Queen of His Heart: Game of Love Series Book 3, page 1
Queen of His Heart
Game of Love Series Book 3
Khardine Gray
Contents
Queen of His Heart
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Queen of His Heart
Game of Love Series
Book 3
Khardine Gray
USA Today Bestselling Author
Copyright © 2019 by Khardine Gray
Queen of His Heart – Book 3 of Game of Love Copyright © 2019 by Khardine Gray
All rights reserved.
Cover design © 2019 by Book Cover Couture.
Photography- Eric Battershell Photography
Cover Model – Drew Truckle
This work is copyrighted. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
The author asserts that all characters and situations depicted in this work of fiction are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The following story contains mature themes, strong language and sexual situations.
It is intended for mature readers. All characters are 18+ years of age and all sexual acts are consensual.
Chapter 1
Xander
Time…
What time was it?
What time is it?
For a man who didn’t have long to live I probably shouldn’t be so obsessed with the time. What did it matter really?
It wasn’t as if I could do anything. I was here, useless as shit.
Useless to everybody, including myself.
In my final moments I just wanted to think of her…
Jia…
Jia Marchesi, age twenty six, artist. Daughter of Giovanni Marchesi the Vegas Mafia King.
She was the innocent in the mix.
I was told that when I was given the mission brief.
Usually when we talked about innocents like that, it meant we weren’t to involve them. As agents we weren’t supposed to allow harm to come to them and most of all, we were supposed to be careful with them.
Be careful not to get them caught in the crossfire. Be careful of them getting close because the people we were targeting could sway them.
I broke every rule in the book with my innocent. I didn’t just involve her, I got involved with her.
I got involved with her and it made me reckless.
It didn’t matter now. I’d be selfish now and I could think of her for however long I had left.
I lifted my head and opened my eyes. There was a clock on the wall. I think Giovanni put it there to add to the torture.
I was attached to two metal pillars. Cuffed to them like I was in some risqué sex club, fuck, maybe that’s what it was, some kind of torture chamber.
Giovanni wasn’t the kind of man to like the risqué. But torture? Yes.
This apparatus I was attached to was definitely for torture. Torture to death kind of torture. Nothing more than that, nothing less.
The clock on the wall said it was three o’clock.
I just wasn’t sure if it was three o’clock in the same day, three in the morning, or three p.m. the next day.
If it was any of the latter, it meant I wasn’t thinking of her at a time when I knew she’d be thinking of me.
Jia.
She was going to Italy with Armand. She’d board a plane and fly off with him, out of the country. Far away from me. Far, so very far away from me.
I wanted to think of her at a time when I thought she’d be thinking about me. Boarding that plane. And looking out the window as it took off. That was what I imagined.
I imagined she’d cry and Armand wouldn’t comfort her.
He’d leave her to cry for me. He’d hate her for it.
I hope she didn’t cry because maybe he’d beat her for it. Or other things.
I wouldn’t be there to save her.
If it was three pm the same day—Monday—then it hadn’t happened yet.
If it was still Monday then that meant Giovanni would have been torturing me since last night when he captured me and I probably would have passed out a few times from the torture.
If it was still Monday then it would have been earlier that Jia came by and came through for me. She didn’t talk. She didn’t tell her father who I really was and that I came to steal from him. She knew practically everything about my presence here. Everything. Yet, she held her silence for me, just as she promised she would.
My girl came through for me and showed I could trust her, even when she watched me being tortured for the information and knew the torture meant death.
If it was still Monday then that’s what happened earlier today.
Giovanni came to me several times after, to try and get me to talk.
Asking me the same questions over and over again.
Who did I work for?
Who sent me?
Who did I work for?
Who sent me?
I gave the same answer. I told him a fucking clown sent me. Granted he wasn’t to know that in my rookie days of being a secret agent I thought of Ethan as a clown, because of the bizarre shit he used to ask us to do.
Fuck, I thought he was clowning around when he made Claire captain of our team and not me.
I thought it was a joke until he pointed out that my girl had more balls than me. Turned out he was right. I’d stopped thinking of him as the clown then.
But he’d become the clown again for the purposes of today, if it was still today, because I wasn’t dropping names.
I’d left Wes with two requests on what he should do if I failed in my grand plan to steal the blueprints. I asked him to tell Ethan what happened and then to tell Jia I loved her. That’s what I asked him to do.
