishment firsthand, but Smith has eyes and ears over every inch of this compound, meaning he didn’t need to be in the room with me to get a bird’s-eye view of Roxanne’s punishment. He just needed to hack into the camera in the button of my shirt.
The tightness of Rocco’s jaw slackens when I say, “Make sure Roxanne gets to her room in one piece. I’ll be up to check on her in a bit.” I don’t know why I added the last half of my statement. Most likely as a warning to Rocco that he won’t have time to nurture her like he’s hoping.
It won’t stop him from ribbing me about the possibility, though. “Want me to rub some cream into her welts for you, too?” He doesn’t wait for my growl to work its way up my chest. He just smirks, gives me a one-finger salute, then exits the room with a pompous flare I usually relish more than hate.
It doesn’t have the same effect tonight. I’m hard, pissed as fuck, and fighting not to shake off my funk with a few lines of coke and an endless number of whores. Returning to the drug-fucked idiot I was before I became a father won’t help anyone, but some days, I wonder if it would make life a little easier to take.
Do you have any idea how gutting it is to know your enemies have been fucking you in the ass for almost two years? Weak. Pathetic. An incapable man. There are a few words I’d use to describe myself when the negativity enters my mind with a refusal to leave until I’ve killed a man. Considering it’s almost daily lately, you can imagine how high my death count now sits. Trying my hardest not to become the monster my father wanted me to be, sees me becoming exactly that.
After working my jaw side to side, I shift my focus back to Smith—for the most part. “Put Roxanne’s room up onto the main feed.” It’s playing on a smaller monitor on my left as it has been the past three nights, but I want to avoid eyestrain while stalking her to see if goosebumps prickle her skin when Rocco is within sniffing distance. They’ve become close the past three days, and I don’t fucking like it. It agitates me to no end, much like my continuously deviating mind.
“What was Roxanne right about?” My clipped tone warns Smith I’m at the end of my teether. If his findings tonight aren’t associated with Fien, we will exchange blows. No fear.
My attitude gets sliced in half when Smith replies, “Roberto. He was at Joops like Roxie said.” He twists his laptop screen around to face me. It has a still image of a much older and fatter Roberto on the screen. Just like Roxanne’s composite drawing, I’m confident it’s him. “As you know, we couldn’t get anything off the restaurant’s surveillance cameras. They were wiped before you realized Audrey had left your side.” His comment isn’t an underhanded swipe at my stupidity, he doesn’t do anything underhandedly, he’s merely relaying the facts as he sees them. “I worked credit card transactions for Joops. I didn’t get anything significant, so I shifted my focus to cell phones.”
“Which also came up blank?” I interrupt, pushing him along. We’re having this conversation with my dick pressed up against the zipper in my trousers. The sooner it’s over, the better it will be for all involved, and I’m not going to mention the jumping of my blood pressure from watching Roxanne’s arrival to her room. Rocco doesn’t drop her off and leave, he walks her inside like they’re returning from an intimate date. It frustrates me more than it should, but there’s no denying the obvious.
Even Smith has noticed a change in my temperament. He tugs at the collar of his shirt as if his temperature is rising as rapidly as mine before moving at a steadier pace. “Yeah, they didn’t come back with anything either, but I was working off pings for pre-2010 circuit phones, assuming not even six-year-olds get around with flip phones these days. I should have realized the rules don’t apply for some people.” He tosses an outdated and cracked phone onto the desk between us before nudging his head to a bank of monitors on my right.
This kills me to admit, but it takes me a good three to four seconds to shift my eyes from the monitor broadcasting Roxanne’s room to the one Smith wants me to look at. Roxanne and Rocco are moving toward the bathroom—the only room in this compound without a motion-activated camera.
When a bloody and bruised man bound to a rickety chair in a dungeon-like room confronts me, my annoyance deepens. Rocco wouldn’t have roughed-up Roxanne’s dad unless he has some sort of feelings for her. He gave me that exact same line when I ordered for Ian’s whereabouts to be unearthed. This is what I meant when I said Roxanne is distracting me from what really matters. The absence of the two men I sent out to bring her father in was barely felt, but the time I put Smith on the case to discover his current location was most certainly noticeable. Every second he hunted the demon of Roxanne’s past added a second to my daughter’s captivity.