Becoming the Mob Queen: An Angel City Mafia Novel (Angel City Mafia Romance)

by Renee Strong

  At the front of the department store, he pushed me up against the wall and kissed me hard. My lip, still tender three days later, stung with the force of the kiss but I buried the feeling down low. Whatever residual pain I had was no match for the desire that was roaring forth in me.

  “Get a cab,” I said. He moaned in aguish as he pulled away from the kiss, his dick so hard I thought it would break free any second.

  He reached into his pocket and took out his cell, agitatedly dialing a number.

  “Send a car now, to McKellan’s department store,” he said and hung up immediately. He went right back to kissing me against the wall. Passersby could see us and some stared at us but that only made me hotter for him.

  After a couple of ecstatic minutes of him probing the deepest parts of me with his tongue, I heard a car pull up.

  “Come on,” he said, dragging me to the car and holding the door open for me.

  It was an old style limo, a classic from the fifties, with dark tinted windows and a black partition between the front back seat. I stifled a laugh as I got into it.

  “Is this yours?”

  He climbed in behind me and shut the door, not waiting a second to start tearing at my clothes.

  “It’s in the family. We control a limo service. Now shut up and take your pants off.”

  He pushed my hair back and started dropping a trail of butterfly kisses from my neck to my clavicle. My eyes flicked to the partition. “What if the driver sees?”

  He pulled back just a moment to say breathily, “he can’t with the partition.” He pushed up my top exposing my stomach and starting planting kisses there too.

  “Besides,” he growled, “I don’t care if he sees. Do you?”

  I thought about it for a second. I really fucking didn’t care who saw. I just cared that Dominic was not inside me—and that had to change fast.

  I helped him push my top up farther, pulling it over my head, and he took in the sight of me appreciatively, reaching back to open my bra. My breasts fell free as he pulled the bra off and he took them one by one and put each nipple in his mouth in turn.

  All of the feelings I’d had the first night I’d saw him came rushing back—the aching, longing, hungry need for him.

  With one hand on the back of his head, pushing him to kiss my breasts wetter and rougher, I reached down with the other and undid the button of my jeans.

  “I need you inside me,” I said, the words falling frantically from my tongue, and he pulled back to stare at me lustfully.

  “Don’t worry, I wasn’t planning to wait.”

  In a few short seconds, he had unbuckled his belt and pulled his trousers down, his rock-hard erection finally and joyfully free of that prison.

  And then, with me lying on the back seat of an old-timey limo, he pressed his naked dick inside of me. I was so wet already that he entered me easily and slickly.

  For a second, I thought about the fact that he wasn’t wearing a condom but as he started to pump in and out, the thought evaporated from my mind.

  In the back seat of that limo, I had a screaming orgasm with his dick inside of me. Then, when we got back to the weekend house, I had another one when he took me again inside the kitchen, then another in the bedroom, then one more in the den… You get the picture.

  That’s how Dominic and I entered our little bubble of sexed-up bliss.

  For three straight days, we didn’t leave the house. He insisted that it was because I needed to be protected. I knew it was because he couldn’t get enough of me but I didn’t dare to say that outright.

  If I talked about him and me, that might remind him that he’d wanted me to go away. My plan, as sad and flagrantly manipulative as it was, was to make him want me so much that he couldn’t bear to see me leave. To do that, I spent my days walking around the house in next to nothing, usually dressed in one of the lacy bra and panty sets that we’d bought in McKellan’s.

  They were, as far as I was concerned, money well spent.

  I knew, realistically, that we couldn’t stay that way forever. We couldn’t spend our days just fucking and sleeping and showering and then fucking some more. For one thing, the fridge was getting emptier and we’d almost certainly starve to death. For another, I couldn’t hope to keep dodging the fact that he planned to ship me off away out of harm’s way.

  Every time I thought of it, that he had been so willing to see me go, without any say from me, it cut me deep.

