SAINT (Boston Underworld Book 4)

by A. Zavarelli

  I’m trying to make sense of her riddles. The broken bits of information she feeds me, but it isn’t easy.

  “Them,” I repeat. “So, there’s more.”

  “I have a list,” she answers.

  And why does that not surprise me?

  The room falls quiet, and I honestly have no bloody clue how to help her. In her mind, this story is already written. There’s a hurricane brewing in her eyes, and it’s heading straight for whoever fucked her over.

  There is only one thing I can offer her. One thing that will ensure she doesn’t destroy herself in the process.

  “Let me help you.”

  She looks at me, and her face is blank again. Empty again. And we’re right back to square fucking one again.

  “Who said I needed help?” she asks. “You could be at the top of my list, for all you know.”

  “Let me rephrase that,” I tell her. “I’m going to help you. And ye’re going to accept it without any more bitching and moaning.”

  She opens her mouth, and I cover it with my hand.

  “I wasn’t done.”

  She glares at me, and I continue.

  “I have a condition to your acceptance of my help.”

  Her eyes are burning through me, probably murdering me a dozen different ways in her mind, but the silence is golden, even if forced.

  “Ye’re going to tell me your real name.”

  She peels my fingers off her mouth one by one and something has flipped inside of her. A switch. Her eyes are predatory when she leans forward, hunting me across the bed.

  And I have to admit, it scares me a little when she reaches down and squeezes my cock through the material of my jocks. I haven’t a clue if she intends to rip it off or worship it. It could go either way with Scarlett.

  Her fingers wrap around the hard flesh, a smile curling across her devilish lips when she feels my body responding to her.

  “All the women who want you… do they make you promises of being the best you’ve ever had?”

  I reach for her hand to pull it away, convinced she’s about to turn on me any second. But she shoves my hand away and straddles me instead.

  “Were any of them better than me?”

  She kisses her way down my throat, and I’ve already forgotten the question. Somehow my jocks are pulled down, and she’s not wearing any panties and she’s rubbing herself all over my dick.

  She digs her fingers into my shoulders and glares at me.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Honestly, baby doll,” I admit. “I never wanted anyone as badly as I’ve wanted you. You rocked my fucking world.”

  She smiles again, and it scares me.

  Fucking Satan is in my lap, looking hotter than any fallen angel should ever look.

  “Let’s do it again,” she says. “Just in case you try to go and forget later on.”

  “I won’t forget,” I assure her, even as I whip her bra off and bury my face in her breasts.

  They are perfect and soft and pillowy and I could spend my whole life here, napping and fucking and eating off her ungodly body.

  We’re both a fucking mess, and I’m still covered in Ethan’s blood. But she doesn’t give a fuck. In fact, I think she likes it even more the second time around when she kisses down my chest and licks some of it off my nipple.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  It would be fucked up if it wasn’t so hot.

  My sadistic little hellion.

  Scarlett’s trying to get straight down to business, intent on shoving my cock up inside of her and riding me like she’s only got eight seconds to do it.

  But I’m not about to let her have control the second time around, and she needs to know it. The first time was a courtesy to her. A mutual trust and respect. But this time, I’m in charge, and she’s going to fucking know it.

  I flip her onto her back and watch her breasts bounce when I yank her down the bed. She yelps and struggles until I drag her pussy onto my face.

  “Jesus Christ,” she yells.

  “It’s Rory.” I smile against her. “But that works too.”

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing…”

  Her words come to an abrupt end when I start eating her out like she’s my last meal. Her hands tangle in my hair like she wants to pull me away, but instead she’s yanking me closer, riding my face because she can’t help herself.

  I like seeing her this way. Back bowed, lips parted and head tilted back. Her perfect tits are on display for me, round and swollen and I want them in my mouth too. I want all of her. Every orgasm, every psychotic thought. Her anger and her wit and her loss of self-control on my face.

  I want to be the only one who’s ever seen her like this.

  I’m going to do everything to her.

  Every dirty, filthy, hot and depraved thing I can think of.

  I own these moments from now on, and I tell her so.

  “Fuck me,” she cries out as she crests higher and higher. “I don’t like this.”

  “You fucking love it.”

  She wrenches her head back and comes relentlessly, just to prove how much she doesn’t fucking like it. My little liar. I taste her until she begs me to stop, panting and out of breath.

  When I try to climb up over her, hoping she’s too spent to argue with me, she pushes me back instead.

  Taking back her control.

  “My turn,” she says. “Better hope I don’t bite.”

  And then she dives face first into my groin. And fuck me, her mouth is heaven. I’ve changed my mind about her tits. I want to live here instead.

  She shoves me flat onto the bed to give herself better access to my cock, and apparently, my balls too.

  She’s touching them with her hand. And licking them now too. And Jesus fucking motherfucking shite fuck Christ.

  I want to ask her if it’s her first blowjob. Mostly because I want to hear her say yes.

  “It actually is,” she tells me, and I guess I did say it out loud. “Now tell me I’m good at it.”

