by Raven Dark
He stomped over and grabbed my hair, twisting until I winced and dropped to my knees. “Listen, you wise-assed little cunt. You’re only alive because the boss wants his money. Put your hands behind your back.”
Well. I had him away from my dad and the gun no longer pointed at either of us, but how to avoid him neutralizing me?
“I’ll bet that mouth of yours always gets you into trouble, doesn’t it?” I heard him holster his gun and he grabbed my wrists. Slapped one cuff on. Shit. He was putting the other one on when another gunshot rang out, deafening.
Derik shouted behind me and there was a thud. Still on my knees, I glanced over my shoulder. The mobster lay on the floor on his side, eyes open and unseeing. I snapped my head up.
Kane stood in the entrance to the living room, gun in his grip. He holstered it, and his ridiculously sexy smile widened at my stare.
“Hello, angel.”
My insides heated. “Kane…”
He was at my side in an instant, hands gently pulling me to my feet. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I…” I chose that moment to look down and caught sight of the gaping hole in Derik’s head, blood pouring from the back of it and staining my dad’s rusty brown carpet in an ever widening pool. My stomach roiled. “You shot him.”
He took my face, burying it in his chest, and it occurred to me he was trying to shield my eyes from the sight. I was about to tell him I didn’t need mollycoddling when David rushed in, holstering a gun of his own.
“You should have let me come in ahead of you, sir.” He rushed to Kane’s side, visibly checking us both over. “Are you both all right?”
“She’s fine, David.” Kane kissed my forehead and held me close, hands roaming over my back. His powerful frame felt far more reassuring than it should have.
“I am, but my dad…” Kane released me and I rushed to Dad just as he moaned and put his head back against the wall. David crouched at his other side, looking over the wound just as I was doing.
“Daddy, you still with me?” I ripped open his pant leg from the bottom to the knee, exposing the bloody wound that gaped from his leg. He’s my father. He has to be.
“Daniella…” His eyes rolled, glazed in pain, evidently in too much agony to realize he was using my real name in front of people who, for all intents and purposes, weren’t supposed to know it. He didn’t realize, with how closely Kane had looked into our past, they both probably already knew it. He grasped at my shoulder, breathing shaky.
Fear for him ripped through me and I quashed it, stripping off my sweater and tearing it into strips. “David…”
He nodded, face focused and took the sweater from me. “I know what to do.” He set to work, tearing strips and binding my dad’s wound with the practiced skill of any nurse. I couldn’t help a smile, and a baffled look at Kane, who knelt in front of us, watching my dad with worry. I looked back at a busy David.
“Who are you, David?”
He gave me a modest smile, but went right back to tying his tourniquet.
Just then, my dad groaned and his eyes fluttered closed, head lulling.
“Shit.” I gently moved him so he lay flat across the floor. “He’s passing out. Dad, stay with me. Come on.” I tapped his face. “Kane, call an ambulance, now.”
It was a measure of his concern that he didn’t chastise me for my commands, the habits of a nurse trained to take charge in a medical emergency where there was no doctor present. He nodded reassuringly, already dialing his phone. Empathy filled his eyes as he looked at my dad, then his face clouded over, masked as he walked to the window and spoke to the emergency personnel.
Dad’s chest rose and fell weakly, and I tried not to panic, keeping him conscious. Dad murmured when I shook him, but his eyes kept closing. Then his eyes fluttered shut one last time and his head fell to the side.
My heart twisted and my face drained of blood, but I made myself check his pulse. It was weak, but there, beating faintly against my fingers.
“Unconscious?” David asked. I nodded, eyes watering.
“You can’t do anymore for him now, Miss Anika.” He reached across my dad and took my shoulder gently. “He’ll be fine. He’s lost a lot of blood, but I’ve seen wounds like this. As long as he gets to the hospital soon, he’ll make it.”
I nodded, taking surprising strength from such an unlikely source of comfort. He was right. There was nothing more I could do.
