by K. I. Lynn
“What are you doing?” I asked as alarm crept in.
Had the day finally come? Was I getting a number or some other identifying marker? After so long, I’d almost forgotten that I was simply goods to be sold to the highest bidder, no matter Domenico’s claim.
Domenico stepped behind me and pulled back the stretched-out collar of my sweater, exposing my collarbone. He kept his hand on my shoulder, holding the fabric back.
“There?” the man asked for verification.
“Yes.”
The man nodded, then slipped on some gloves. He splashed some liquid—maybe rubbing alcohol or just water or something else, I didn’t know—on my skin, cleaning the spot.
The buzzing of the machine made me jump, and I pulled back, but Domenico stopped me. He wrapped his arm under my chin and held me tight against his chest, my head unable to move.
The man’s eyes met mine, then looked to Domenico, but he said nothing. Instead, he dipped the tip in ink and leaned forward.
He met my eyes again. “Don’t move. Please.”
My hands were in white-knuckled fists on my thighs. I was trying to regulate my breathing when the buzz of the machine sounded just below my ear.
The sting of the shallow area was low, but each swipe of dry paper towel was like sandpaper across the newly punctured skin. He used no stencil, free-handing. I tried to focus on the movement, to figure out what he was doing and blot out the pain, but it was more fluid than the harsh lines of numbers I’d anticipated.
It didn’t take long for him to finish, and with a final swipe he cleared any overflow of ink. That towel was wet and felt so good as it moved across my aggravated flesh.
“You’re mine now,” Domenico growled against my ear.
My brow scrunched, and then the man who’d tattooed me held up a mirror. My appearance shocked me. Weeks of poor nutrition had thinned out my face and my body. My hair was a rat’s nest of tangles, greasy and knotted (despite my limited efforts), with some of the natural shine missing. Dark circles sat under my eyes, and a light layer of dirt was smudged all over my skin. No matter how hard I tried to bathe, a bucket sponge bath was no substitute for a shower. Even with the makeshift shower I was occasionally allowed, it simply wasn’t enough.
The only clean patch of skin was where he’d cleaned off my right clavicle. The skin there was red from irritation, and in the center, in black cursive lettering, sat one word—Domenico.
I’d been branded with his name. His name.
I was caught between fear and elation and confusion. What did it really mean? What was the real reason behind the new ink embedded into my skin?
Oddly, it gave me back a small spark of the hope that had almost completely left me. If he, the leader, had marked me, maybe I wouldn’t be sold, maybe I wouldn’t have to use the one and only card I had up my sleeve. The only thing I knew that could save me was the same thing I refused to use.
But maybe I’d been handed a new way of survival…at Domenico’s side.
Every day since Domenico had ordered Marco to reduce the amount of crew, the loiterers had decreased. Only the trusted few circulated, and I noticed Roman was not one of them.
The sad-looking rose was a ghost of its former self. The amount of petals that remained was small, and I couldn’t help the hard thump of my heart when I again wondered what would happen when there were no petals left.
Domenico had marked me, but would that save me from whatever fate was only days away? I’d managed to survive weeks. A couple of the guys were watching the news on a laptop and I overheard how Halloween was fast approaching, only fourteen days away.
I’d been in my cell, surviving, beating the odds and keeping my secrets locked tight, for over three weeks. Yes, I’d been violated in many ways, the worst being my dignity over the corruption of my body. I didn’t like what was done to me, but he somehow made up for it. None of it was enough to break me, but it was enough to weaken me.
More than once I almost slipped, the words sitting on the tip of my tongue.
Domenico seemed more on edge since the explosion of testosterone and subsequent culling of men. The fewer there were, the more alert he became, almost like he was waiting for an attack.
Everything was about to change. I could feel it deep in my gut. The only problem was that I didn’t know what that meant for me.
“Ella?” someone called, rousing me.
My eyes tried to focus, but there was no strength in me.
“Ella!” the voice hissed.
In my haze, I heard the door to my cage rattle and groan before creaking open, clanging when it slammed against the wall.
“Come on, we don’t have much time.”
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. Sleep had me, and my weakened state made it harder to comply.
“Get the fuck up!” he growled.
It wasn’t enough.
He stomped forward and gripped my arm tight, rolling me onto my back. Lazily my eyes found his and the sharpness of his gaze forced a shot of adrenaline through me, waking up my tired limbs.
“If you want out of this shithole, get the fuck up,” Domenico hissed.
I stared up at him, my brain trying to process his words. My gaze bounced between his eyes, confusion flooding me. What was he talking about?
I had less than two seconds to decide what my response was. Go or stay? And which was the right answer?
Did I trust him enough to leave? Or was he simply dragging me to another level of hell?
The silence made up my mind. There was nobody around, not even Marco. We were alone.
He slipped my shoes on as I sat up, then pulled me to my feet.
His hand sat in the space between us. I looked from it to his eyes and made my decision—I slipped my hand in his.
“Why are you helping me?” I asked as we raced across the open space to the door leading to the fire escape.
