City Of Sin: A Mafia & MC Romance Collection

by K. J. Dahlen

  I dropped her and luckily she didn’t fall. She straightened her skirt hastily right before two Asian men got on the elevator. They both looked at us and then start jabbering in another language. I looked down at her and realized that she looked like pure sex. If I hadn’t known any better, I would’ve assumed we’d literally just finished the act.

  Her bodice was pulled askew, almost revealing her bra; her hair mussed and cheeks bright. Her lips—those lips—were red and juicy, and there was beard burn on her neck from my passion.

  Some part of me was satisfied with that fact, that I’d marked my territory and claimed her, but something told me that she wouldn’t be too happy if I pointed that out right now.

  “Going down?” I asked them. They nodded and I pressed the lobby button.

  Anya and I were headed to the basement to get my car, which would afford us exactly one floor of privacy in the elevator. I think I could control myself for one floor. Although, looking down and catching her laughing gaze, one could never be too certain of that fact.

  She was the devil, and somehow, I didn’t mind that at all.

  When the Asian men got off at the lobby and the doors closed, I started to laugh. Somehow the complete recklessness of what we’d done, what we’d almost done suddenly hit me.

  This was my place of work. Granted, it wasn’t where I did the dirtiest and most loathsome aspects of my job, but this was a place that I had to appear professional and in control. And instead, I’d almost banged my new Russian wife to within an inch of both our sanity in a public elevator—equipped with cameras, with witnesses nearby.

  It was official. I had lost my mind over this woman.

  Anya looked up at me curiously, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Her giggle sounded like pure joy as we arrived at the basement. I walked out of the elevator, pulling her along with me until we got to my car. She walked around to the passenger side, hopping in.

  “Don’t come to my office again,” I warned her after I sat down and shut my door. She tried to look innocent, but I knew that she’d come here on purpose to make me uncomfortable.

  “I wouldn’t have if you’d just come home, Viktor.” She crossed her arms, which only served to plump up her breasts like a sexual offering.

  I groaned, tempted to take her up on the offer. But there was my office, and then there was my car. Some things were sacrosanct.

  When we got home, I pushed her up the stairs and told her to change into something more appropriate.

  “You didn’t seem to mind what I was wearing earlier,” she reminded me.

  “And it was inappropriate then, too.” I swatted her ass.

  She glared at me but did as I asked, teetering up the stairs on those sharp little heels of hers. I’d enjoyed every moment of the inappropriate way they dug into my ass when her legs were wrapped around me.

  Tired, I tugged the black tie from my neck and watched her disappear to the upstairs hallway. Despite my emotional and physical fatigue, my body stirred at the mere memory of where that tie had been, what it had witnessed. After a few minutes, I went upstairs to hop in the shower.

  Cold water was what I needed, and a lot of it.

  After donning on a low-slung pair of sweatpants, I laid down on my bed and reached for the remote. The news didn’t relax me, nor did a movie. My mind raced with the possibilities of what could be—what Anya and I could be, or could not. Hope chased me relentlessly, like a wolf.

  When I heard a knock on my door, I knew it could be Vlad or a member of my security detail. But I also knew that it would only be her.

  Anya’s silky white nightgown didn’t leave much to the imagination, though I didn’t need much when it came to her body. Somehow she had imprinted on my brain, like the negative of a photograph. To bring her image to mind, all I had to do was reverse the darkness in my soul to light.

  She had her beautiful hair tied high in a curled ponytail and she had washed her face. In short, she looked good enough to eat. I willed my cock into submission, knowing that my sweatpants wouldn’t hide the kind of erection I got when Anya was around, especially in skimpy clothes like those.

  She looked up at me and then around me, into my bedroom. “I’m bored.”

  I sighed, rubbing the wrinkles that were probably forming right this second on my forehead. “Read a book. Watch a movie. Go to bed.” My gaze swept up and down her body. “You’re ready for it.”

  The thought of her in bed was not a good way to start the night. Suddenly, all I could picture was her, naked and writhing, on my black silk sheets. Then I realized she was ogling me, too.

  “Looks like you’re ready for… bed, too.” Her gaze was drawn to my traitorous dick, poking at her through the material of my pants.

  My chest felt tight. I was really trying to be a gentleman, here.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “That I’m trying to seduce you. But I’m not. I’m just bored. I can’t read any more Russian literature, and that’s all you seem to have in this house.” She glared at me, as though I should apologize for not providing a bookstore-style selection.

  “Haven’t you heard of ebooks?” I asked.

  She waved a pale hand, making her breast shimmy under the satin. “I like to turn the pages. I can’t watch any more television shows. Can we just…talk?”

  I sighed again. “Anya…”

  “Please,” she cajoled. “I won’t push you to answer anything you don’t want to talk about, but I just want to talk to a living human being and have them answer back to me. Please.”

  It occurred to me that she wasn’t so much bored, as she was lonely. I empathized, more than she knew. But letting her in now meant more than entry to my bedroom. She was this close to getting into my heart, and I couldn’t let that happen.

  “Please, Viktor.”

  After a moment of trying to talk myself out of this very bad idea, I ended up opening the door a little wider. She flounced by me, leaving me standing there with an erection and a smell of her fruity perfume.

