The Vanity of Roses

by Lily White

  Gretchen still managed the household staff. Callan’s mother had stepped into her new role among us and worked closely with Franklin and Gretchen both to ensure the house and family ran smoothly.

  As Callan insisted long before I came back, the staff was treated extraordinarily well, the fighters were given their chance in the ring but also employed as guards.

  But no longer was there a huge separation between the members of the Rose family and those who worked for them.

  We were a larger family now, one made up of maids and butlers, fighters and guards, gardeners and kitchen staff, each person having pride in their part.

  I refused to allow wealth to be the bar that established who was deserving.

  Respect was paid to those who deserved it. It was earned. It was promised. And if anybody attempted to step out of line and demand it without reason, they were quickly dealt with by the lethal force I now called my husband.

  Callan and I were the new heads of the Rose household. The power couple. The two people to whom everybody else answered if they wanted to remain in the mansion.

  Only, we looked to everybody as equals, including the women who earned their living by selling their bodies to the fighters.

  I’d tried to do away with the fights. I won’t lie about that, but in the end, I knew to do so would be to take something from Callan he loved. Leaving that part of the business to him, I claimed control of another part.

  “Stop fidgeting, Lisbeth. I need to set this strap right or the dress won’t fall properly.”

  Rolling my eyes, I straightened my shoulders while Gretchen worked to ensure my costume was perfectly fitted before I was walked out as Callan’s prize.

  “Whatever, Mom,” I teased, still unable to believe that this woman with her sensible, clicking shoes and perma-scowl had been the one to give birth to me.

  After discovering the truth, I’d wrestled with what to do with it, but eventually I understood the lectures she’d given me, the quiet strength she’d provided in my darkest hours. She wasn’t doing so for her own reasons; she was trying to teach me in the only way she knew how.

  Having been through a life much worse than I could ever imagine, Gretchen knew it was better to make me stand on my own while claiming my power than to coddle me and set me on the same pedestal as my other parents had done.

  For that, I could forgive her the secret she’d kept from me because even though I didn’t know who she truly was, she’d managed to teach me more about myself than the people who raised me.

  “You look gorgeous, Lis. Seriously, Callan’s going to blow his load the minute he sees you.”

  My eyes shot to Haley where she sat on the bench watching us, her hands cradling her growing belly. Jacob and her first child was due within a couple months, and while he promised not to go in the ring again, he still sparred with the other fighters. Beside her, Holly watched Gretchen and I, a smile stretching her lips

  Even now, I knew he was in the viewing box with Franklin, both of them watching Callan do what he loved.

  “Ladies,” Gretchen snapped, “language.”

  Haley laughed, Holly blushing beside her.

  “Whatever. You know it’s true. I’m almost jealous you didn’t make this change before I was released from my contract. Getting laid by aggressive men and getting to do it looking like that? Seriously, that’s some hot shit right there.”

  Beyond the doors, I heard the chanting that meant the fight had come to its bloody end, and while a knot of apprehension filled me, I knew there wasn’t a man out there who was more brutal than my husband.

  I knew it would be Callan’s face I’d see when those large gates swung open, and this was the first time I would get to experience what it was like to have all that lethal strength walking toward me after a battle to the death.

  My nerves were on edge, my legs weak, the flutter in my stomach making me dizzy as Gretchen pulled the last strap of the dress in place before stepping back to nod her head in approval.

  Her eyes lifted to mine. “Are you ready?”

  Nodding my head, I swallowed. “As ready as I can be.”

  She gave me a look I would never associate with anybody but her.

  Lightly gripping my chin, she tilted my head up, pride flashing behind her eyes.

  “You walk out there and show those men who owns this place. Head high. Shoulders back. Your eyes meeting theirs as if daring them to do a damn thing about it.”

  I smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Another nod as she motioned for Haley and Holly to follow behind me, my ladies that escorted me out to meet the only man who would ever have me.

  Slowly, we stepped through the doors and waited in shadow, the cheering crowd growing louder as the large hinges of the gates creaked, the wooden partitions swinging open.

  I stepped down the ramp with the girls at my back, my eyes seeking Callan where he stood in the middle of the ring.

  Sweat dripped down a body that was a fantasy come to life, his shoulders and chest beating with breath, every muscle hard and taut.

  Blood splashed his arms, a body lying at his feet, but those amber eyes held mine with the promise of another type of violence.

  My feet tripped over themselves as I walked out, Haley gripping my arm to steady me.

  Whispering at my back, she said, “Didn’t I tell you? That’s a fuck ton of sexy about to come your way. You’ll be walking funny for a week.”

  Biting my cheek to keep from laughing, I stepped out of the shadows and into the lights that were bright above the ring.

