“I’d like to add to that,” Grey says, rising to his feet and casting me another look. This time, it’s part admonishment for my stunt and part apology. For what, I have no idea, but his expression scares the shit out of me. Grey is my only ally. Not just here, but in the whole world. He’s literally the only person I have left. If he betrays me … well, I wish I were someone who gave into defeat that easily. If he betrays me, it’ll hurt, and it’ll suck, but I’ll fight through. Because that’s what I do. It’s what I was born to do.
A servant steps forward to move Grey’s chair back, and he turns to me, dropping down to one knee in front of me.
I feel the blood drain from my face, my red-stained grin fading into a deeply etched frown.
No.
“Gidget Kesselring,” Grey begins, sliding a black velvet box from his pocket that isn’t unlike the ones that held the necklace, rings, and bracelet I’m wearing now. “You showed such bravery during my rescue, returning me back to my home and family. It is surely God’s wish that our companionship be taken to the next level.” He cracks the box to reveal a diamond ring. It’s probably worth … well, shit, I’m a biker’s daughter, not a jeweler, but it’s likely worth a half-mil at least.
Grey meets my eyes, and in his, I see it again: a warning.
Refuse, and we both die.
“Would you do me the honor of becoming my bride?”
The room is so silent then, you could hear a pin drop.
My mind begins to buck and kick, rebelling against what I know I have to do.
It’s then that I think about them. My father’s officers. The four men I’ve slept with. The ones that watch me like something they desperately want but won’t let themselves have. Maybe I imagined it? Maybe I was nothing but a piece of ass to them anyway?
Then I think about how disappointed Crown was when he saw me at the clubhouse that night, how vehemently Grainger tells me he hates me, how sad Sin was in the cemetery during the funeral, how Beast told me if Cat gave his blessing, it’d be a battle royale that he wouldn’t lose.
I make myself smile with closed lips, even as I bite my tongue and bleed.
Because that’s how you survive against all the odds: you pretend, and you lie, and you swallow back the blood and bile until you get a chance to make your move.
“Yes, Grey,” I tell him, and his smile gets a little more real. If he truly does like me, then I feel sorry for him. I’m pretty sure I’m cursed. “Yes, I’d love to marry you.”
He slides the ring on my finger as the room erupts into polite applause. Nobody’s surprised by my answer. They were all expecting it. This is a play to them, a careful dance of actors with scripts to follow. One wrong move and you’re off the set—permanently.
Grey lifts up from his crouch, leaning forward and pressing his lips to my ear in the pretense of a kiss.
“Make it look real,” he breathes, and then he pulls back and kisses my mouth.
I think about Sin, and I think about Beast, I think about Grainger and Crown, and I kiss him with all of that wicked hot wrongness and perverted passion, that dirty chrome and leather, that aching want and need for something I can never have.
I didn’t want them to cage me.
I’ve just traded a chrome cage for a gilded one.
My arms wrap around Grey’s neck, but with my eyes closed, with my mind wandering, it isn’t him I’m kissing, but a blood-drenched outlaw in a leather cut.
The dinners become more frequent after that night, almost daily. We have lunches on the veranda with Giulia, and it becomes quite clear to me that we’re not in Ashbury, Oregon anymore. Where it is that we are, I’m not certain. The landscape beyond the walls of the compound—or whatever this church hideout thing is called to these mafia snakes—looks familiar enough to be the Pacific Northwest. But then, what do I know about flora and fauna?
“I still can’t believe you didn’t give me a heads-up,” I murmur to Grey, wearing a sundress and a floppy hat that I hate. I don’t feel like myself, more like a piece of clay that Giulia’s been sculpting with her long witch-like fingers. She controls everything that I do, drags me around like a pet. She even keeps a diamond encrusted leash that she attaches to my wrist when she takes me around the compound.
It’s humiliating.
