Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 74581 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74581 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
This is partly true. But I have many other plans for Clare, before I’ll even think about trading her back to her father…
My father seems to infer something along those lines, because he narrows his pale blue eyes at me, his upper lip curled in a sneer of disgust.
“Kidnapping her was… impulsive,” he says. “It’s bringing too much attention from the cops.”
“They would have looked for me anyway,” I say. “Valencia didn’t go to all the trouble of chucking me in that fucking hole just to let me escape again.”
“He smashed eight of our slot machines,” my father says. “We should send him her pinky to remind him to watch his fucking manners.”
Clare shrinks even closer to me, so close that I can feel her soft breasts pressing against the back of my arm, and even sense the fluttering of her heart as she watches my father, wide-eyed and terrified.
My own stomach does a long, unpleasant revolution at the idea of holding Clare’s wrist against a table while one of my father’s men swings a cleaver down on her hand.
Clare has beautiful hands—cream-colored with translucent nails and long, elegant fingers.
No fucking way is anyone touching them. Or any other part of her.
She’s mine to do with as I wish.
Mine and no one else’s.
“I have better uses for her,” I say, shortly.
My father is silent, his expression judging.
“There’s a fight at Yama tonight,” he says. “Ilya will be there.”
Ilya is a broker of sorts. In fact, he was instrumental in brokering the alliance between us and the Maguire clan.
Funnily enough, he’s been damn hard to get hold of ever since I was chucked in jail.
He can dodge my phone calls, but not my hand around his throat.
“Perfect,” I nod. “So will I.”
With that, I close my hand over Clare’s wrist and pull her out of the office.
I can feel her relief as we leave my father’s dour presence, and the oppressive gloom of the house overstuffed with artwork, rugs, statuary, and furniture. Gangsters always over-decorate. The drive to transform illicit wealth into ostentatious belongings is too strong to resist. Vases and paintings are the trappings of a legitimate life—harder to claw back than a pile of cash.
“So you’re not going to cut off my pinky,” she says quietly, once we’re out of the house.
“No.”
She pauses, then asks, “Why not?”
I turn to look at her, at her large, dark eyes that gaze up at me with more than fear… with genuine curiosity. This fucking crazy little shrink—she can’t stop analyzing me for a second.
“Because I don’t want to,” I say, roughly. Then I add, “I have much more interesting uses for those hands.”
The statement comes out gruff, like a threat.
Clare doesn’t flinch away. In fact, her soft little exhale carries more than relief—maybe, possibly, a hint of anticipation.
She’s silent following me into the car. Then she says, “What happened to your father?”
“Shot by a rival,” I say.
“When? Back in Moscow?”
I nod.
Almost as soon as my father was back on his feet—figuratively speaking of course—he began bringing me to work with him.
“He needed me to be his eyes, his ears, his legs,” I say. “He was paranoid. He thought there was a mole amongst his men.”
Someone who had tipped off the Armenians as to where he would be the day they drove by the Danilovsky market in their open-top Cadillac, spraying bullets out of two machine guns.
His physical reduction maddened him.
He needed someone to act as his avatar. And though I hadn’t reached my full strength or height yet, he knew I soon would.
“How old were you?” Clare asks.
“Twelve.”
She recoils, horrified.
“I was almost six feet tall already,” I tell her, as though my mind had grown along with my body. As though I wasn’t still a child inside. “He put a gun in my hand. He began to train me in his business—first the basics of extortion, theft, and vice. Then he took me to his whorehouses, his drug dens, the warehouses where he broke the kneecaps of men who owed him gambling debts.”
Clare looks sickened. Her reaction is stirring something inside of me. I hear my voice coming out of my mouth without thought, without plan. Telling her things that I told myself were fine, were acceptable, were good business, good parenting—for a mafioso.
“I was still twelve when he popped my cherry,” I say. “Not sex—that came a year or two later with one of his whores. No, he wanted to breach the one great barrier of the criminal world, telling me the sooner I got over it, the better. He wanted me to kill a man.”
Clare’s lovely, pale hands twist in her lap. She’s watching me closely, but she doesn’t say a word to interrupt or discourage me.
“He waited for a good candidate. Someone from the neighborhood who turned snitch for the cops. His men brought him into that same warehouse, the one where the floor was already stained, where the dumpsters out back often held parts of bodies wrapped up in black garbage bags.