Sins That Find Us, page 2
And I failed her.
She was snatched from school, and it took my father months to track down the man responsible. He passed Guido Romano’s photo to me. He was somber, in vestments, looking godly as any man of the cloth. And he was the one who did this.
“He will pay,” my father muttered.
He wanted blood as much as I did, but something dark and monstrous was born inside me after that. He would pay in blood, but he would pay in every other way possible too. And six months later, it began. Six months later, I cornered him in his confessional and knocked down the first domino.
My only regret is that my father didn’t live to see the end game. And it starts now, with this precious man standing in my space, ready to do anything I ask of him.
Reaching my hand up, I curl my fingers around the back of Ari’s neck and force him to bend down until his lips meet mine. The position has to hurt, but it’s a mark of what a little masochist he is for me for how long he holds it as I devour his mouth.
“I’m feeling restless,” I tell him when we break apart.
He quirks a brow at me, waiting for me to tell him what I need.
“I’m going to be late, but not that late. Go home and tell James to get you ready for me.”
Ari’s eyes darken. He loves nothing more than when I take my frustrations out on his body. He lives for it. It’s one of the only ways he can truly feel anything. I dig my nails into his neck and wait for him to suck in a breath before letting him go.
He straightens and fixes me with a hot look, but he doesn’t move yet. He lets me drink him in. The young teen—barely out of adolescence—that stood in my manor, letting out a scream that would never be heard, is nothing like the man who stands here now. Years have passed, and though his voice is gone—stolen by Guido Romano’s arrogance and ego—he has become something else.
A monster, yes, but also a lover. He’s become steadfast and perfect with all of his broken pieces glued together by a lifetime of promises that I will always continue to make. It doesn’t matter that he can’t love me the way I love him. It doesn’t matter that he feeds off chaos and blood and violence.
What matters is that he—like all of my other misfits—is mine.
I rise, tugging him by his shirt until our chests collide, and I kiss him again. My teeth dig into his lip until I taste copper, and I lick the drops of blood away before pulling back. “I’ll make it hurt tonight,” I promise him.
His eyes are dark and narrowed, and his lips are slightly parted on his panting breath. He collects himself for a moment, and then a small, arrogant smirk tightens his mouth, and he steps back with a half salute. His erection is visible through his jeans, and it fucking does something to me that he doesn’t bother hiding it as he strolls out of my office and leaves me for the afternoon.
“That display,” comes a voice from my office doorway, and I turn to see my uncle, Aldis, strolling in, “was grotesque.”
He’s flanked by his son, Rhys, who is probably my closest confidant. At least, one that I’m not fucking. I’m not foolish enough to trust anyone, but Rhys is loyal, and I plan to do everything in my power to keep it that way.
His father, well…
Aldis always did have a sliver of hope that he’d get the keys to this empire after my father died, but I know he knew better than to truly believe it. I have given him power, though, and the respect that comes with it. And the money, which doesn’t hurt.
Gesturing to my two chairs, I sit back down and refuse to address his comment. I know many of my men look at me askance with the choices I’ve made. I’m unmarried, and there’s no heir on the horizon, and considering who my lovers are, I don’t know that anyone expects one.
What they don’t know—no one except James, Phoenix, and Ari—is that I don’t have the ability to produce one, even if I’d changed my mind about it. On my twenty-second birthday, Guido Romano sent a woman to me. Someone he knew I would be drawn to. She charmed me, whispered promises into my ear, and the second I dropped my guard, she slipped something into my drink.
I woke up with my pants around my ankles to her being dragged off me by Phoenix, and I don’t actually know what happened to her after that.
Phoenix told me she broke quickly under my father’s hand, though. She confessed who had sent her and why. Romano wanted the Walsh heir under his thumb as payment for what I’d done to him, and it was in that moment I knew I would make him pay. I just hadn’t realized how deep it was about to go.
A year later, with Phoenix at my side, I stepped into a clinic and took care of the problem forever. Should Guido try it again—should he ever be foolish enough, should I ever drop my guard enough—it wouldn’t matter.
He would condemn that soul to torture and torment for no reason at all.
And one by one, I began making my list of the ways to hurt Guido. And one by one, I begin ticking those items off.
I don’t know what the end game is going to look like exactly, but right now, I do know it involves the woman on the now darkened tablet, And eventually, Guido Romano on his knees, begging without a tongue after I let Ari rip it out.
“Gentlemen,” I say when I realize I’ve been quiet too long. I fold my hands on my desk and give them a look. “Let’s go over the quarterly reports.”
Ari’s playroom is lit up when I get home, but I bypass it. He can wait. He’ll enjoy how long I draw this out, and I make my way up the stairs and into my bedroom. It doesn’t take me much time at all to strip down to a T-shirt and lounge pants, and as I’m ruffling some of the product out of my hair, I reach down and flick on the tablet again.
The screen loads immediately to Alice’s room. She’s not brave enough to sneak out yet…but she will be. I watched her all afternoon, and I could see the way she was eyeing the fire escape every time she thought someone wasn’t looking.
Of course, she has no idea we’re always looking.