“I didn’t have many good options, Gidge,” Grey tells me, sipping an iced coffee, his new wristwatch gleaming in the sunlight. He looks every bit the mafia brat now. Looking at him the way he is, it’s hard for me to imagine that I actually felt sorry for him once upon a time. He fits in here in a way that’s disturbing. His gray eyes glance my way, and he smiles. It comes across as genuine. And his behavior and personality in private haven’t changed, even if his looks and public persona have. He sets the coffee down and turns to look at me, waving his hand to dismiss the guards waiting at the edges of the veranda.
They disappear inside the stone walls of the church, but they don’t go far. It’s a pretense, their pretending to listen to Grey. It’s all bullshit.
“This doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” he tells me, and I cock a brow. “What? It doesn’t.” His smile gets a little bigger and he reaches out to take my hand. I let him, because we are playing a chess game after all. We can’t very well be engaged and not show any sort of affection toward one another. “This is a chance to start over.”
I stare at him.
“Start over?” I query, lifting a brow and withdrawing my hand from his, like we’re having a lover’s quarrel or something. I down my mimosa and pour myself another before one of the servants runs up and starts doing it for me. I hate that. It just isn’t in my blood. I can take care of myself. “Explain, please.”
Grey has a habit of stating something like it’s fact, and then getting tangled up in whimsy. He stares up at the clouds a lot, lost in thought. Sometimes, when the light hits him just right, and I glance his way, I can see an internal struggle playing about on his features, like he’s at war inside his own brain, his own heart.
I snatch a macaron and stick it in my mouth whole, even as Grey cringes slightly. He’s urbane and polished, and I’m craggy and wild. We’re basically exact opposites in our mannerisms. On the inside, we’re the same person, just two birds trapped in a cage. I take another cookie and lean back in my seat. During that first dinner, I sampled everything carefully, prepared for poison. But then it occurred to me that the mafia could just put a goddamn bullet in my brain at any moment, so why bother?
Then again, they do enjoy a good performance.
“We’ll get married,” Grey says, like it’s a fact. Because, in spite of my own feelings, I know that it is. There is no getting out of this. If I don’t marry Grey, I’m signing my own death warrant. “And eventually, they’ll learn to trust us. Eventually, Gidge, this can all be ours.” He gestures with a hand in the direction of the rolling hills and the pine trees that trail down toward the ocean.
He doesn’t just mean this church-house-whatever-it-is, or the land surrounding it, or even the jewelry and the money and the clothes and the servants. He means the Grey Wolfe Mafia empire. Their crime rings, their drug and human trafficking, their weapons smuggling, their political machinations.
“Your family ordered my pregnant sister killed—even when they knew she was carrying their own flesh and blood.” I just stare at Grey because I can’t quite believe what I’m hearing. “They raped my sister Posey and left her for dead beside our swimming pool.”
Grey cringes and sits back, ruffling up his perfect, burnished-gold hair.
“We could change things,” he says, looking at me with a sort of silent pleading in his gaze. If I fuck up, he’s done for. We’re both done for. His survival hinges on me and my behavior just as much as mine does on his. “Once my father hands over the reins, it’s our horse to run.” I just keep staring at him. “Goddamn it, Gidget.” He curses in Italian then French then something that sounds Eastern European. Grey scoots his chair toward me and takes my hands in his. “Please. Wha
t else do you plan on doing? Waiting for them to trust us enough to escape? And then what? We’ll be on the run from both of our families. As of right now, we’re only trying to escape the claws of one.”
He stands up suddenly, knocking his chair over in his haste, and storms off.
I watch him go, my hands squeezed so tightly around the ends of the chair arms that my fingertips are going numb. He keeps saying ‘us’ and ‘we’, like I’m an equal partner in all of this. It’s something I’ve always wanted. So why can’t I just give in and try to enjoy it?
What the actual fuck is wrong with me?
Handsome, kind partner. Equal marriage. Ready-made empire.
As if summoned by her son’s anger, Giulia reappears, gliding out onto the veranda in another of her silken designer gowns. This one is loose and flowy, as if a three-thousand-dollar dress is just a pair of lounge pants. She waves her hand, and a servant rushes forward to right the chair for her.
I frown.