Whether or not it was still Monday, he would have known by now that I’d failed. Enough time had passed since Giovanni captured me to alert Wes to my failure.
I was supposed to message him when I got out of the secret chamber.
That never happened.
Wes would have known to take the next steps if he didn’t hear from me.
It was so difficult to know what to do sometimes.
Sometimes when you thought you were doing the right thing. It turned out to be the wrong fucking thing to do.
In my case it always seemed like I was wrong whatever I did.
I thought by getting the prints myself I was going to be one step ahead of everybody. Not just Balthazar and his Spades, but everybody.
I thought it would give me an edge, something to work with and it would protect everyone else who was part of the mission.
Instead, I blew the mission out of the water and here I was. Captured.
Who knew what could be happening now?
Both Giovanni and The Chameleon knew of my presence, and they were so very far from stupid. Giovanni guessed right that I was an agent. He also knew I had to be of the special variety to disturb the nest.
I was pretty sure that global threat I was so worried about would come to pass.
Maybe…
There was always a maybe, but in this case I didn’t know.
The situation was pretty bad.
The minute my mind started clearing up, a jolt of electricity ran through me and Giovanni’s face came into my view.
Holy fuck!
I screamed. It was so fucking painful. So damn painful. Like a thousand knives piercing through my body. That was what it felt like.
Knives, swords, blades.
Pain beyond belief. Pain beyond measure.
They turned up the voltage again and administered another wave that made me heave like I was going to vomit. I was pretty sure I would have if I’d eaten. But there was nothing to come up.
Fucking hell.
How was I still alive?
Giovanni came right up into my face and snarled.
I’d foolishly thought he’d left me but he hadn’t. Neither had the prick who was giving me the electric shocks. He was still very much here.
My ass was still being tortured. It hadn’t fucking stopped.
Giovanni held up a hand and the electricity zapped away as it was switched off.
“Xander Cage, I’m growing tired of this. As you know I’m a very busy man. Very busy. I don’t have time for shit like this,” he taunted.
Fucking asshole. I didn’t give a flying fuck about his schedule.
“Tell me what I want to know and this will be over. I’ll kill you and you’ll be dead. No more pain, son. Why would you prolong the torture? I never figured you for a man who liked pain. Come on tell me who sent you? Who sent you to steal my prints?”
The one fucking kick I got out of this was watching him squirm every time I gave an answer. It gave me strength to find my voice.
“A clo...wn. And, the prints aren’t yours.”
This time he didn’t squirm, he answered me with a kick to my stomach that would have made me double over if I wasn’t cuffed to the fucking pillars.
The pain from the kick and the electrical shocks were just too much. Once again I saw stars and felt my consciousness slipping.
Slipping away.
“You’re a fool, you know that. I keep telling you you’re the fool. Being used. Being fucking used. I told you The Ra wouldn’t have gotten involved if somebody hadn’t alerted them. Those prints are mine while they are in my care. The whole thing was covert. Oh so covert. Shhhh.” He pressed his fingers to his lips. “Covert and silent. I shouldn’t have people like the Ra on my ass. No, and the Spades? Fucking hell Xander Cage. You know as much as me that mobsters keep their noses out of anything they don’t belong in. No, no, no. We have enough wealth, but we still want more. Too dangerous, and we say no. We actually say no to things that are beyond us. This thing wasn’t beyond me when I first agreed to it, then it became so. Like fuck.”
He was talking out of his fucking ass. I wasn’t sure if he expected me to feel sorry for him or, what his point was.
If I were even ten percent myself I would have told him to go fuck himself.
He leaned forward again and dropped a playing card.
The queen of hearts.
Jia. That was her.
She was the queen of my heart. The asshole knew what he was doing to me.
“It’s fine. Play the game of silence, you fucktard. We’ll resume this but rest assured, I haven’t even begun yet to show you the extent of how truly evil I can be. Those shocks were nothing. That was just to try and crack the surface, but you refuse to cooperate. It’s all good. Ace.” He slapped my cheek and backed away.
He’d taken to calling me Ace earlier; assuming this was the same day.
“When you see me again, it’ll be death and I’ll take pleasure in killing your ass, but I’ll make you suffer first. Maybe I’ll cut your dick off for screwing around with my little girl, and I’ll make you watch me kick it around in the dirt.” He laughed then backed right out of my view.