My eyes take in her form on the bed, stretched out with her back against the headboard, the toes on her right foot pointed. Her left leg is crooked up, and she’s got her new book resting against it while her hand absently strokes over the flower petals.
It gives me a strange, hot feeling to see the way she treats our gifts like they’re something precious, and the piece-of-shit bit of costume jewelry is forgotten, lost to the mess of her dorm. My fingers touch the screen just to the right of her.
She’s young, and I know she’s innocent and untouched. Her father’s kept her like a fucking pheasant under glass for most of her life, and even here with the torture of everyone else’s freedom, she’s bound. She never had a chance, this girl.
She never had real hope.
She doesn’t look much like her father at all, and I suppose that’s some kind of saving grace for her. She’s everything like her mother, though I only met the woman once at a party. She was stunning and she was charming, and resisting the urge to seduce her where Romano would find us was almost impossible.
I’d had him once—just before his entire world and his faith shattered.
And I knew it would break him to have her and make him watch as she fell apart under my tongue the same way he did.
But I would wait.
This game would have to be a long one. There was hell to pay, and a quick death for Guido Romano would be far too good.
“Is she still reading?”
I turn my head at the sound of Phoenix’s voice. He’s hovering in the doorway, his face tipped down. He’s got a tank top on and sweatpants, and the stains on the front tell me he’s been working out. He doesn’t keep to a schedule the way I do—the way any of us do—because he no longer leaves this place.
He hasn’t left in twenty years.
He hasn’t set foot beyond the gardens since the bullet tore through his temple, ruined his eyes, and took away everything he’d worked for. Not since he attempted to take his life—to take himself from me. And I snapped.
Twenty years hasn’t softened his resentment toward me at his imprisonment, and I know it’s mostly fear now that’s staying my hand and refusing to hand over the key to his gilded cage, but he has stopped hating me for it.
“She’s touching the rose,” I tell him as he crosses the room. His hands find me, and I look up into his face. Still the beautiful, dangerous man I think I’ve always been in love with. He digs his fingers into my waist and leans in, running his nose along my jaw.
He’s the only one who ever takes these kinds of liberties with me. I love my boys, but Phoenix knows the shape of my soul in ways no one else ever has. He cups my face and tips my jaw up with his thumbs, then kisses me.
“James watched her last night,” he murmurs against my lips. “Late—after all of us were asleep. She touched herself.”
My body and brain refuse to commit to any kind of reaction. I don’t know how to feel. I know in the short weeks we’ve had her under constant surveillance, he’s become increasingly obsessed, but that doesn’t surprise me. James is the sweetest among us. He’s the only one with a heart left.
He was a broken, shattered man when I dragged him from the floor of the drug house and let my doctor stitch him up. He looked at me with pain in his eyes that stretched down to the very core of his being when he realized he was worth nothing more than a sacrifice to Guido Romano.
He’d been told that far too often growing up, and I promised him in that moment if he stuck with me, he would understand what it truly meant to be worshipped. And none of us have truly let him down.
But I worry now. Alice is exactly the sort of creature who could take him down at the knee, and I don’t know what’ll happen to my sweet little murderer when he faces the reality that she might breathe her last in Ari’s chair.
“He’s falling for her,” Phoenix murmurs.
“It sounds like you watched too.”
“Both of them,” Phoenix says. For a blind man, he has an intense voyeurism kink. He’s constructed an AI tethered to our home and to every one of our surveillance lines that reads to him exactly what’s going on in any room.
No matter where I’m fucking or where we are, Phoenix is always there with us.
“Did you enjoy him getting off to her?”
He just laughs and dips his hand into the front of my pants, curling his fingers around me. “Her pussy sounds sweet. I isolated it once she got her little toy inside her, and I fed it right into James’ speaker.”
I shudder. I shouldn’t indulge this. I should demand that they stop immediately. It’s not safe—not for us, not for our dynamic. But something stays my tongue as I buck up against Phoenix’s grip.
“They’re waiting for you,” he eventually says. He thumbs at the head of my cock, and I’m pretty sure I can’t get harder than I am right now.
“Do you want to join us?”
“I’ve had my taste of Ari for the night,” Phoenix says. He kisses me again, dipping his tongue into my mouth like he’s sharing it with me, and I imagine I can get a small hint of his musk. “Make him cry.”
I grin and nip at his lips. “Don’t worry, I will.”
Phoenix leaves me, and I take a few moments before I make my way downstairs, then out of the main house and toward the building we constructed for the resident psychopath to do his work. I imagine I can hear noise, though it’s entirely soundproof, and there’s only silence as I open the door.
James is there when I walk into the room, and he’s got Ari lying on his back, entirely naked, covered in red marks. He looks up at me and grins, and I realize he’s wearing his hook prosthetic—something he only does here.
He’s never felt the need for it out in the world. I once asked why, and he told me he wanted to make sure every Romano knew what happened to him and why they would all pay with blood.
But here, he uses the hook to take Ari’s nipple in a vicious pinch, and my cock twitches when Ari’s mouth falls open wide in a silent scream.