“Young couples are so passionate,” she tells me, crossing her legs at the knee and resting her hands atop them. She stares at me from her son’s eyes, that same soft heather gray with thick, dark lashes. “I don’t see much of that in the bedroom however.”
“It’s creepy as fuck that you watch to see if your son and his fiancée are doing it,” I retort back, but Giulia just smiles at me. “Did it ever occur to you that we aren’t doing it because you’re watching?”
This time, she laughs, and the sound cuts straight through me like a knife. Goose bumps rise on my arms, and I rub at them with my hands, hating my body for betraying me like that. She doesn’t deserve to know how she makes my skin crawl, how much I despise her, how much I’d like to reach out and wrap my hands around her skinny neck …
“Grey is my son, but he’s weak. He’d do whatever his bitchy biker bride requested.” She keeps her legs crossed, tapping those long nails of hers against her silk-covered knee. “And you? You’re a barbarian. Your people rut like monkeys, regardless of who’s watching. Don’t tell me you actually care about privacy or modesty.” Giulia leans forward, getting in my face in a way that triggers every instinct I have to fight back. But I don’t. Because I’m learning that I don’t have to display every emotion I feel, every time I feel it. “I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t tell my husband about your lack of intimacy. It’s concerning to me, Gidget.”
“It’s concerning to me that you’d kill your own grandchild,” I retort back, and for once, I get a reaction out of this bitch. Just … not the one that I was expecting.
She has the audacity to smile at me.
“How many bastards do you think my son left behind in his wake?” she asks me, cocking her head slightly to one side. “A dozen? More. Do you think I’d ever accept the offspring of some dirty whore as my grandchild, as the heir to my husband’s throne? Do you think I’ll ever accept you?” The look she flashes me then is crafted of calculated menace and pure, unadulterated hatred. “You will never walk outside these walls without a leash. You’re a useful political tool, that’s all you’ve ever been.”
“If you call my sister a whore one more time, I will hunt you down and put your head on a pike,” I grind out, even though I know I shouldn’t be talking back. But how can I ever describe the rage that I feel at hearing my beloved sister reduced to a pejorative expletive with no truth to it? Queenie was loving, and she didn’t share herself with just any man. Kian must’ve been special.
Giulia cracks me across the face and, for the second time in as many weeks, I taste blood.
“Come to heel, pet. Or I’ll break you like I break my horses.”
I put my hand to my cheek, closing my eyes against the overwhelming rage inside of me, a fire that burns so brightly it could blot out the sun. Cat said something to me like that once. “You know, all horses can be broken, Gidge.”
Like I said before, I’m a bear. A predator who hunts alone. You go ahead and try, bitch. I’ve been challenged by greater minds than you.
I say nothing as Giulia walks away, letting my stinging cheek remind me of what I already know: I’m not safe here. I’m not safe anywhere. I have to carve out space for myself.
The next day, Grey and I are invited to the shooting range. I’m given a revolver with a single round in the cylinder. I lift my eyes up to look at Ivan Wolfe, his thin, slick exterior a couth blotch against the surrounding hedges and the rolling hills of pine behind him.
“Is this a warning or a privilege?” I ask dryly, turning and lifting the revolver up in both hands. I could shoot Ivan with this gun, but what good would that do me? Instead, I fire off the shot and hit the bull’s-eye dead center as Grey raises a brow in surprise. With a flick of the wrist, I open the cylinder and hold the gun out. Ivan smiles as he studies me, nodding his chin in response to my silent question and watching as one of his goons moves forward and puts another round in for me.
I snap the cylinder closed and move over to a person-shaped bull’s-eye beside the circular one. This time, when I fire, I hit the pretend figure right in the head and fantasize that it’s Giulia Wolfe.
“You’re good at this,” Grey muses, grabbing a gun from another one of the ridiculous mafia goons and taking a few shots of his own. I notice that he’s given a full cylinder. Interesting. So I’m the bigger threat here? Not bad for some backwoods biker bitch, am I right?