Footsteps sounded then faded into nothingness. I couldn’t hear anymore. I hung my head down and stared at the queen of hearts.
The image blurred into the ground and my mind drifted again. I drifted into the nothingness for what was likely hours. I didn’t know.
It was more footsteps that woke me up. I blinked and geared myself up to see Giovanni again. He said he’d kill me. I didn’t need any more pain. Maybe I would will myself to die somehow. Maybe I could just try to force my body to give up so it wouldn’t have to go through any more.
The face that stood before me was not, however, Giovanni’s.
It was Frankie.
Frankie, one of the knights. The only guy I could really say I got on with here. What would he do?
Had Giovanni sent him to kill me, knowing we’d been close to being called friends?
Was that what this was?
“Kid, boy I wished you’d listened to me. They messed you up bad,” he remarked. Despair clouded his russet eyes as his gaze assessed me.
My lips parted but I couldn’t talk. My throat was so dry and my body weak.
But… not too weak to take note of what he did next. He pulled out a key and moved to undo the cuff on my right hand.
“Get this side Vin,” he instructed, glancing over his shoulder.
Surprise took me when Vinny stepped forward and took hold of my right side, holding me up so I wouldn’t drop to the ground.
In the meantime Frankie unlocked the cuff on my left hand and took hold of my left side. Both of them supported me. I looked from one to the other, not quite sure what they were doing yet. These two guys after all, were Giovanni’s most trusted people. His capos.
“What … what are you doing?” I asked weakly.
“What the fuck does it look like we’re doing, prick?” Vinny threw back.
“Just don’t talk.” Frankie told me. “Here to rescue you from shit. Capisce?”
I couldn’t believe it. Jesus.
“Capisce,” I answered.
Chapter 2
Xander
The two carried me out back. When the night air hit me, it hurt all over.
It was night again so a whole day had gone by. I forgot to look at the clock.
Was it the same day?
They put me in the back of Frankie’s truck but Vinny didn’t get in.
Frankie got into the driver’s seat and Vinny came up to the window.
“You asshole,” he said to Frankie. “You better know what you’re doing. He’ll kill you when he finds out.”
“I’d like to see him try,” Frankie answered with a daring smirk, cocking his head to the side so the light from the lamp post beamed down on his black spiky hair.
Vinny sighed with an uneasy expression, tensing his square jaw. His hawk-like eyes switched from Frankie to me, then back to Frankie. “I’ll hold the fort here.”
“Hey,” Frankie shook his head and held up his finger. “You know nothing, and you never helped me. I’m serious. This is on me. My sister won’t be without a husband.”
Vinny dipped his head understanding and backed away into the shadows of the night.
I barely managed to keep my eyes opened as I looked at him. Frankie drove off, leaving him standing there.
I bid him a silent thanks.
I struggled to keep myself up. It was so hard. All I could manage to do was slump against the seat.
“There’s a sweatshirt in the back next to you. Put it on,” Frankie instructed. “There’s also a bottle of water. Drink some.”
I swallowed hard against my dry throat. The lump there was so big it actually felt like I’d shoved a ball inside and was trying to move past it. Very similar to having a sore throat, or when I’d had tonsillitis. It was so bad, I’d needed my tonsils removed. Thank God I’d had Jack in my life then, because it crippled me for weeks.
I was thanking God and his heavenly host now that I had Frankie. And Vinny? Fuck…
What the hell?
Frankie had watched my back over the last few weeks, giving me a pass to see Jia. If not for him I would never have had the chance. I never expected this though. Not from him and definitely not from Vinny.
Pulling in a deep breath I gathered strength to straighten up. The hooded sweatshirt was folded next to me, the bottle of water under it.
My arms were like lead pillars as I lifted them up to shrug into the shirt. Then I downed the water, my throat thanking me in abundance.
Jesus, it actually made me feel a little better. I must have been severely dehydrated.
Frankie’s eyes alternated between watching me and the road ahead.
I stared at the back of his head and he glanced around at me.
He was definitely help that had come in the most unexpected form.
“Thank you,” I told him. “Thank you and Vinny. But Jesus, why? Why did you do it? Giovanni will know someone had to have helped me.”
Giovanni would have known that straight off the bat when he discovered I was missing. He knew I had skill but there was no way I was that good.
Frankie was silent for a few seconds.