  It was going to be a long night.

  15

  Anya

  I wanted to curl up against him like a kitten but figured he needed to get used to the idea of having me in his bed first. It was true—I was bored to tears.

  But I also just wanted to be around him right now. I couldn’t explain it.

  He put something on Netflix on the TV in his room. After fifteen minutes into the movie, I slid a little closer to him, sighing as my body curved against his harder one. “Why did you get into the mafia?”

  “I thought you weren’t going to ask any questions.” His voice was gruff, but his tone mild.

  Right. My curiosity was about as easy to control as my arousal around him. I responded with silence, and my palm on the muscles of his belly. His sharp intake of breath was a contrast to the sighs I usually heard around him.

  Surprisingly, he answered after another five minutes of the movie that neither of us was actually watching. “It wasn’t really a choice for me. I was an orphan at a young age. You know, back then, when things changed, there was a lot of…” He paused, searching for the right word for the collapse of the Soviet Union. “There was a lot of unrest. Grown men didn’t feel safe walking around on the streets alone, much less boys who thought they were grown up.”

  Now giving up any pretense of watching the movie, I hit mute on the remote. Hopefully Viktor wouldn’t go mute, as well. I looked up to see the corner of his mouth turn up. “And?” I prodded.

  He shrugged. “And I learned to fight, to be sneaky. And soon, Petrov took notice. He drew me into that lifestyle because of his wealth, his confidence, his intelligence. I wanted to be that man—the one with power. The one that held all the cards and made other men scramble to find a place beneath him.”

  “But you are still beneath Petrov,” I said, confused.

  He nodded. “But to no other man but the Pakhan. Besides, until this moment, I’ve never really had a desire to be in charge. With that positi
on comes paranoia, drama, and the failure to ever have a normal life.”

  I sat up, surprised. “You want to have a normal life? I just figured…well, you’re so perfect in this life. It feels like you were meant for the mafia.”

  My hand went over my mouth as he laughed humorlessly, and I heard my words in my own head. It might not be considered a compliment to tell a man that he seemed perfect for a life of crime and violence.

  “Thank you, Anya. I’m sure it’s what my parents wanted for me, as well.”

  My face flaming, I dropped a kiss on his lips. “I’m sorry,” I said softly. His beard both scratched and soothed, a sensation to which I was becoming accustomed. “What did you want to be when you grew up? When you were younger, I mean?”

  He was silent for a moment. Could he remember? Maybe he had no ambition as a child, but it didn’t seem like him to not have a goal—even if it wasn’t where he ended up. “I wanted to study. Maybe to teach,” he finally said, staring unseeingly at the TV on the opposite wall.

  “Literature.” Of course.

  “Yes, printsessa. Russian literature. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, all of it. I loved all the stories of old Russia.”

  “Old Russia is no more.” But I didn’t need to tell him that; he already knew, from hard experience.

  “No? Sometimes I feel like I live in a feudal kingdom.”

  I looked around at the silk sheets and opulent furniture and rolled my eyes. “Somehow, I don’t see you as a serf.”

  “Perhaps not, but I still serve the Tsar. The Pakhan. For now. I always figured at some point I could get out of it, but that was before I was this involved. Now it seems like a tunnel with no end.”

  I lay back down, rubbing his arm absentmindedly. Worrying that it was all my fault, this tunnel with no light at the end except for the flash of fire from an automatic weapon. “So what are you going to do?”

  He sighed, curving his arm around me and drawing me in, giving in to my comfort. “I have a plan, but time will tell if it’s a good one. It could cause both of us to be killed. I just want you to be prepared for what comes next.”

  “Being killed? You want me to prepare for that?” Panic welled up in my chest.

  He squeezed me tighter, which paradoxically loosened fear’s grip on me. “I won’t let that happen, Anya. I only said it could, to point out how dangerous this game is that we’re playing. But I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

  “What’s coming next?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “And I will be damned if another man comes for you, but I have to consider the possibility that if both families hunt us, it’s only a matter of time before something happens.”

  “But I thought that’s why we got married?” I asked, lifting one leg and placing it in between his.

  “It is. That’s why they’ve left us along for this long. But it won’t last forever. I have a feeling that Boss Petrov is less interested now, but Boss Ramone will surely want you back at some point.”

  I saddened, realizing that our little bubble would be burst soon enough. While I was bored and I was sick of being in this massive house, that didn’t mean I wanted to give it up for some strange ‘family’ that I’d never known I’d had. Somehow, it didn’t feel like that was the answer I’d been looking for. It felt more like a trap. A trap that was going to pull me away from him. And probably soon.

  I still didn’t understand my place in all this. What was so special about me? Ramone—or whatever his real name was—apparently felt free to abandon me to my uncle in Ukraine when I was too young to remember. That uncle, who then promised me to Petrov in some sick trade.

  I knew Viktor better than I knew any of my family. Suddenly I realized that we were both orphans of a sort, clinging to each other. Did he see in me what he could have been, had he not been taken under Petrov’s wing? And what if Ramone or Petrov… possessed me?

