Masterson Made (The Masterson Series Book 4)
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Masterson Made
Masterson Series Book Four
Lisa Lang Blakeney
Writergirl Press
LISA LANG BLAKENEY
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Copyright © 2020 Lisa Lang Blakeney.
All rights reserved.
Published by: Writergirl Press
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License Note
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real events, people, or places is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without the permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations used for review.
The author acknowledges the trademarked status of products referred to in this book and acknowledges that trademarks have been used without permission.
This book contains mature content, including graphic sex. Please do not continue reading if you are under the age of 18 or if this type of content is disturbing to you.
NOTE: All characters in the book are 18+ years of age, non-blood related, and all sexual acts are consensual.
To Mommy
Contents
Book List
Introduction
Prologue
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
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Bonus Epilogue!
Note From Lisa
Where You Can Find Me
Bonus Stuff!
Joseph Loves Juliette
Claimed
Indebted
Broken
Promised
Book List
About the Author
Book List
The Masterson Series
Masterson
Masterson Unleashed
Masterson In Love
Masterson Made
Joseph Loves Juliette
The King Brothers Series
Claimed
Indebted
Broken
Promised
The Nighthawk Series
Gunslinger
Wolf
Diesel
The Valencia Mafia Series
Coming Soon. Get Notified!
Introduction
Now that my heart belongs to Elizabeth, I need to make sure she doesn’t crush it. Now that I’m committed to giving her everything, I need to ensure that I’m left with nothing. Now that I’ve gotten everything I ever wanted, I need to make certain that things don’t fall apart…and I will fight like hell for it.
The first night the dark and dangerous Roman Masterson laid eyes on Elizabeth, the earth shifted beneath him, changing the trajectory of his life forever.
The only thing that existed for him from that moment on was her, but nobody said a happily-ever-after was going to be easy, especially when one gunshot could change everything.
Prologue
ROMAN
It amazes me how time can become an abstract construct when some of your senses are muted and others heightened. I am seated on a cold concrete floor and there is a large blindfold made of a sour-smelling fabric wrapped tightly around my skull, completely blinding me to my surroundings.
There is an irritatingly loud song playing on a loop in a language I don’t understand. Based on some phonetics of the song, my guess is it’s a Russian band. My hands are tied tightly behind my back with what feels like two zip ties, my ankles are duct taped together, and I have no idea how long I’ve been here. My guess is five hours, but it could easily have been fifteen minutes. Who the hell knows.
I’m fuming.
It’s been a long time since anyone’s gotten one up on me, which is why I’m furious with myself that I’ve allowed this to happen. The old man is right. I must be slipping. I’m getting entirely too soft and complacent. This is my fault.
When I was a kid, I was always the tallest and the strongest boy in the neighborhood and no one could beat me. As I grew into an adult, my reputation preceded me, and I didn’t have to be the biggest or the strongest because I was the most feared. Now, I find myself in a unique position. The men in this room either don’t fear me or don’t know that they should.
I’ve long since stopped struggling to free myself from the ties that bind my wrists and ankles, because I need to think clearly and reserve my energy. My sole mission at this point is to get back to Elizabeth and my baby boy. That’s it.
All I see are their faces behind this mask. All I hear is the sound of their laughter. All I smell is the warm jasmine on her skin and the faint baby soft scent of his. So I need to be really confident about any action I take next to get out of this clusterfuck.
I can’t let them down.
Not again.
I hear a heavy door creak open and then footsteps. Based on my count, there are at least two men crossing the room toward me. They speak to each other in brief terse sentences in what I’m now positive is the Russian language, and while I don’t understand what they’re saying, I can sense things from their tone.
They’re worried.
And they should be.
Once Camden, Cutter, Stone, or Joseph find out what happened to me there will be some slow singing and flower bringing for these jackasses. They’ve kidnapped the wrong motherfucker and there will be a reckoning.
“Wake up,” one man orders as he pushes the makeshift scarf off of my eyes.
I slowly raise my head and open my eyes. The lighting in the room is dim, which fortunately helps my pupils adjust faster than if it was normally lit. I’m being held in an area which is larger than I thought. It looks like an unused storage facility with unfinished concrete floors and walls. The only thing inside here besides me is a battered-looking utility sink, a portable boom box which was no doubt the source of the wretched Russian rock music, and some sealed cardboard boxes on the other side of the room.