“The ambulance is on its way,” Kane said, returning to us and snapping shut his phone, “Anika, we need to get out of here as soon as it shows up. I’m assuming if his man doesn’t report in soon, Dominic will know something is wrong and send reinforcements.”
My eyes widened. Worrying over my dad, I’d forgotten the other man. “Shit. Vince.”
“Who?”
“There’s another one in the kitchen. I knocked him out, but he’ll likely come to soon enough, and he’s not going to be happy.”
Kane raised a brow at me in surprise—and, did I imagine respect there?—then went to the kitchen. I heard him chuckle. “Wow. You really clocked him, didn’t you?”
Feet shuffled, Kane lifting Vince up, I guessed, then Vince shouting. More scuffling, then a gunshot, and Vince cursed. A crash, what sounded like my dad’s table smashing, then Kane came back into the living room, holstering his gun.
I jumped to my feet and glared at him as I marched toward the kitchen. “You shot him, too? Is that the only way you know how to resolve conflict, Davros, by putting bullets in people’s brains?”
“He was a mobster, Anika.” He followed me toward the kitchen. Before I got inside the room, he grabbed my shoulder and yanked me back against him, an arm pinning me to him. “Trust me, he deserved it. No, you’re not going in there, girl, there’s no need for you to see that.”
“Oh, knock it off. I’ve probably seen worse in med school.” I twisted and he let me go, but blocked the entrance with his huge frame, arms crossed.
“I don’t care, you’re not going in there. Stay with your dad, he needs you.”
She isn’t my daughter.
“You—” I cut off the string of insults I wanted to sling at him for his over protectiveness. I’d seen a few gunshots since I started, and they still weren’t fun to look at, but I wouldn’t faint like some willowy damsel. Still, there were more important things. I dropped my arms. “Okay. So, now what? What do we do about Gavini?”
Kane uncrossed his arms and his eyes softened. “Anika, he’s not going to stop. He’ll keep sending more men, or come himself, until he has his money, or you are dead.” The warmth, the tenderness, the concern in his voice made me blink. I sighed, my shoulders sagging, and he closed his big hands over them, infinitely tender.
“I…” I trailed off, looking back at my dad. Blood seeped through the bandage David had wrapped his leg with, and his face was soaked with sweat. He lay frighteningly still. I wanted to go to him, but if I did, I’d only break apart with sadness. He was all I had. My eyes stung violently, and blinking didn’t help.
A strange uncertainty of who I was settled over me. I ran a hand through my hair, and for a moment I caught sight of the curls beside my cheek. I thought of my dad’s vivid black hair and those curls looked suddenly too red, too bright. I shook my head, trying to shake the tears off. Kane took my face, wiping at my cheeks, and I couldn’t muster the strength to push his hands away.
“Please. Please, let me help you. I couldn’t stand to see anything happen to you.”
My heart squeezed and I closed my eyes. A feeling like I was signing my soul over to the devil clawed at me, but I knew I was out of options, and so was my dad. He raised and protected me. I have to protect him. This is the only way.
Head heavy, I nodded, unable to look at him.
As soon as I answered, I expected… I don’t know what I expected, but some sinister sign from Kane of the mistake I’d made, the nightmare I’d trapped myself in. My nod felt like an oath, binding me to him as irrevocably as
a spell. Instead, he pulled me into his arms, and for the life of me, I couldn’t bring myself to push him away. His warmth, his huge, powerful frame, felt like a wall, a solid barricade against the past that now had become a present trying to swallow me whole.
“I will protect you, angel. With my life. Nothing will ever, ever happen to you.” He kissed my hair and cupped my nape.
I made myself look at him. “But who’s going to protect me from you?”
He opened his mouth to speak, and I swore I saw something like sympathy in his eyes, or maybe regret. But before he could speak, a siren reached my ears, growing louder, and he released me and went to the window.
I joined him in time to see the ambulance pull up and the attendants rushing up to the house with a stretcher. I glanced at my dad, some of the tension leaving my chest. David gave me a reassuring nod. Yes, he’d be fine.