  Eventually we would have to talk about it. I didn’t want to in case his feelings on the matter were still the same.

  If his feelings hadn’t changed, we would have a big problem. Because I would be telling him I wouldn’t go—and if he insisted, I’d stay in Angel City anyway. Just not with Dominic.

  No one—not even someone as gorgeous and charming as Dominic—could tell me what to do.

  Four days after the meeting with Vlad, my phone beeped. I swiped the screen to see a text from Bobby. It was the one I had been waiting for.

  The text message was simple and coded.

  Acc 423.

  If the feds ever saw it, it wouldn’t make a lick of sense to them, or so we figured. They’d think it related to a bank account or something along those lines. Not an impenetrable code but having met enough feds in my time, I knew that the movies and cop shows way overstated their actual smarts.

  I dragged myself out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxers, slippers, and my dressing gown, and walked out to the mailbox. Lexi barely stirred in the bed. I had fucked her so hard and so often these last few days that I had worn her out. Her little, peaceful snores made me smile.

  It was quiet outside the front door when I stepped outside. No one came round here during the week; they were all too busy with their finance and CEO jobs in the city. The suburbs of Angel City were for the rich and too important to relax only.

  The daily papers were in slotted into the mailbox.

  I shuffled through the pile until I got to The Angel City Chronicle. I flicked it open, turning to page four, column two, line three: Acc 423.

  Mutilated Body Found in Busy Park, the headline read.

  I scanned down to the third line. “The body, though yet unidentified, is believed to be that of an adult male, 30 to 35 years old, with ties to the Russian mafia. Someone close to the case, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that it appeared that the brutal manner of the man’s death, coupled with his very public discovery, was designed to send a clear message. The source, who works in the Angel City PD, would not expand on what that message might be when asked.”

  So that was Serge gone, just like Vlad had promised. He’d kept to his word. He’d dealt with it swiftly and brutally. I appreciated him feeding the line to the police source. Anyone else reading this story would think it was just good journalism. I knew better. That sentence was hand-designed by Vlad to appease me and Bobby, to tell us that this sort of insurrection in the ranks would not be tolerated.

  Though there were no clear details on how the body was mutilated, I figured it wasn’t a short or easy time for Serge. This was meant to let us—and Vlad’s minions—know that nothing happened in the Russian mafia’s name without Vlad’s say so. It clearly indicated Serge’s actions were unapproved; Vlad would never torture a foot-soldier unless the soldier had done something serious enough to deserve such retribution. That included treachery against Vlad.

  I closed the paper again. The news gave me a measure of relief but it didn’t solve the other problems: One. What to do about Vlad’s son and Two. Where Jules and Serge had gotten the information about where and how to find Lexi.

  Bobby had been working his trusted contacts for days, putting quiet words in discreet ears all over town, but we were still no wiser.

  I folded the paper under my arm, grabbed the rest of the stack, and headed back inside.

  When I returned back in, Lexi was up, brewing coffee and humming to herself. She leaned over the kitchen counter, scandalously revealing pair of panties peeking
out from under the bottom of one of my shirts. The sight of her round ass distracted me from my musings on the mole.

  I walked up behind her and circled my hands around her waist.

  “Good morning, sexy,” I whispered into her wild-and-untamed curly hair.

  She turned to give me a sultry smile. “Well hello there.” She bent up and kissed me and I drank in the smell of her skin and the feeling of her lips. I had been doing that a lot these past few days, subtly and constantly. I wanted to imprint her on my memory. My mind was still made up that I had to let her go, for her own safety and sanity, but every bit of me bar the logical part of brain was resisting the decision.

  She broke from the kiss and looked down at her hands and I realized she’d been scrolling down the screen of the new burner phone I had bought her.

  “What you looking at?” I said, stretching my hand around and into the front of her panties to play with her clit.

  Her breath hitched and her back arched and I made to inch my fingers inside of her before an image on her phone stole my attention.