I make sure to stare my captors directly in the eyes. Just by their body language, I can tell who the one in charge probably is—the one who’s silent. The one asking all the questions is probably the enforcer, the man who puts in the work so that the boss can sit and analyze my responses. How I answer determines whether I live or die.
“What business you have with Patricia?” he asks in broken English with a thick Russian accent.
I’ve been hired to handle a lot of jobs over my career as a professional fixer, and I’ve never been under any delusion that my past couldn’t come back to haunt me. In fact, I’ve lived my life knowing that it could. So the King Brothers and I pay an exorbitant amount of money to a private detective to keep tabs on all of our clients and most of our enemies. We usually stay on top of most everyone, but I didn’t see this one coming.
That’s because Patricia wasn’t
a client.
She was a favor.
“None.”
The asshole kicks me swiftly in the ribs with his steel-toed boot.
“Wrong answer. What business you have with Patricia?” he repeats.
“Nichego,” I say in a truculent manner.
It just so happens that I know about five words in Russian. I learned them from a female bartender who worked for the club years ago when my father first bought it. One of them was her safe word, nichego, which means nothing in English.
The enforcer’s eyes widen when he hears me say the word. The other man doesn’t express any emotion at all, but I know that I’ve at least created some doubt. They aren’t sure who I am and what I know. They might even question whether it’s possible that I understand Russian since I know such a random word. All of this uncertainty is buying me time. I need it so that my boys can find me. If I know Camden, he probably has trackers on shit I don’t even know about. If anyone can find me, he will.
I hear the rusty hinges of the door creak again before I see it open. Another person enters the room and both men immediately straighten their spines and stop speaking. Now I realize that they must both be enforcers because this woman strolls in the room like she is the real boss.
She looks like a middle-aged Nikita on a budget. Her cheap high heels clack against the solid floor and her hips swish exaggeratedly. She’s dressed in a long, leopard print, slip dress and a pair of very high black pumps. Her puffed-up lips are painted a deep, crimson red, no doubt to distract us from the fact that her face has been pulled so tightly that she resembles a sixty-year-old Bratz doll.
She stands in front of me and gives me a pensive long look. I stare back at her just as intently. Something about me intrigues her because the corner of her painted lips lifts in a small smirk.
“Do you speak Russian?”
“Nyet,” I answer with the second word I know, but this is easy. Many people know how to say no in Russian just by watching television, but again the point here is to create doubt, not certainty.
The woman beams this time.
“You lie to me?”
“Nyet,” I repeat.
She walks in a circle around me and the squeak of her heels grows increasingly more annoying than the god-awful music they were playing earlier.
“The beautiful boy you put your hands on at Drexel Village is my son.”
At least she gets right to the point.
“Your son needs some manners,” I tell her, as I contemplate how the hell this woman knows who I am and where she could find me.
“Who are you to speak of manners when you have no respect?”
This conversation is actually helpful. The woman only has a slight hint of a Russian accent which tells me she’s probably American born and was perhaps raised in a Russian neighborhood but not one in Philadelphia or else I’d know her. The mention of the word respect also reveals to me she’s indeed Bratva. Mafia types are obsessed with being paid respect. The question about her now is from which family and where.
“I don’t respect any man who harasses a woman just because he can,” I tell her.
“Is this what Patricia told you? That my son harassed her?”
“She didn’t have to tell me anything. It was obvious what your son was doing.”
“Based on what evidence?”
“He broke into her apartment and searched through her things like a pervert. He placed spyware on her computer, which is illegal. He followed her to her car on numerous occasions, asking her out after she already turned him down. That is stalking. You need more? I could go on.”
The woman points two of her fingers to the ground as some sort of signal. The enforcer whom I’m growing to loathe at this point kicks me two times in the same spot with that damn metal tipped boot of his. She’s got these dogs of hers trained well. I need not hear a snap to know that he’s successfully broken one of my ribs this time. The pain comes swiftly as I struggle to breathe.