“Because I’m your knight in fucking black armor, princess. Now let’s go before they notice your cage is empty.”
My muscles were stiff, and his arm wrapped around my waist to help hold me up while we descended the stairs.
There were a couple of beat-up cars in the gravel lot, including my familiar sedan. He popped the trunk, and I noted the bags upon bags before he pulled out my duffel and my Louis Vuitton bag.
They had cleared out my apartment. Domenico had packed me a bag in anticipation.
“Did you grab the photo of my mother?” I asked, my chest clenching.
“We didn’t grab any pictures, just some of your clothes to make it look like you bailed.”
I grabbed hold of his arm. “It’s the only thing I have of her. Please.”
His jaw clenched and he growled, “We have two minutes.” He turned toward an older car, one I recognized, and who wouldn’t? It was a black sixties-era Ford Mustang. “Get in.”
He threw my bags into the trunk, and in seconds we were off. The Mustang’s engine roared as he pressed the gas pedal, rocketing us down the street, kicking up gravel in its wake.
“When are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I asked when we were a couple of blocks away.
His eyes scanned the mirrors to make sure we were in the clear. “When we get somewhere safe.”
Somewhere safe. My pulse sped up as a new rock settled in my stomach. Whatever safety being Domenico’s had provided was abolished by his act of freeing me.
I wasn’t safe anymore, if I ever was in any measure.
What unnerved me the most was my calmness. Domenico had freed me. He had stolen me away. The leader.
La Bestia.
And I was oddly fine with it.
Was it shock, or the simple knowledge that I was his and I went where he went?
I didn’t even tell him how to get to my apartment, but after a while the scenery became more familiar. Was there anything left? Were my few prized possessions still there?
My rent was paid up, even with my disappearing for three weeks. His men had emptied a lot
of my stuff out. Would they have left the two items I desperately needed? Or were they stuffed in one of the bags still in my trunk?
He pulled into the small parking lot of my building and quickly headed up. The shitty metal steps clanged beneath us with each step up to the second floor. When we got to my apartment, I realized there was a fatal flaw in this plan.
“I don’t have my keys.”
Domenico pushed past me and pulled a set of keys from his pocket. I recognized the yellow leather rose key chain—he had my keys.
Once the door was open, he held it for me while his eyes swept the parking lot one last time.
My apartment was trashed. Books were strewn everywhere, furniture flipped, and my tiny kitchen had dishes everywhere. It felt like a violation worse than what Domenico had done.
I ran in and immediately located a plastic bag on the floor and tossed in a few of my books that were littered around. In the bathroom I grabbed a few missed items and tossed them into an empty makeup bag.
Maybe after over three weeks I could finally have a hot shower. The thought alone felt like heaven, especially after my sponge baths in front of hungry eyes in a dirt-filled cage.
“One minute,” Domenico called from the door.
At my dresser, I pulled out a few more missed pieces of clothing. On top lay my jewelry box, but there was only one item that I was desperate for.
I heaved a sigh as I pulled the gold chain from the box. For my sixteenth birthday, days before she killed herself, my mother had given me a locket. I slipped that on, then grabbed the photo of her that sat beside it.
I didn’t need anything else, but I took one last look around for anything I wanted. Domenico called it, and I walked out the door.
We made it down the steps, but a few feet from the base my legs gave way. All the strength I had was gone. Domenico caught me and once again wrapped his arm around me and helped me to the car.
Weeks of barely enough calories to survive had zapped my body of energy. I’d grown weak, my muscles unused to so much activity, a level that was much more than I had become used to.
As we drove, I wondered if we were heading out of the city, but he didn’t get onto the interstate, instead taking city streets deep into the South Side. With each mile, I watched the buildings and surroundings become more and more run down.
We drove deeper into the overcrowded streets until he turned into the parking lot of an old motel.
“Come on,” he said once the car was parked, the engine off.
I looked around, my mind whirling with a dozen questions. I stared at the open space, to the street and the buildings across the way. If I ran, could I get away?
The slam of the trunk pulled me from my thoughts, and I climbed from the car.
It was a stupid thought at that point, and I needed more information and more strength before I tried to pull off a maneuver such as that.
“Ella, come on.”
“Ari,” I corrected as I shut the door. It was a gamble, but I knew Domenico was a smart man. There was more going on than either of us knew.
“What?”
“I like Ari.”
He furrowed his brow before he gave a stiff nod and led the way. We entered the small motel room, and he shut and locked the door before throwing the bags down on the bed and turning to me.
“What the fuck just happened?” I asked.
He shook his head. “First, you will still follow my rules.”
I tilted my head to the side. “Why should I?”
“Because by now they’ve noticed you’re missing and so am I. The penalty if they capture you will be hell compared to the last few weeks—and death for me.”
My gaze flickered between his eyes to dig for the deeper meaning. Unbeknownst to me, my lead captor was my savior, taking unseen steps to make my capture more bearable without being noticed. What he did wasn’t good or decent, but it was a show of dominance over the other men, marking me, keeping me from their torment.
“Why me?” It was a question I’d asked for weeks, and I thought I knew the answer, but now I wasn’t so sure.
