by SR Jones
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced or used without the written permission of the publisher.
All events depicted are fictional, and any resemblance to places and persons is coincidental.
Copyright Skye Jones, writing as SR Jones, 2019
Thanks go to my editor and proofreader, Ansley Blackstock.
Beta Reader, proofreader, and my all round superstar, Silla Webb!
Beta reader Jessica Fraser.
Beta reader Valerie Elizabeth Place
My bestie and reader, Sian Lewis
The Addicted to Alphas gang – love you all!
Obeithion cover designs.
My amazing reader group.
And all who read this and take a chance on me.
You are all stars, and I am so grateful!
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
How do you live totally alone in this world?
If family provides our anchors, without them are we free … or adrift?
I’m about to find out.
From today, I’ll experience what it is like to have no family, no one related by blood, except for far flung distant relatives I don’t speak to anymore.
From today, I’m truly an orphan.
I stare at the casket and the face of my beloved grandmother.
My stomach twists, and my heart is beating far too fast. I’ve seen a lot of death, much of it gruesome and horrifying, but looking down upon her serene face is one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do.
My yaya. The only family worth anything I have left. I loved her to pieces.
Swiping a tear from my cheek, I touch the cold wood on the side of the casket, unable to actually touch her, and a shiver runs through me.
My maternal grandmother, a woman who looked like an older version of my mother, is dead, and she was the only blood worth anything I had left in this world.
My yaya was a woman who suffered far too much loss in her life, but she still loved fiercely, loved me fiercely.
My friend Alesso loves me like a brother, and his family took me in when mine collapsed in horrifying circumstances, but it’s not the same.
My yaya loved me with the fierceness of the sun, and now she’s gone.
Now it’s just me, and that’s okay. It’s the way I like it. No one to worry about, except for Alesso, and he can take care of himself. I don’t deserve to have anyone special to care for. The one time in my life someone really needed me, I let them down, and I don’t deserve a second chance. I’ll probably fuck up all over again.
A heavy hand lands on my back, and I turn to see Alesso. He smiles at me, but it’s sad. He loved my yaya too.
“What time is the service?”
I glance at my watch. “Half an hour.”
I don’t know how to do this.
How do you watch the only person you truly have left in the world leave it?
As if he’s reading my mind, Alesso squeezes my shoulder. “You’ve still got family.”
“I know,” I say. “And it’s kind of you guys, the way you treat me.”
He frowns. “Fuck you, Damen. It’s not kindness, you’re our family; don’t you get it? For real, not some sort of charity. You’re my brother, in every way except for actual blood, and for that reason, you’re their son too.”
He means it, but it isn’t true. If push came to shove, if ever choices had to be made, I’d be the one out in the cold, as it should be. Blood really is thicker than water.
Alesso doesn’t get it.
In school, when he was a skinny, bullied kid, I took him under my wing, and he’s been paying me back ever since. I was the golden child. The popular kid. Already big and tall, good at sports, and clever. I’m surprised I didn’t have the other children bowing and scraping as I walked down the hall.
Alesso was skinny, shy, and bullied because his daddy was a flake with a gambling problem, and everyone knew.
My daddy? He was a handsome, wealthy politician.
But the surface isn’t the truth—what lies below is. Our family was like the fucking Bermuda Triangle: beautiful on the surface, but deadly underneath, with hidden currents and dangers everywhere.
Despite his dad’s weakness, Alesso’s family are good people—kind, decent. My family? My father was poison. A nasty, violent man who liked to take his frustrations out on those around him, particularly the females of the family. There wasn’t a woman my father didn’t disparage, talk down to, or if they were in his power somehow, beat.
That poison is in me. I’m fifty percent cut from his cloth, no matter how much Alesso and his family tell me I’m one of them. I’m not.
“Shall we go and take a seat?” Alesso asks.
The door to the church opens, and heels clack down the aisle. I turn to see Alesso’s sister, and I smile. “Didn’t know you’d be here,” I say as she reaches us. “Thought you were in Corfu with the rest of the family.”
“I was,” she says, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “But I came to say goodbye to Yaya. Mother and Father would have come too, but Mother’s sick. She got some virus, and she’s streaming with it, so she decided not to come and spread her germs.”
She hugs me and gives me a concerned look as she pulls away.
“Come, let’s go and take a seat, Damen.”
She links her arm through mine, and with Alesso on the other side of me, they lead me to a seat. My honorary siblings, who right now I’m more grateful for than ever. Without them, I don’t know how I’d get through the next hour or so.
The funeral passes in a blur. The orthodox chanting and scripture readings wash over me—familiar, and in a way comforting.
I don’t go to church often, but I do believe. Some may think that’s odd with the way I live. The lives I have taken, but I don’t take innocent lives. I only kill in retaliation, to protect, and to serve those who have given me the honor of keeping them safe.
So far as my personal life goes, I don’t have one. Don’t deserve one. I couldn’t keep her safe, I let her down, and I fear anyone who gets too close to me personally will suffer the same fate. But in my work? I’m the best protector you can get. Only Alesso, Markos, and our Ukrainian friend, Andrius, are as deadly as me.