  I stopped in place, my white dress tight over the chest, but flowing like water around my legs.

  Women weren’t slaves to be used and taken. Not in my house. We were as fierce as the men who fought. As dangerous as the most lethal of predators.

  And as Callan approached me, I remembered to keep my head up, my eyes open and locked to his, my shoulders pulled back with the same pride as him.

  It was difficult to remain in place, to watch someone so fucking beautiful approach, to keep from running out to throw my arms around him and check for any injuries. I needed to know he was okay. But I held my place and allowed him to come to me.

  As soon as he reached me, his lips pulled into that arrogant smirk that drove my pulse harder and tightened my thighs, but then he dropped down to one knee, lowering his head as if to bow.

  Reaching down, I tipped a finger beneath his chin, directed him to stand again, and met a set of whiskey colored eyes that still had the power to freeze me in place, just like they’d always done the entire time I’d known him.

  “I never want you on your knees again.”

  His smirk stretched, adrenaline pumping through his veins as his eyes tracked down my body with wicked intent.

  There was nothing in his expression except for the promise of sex, and I damn near died at the power of it.

  Yes, these men still deserved the prize at the end of their fights. They still deserved to have a place to drain all that energy inside them.

  But rather than being the poor slave girls who didn’t have a choice, we were now goddesses in their world, we were queens, we were a prize fit for a warrior.

  Leaning into me, Callan nipped my ear with his teeth, his breath hot against my skin.

  “You have no idea what I’m about to do to you right now.”

  I laughed, my heart pounding harder.

  “Does it involve torture?”

  He smiled against my cheek, his voice a deep purr when he answered. “You better fucking believe it.”

  My mouth flew open on a scream as he picked me up and carried me over his shoulder.

  And despite the secrets and lies that led us to this place, when all was said and done, I could forgive those crimes.

  We were happy in our roles in life.

  I wouldn’t have wanted it to end any other way.

  THE END

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  THE DANGER YOU KNOW

  You’ll judge me

  Hate me and tell me I’m wrong.

  Refuse to see how my darkness is what she needs.

  While I don’t particularly care about your feelings in the matter, and while I pursue her despite the wedding bells that rang for another, only I know she is drowning beneath mediocrity.

  How many times must I remind her?

  It can’t matter that I am the person who ruined her life.

  The man who killed her father.

  The constant shadow that watches her sleep.

  The lover who prefers dirty alleyways to freshly laundered sheets

  She’s mine.

  Always has been.

  Always will be.

  I am the worst thing for her, yet I’m the only salvation she knows.

  He had his chance to make her happy.

  He failed.

  It’s my job to bring her back to life.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ari

  When I remember that night - the first, the last - the beginning and end of it all, I don’t recall the details of the hit. The reason for Liam Kane’s death mattered little to me.

  I was born for one task, my temperament honed in the flames of apathy, my morality in such things entirely absent.

  The only details that mattered to me were that Liam had to die, and if it happened by my hand, my life would all the better for it.

  I didn’t know if he was a demon who sold drugs that killed hundreds of people, or a saint who worked his ass off to donate millions to charity.

  The facts meant little to me.

  All that mattered was that he had a price on his head. Two million dollars to be exact.

  The only details that I needed to know were that he was a heavyset middle aged man standing approximately six foot, that he lived in a gated community northwest of Hollow Lake, and that he’d be home for the night after ten p.m., alone in his first floor office where nobody would bother him for some time.

  Nobody but me, at least. The man who would kill him. The interloper that couldn’t give a damn about why the bullet should be in his brain, just that it should be there.

  And it was.

  At fifteen minutes past ten, Liam took his final breath, his brain worse for the wear, a small hole at his right temple that led to a much larger one on his left.

  By all accounts, Liam had been depressed, had held the weapon himself, had gunpowder residue on his hand to prove it. His body was left slumped at his desk.

  I was nothing but a ghost, an unseen force that guided his hand. And I would have remained just that if his daughter hadn’t come to check on him shortly after I closed the window.

  It was stupid for me to turn back when I heard her voice. I knew better. I never get involved. She was a detail I didn’t need to know.

  But still, the scream that left her throat stopped me in place, the agony pouring out of her when she called her father’s name caused me to spin to look at her.

  Breath leaked out of me, a white gust against the cold night air.

  I wasn’t sure what I recognized in her that trapped me in the shadows to watch her for the first time, but that moment was the beginning of a mistake - the end of a life lived without concern for another person.

  It was the first night I saw her, and the last I had the ability to walk without guilt for what I’d done.

  Adeline Kane was sixteen years old when I first found her, a vision with raven black hair and skin so pale she would glow beneath moonlight. She had crystal blue eyes and red lips that defied every shade a lipstick could provide. And she had the bone structure of an angel, not the round cherubic type, but the ones fallen from Heaven and designed solely to punish a man’s soul.