  “Ye’re the best, baby.” My back arches off the bed and my hands are in her hair and she’s bobbing up and down on me and I don’t know if it’s a lie but I don’t care. Her lips are wrapped around me and they were made for sucking my dick.

  Drag me out into a field and shoot me because I am done for.

  She’s hard and then soft and just when I think I know what I’m going to get she changes everything.

  It feels so fucking good I don’t want her to stop.

  But I’m like a kid with too many toys and I am torn. I want to come inside of her again. I want to fuck her raw again. I want to come on her tits and her arse and her throat and in her mouth. In a car and on a plane and on a motherfucking train. I want to fuck her all day, every day, and oh fuck… there it is.

  I explode inside of her mouth.

  She swallows it, and she’s still licking my cock and I fall back onto the bed and throw an arm over my face.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “It’s Scarlett,” she mocks me.

  I have to pull her off my cock because she’s still going at it and she loves it just as much as I do. But I need a breather and we need to talk.

  She lays down beside me, and we’re both quiet and I’m thinking about what I want to do with her today. She apparently is thinking how to ruin this.

  “So, we’re even now, right?”

  “What?” I pull my arm off my face and glance over at her.

  “I made you feel good. So we’re even.”

  “Don’t ye ever just give it a fecking rest?” I ask her.

  She glares at me and covers up her tits, and this is all wrong.

  “I don’t like to owe anyone anything.”

  “For fucks sake,” I growl under my breath. “Can ye please dispense with the bleeding bullshit? Just for five minutes, Scarlett. This was not a goddamn tit for tat.”

  “You’re right.” She bolts up and starts gathering up her
clothes. “It was nothing.”

  She looks me in the eye then, goading me.

  “Even less than nothing,” she clarifies. “Because I’d have to care for it to be something. And as you already know, I just have this thing where… well I really don’t give a fuck. About anyone.”

  “That’s how ye want to play it?” I ask.

  I’m exhausted with this game, and when she pulls shite like this, it’s hard not to be. She’s always pushing me away. Always trying to cut me and make me bleed. She’s so quick to draw her weapons, and the most dangerous one is always her tongue.

  But then I take one look at her, and I know that I’ll always play this game with her.

  Because I do care.

  And Scarlett needs someone to care about her. For at least once in her life.

  Sixteen

  Scarlett

  Put on your boxing gloves, sports fans. Looks like there’s another contender.

  Conor gives me a lift home at Rory’s insistence.

  He’s quiet and broody which suits me just fine. Don’t know what I ever did to offend his delicate sensibilities but I don’t really give a fuck either.

  When he pulls up to my apartment building, I make a mad dash for it because all I wanted was a ride and not an attitude. But Conor follows me up the stairs- uninvited- and I’m already annoyed and why the hell is he still here?

  “I don’t need an escort,” I tell him.

  “Saint doesn’t want you going in to the apartment alone,” he says. “I’ve got orders, and I’m going to follow them, whether you like it or not.”

  The way he says he’s got orders makes him sound like he’s about to invade the Middle East. And I want to tell him if he wants to enlist, all he had to do was say so. But one look at him and I know Conor couldn’t handle my war.

  “What are you going to do?” I ask. “Protect me from the big bad wolf?”

  “You really are a bitch,” he mutters.

  Words are just words and sticks and stones and all that, but it bothers me that he thinks so because I am a bitch but he doesn’t need to say it.

  “Don’t act like you know me.”

  I unlock the door and he barges in before me, going about his duties like a good soldier. He checks for monsters and killers, completely oblivious to the fact that the worst is already standing right in front of him.

  “Satisfied?” I ask.

  He pauses at the kitchen counter and looks at me.

  “I felt sorry for you,” he says. “That whole thing that happened with the butcher? You didn’t deserve that. Nobody deserves that, Scarlett.”

  The scars on my chest burn the way they always do when someone brings it up. I want him to stop talking and I tell him so.

  He carries on anyway.

  “I get that you’re fucked up in the head. But we’ve all had a shitty go of it, okay? Even Rory. It doesn’t give you the right to take your hate out on everyone else.”

  “Stop talking,” I tell him again. “And get the fuck out of my apartment.”

  “He cares about you,” Conor says. “And I know you’re fucking with him. I can see it in your eyes. We all can. He doesn’t deserve that any more than you deserve what happened to you.”

  He keeps talking about the butcher and he’s being an asshole and now it’s all I can see. All I can feel. His body on top of me. Inside of me. His taunting words and the blade of his knife slashing through my skin.

  Conor’s laughing. Or is it just in my head?

  No, it’s the butcher, laughing. And then it multiplies. Alexander and his friends. They are all laughing too. It’s five pairs of hands holding me down. Choking me. His laughter starts to multiply and I scream for it to stop. But it’s five pairs of hands and voices and faces and…

  Conor’s words.

  “You need to talk about it with someone. If you keep holding it inside, it’s just going to keep poisoning you. Making you sick. I know you think I’m stupid. But I know better than anyone.”

  “Stop talking,” I say and it’s the third time I’ve said it and most are lucky enough to get one warning.