“Looks like he’s perfectly warmed up,” I say.
James shrugs and brushes back some of his dark curls. He looks every bit like a Spanish pirate with his wild, long hair and his piercings and tattoos. His skin is olive and glistening right now with a fine sheen of sweat. He bites his lip ring as I come close, but he opens for a kiss.
“Glad you could join us, love,” he murmurs.
I have always loved the lingering English accent that curls his words, making them sound like poetry, even when he’s vicious. I push my hand into his hair and grip tight. “Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.” I kiss him a second time, then take a step back and drag fingers over the sore spots shining like beacons on Ari’s chest.
He shudders, his hands flexing against the table, and then he opens his eyes and meets my gaze.
“Alice is getting bold,” I tell them. My tone means business, and they both freeze. “Her little fuck-face cousin has tempted her to sneak out away from her guards, and if any other family gets their hands on her…”
I let them finish that sentence for themselves. I won’t lose sleep over her torture or death, nor will Ari. But James will. However, it will throw a wrench into my plans if she’s taken before we can get our hands on her, and I can’t have that.
They might be kings, but I am the fucking god of death in this empire, and I will not have subordinates stepping on my toes.
I pull James closer with one hand, my other drifting to rub over Ari’s abused, bruised nipple. “Your orders after tonight are to watch her. Tail her. Stalk her. Whatever you need to do. I don’t want her to see you ever, but you have kill orders for anyone who gets brave enough to cross the line we’ve drawn around her.”
James licks his lips. “Of course.”
Ari catches my gaze, and then his hand slots over mine, and he uses the little code we created so he can speak to Phoenix. ‘When do we take her?’
I blink at him, then look at James, who will be the one to crack first—I’m certain of it. “When I’m ready.”
They both bow their heads, subservient and loyal, and that’s all I need. My love for them grows more profoundly in this moment, and I give myself a single, solitary breath before I turn my attention to Ari.
“Now that’s out of the way,” I say to James, who’s hovering behind my shoulder, “let’s make our pretty boy cry.”
Chapter 2
ALICE
With a sharp grunt, I hit the ground, scraping my knee through my jeans. The ground is ice-fucking-cold, thanks to early March weather, so the skin quickly goes numb. Not that it matters. After a year and a half of ditching Flotsam and Jetsam, I’ve gotten really good at taking the pain of leaping out of my third-story window and dropping down the bottom rung of the fire escape. I’m pretty sure my ankles are as strong as the bones of those martial artists who punch cement blocks to create microfractures on purpose.
And I’d do it no matter what the consequences were, anyway. It’s the only way I can have an actual college experience.
It’s the last semester of my senior year, midterms are finally over, and I have a few days where I can actually relax and indulge before facing the fact that my first four years are coming to a close. And once I do that, I need to figure out what the hell I’m going to do next because I know what my father’s thinking.
He’s thinking that I’m finally ripe. He’s thinking that I’ve had my fun and sowed my oats, and now he can shove me off into the hands of whatever fucking creepy asshole has the most to offer. Like I’m some kind of animal at an auction. And that is not a life I’m going to live.
The first time Leo tempted me with a taste of freedom and the means to escape the constant watch for just a little while, I became addicted. I haven’t been reckless, and I don’t indulge too much, but just enough to remind me what I’m fighting for.
Someday, this will be over.
Someday, I will take my future into my own hands and fuck anyone who wants to stand in my way.
Tonight, though, I just want a drink.
Peering around the corner, I see my two watchmen standing by their car, smoking a cigarette. They probably do know about the side-alley exit, but none of them has ever bothered keeping an eye on it. I’ve grown an almost sixth sense which I can feel when I’m being watched by them, but I think Leo was right the night of my birthday when he said I’ve created a sense of security.
They no longer have to care.
I will admit I get off on it a little bit, knowing I’m pulling one over on them. It’s one of my more mild fetishes—if I even want to call it that. It doesn’t hold a candle to big, green men with alien dicks railing men and women in the pages of my favorite books, but it is something a little more tangible. And okay, sure, I’m into those books because the main characters are always finding their way to freedom through their own means. I’ve taken enough psych classes to know that basic 101 shit my brain is processing.
But my life is complicated, so I take what I can get. It’s not easy being a Romano. Not a single person on campus will come within ten feet of me the moment they learn who I am, and honestly, I wouldn’t trust them if they did. It’s left me depressingly untouched, craving what I’m not sure I’ll ever get, and very familiar with the few toys I’ve managed to sneak into my dorm without my roommates ever seeing.
With the certainty that I’ve gotten away, I carefully cross the street, keeping a careful eye on the people around me. It’s a Wednesday, so the long strip of bars on the street isn’t exactly hopping, but there are enough people that I can weave through the groups of students without standing out.
I pull my beanie a little lower over my head and tuck my hands into the sleeves of my oversized sweater before eyeing my favorite place. The bar is called The Book Spot, and the inside is covered in shelves, packed with used books. You can get a free well drink if you donate to their stacks, and if you’re lonely or bored, you can snag something off the shelf and curl up in one of the armchairs in the lounge to read.