  I pulled my hand back out.

  She held the screen up to me, looking confused that I had stopped the foreplay before it started.

  “I found Jules on Facebook,” she said.

  I grabbed the phone from her hands and pinched the screen to enlarge the picture.

  “That motherfucker!”

  Standing grinning in a photo was Yulian Mikhailov, son of Vladimir Mikhailov—or Jules Michaels as the name on the top of the profile called him. He was at a party with his arm around another kid his age. They looked to be in high school—likely one of the prestigious private ones that guys like Vlad tend to send their kids to.

  Guys like Vlad rise to power by executing anyone who gets in their way, but what they want for their kids is for them to rise to power through the execution of memos and hostile company takeovers. They think their children are too good for decent, honest crimes like ours. They’d rather their progeny’s criminal activities be of the white-collared variety.

  But it wasn’t Jules or the knucklehead who stood beside him that had caught my eye. In the background of the photo, laughing like the snake that he was, was a face I recognized—Marc Anthony’s.

  Chapter 13

  Dominic

  The boys had all gathered in the kitchen of the weekend house. Which meant, sadly, that Lexi was fully dressed again. Still, the way those tight jeans clung to her curves was distracting me from the matter at hand.

  As was her ease with Bobby, Tommy, and Vince. When most women were around those guys, knowing what kind of guys they were, they either got this dazed, rabbit-in-the-headlights look or else they turned into giggly, eyelash battering types. The latter variety irritated me. They couldn’t give a fuck about having a conversation or being seen as equal. They just knew that mob guys had money...and if they giggled in just the right way or pushed their chest out, they figured they’d be showered with gifts.

  Not like Lexi. She had so far been appreciative of the things I had bought her—small price, really given how all her things had been destroyed—but she was too independent to see it as her right.

  That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy spoiling her. She was worth every trinket or luxury I could think to buy her. Even if it meant having to FedEx them to her new address…

  I pushed that thought back out of my mind and watched her chat to my brother and my friends. Her face lit up with laughter at frequent intervals as she sipped from her beer; the guys’ faces did too. She had them in stitches laughing.

  She’d figured out that the way to win them over was to ride them mercilessly. So far, she’d teased Bobby about his thick eyebrows, Tommy over the sauce he’d somehow spilled down his front, and Vince about not knowing the difference between Mount Rushmore and the Washington Monument.

  And they were loving every second of it.

  “Hey, Dominic,” Tommy said. “If you’re not careful, one of us will take this one off your hands.”

  It was meant in a joking way, lighthearted, but I bristled at it. The thought of any man but me touching Lexi made me furious.

  “And if you’re not careful, Tommy, someone will beat your ass,” I replied, my tone teasing but my stare dangerous.

  He put up two hands in a placating gesture.

  “Hey, I jest.” He winked at Lexi. “I don’t think the rest of us could handle her anyway. She’d chew us up and spit us out.”

  “Damn right I would,” Lexi said with a throaty laugh and I softened.

  Though my assumption was that I needed to protect her, I was starting to see Lexi in a new light. She was smart, she was strong, and she was confident. More than that, she got shit done.

  As if to prove that point, she tapped the counter lightly.

  “So this rat problem you’ve got,” she said and the guys fell quiet. “Do you call in an exterminator in these situations?”

  Bobby nodded to me. “There’s your exterminator. He has a special skill for getting rid of unwanted pests.”

  I shot my frustration with him over in a glance. So far, Lexi had seen a hint of that side of me. I wanted her to know me as a man before she knew me as a monster.

  But the comparison didn’t seem to faze her. In fact, she smiled and tented her fingers.

  “Good. Because one rat in a building will always attract more. The best thing to do with one is to get rid of it. And get rid of it quickly. Otherwise, before you know it, you have an infestation.”

  Bobby’s eyebrows sprang up at that. I wondered if my expression betrayed my own surprise. Then, I second guessed whether she maybe was talking about literal rats.