“I’m a club daughter,” I say with a snort, opening the cylinder yet again and waiting for another round to be placed in it. “I got my first gun when I was six.” I nail the next shot and then sigh. It’s just not as fun this way. And I have a feeling that Grey is the only one who’s impressed by my shooting. Ivan’s just checking to see where I’m at, if I’m willing to lie about my skills for a chance at escape. If I were to act as if I didn’t know what I was doing, things wouldn’t go well for me.
The Grey Wolfe Mafia will never trust me, no matter how well I toe the line, but I need them to believe that I’ve been cornered and chained, that I’m an animal who’s smart enough to wait for the hunter to free them from the trap and put them in the cage … rather than one who’d chew its own leg off to escape.
“The wedding is next week,” Grey reminds me, and I glance over to see him with the gun pointing at the target, but his eyes on me. “Are you going to behave?”
He fires off several shots. I wait until he’s done to put my bullet right in the center of his, and he frowns.
“What choice do I have, Grey?” I query, tossing the gun to one of the goons and heading inside to try on my dress.
It’s a day that many girls fantasize about.
It’ll be the start to a new nightmare for me.
Typical.
I’d have rather married one of my father’s dickhead officers.
I hate how much that sentiment appeals to me.
I don’t see much of the Don in the weeks leading up to the wedding, but I’m inundated with Giulia’s presence. She brings me white lingerie and makes me try it on for her under the pretense of selecting the very best for her only surviving son. In reality, I’m certain it’s an exercise in humility for me. A humbling, if you will.
“Those scars …” Giulia tsks, looking at my rippled and ruined legs. “You’re lucky Grey is a man of heart. This body …” She sighs again, walking a circle around me while I stand there in a white teddy and stripper heels.
In order to control my temper, I’ve sent a good portion of my psyche into the clouds. I’m experiencing a level of depersonalization disorder that’s never happened to me before, like my body isn’t really mine, like I’m not really here at all. I’m just an observer, watching it all from on high. Or down below, drenched in hellfire. That seems more appropriate.
“I’m hotter than you’ve ever been—scars and all,” I murmur, but Giulia just laughs at me, snapping her fingers to call her servant girls forward. In their hands, they have the dress.
It’s a hideous, gaudy thing, but undeniably expensive. That, and it weighs about a
million pounds. I’ve worn it a handful of times during fittings, but tomorrow, I’ll be wearing it for real.
Walking down an aisle.
Getting married.
As far as grooms go, there are worse ones. Grey is a good man, and every day that I get to know him better, I know that I made the right choice in saving his life.
That being said, I’m not happy about any of this.
The servants slip the dress over my head, adjusting the long sleeves, rearranging the train, and draping the lace veil over my face. Giulia makes a few tweaks here and there, selecting several pairs of shoes that are slipped onto my feet, examined, and then rejected. I’m draped with diamonds, primped and prettied up for the mafia to gawk at like a sideshow freak.
“This will have to do,” Giulia muses with a sigh, studying me with a distasteful expression on her hideous face. The more I look at her, the more I think she looks like a witch, one with a candy cottage who bakes and eats babies. Fuck you, you stupid bitch. I’m going to rip you apart, first chance I get. If I have to marry your son and play mafia wife just to get a chance to kill you, then you best bet your fake tits, that’s what I’m going to do. “Can’t put lipstick on a pig.” She turns back to her servants and gestures for them to undo all the work they’ve just done, removing the dress, the jewels. When they go to take the lingerie, I slap their hands away and give a little curl of my lip. “Gidget, don’t be a beast.”
I unhook the clasps on the teddy and shove it down myself, tearing the garter belt off, kicking off the heels, and chucking the items into a heap on the floor. “You’re being waxed after this,” Giulia tells me on her way out the door.
That gives me pause.
“Excuse the fuck out of me?” I ask, standing there naked and quivering. There’s so much heat and hate inside of me, I don’t know what to do with it all. What would Beast say? I think, imagining his quiet stoicism, the way I beat on his chest and he simply stood there and took it. He’d wait. He’d bottle it all up and unleash it at the most opportune moment.
I Am Dressed in Sin: A Reverse Harem Age Gap Romance (Death By Daybreak Motorcycle Club Book 2) Page 5