To be honest, I think Alesso and Markos pale in comparison to some of the skills I have gained and the things I have done. If I ever had to go against them, which I never would, I’d be confident of winning. The only person I’m not sure I could win against is Andrius. That cold bastard scares even me sometimes.
The service draws to a close, and Alesso practically pulls me up out of my seat. “Come. Let us go get a drink,” he says.
I nod because I need the burn of something strong right now.
***
The next morning, I awake with a start, and it takes a moment for it to sink in. Yaya is gone. The last of my family … gone. A sinking feeling hits me. I need to go and see the lawyer about estate planning, and I’ve asked Alesso and Markos to cover for me today and the next two, so I can get my head right before I go back to watching over the spoiled princess we’re currently protecting.
Maya.
I think of her, and my cock stirs. She’s spoiled and up herself in some ways, but she’s
undeniably hot. Curves in all the right places, and that hair! It is long and thick with strands of red that catch the sun. I want that hair wrapped around my fist as she sucks on my cock.
I want doesn’t get, though, and certainly not with this girl. The niece of our boss, Stamatis, is so off limits she may as well be on the moon. I’m not scared of the man we work for, maybe I should be with his position as one of the top crime bosses in Athens, but I’m not. I do, however, respect him, and his niece is no go. She’s also in danger, hence us being put on her and her mother as guards. They’ve received death threats from an unknown source, and they’re aimed at both Maya and her mother, Marina. They’re fucking lucky they are related to Stamatis through blood. He might think his brother Spiros is useless, but honor means he has to ensure the safety of his sister-in-law and niece when things like this happen.
So here we are, his best men, guarding his niece, and me lusting after her like a total fool.
Not that she’d have anything to do with me anyway. I’m sure she only views myself and my two friends as the hired help, which is funny. I’m a lot higher on the totem pole than little Miss Up herself. Her father is an epic screw-up. Alesso and I, well, we may be viewed by all and sundry as nothing more than Stamatis’ bodyguards, but in reality we are way more.
We do this because we choose to.
It wasn’t always so, for Alesso at least. It all started when Alesso had to get his father out of a fix, and he took the offer of paying back his father’s debt by working for Stamatis. When I finished working for the government and returned to Athens, it was more than a bit of a shock to find my best friend working for the mob, but I needed something to do, and I joined him.
The Greek mob isn’t like the Italian families. It’s not as organized, there isn’t the same hierarchy, and mostly it’s a collection of disparate families running dodgy businesses out of covers, like nightclubs. Stamatis, however, is a little different. He’s reached international levels of organized crime, but the shit he does isn’t the kind of thing I’d struggle to have on my conscience. He doesn’t traffic people, he doesn’t shake down businesses, and he doesn’t run drugs.
What Stamatis does is deal in high-end contraband for the world’s wealthiest people. He controls shipping lanes in some of the waters around certain Greek islands; he’s that powerful.
He doesn’t run drugs, but he gets paid by the marijuana runners to be allowed to use the waters he controls. With his beneficence they can take their bounty from Crete into Europe. Other than that, he doesn’t get his hands dirty by touching drugs at all, but anything else a person might desire…
Cigarettes, cigars, rare and extortionate booze, art, weapons; if you want it—legally or illegally—Stamatis can get it for you.
It’s made him supremely wealthy, and inescapably powerful, but he doesn’t mess around with small fries, like Maya’s family. The only reason he’s helping her is because she’s his niece. Oh, and because she’s engaged to be married to some prick who is the son of another crime family, the Pappas family. Maya’s father, and Stamatis, think it will be good if the families are merged.
Not because Stamatis wants any of the business the Pappas family are involved in, but because he wants to make sure they are kept within their own corner and don’t try to take over his territory. A merger between the princess and the prince can ensure each family keeps their territory and merges their power, whilst sticking to their own lines of business. Good for all involved.
Except maybe Maya, because she’s treated like a brood mare.
Maya amuses me when she puts on her high and mighty act around me, because if she truly understood the world she lives in, she’d know I might be guarding her life, but I’m worth way more to Stamatis than she, or her useless father, ever could be.
I don’t simply provide top-level security for Stamatis, but Alesso and I also work with him at the highest level. Alesso has a strategic mind like few others, and my years in intelligence make me a useful asset for the boss. I have contacts in many nations and knowledge of how their legal and financial systems work.
I could have chosen an easy life; after all, I come from old money. My grandfather, on the maternal side, was a shipping magnate, and my father a politician. With a sweep of a pen today, I’ll inherit the family home here on the coast in Athens and their land on Corfu. I like fight, though. Peace bores me, hence, why I like working with Alesso for Stamatis.
I get up, stretch, and wince. My head hurts from the amount I drank after the funeral, and something tells me I’ll be repeating the brandy-fest tonight. Once I’ve signed the papers, I’ll come back here to the apartment I share with Markos and Alesso and get messy drunk while I contemplate my inheritance and what to do with it. I doubt I’ll spend much time at the family home here. Too many bad memories.