I looked at Kane and he put his hand on my back before I went to let the attendants in.
“Anika…”
I shook my head at him, too overwhelmed and confused, not ready to hear whatever he had to say about being his. The weight of my decision, and all that might lie ahead of me because of it, settled on me like a dark cloud.
Dad would be fine, but would I?
* * * * *
Hours later, when they wheeled my dad out of surgery and the doctor had assured me he’d be fine in a few weeks, I stood over his bed, heart trying to shatter in my chest as I tried to make sense of what had happened.
Kane waited outside, and I couldn’t help the wave of gratitude I felt for that. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t want him seeing this moment between me and the man I’d always called dad. Sadness and confusion twisted through me and I would have given anything to call Fran. I couldn’t do that, though. Fran knew nothing of our connection to the Gavinis and I wouldn’t draw my best friend into this.
I closed my hand around my dad’s, hating how weak and fragile it felt. He lay unmoving, eyes closed, face too pale. The doctor said he’d lost a lot of blood. Much longer, and he wouldn’t have made it. He’d always seemed so strong, so invincible to me. Like he’d live forever.
Like I’d always been with him.
Half formed memories, things he’d told me about when I was a baby, swirled through my thoughts. My getting sick, the huge amount of money he’d paid in medical bills. The way he’d always tried to hide certain papers from me, the way he never talked about the red-headed beauty I knew as my mother, who’d apparently died giving birth to me. So many things that never quite added up began to make a sickening sort of sense now. My stomach churned and I squeezed the masculine hand in mine tighter.
“I love you, Daddy.” I bent and kissed his rough cheek, breathing in the warm, pipe smoke scent of him that had once given me so much comfort. “I love you. You’ll always be my father.”
5
“So, how does this work?” Sitting next to me in the back of the limo after four hours in the hospital, Anika refused to look at me. Her voice shook, but why? Worry over her dad, or over the Gavinis? Or was it uncertainty over the direction things would take between us now, perhaps? I wouldn’t tell her this, but if it was the last one, I knew how she felt.
She’s mine. I own her. Jesus, what have I done? My cock hardened at the thought, that twisted part of me getting off on knowing she belonged to me, while my gut ate a hole in itself. “I don’t know.”
Her eyes snapped up to mine. She looked as surprised by my admission as I was.
“What? I’ve never done this before.”
“You mean you’ve never made a woman your slave before.” The scorn in her tone annoyed me, even while the tension in her frame made me want to reassure her. I couldn’t comfort her. I couldn’t care about her now, not if I wanted to protect her.
“Anika. Don’t make me keep repeating myself. You are not a slave.”
She shook her head like she wanted to argue, but sighed instead. “I was talking about Gavini. What happens now? I should be with my dad, but you insisted I needed to be with you for our next move, so, tell me what you’re going to do.”
An odd inflection in her voice when she mentioned her dad made me turn my head to her. What was that about?
“You heard what the doc said. You can’t do anything more for your father now. He’ll heal. And I called Dominic while you were in with him.”
“Dominic, is it? You’re on a first name basis with the Mafia kingpin then?”
Irritation tightened my jaw and I suppressed the urge to turn her over my knee, instead giving her s cold smile. “I’d rather we met him at the hotel, but he insisted we deal on his turf, so we’re meeting at his estate. I want you with me, for him to see you with me, so he’ll see what your end of the bargain looks like.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he needs to know you really are mine. He needs to understand that you’re off limits.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why would he doubt you?”
Damn, she was making it hard to keep my distance when all I wanted to do was yank her into my arms and ravage her mouth until she knew I wanted only her. I ran a hand through my hair. “Because, he can’t think I’m helping you out of the goodness of my heart.”
“Right. God forbid anyone think you’re a nice guy, Davros.”
Fuck I was going to tear her damn clothes off if she mouthed off one more time. “Anika, shut up.”
She widened her eyes in mock shock. I could see it in her gaze, she thought I was just being what I was. “Smooth, Davros. Smooth.”