  I didn’t want to know she was an artist who preferred tragedy to romance.

  It shouldn’t have mattered that she felt most comfortable when she was alone.

  It wasn’t in me to care that she’d lost her mother only months before I killed her father and that she was the heir to the small fortune they left behind.

  All that concerned me in the years I watched her was that she’d fractured the night her father died, that I’d left her at a moment when her life would spiral out of control. That I felt responsible for the girl becoming a woman. And that she pulled at something inside me I had never known before.

  I was ten years older than her.

  A trained killer.

  A skilled assassin.

  But I became one more thing on the night I first saw her:

  A stalker.

  A constant shadow.

  And the man that would protect her from the world.

  . . .

  The last place I want to end up on a Saturday night beneath a full moon and shrouded in the first flurries of snow is outside a nightclub.

  I can’t stand these types of places. Always with the garish lights, thumping music and pungent scent of youthful hormones mixed beneath a layer of alcohol and cigarettes. I’ve avoided the cramped quarters and brush of sweaty bodies for many years.

  Only she can bring me to a place like this, The Black Orchid, a club that caters to those with a penchant for the macabre.

  I have to admit, it isn’t your typical nightclub. The interior is designed to mimic a dungeon, the exterior a facade of fake stone like the walls of a castle. Every person standing in line is dressed in black on black, some pretending they’re vampires, others too stupid to know that fantasy is always more convenient than reality.

  Yet, here I am, standing near a small tree planted in the center of a sidewalk, my shoulder leaning against the iron cage that circles it, my eyes set on a newly of-age woman who’s already had too much to drink tonight and is bouncing in place waiting to get inside.

  Her idiot for a boyfriend stands next to her, a flavor of the week and nothing more. His skinny jeans and floppy hair annoying the living piss out of me. It is what it is. Adeline has no taste in men, but I won’t have to hate this one for too long.

  Her boyfriends never last more than a few weeks or months because Adeline isn’t the type to commit.

  Her habits and choices have driven me insane for the past two years.

  I’ve watched her lose her virginity in the back of a car, have witnessed her run from one guy to another. I’ve been the silent specter that counts the boys and men she’s stumbled through without concern for her reputation.

  Thirteen, not that I’m counting, and if you judge her for it, I’ll gut you and laugh while you scream.

  It isn’t that she’s desperate for the attention, she just falls into it, and like most anything with a dick, they take advantage.

  But she never seems to care, and for that I admire her more than I should. She’s a free spirit, a beam of light that manages to slice its way through the dark landscape of my careful life.

  Adeline isn’t the type to attach herself to anything. She’s only seeking a release during painful hours, an escape to lessen the weight of a life spent misunderstood by everyone that knows her.

  Everyone but me, that is. But then I’ve never met her, not formally, at least. Not in way that she would remember.

  Still, I know everything about her.

  I know that she’s a Hellscape that can consume you before you realize what’s happening.

  I know she’s turned on by dominance and fear, and that she hates fluffy r
omance that’s sweet and shallow.

  I know she has fantasies that other people would consider immoral and wrong.

  I know that she never shows herself to the world because they will judge her.

  And I know there isn’t a single jackass she’s ever been with that appreciates how dirty and broken she really is.

  They can’t make her scream.

  Can’t make her come.

  Can’t do much of anything but convince her to lie beneath them pretending she’s into the moment.

  I won’t deny that last part amuses me, even if I won’t let myself do anything about it.

  The woman has issues.

  They are the same as mine.

  Tonight is her eighteenth birthday and she’s waiting outside a club that you have to be twenty-one to enter. It’s so like her, the rebellion, a personality trait that would drive most sane people crazy but that calls to me like a whispering lover.

  I’m going to follow in behind her at some point, but for now, this spot by the tree will do.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I fish it out to see Lincoln’s name flashing at me.

  “Where are you?”

  He doesn’t bother waiting for me to say a damn thing before demanding answers I don’t want to give.

  “Taking a walk,” I answer.

  His deep laughter bursts through the phone. “Walking my ass. You’re watching her again, aren’t you?”

  “She needs to be watched.”

  He curses beneath his breath. “I won’t argue with you there. What’s the little psychopath doing now?”

  “Waiting outside Black Orchid.”

  Lincoln goes silent for a second. “She’s not old enough.”

  “She never is,” I answer, amusement dripping from my voice. “But she has a fake ID.”

  “I thought you took that from her.”

  Three times to be exact but she keeps getting new ones. Eventually, I’ll have to kill the assholes giving them to her. I say as much and he groans.

  “She’s out of control.”