by Zara Cox
Petrosyan’s jaw flexes, but he nods. “Okay, then let’s talk our business. Economy is in toilet. I need to raise prices—”
“Two hundred thousand a month. Fifty thousand dollars more for the same deal.”
He looks off to the side, pulls on his cuffs, and then his fish eyes dart back to me. “I am thinking a cool quarter million has nice ring to it, no?”
“Fine. Deal. Are we done?”
Surprise livens his eyes for a few seconds before his gaze turns speculative. “You must really want to…how you say, shank it to my former business partner, hmm?”
“Yes, I must really want to stick it to him.”
The turn of phrase baffles him for a second then he gives up in favor of confirming that I’ve really folded and given him a one-hundred-thousand-dollar price hike after a two-minute negotiation.
Now that he’s satisfied, I turn to leave.
“I would sleep with gun under my pillow if I had someone like you for enemy,” he states.
I look over my shoulder. He’s watching me carefully. Trying to read the unreadable. “Then it’s a good thing we’re friends, isn’t it? And you do sleep with a gun under your pillow.”
He laughs. “Well, for you, I would make it two guns.”
“You keep your end of the bargain, and you will never need to.”
He catches the warning in my voice, and the laughter fades. “You keep up payments, and we won’t have problem.” He clicks his fingers for his girls.
Our battle lines redrawn, I return to the bar in time to spot Cleo raising a nearly empty champagne glass to her lips. My jaw clenches. Added to the two shots of tequila, I’m uncertain what the result will be. So I sharpen my focus with an even more vicious blade. Everything falls away as I saturate myself with her presence.
Every breath. Every blink.
I catch the moment her hips sway, ever so slightly, to the throbbing rock anthem.
The move resonates through me like the cuts of memory’s blade. In an instant, I’m thrown back to the bedroom in the pool house I claimed the day I turned eighteen. It was the single thing I requested when my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday. The need to distance myself from my father had grown into a visceral, unbearable ache. My mother saw it. She granted my request, despite my father’s firm refusal. It was most likely what earned her the black eye two days later.
I don’t know because I didn’t ask. It would’ve been useless to do so anyway. She would’ve lied. And I was too selfish, too thankful for the mercy of not having to live under the same roof as my father, to rock the boat.
So I claimed my tiny piece of heaven in hell. And it was there that Cleo danced for me for the first time. Where we celebrated a lot of firsts.
That particular memory flames through the charred pits of my mind. I don’t fight it. Like the fleeting moments of pleasure and pain, it will be gone in an instant, devoured by the putrefying cancer that lives within me.
Sure enough, it’s gone from one heartbeat to the next, and I’m left with rotting remnants of what once was.
“All taken care of, boss.”
I snap my head to the side. Cici’s standing next to me. Her gaze slides over me from head to toe before it settles on my face. She’s wearing that special do me smile she’s worn since she started working here six weeks ago. I made the mistake of fucking her as part of her interview process. I shouldn’t have. I could pardon myself by making the excuse that her presence in my office that day coincided with the first call in three years from Ronan, my oldest brother.
Ronan. Daddy’s boy through and through, right down to the pansy-assed ring on his left pinkie.
Like one hundred percent of our interactions, that call hadn’t gone well. So I needed an outlet. It was either a fist through a wall or my cock in a pussy. I chose pussy. I refuse to make excuses for that choice. Because what’s the point of having a black soul, of making choices that leave your hands permanently soiled in evil, if you don’t fucking own it? But I do admit to a modicum of regret. She’s not the first employee I’ve fucked, but usually I’m a little more circumspect with my choices. My blinding rage prevented me from seeing that ill-disguised, you-fuck-me-I-own-you light in Cici’s eyes until it was too late.
Now, irritatingly, ever since our one encounter, the ever-growing stench of possessiveness clings to her every time she’s in my presence.
She sidles closer now. “Is there anything else you need?” she says in a low, intimate voice. “I couldn’t help but notice that both you and your friend are wound up tighter than a drum tonight. I…I can help relieve your stress…if you want?”
In the next minute, she’ll find an excuse to touch me. I’m slammed with the smell of cheap perfume and shameless arousal. Because my senses are wide open and raw, I take a deeper hit than I normally would. Which makes me direct more anger at her than I know is warranted.
“Cici?”
“Yes, boss?” she responds with a breathy eagerness.
“Fuck off and do your job,” I snarl.
She recoils with shame and turns red-faced toward the bar.
“Jesus, twice in one night. You’d think I have a disease or something,” she mutters under her breath as she busies herself collecting a drinks order from the bartender.
I feel no remorse when she walks away in a huff. I don’t give a shit what’s got her ass in a vise or who else she’s hit on tonight. Under normal circumstances, her feelings matter very little to me. Tonight, I care even less.
When she moves away, I exhale and glance at my watch. On Tuesday nights, the club shuts at three a.m. It’s almost one. Two more hours to go.
I brace myself before I raise my head.
It does absolutely nothing to buffer the potency of Cleo’s stare or the effect of the evil little smile I see playing at her lips when our eyes hook into each other.
She’s under my skin, where she’s lived for seventeen years. And she knows it.
Fifth Harmony’s “Work” blasts from the speakers. The hard beat and dirty lyrics produce a lusty sway of her hips. The look in her eyes and the movement of her body are almost dichotomous. Her eyes tell me she hates me. Her body beckons me with the promise of transcendental lust.
I should retreat to my office where I can watch her from the relative safety of security cameras. Or walk the other upper and lower floors, greet a few VIPs who would love a personal acknowledgement from me.
Fuck that.