  But no. She looked me directly in the eye.

  “You’ve been asking around about where one might find this rat?”

  I gave a short laugh and nodded.

  “Eh, yeah. I’ve got a line on him. I’m setting up a time to set the trap.”

  She sipped her beer again and nodded in return.

  “And the other problem? With the family jewels?”

  It took me a second to realize that she was talking in code—referring to Jules. I hadn’t explicitly told her that she needed to watch what she said—I didn’t think I had to—but she was speaking like the house could be bugged. Which, while it was a slim possibility given the regular sweeps we did, was a possibility.

  Bobby picked up on her coded language faster than I did.

  “Yeah, we’re planning on coming down hard on that problem. I’m figuring out a permanent solution.”

  Lexi let out a low breath over the top of her beer, so that the sound reverberated in the bottle neck.

  “I think you should reconsider that.”

  Tommy’s let out a subtle gasp while Vince became very busy looking at his fingernails all of a sudden. Nobody but me, and sometimes Ma, contradicted Bobby like that.

  I waited for him to explode, to insist I got Lexi’s smart mouth out of here, but he didn’t. Instead, he did the one thing none of us expected: He leaned closer and asked why.

  “Because how you act now decides the next month or year or decade,” she said. “Why expose yourself to retribution when you could make a business rival grateful—so grateful he owes you a favor?”

  Bobby crossed his arms and stared at the ceiling for a second in thought.

  “Tell me more, Lexi.”

  Two nights later, I sat in a coffee shop waiting patiently. When I’d got Vlad on the phone, he’d sounded pleased to hear from me. I was glad he was—it meant I hadn’t misjudged his perception of me.

  It also made it easier for him to agree to come meet me one-on-one. I promised him no catches, no surprises, and no conflict. He had been hesitant at first but agreed with the proviso that he could have one of his guys wait inside the door.

  “Of course,” I’d said. “Whatever makes you comfortable, Vlad. I have nothing to hide.”

  Dominic had begged me not to go. He warned me that I was putting myself in danger. I knew that he was righ
t, but I wouldn’t be dissuaded. If I played the politics of this meeting just right, it would be a win for everybody.

  So, I picked a café on neutral ground and invited Vlad to meet me there. While I waited, I stared out the window. There was a big guy across the road leaning on a wall. One of Vlad’s, I guessed. A sharpshooter who would open fire if so much as a plate dropped near Vlad.

  I repositioned myself so that my back was to the wall. From where I had sat, he would have no clean angle to me through the big front window. Not without winging Vlad in the act. Of course, I also knew that Dominic was idling in his car feet away. He’d promised me he would leave after he scouted the scene and made sure I was safe. I knew he wouldn’t.

  As promised, Vlad showed up at nine o’clock, goon in tow, and I stood to greet him. I stretched out my arms and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  He smiled broadly in return.

  “Thank you so much for meeting me, Vlad,” I said. I waved to the seat that looked directly out window. “Please, please. Sit.”

  Vlad inclined his chin a touch graciously but picked up the wooden chair and moved it closer to me so we would be sitting side by side. I understood; he didn’t want to be in the line of fire either. He covered the tactical move with charm.

  “So I can be near the pretty lady,” he said.

  I didn’t call him on the untruth. He had a right to protect himself.

  A waitress came to the table and refilled my coffee. She wiggled the pot at Vlad and he put up one hand to refuse.

  “I think best if we just get down to it?” he said to me.

  “Indeed,” I said. “That sounds best to me.”

  He looked at me with interest, his grey brows raised into slight peaks.

  “I confess I am intrigued, Ms. Wilson. What did you have to speak to me about that could not be done by phone? And why alone?”

  “Please, call me Lexi,” I said. “My friends do.”

  He smiled slightly but made no verbal reply. I took a second to think about my next words, even though I had been rehearsing this scene—and playing out all the eventualities—for days.