  My mind wrapped up in that, I unconsciously pushed closer to him, wanting his heat and his protection around my body. He responded by pulling me as close as possibly, half on top of him. We lay like that for a while, throughout the rest of the muted movie—both of us deep in thought. Or at least, I was pensive, but wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

  When the end credits started to roll, he made a move to get up. I pulled him back down. “Not yet,” I chided. He seemed surprised, but gave in easily enough.

  I wanted to try something. To see if he would let me try something. I leaned over him, looking deep into his eyes. He had an almost pained expression on his face. As if my nearness caused him discomfort. Based on the bulge I could feel against my thigh, I had a good idea of the source. I hid a smile.

  Idly, I rubbed his handsome face, caressing his mouth and the jawline that always seemed so tense. I slowly moved in, giving into temptation. I kissed him until I felt his lips start to respond. I increased the pressure, wanting to feel what I’d felt earlier. Finally, with a groan, he gave in completely. He arched up and over, covering my body with his, wrapping a hand behind my ponytail, pulling down on it to keep me in place and expose my neck. I moaned, feeling his mouth on my neck, nibbling.

  His hand dropped down to my breast, squeezing and kneading until I was a writhing mess, begging and pleading. Suddenly, he stopped. I whimpered at the loss.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said softly.

  “What? Why not?”

  “You know why, Anya. A time will come where you’ll have to choose. And you don’t want your mind clouded by lust and lust alone.” He placed a soft kiss on my mouth, one very different from the kisses he’d just been giving me.

  Something twisted in my chest at his use of the words ‘lust alone.’ “Well, I wouldn’t be so lust-driven if you’d just give in.” I pouted.

  “Anya,” he warned.

  I grumbled, but sat up, giving him some peace. He sat up as well, then stood and turned off the TV. I admired the ripples of muscles of his back and arms. He held out a hand to help me up and I let him pull my body against his.

  “Goodnight, printsessa,” he whispered, placing one more kiss against my mouth.

  I hungered for him but knew that he wasn’t a man to be trifled with once he’d made up his mind. “Night, Viktor. Thank you.” He looked at me blankly. “For talking to me, I mean.”

  When he nodded, I headed over to my room. After lying in bed there for only a few minutes, my hand crept into my panties and I thought of him. Thought of his hands, his mouth and his body, sliding over me. In only a few minutes, I came, wishing that he’d been the one to cause it.

  16

  Viktor

  A few days later, I noticed that we were being trailed on our way in to get Anya some new things. I didn’t want to alert her, but I could see the black SUVs behind us. They were still a few cars away, but they turned with us, not giving into my tricks of evasive driving. I knew that even public notice would’ve stopped them from doing the job they’d came here to do, and I’d rather not have an audience, so I started to pull off the turnpike.

  Anya sat up in her seat, looking out the window. “Where are we going? The city’s not for another ten miles.”

  I stayed silent, hoping she’d let it drop. I looked over at her for a moment. She was wearing these distressed, faded jeans that looked like they were made for her body. She’d left her hair down and curled, just how I liked it. I wonder if she knew that it was the way I preferred. She was wearing makeup, but I liked that it was only on her eyes. She didn’t have to cover up her flawless skin or add fake powders or liquids.

  When I saw three SUVs turn off with us, I did a mental check of the weapons in my vehicle. A gun tucked into the belt of my jeans, a knife in my boot. A gun in the glove compartment, the pocket of the door, and under my seat and hers. Extra ammo in the console. Another knife on the right side of my seat. Heavily artillery in the spare wheel compartment in the back.

  If I had been alone, I wouldn’t have been that worried. But Anya was a sitting duck. Sh
e had no knowledge of weapons and very little self-defense training, from what I could tell. If she was captured, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would give my life for her. And that might be what was required, but it was only a matter of time if I was captured that she would be as well, so it wouldn’t really do us any good.

  “Anya, listen to me very carefully. There are SUVs behind us that, once I stop, will pull behind us and either attack us, or get out and attempt to persuade us into giving ourselves up.”

  She whimpered and reached for my right hand. I let her have it. Then she sniffed and straightened up in her seat. “What do you want me to do?”

  Good girl. “I want you to stay in the car when I get out. I’ll attempt to reason with them.”

  “You know that these aren’t reasonable people, Viktor.”

  “Well, if that doesn’t work, I’ll attempt to get us out… in a different way.”

  She choked on a sob. “I don’t want you to kill people for me, Viktor. It’s not worth it.”

  I didn’t bother correcting her. Of course it was worth it. I’d do it without a moment’s notice if I had to, and never question it. She was worth it. “Hopefully it won’t come to that.” I would never get the jump on all of them, in any case.

  I pulled over into an abandoned parking lot that offered one building for protection. I parked the car behind it, then told her to get down behind the front seats. I got out quickly, locked the doors behind me, and walked around the corner so she would be out of sight. I knew this place, had used it before. I knew there was no other way around the building since it was contained with an electric fence and steel-enforced gates.

  All three vehicles came to a screeching halt when they saw me walking. This was the test. If they gunned me down where I stood, there was nothing I could do. I had no protection and didn’t have enough bullets to kill them all inside the bulletproof vehicles.