“Your information is incorrect. My son doesn’t need to stalk some shlyukha who can’t pay her rent on time. You made a mistake.”
I know for a fact that my intel is correct. Cam found the spyware, Cutter found his prints on her underwear drawer, and I had Stone watch the woman for a week. This woman’s sociopathic son was approaching Patricia damn near every day. He was obsessed with her, and anyone with an ounce of common sense could see that his fascination with the girl was going to go south soon.
“My intel is solid,” I say through pained breaths.
“You put your hands on the wrong man.”
“And he was stalking the wrong woman.”
The woman’s face tightens further, as if that’s even possible. It’s so full of Botox she has a permanent scowl on her face already.
“Are you a cop?”
“Nyet.”
Her eyelid jumps every time I try replying in my terrible Russian. That must be one of her pet peeves, as I’m no doubt butchering the pronunciations.
“Then who hired you or who is Patricia to you?”
This is the second time they have asked me this specific question which makes me think Patricia is seriously hurt or they plan to hurt her because they’re trying to calculate what the ramifications might be afterward.
“She’s no one to me.”
The woman waves her hand twice to the quieter goon and he hands her a gun. She points the modified Springfield Hellcat at me with focused intent. This woman is dead-ass serious, she hasn’t come to play.
“I am not in the habit of torture or long conversations. You are either useful to me or you aren’t. As far as I can tell you’re just muscle for someone else. I want the person who hired you and maybe you’ll live, but if you’re not willing to share that information, there are other ways I can get it. Ways that don’t involve you still breathing.”
I’ve learned over the years that women in power are often more calculated and much more ruthless than men. On top of all of that, they take shit personally. Did I break her son’s arm? Yes, but only in self-defense. That asswipe tried to sneak a punch so he deserved it.
I say nothing more in response to my captor’s threat because there is nothing left to say. At this point, I need to think about how I’m going to buy myself some more time until the Kings get here. Elizabeth must be out of her mind, worried about me.
“Give me his wallet and his phone,” she commands them.
Dammit, I forgot about that. When they tased me at my car, they caught me completely off guard. I own two wallets and two phones. One set contains my official identification and the other is a burner phone and fake ID for work. I usually keep my genuine stuff in my glove compartment and not on me, but I didn’t have time to switch them out after leaving the store, so now these assholes have my actual information.
“So… we have a license with an address. A prestigious address. Right around the corner from where my friends picked you up. Interesting. You’re not only good-looking but you must make good money as well, Roman Masterson. Very impressive for someone your age.”
This is going to shit really quickly. What is taking those fuckers so long to find me?
“His phone is unlocked,” the boot kicker offers excitedly.
“Not very smart, Mr. Masterson. I see you have a picture of the wife and kid on the home screen. How quaint. She’s not what I was expecting, though. A man like you could do a lot better.”
This walking piece of plastic is dead when I get out of these restraints.
“Fuck you.”
Her eyes deaden after the insult.
“You’re sensitive about the family, huh? Well, I totally understand that because guess what? I’m the same way.”
Within seconds she lifts her arm, points and shoots with pinpoint accuracy at my right shoulder. It’s as if I’m watching in slow motion as the bullet releases from the chamber and plunges into my flesh through what feels like bone. Since they bound my hands behind my back, all I can do is bend over and grimac
e from the intense pain as blood oozes from the wound and trickles down my arm.
I can’t believe the bitch actually shot me.
1
ROMAN
Six Weeks Earlier
Two of the most important people in my life are fast asleep on their sides in the middle of the bed. One is snoring louder than a truck driver, but for me no woman has ever looked sexier. The other has his mouth slightly parted, drunk off of his mother’s breastmilk, and no baby in this world has ever looked more angelic.
I pull out my cell phone and snap a picture for posterity. I want to always remember the two loves of my life just like this—unfiltered and unbothered by the world. Afterward, I gently scoop my boy in my arms and take him to the nursery so they both can have a little uninterrupted rest.
Although falling asleep is a pretty common thing after Elizabeth nurses our rambunctious eight-month-son, Knox, I know that part of the reason she is dead to the world is that she is completely exhausted. No matter how much I try to help with Knox, I am no substitute for him wanting his mother’s tit. He is wiping her out in a way that I never could.