I prefer our city apartment. It’s a four bed, three bath, right in the center of Kolonaki, central Athens. An area that is expensive and used to be very popular. Now it’s lost some of the sheen, due to the economic and political turmoil the nation has experienced. A lot of Greeks who have the means have moved out to places like Kifissia, or to the coastal towns and villages nearby. Not me, I don’t mind the febrile atmosphere. Keeps things from getting too dull.
One day, Alesso and I were enjoying an early evening drink at a roadside café, when a burning tire simply peeled down the street in front of us. Most people on the terrace that evening didn’t even bat an eye.
I laugh to myself at the thought as I head for a punishing cold shower. After washing, I dress in one of the few suits I own, ready to go see the lawyer. I don’t want to sign those papers. Signing means my beloved yaya is gone. It also means the cursed piece of property, Ithaca1, and God knows why it is called that, because I don’t think any of my family have even been to Ithaca, is now mine. The place where all my ghosts linger is not a place I want to own.
My yaya lived in it until her death, and it was hers long before then, but for a long time, while I was growing up, she lived in an apartment here in central Athens and let my mother and father inhabit the family home. I hate that my father ever set foot there.
I’d sell it tomorrow, if it weren’t for the fact that at some point, I need to visit and sort through Yaya’s things.
Suit on, still damp hair slicked back from my face, and a splash of aftershave later, I’m ready to go meet with the lawyer.
As expected, I inherit it all, every shitty thing I don’t want. The thought of going back to that house gives me the creeps. I always met my grandmother somewhere else when we had lunch.
She was a healthy woman, very much so for her age. She had a live-in maid, so she had the help she needed, but I still feel guilty I didn’t go see her at the house. Thing is, she liked the old-fashioned décor and hadn’t changed it for years. Every time I stepped inside, my childhood would flash before my eyes, and that’s a movie reel no one wants to see.
I stand, shake the lawyer’s hand, and leave. His office is central, and I decide to grab a coffee before I head back to the apartment.
As I stroll through Kolonaki passing by the coffee bars lining the streets near one of the squares, I glance back in surprise at the one farthest from me. Alesso is sipping a coffee alone at a table, but at the next table along are Maya and her friend, Stella.
Maya looks hotter than ever today. The sun is hitting her hair, making it more red than brown, and I get the urge to twist it around my fist. I want to wrap it around my cock like pretty ribbon, use it to stroke myself, before I force her to her knees and make her suck me. I wouldn’t come, though; no, I’d save that for her pussy. And before I fucked her, I’d drop to my own knees and eat her, lick her until she cried and begged for me to stop, or never to stop.
There’s something about her that makes me want to have her submit to me, and then have her a wet, writhing mess as I give her what she needs.
Something tells me the girl needs attention … and a guiding hand. Her family are seemingly all shades of
messed up. Her mother drinks, often starting early in the day. She’s not an out and out alcoholic, and she rarely gets messy, but the woman imbibes too much. The father is a sneering, cold, bitter little man. Honestly, I don’t see one drop of him in Maya. Not in her statuesque physique or the way she holds herself.
I wonder what she’d do if I put her over my knee?
Fuck, I need to stop with this. My head needs to be professional the next time I step foot in their home.
Shaking my head to dislodge the increasingly filthy thoughts I’m having about our charge, I head to Alesso.
His eyebrows raise in surprise when he sees me, then he grins. “Yasu malaka.”
I give the same hello, wanker, greeting in return and collapse into one of the free chairs. I feel as if I weigh thirty pounds more today than usual. Sluggish, with a strange sort of exhaustion creeping over me.
“What are you doing here?” Alesso asks.
“Been to see the lawyer about estate planning.”
“I’m sorry. Fucking sucks.” Alesso gives me a sad smile.
“Yeah, but she was old and sick. I’ll miss her, but it was her time,” I say the words, even though I don’t mean them. It doesn’t feel as if it was her time. It feels unfair and somehow tragic that she’s gone, but I can’t say so. Not with Maya right to the side of me and probably listening in.
“You want a coffee?” Alesso goes for his pocket, but I shake my head.
Alesso rarely smokes, maybe once or twice a month, but he always carries them around with him. Right now, a cigarette sounds good. I haven’t smoked in the longest time, but right now, I want one.
“You got a cigarette?”
Alesso does a bit of a double take. “You don’t smoke,” he says.
“Friend, I’ve been talking about my grandmother’s estate; I think I’m entitled to one. Then I’m going home and drinking a whole bottle of brandy, so you and Markos better have things under control for the next day or so.”
“Of course. You’re not on until Wednesday.”
I take the cigarette, light it, and take a drag. Glancing over at the girls, I find Maya’s green eyes locked on my lips.
Does she know the vibes she’s giving off right now? As if she wants to straddle me and suck on my bottom lip. It’s normally something she seems to reserve for Alesso. I don’t look away, won’t break the eye contact first. As I watch her a movie reel of depravity runs through my mind, and I bite back a smirk.