I gripped the door handle until my knuckles ached. If I didn’t, I would have been too rough with her. When some of the tension left me, I slid my other hand around her nape and jerked her toward me from the waist up. Keeping my voice low with practiced calm.
“I know you’re trying to piss me off, girl. You haven’t signed the contract yet, but your verbal agreement is as good as. The minute you agreed to belong to me, you signed yourself to all the rules I laid out.”
Her body stiffened, but I also felt her body heat rise. Her breathing quickened, pulse jumping under my fingers. I could smell her arousal. Intoxicating.
“You get a pass this time, girl, because of your dad. But call me Davros like that one more time, and I’ll blister your ass. You won’t be able to sit for a week. Do you understand?”
Her breathing got even quicker, and her musk grew stronger. I could imagine how wet her sex was, and my cock jumped.
“I’m sorry. I just really don’t like you.”
“Noted.” I released her nape and slid my other hand under her chin, so that her long, slender throat was cupped in my palm. So soft. So fragile. She swallowed, hard. I put my mouth right against her ear so that my voice was all she heard. “Listen to me. I know you loathe me. But you and I will be spending a lot of time together. A lot of it with me inside that sweet pussy. You best find a way to let go of your dislike, because if you don’t, this is going to be a very long, unpleasant six months for you. Is that clear?”
She gave another swallow, and her voice oozed as much desire as hatred. “Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
I saw her try to glare at me out of the corner of her eye. Something scratched my leg, and I looked down to see her nails digging into me. Did she realize it? I almost chuckled at the effort she put into fighting protocol. When she didn’t speak, I put my mouth to her ear again, and tightened my grip just enough that every cord in her throat pressed into my palm.
“Yes. What.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Better.” I released her, but trailed my hand down her front, between her breasts, feeling her heart batter my palm where it stopped. “We’ll work on getting rid of that obstinate tone, though. Whips are great for that.”
Her heart gave a giant leap against my palm. Looking at me, her pink lips parted, her sea-blue eyes widening. I might have felt bad for her if her cheeks hadn’t gone a rosy pink.
“You’re serious?” Raw desire, but als
o trepidation swirled in the depths of her gaze. Oh, fuck, I was going to love showing her just how pleasurable pain could be.
“Yes. I am. In fact...” I paused and ran my fingers over her soft rose-petal lips, imagining them wrapped around my cock. “In fact, when we get back to the hotel, I think I’ll take a taste of this gorgeous angel I’ve bought today.”
David carried the single overnight bag Kane had let me pack up to the hotel room. We’d stopped off at my apartment, where most of my clothes were, and he’d given me ten minutes to pack only the essentials. Actually, for some weird reason, he had David pack them, while they both had me choose a few things I couldn’t be without. A rabbit teddy bear my dad had given me named Pinky, a favorite sweater, fuzzy socks, the right scrunchy.
When we were in the suite and David took the bags to the bedroom, I looked at Kane. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t even let me pack my own things. Were you afraid I was going to slip a knife in there to put in your back when you slept?”
He grinned, that stunning flash of teeth that made my knees weak, and poured himself a bourbon before he followed me into the bedroom. David left, tipping his hat to me. “You’ll never stop being mouthy, will you?” Kane shut the door to the room. My pulse sped up when he locked the door. Sealing me in with him.
I shrugged, hiding my mounting anticipation with casual indifference and lowered myself onto the bed, opening my suitcases. The look he gave me promised all the punishment he’d spoken of, but also the intention to claim the taste of me he vowed he’d have.
“We’ll be traveling a lot this weekend. I didn’t want you taking anything you don’t need, and since I will buy you almost everything anyway, that doesn’t leave much.”
I stared. His need for control baffled me. “When are we supposed to meet Gavini?”
“Not until ten. He’s flying in from somewhere.”
I checked my watch. It was only six now. I went back to picking through my things. “David didn’t pack many clothes in here. It’s mostly my toiletries. Am I to spend the next six months naked, Sir?”