“You’re payment.”
“Payment for what?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. For the Ferrante, I’m a faithful servant in charge of many men.”
Ferrante.
Shit.
I knew it.
In all the weeks, I’d never heard anyone utter the name of the family they worked for. They’d always said the family or the organization, but my every suspicion had been confirmed.
“Yet you just threw that all away,” I said, knowing what his betrayal would mean.
His eyes were hard, jaw clenched tight. “Everything was going sideways, and all I know is that you are the answer.”
“Why me?” I asked again. He was as observant as I’d suspected.
He shook his head. “Before we picked you up, Ferrante’s consigliere called me in. He gave me your information, told me to hold you, and asked me to keep you safe.”
My heart slammed in my chest. The consigliere was an advisor, a trusted confidant, and third highest ranking member.
The Ferrante consigliere was also my father.
I wasn’t random.
“So you’re my protector?”
“My job was to keep you safe, no matter what.”
“And yet they will still kill you. You traded your life for mine?” I crossed my arms in front of me. “I don’t believe it.”
“You can believe what you want,” he said, refusing, as always, to give away any information. But we weren’t in his headquarters, if you could even call it that. It was just him and me, and I was going to figure out what was going on.
He drugged me and took me, to keep me safe? “After what you did to me?”
His gaze stayed locked on mine. “There was no other way.”
“No other way?” I quirked a brow at him. “You fucking say that like forcing your dick in me was a favor?”
“It was,” he growled.
I shook my head. “What you did to me could never be a favor.”
His eyes narrowed. “Trust me, it wasn’t something I wanted to do.”
“Your dick seemed to like it just fine,” I bit back.
“Jesus, Ella, you don’t fucking get it. If I didn’t, they were going to, and it would have been much worse,” he ground out.
We were standing face-to-face, on even ground for the first time and I wasn’t going to back down, but his confession stopped me. “What?” Words he’d said floated back to the surface and nagged at me.
Trust me, princess, I’m not doing this for the pleasure.
He ran his hand through his hair, another tic of his jaw visible. “You get me hard just by being in the same room, make no mistake, but those guys? They revel in that shit. Seeing how far they can break a girl, and I’m not just talking about mentally.”
I shook my head. “They wouldn’t have hurt me.” My father would have had their heads. That was why he’d told Domenico to keep me safe. Right?
A loud, cynical laugh made me jump. “The only arrangement was that you were to be kept alive. There was nothing saying what condition you would be in.”
I blanched at that. Oh, so safe simply meant not dead. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.
“I listened to the ways they were going to violate you. Their plan was to pass you around. By claiming you and keeping you by my side, I kept you from being raped by a line of thirty guys day and fucking night.”
I tried to sink down to the bed but my knees gave out, landing me on the carpet. My brain was unable to handle the information.
“The drugs were heavy in your system, and your attention was locked on me. You either couldn’t hear or couldn’t process their whispered words,” he revealed as he stood over me.
It sounded sick and twisted and wrong—he’d violated me to save me.
In doing so, he’d kept me from becoming a sex slave, nothing more than a pussy to ruin.
My body ached to have him again, and that scared me even more because it wasn’t what I was supposed to want. Not from him. Never from him.
But I did.
“You always seemed angry,” I whispered.
“I was. I may be a monster, but I don’t do that, Ella. I was angry. I am angry. Forcing myself on you was not what I wanted.”
“So you drugged me so that when you took me, it wouldn’t traumatize me,” I said as the puzzle pieces clicked together. When he didn’t agree, I looked up.
Domenico was silent, his teeth clenched. “You have it backwards. I took you because you were drugged.”
My blood ran cold, and I stared up at him. “Wait, you didn’t drug me?”
Everything I believed shifted.
His hard eyes locked with mine. “He forced my hand. If I didn’t do it, they would have eaten you alive, some physically and not just metaphorically.”
I was frozen in disbelief. “Who?”
“Roman.”
Roman? Roman, who always seemed too fragile and out of place? It didn’t make sense.
But Roman was the one who fed me that day. Before then, Domenico was all words and harsh grips, enforcing his dominance and superiority, but nothing more. And then there was the way he looked at me the last time I saw him.
“He rapes women, and when I saw the way you were acting, I knew what he’d done. He’s not above using any and all means to get what he wants.”
It was hard to process, to understand. Roman, the man who’d brought me blankets and sneaked me extra food. Who was always so kind and fragile but was really two-faced.
I felt violated in a totally new way, one that hit to the core. I trusted him. If Domenico hadn’t claimed me, what would Roman have done? “Did you want to…do that to me?”
He squatted down in front of me, his fingers knotted in my hair, and pulled back, making me hiss. “I already told you no. I may be harsh, rough. I fuck hard. Doing that to you? No. I want you willing to do anything for my cock. Begging for me to fuck you until you can’t walk. I want to ruin you for any other man, not ruin you for life.” His teeth dug into my bottom lip and pulled. “I did what I had to do to keep you safe. But make no mistake—I’ve claimed you as mine.”