  But Conor doesn’t heed my words. He doesn’t understand what he’s unleashing right now. It’s rising up inside of me like a volcano.

  “Don’t you want to get better?” he asks.

  And I don’t want to get better, I want to fucking murder him.

  I reach for the knife on my thigh, but it isn’t there. Because Rory took it from me last night. He took my power. The way that they all do.

  I lunge at Conor anyway, prepared to go at him with my bare hands.

  He puts me in a choke hold I never saw coming.

  “Mack’s been teaching me,” he says.

  “Let go of me!” I scream.

  My voice is raw and my breath is gone and when he hears it, he does fucking listen this time. And now he’s staring at me. Judging me. And even worse. Pitying me.

  “You need to leave.”

  “Okay.” He holds up his hands and tells me he’s sorry and he didn’t know.

  “I’ll leave,” he says.

  But he doesn’t.

  “There’s just one thing I need to say first.”

  I don’t encourage him, but I underestimated Conor. He’s young, and he’s not as tough as the other guys, but he is stubborn.

  “Rory saved me,” he tells me. “I owe him everything. I was a lot like you when he met me and I had a whole lot of nothing going on for me. But now I have everything. Because of him. So it has to be said, Scarlett. If you hurt him… I’ll rip out your cold, black heart with my own two hands.”

  Ah, and there it is.

  He does have a backbone. And I have some respect for him now. Who knew?

  “That sounds fair,” I agree.

  And I mean it.

  Because I think by the time I’m done with Rory, there won’t be any good left inside of me to save.

  Seventeen

  Scarlett

  If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later- Lewis Carroll

  Tick.

  Tock.

  Alexander runs down the clock.

  And it’s only a matter of days now, until we meet again.

  Agent douchebag probably has an alarm set on his phone for the witching hour.

  Reminder:

  Ruin Tenly’s life. Again.

  Four days have come and gone and only one of them is dead because I was too busy cavorting with Rory rather than doing what needed to be done.

  It isn’t like me to be so scattered.

  Perhaps it was over ambitious of me.

  Or perhaps, it’s something else.

  There’s a bottle of Jack beside me, and a pervasive insistence that this all Rory’s fault. I was so drunk on the idea of him killing Ethan that I was blind to it.

  I was supposed to kill Ethan.

  Not only did I not kill Ethan, but I ran straight into Rory’s arms and fell into his bed like some sort of grateful twat.

  Who does that? I mean really… who fucking does that?

  That line inside of me is going berserk and I’m drunk and I can’t tell left from right anymore.

  My living room is a junkyard of paperwork and news articles. Nothing is going to plan and as it turns out, it’s difficult to wage war when your army now only consists of one.

  Plan B wasn’t in the cards.

  There isn’t a plan B.

  But exceptions are made for a reason. I’d rather crawl through a bed of broken glass than admit to Rory I need his help.

  He doesn’t want to help me. He wants to save me.

  And I can’t be second guessing myself.

  They wronged me.

  If I don’t make it right, then it’ll be my body in a dumpster by week’s end. These are the facts.

  I can be the cat or the mouse.

  And I’m a fucking cat.

  I tell Whiskey so and I swear the little fucker rolls his eyes.

&nb
sp; “Three days, Whiskey,” I say. “Don’t underestimate me. A lot can happen in three days.”

  He walks to the door and even he doesn’t want to be in my army.

  So I call the one person that will.

  If I was capable of trusting anyone, Mack would be at the top of the list.

  She was only a kid when I saved her ass on the streets. It was a once off I told her. She didn’t listen. Her and her friend Talia followed me around like strays and asked to join my pack. There was no pack, I said, because I was a lone wolf. Mack said that we should be lone wolves together then, and I told her that’s just another way of forming a pack. She insisted it really wasn’t and eventually I got tired and Mack formed the fucking pack and that’s what happens when you help people.

  Mack is headstrong. She does whatever she wants to do. And I guess she thinks she owes me.

  She says that we’re friends, whatever that means.

  So I know I can count on my friend to help me now.

  When she answers, I lay it out for her loud and clear.

  “I need a PI.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  “It needs to stay between us,” I add.

  “Alright.”

  And that’s that.

  I guess maybe friends aren’t so bad. Mack respects my level of impatience. She doesn’t bother with unnecessary questions because she knows I’m testy and unsociable. She doesn’t ask me to change or talk about my feelings or sing Kumbaya. And that’s the kind of person I need in my corner.

  But it also makes for awkward conversation because I don’t think she ever really knows what to say to me.

  And since I communicate with people only out of sheer necessity, I don’t know what to say to her either.

  “Everything alright?” she asks.

  “Hunky dory.”

  “Cool,” she replies.

  The line is quiet for a minute, and then she says, “so Rory, huh?”

  “Can’t anyone keep their mouths shut anymore?”

  “Crow’s been going on and on about it,” Mack laughs. “Thinks you’ve cooked up some evil plan to fuck with Rory just for fun.”

  “Huh.”

  “I told him you wouldn’t do that,” Mack says, and her laughter is gone and now she’s all business.