I stay put and nod tersely at a few regulars who are brave enough to breach the no-fly zone around me. When my bartender slides a glass of Scotch to me, I pick it up and down it.
Cleo and I play the staring game until she reaches for her phone once more. She toys with it for a beat before her slender fingers fly over it.
My blood thrums harder as I take my phone out and read her message.
“Stop this, Axel. Be a man. Come over here and talk to me.”
My cheek twitches in an imitation of a smile. “You’re not senile, I hope, so you wouldn’t have forgotten that I don’t rise to dares. Or taunts.”
“Dammit. What do I have to do?”
Those six little words send all the blood fleeing from my heart. It turns harder than stone, and my vision blurs for several seconds. I cannot believe her gall. “You’re eight years too late with that question, sweetheart.”
Her head snaps up. She’s breathing hard. She shakes her head. I’m not sure if it’s denial, disbelief or a plea. It’s probably none of those things. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve attributed a benign sentiment to her actions only to be shown the true depths of her traitorous heart.
My phone buzzes again. This time there’s a single word on my screen.
“Axel.”
A whispered caress. An entreaty. A demand.
It’s a thousand other things. All wrapped in sugared poison. I push away from the counter, despising the knots in my stomach and the steel in my cock. I feel her gaze on my back as I stalk through the door n
ext to bar that leads to my office.
Shot after shot of adrenaline spikes through my bloodstream until dark, volatile sensation drenches me to my fingertips. My office door slams behind me, and I throw the bolt, as if locking myself in will prevent my growing insanity.
Already I want to tear the door off its hinges and rush back to the bar. I force my feet the other way and throw myself into my chair. High on the wall, the screens reflect the various areas of the club. My eyes zero in on her. I don’t even fool myself into thinking that she’s as defenseless as she looks. Her skin may look satin smooth, but it’s coated with steel armor.
Deliberately, I shut off the feed to that camera and activate my phone. As I type, I silently urge her to accept my words.
“You’re free to leave. Take me seriously and Do. Not. Come. Back.”
As I power off my phone, the full extent of my weakness cannons through me. I don’t want her to come back, and I don’t want to hear her out for one reason alone.
She’s here because of my father.
She’s here on behalf of the man I hate more than anything else in the world. The man who made sure that, at nineteen, I would never have the option of redemption as long as I lived.
For a few years, I thought he would be satisfied with helping the devil stain my soul. But no. He’s still after me. He’s used his sentries in the form of my brothers, and now he’s pulling out the big guns. I give him kudos for sending Cleo. With each visit, I’ve felt my edges crumbling away.
Despite everything I feel for her, I’ve tortured myself with the urge to give in. To hear that voice up close and personal. To smell her. Touch her.
Is her skin still the softest satin I’ve relived in my dreams?
Jesus.
I crave all of it even when I know it will be the last straw once she speaks the words she’s been sent to deliver.
The Rutherfords and the McCarthys.
Once unlikely allies turned bitter enemies. Two dynastic families with feet firmly entrenched in underground crime. Drugs. Girls. Racketeering. Extortion.
Murder.
Between the two of us, we changed the course of our families’ destinies. And I intend to change it even more. I intend to annihilate the Rutherford name until there’s nothing left.
In a family of cold-hearted black sheep, I, Axel Rutherford, am the blackest. Abundantly despised by my three brothers, actively hated by my father.
She was the golden princess. Put on earth to test every single one of my hardened edges. And I happily burned away every last one for her.
But my reward wasn’t forever with her.
Instead she turned away from me. And crawled into my father’s bed.
Chapter Two
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
The howls of hell’s demons eventually stop once the club is empty of patrons. Stomach clenched, I turn on the monitors, zoom in on where she was. She’s gone. The relief I should feel is painfully missing.
I stand, already punching in my assistant manager’s number to let him know I’m leaving as I stride out of my office and out of XYNYC. In the city that never sleeps, the stale stench of humanity and rough sounds buffet me when I step out, but I welcome it as I walk the short distance to the underground parking garage where my black McLaren Spider waits.
Its throaty roar echoes the one prowling inside me so I slam my foot on the gas and revel in the squeal of tires when I skid onto the street.
Twenty minutes later, I park in another allotted spot beneath another building I own.
The Punishment Club started out as a sick private joke, a way to find a less hellish outlet during a period when time on my hands was an even more dangerous thing than the average death-wishing that was my constant reality.
In New York City, it didn’t take long for it to become clear that there was an outlet for every problem. And very often, the more extreme the outlet the better.
When Black Widow, my now-manageress at the Punishment Club, suggested we open the club for six months, tops, to alleviate our boredom, it was done on a drunken shrug-fuck-it-why-not basis. Six months turned to one year, then another. Now, the club is bringing in nearly as much monthly income as XYNYC with almost five hundred applicants creaming themselves to become members.
Unlike most underground clubs, there’s nothing dungeon-like about the Punishment Club. It soars into Hell’s Kitchen’s skyline like the fat fuck you it is, right down to the giant red double doors gracing the Victorian front entrance. Others cautioned a little discretion when it came to advertising the club’s presence. I countered with a fuck no, although I conceded to a less glamorous side entrance for the politicians and priests who didn’t want their shibari-while-wearing-baby-clothes addictions whispered about or publicly witnessed.
I may be insane but I’m not stupid. Not when it comes to money anyway. My acumen where money is concerned is what turned the two-hundred-and-fifty thousand-dollar online gambling windfall when I was nineteen into billions at age twenty-nine.
I enter the code in the wall panel, and the double doors spring open. An elaborate, tiered chandelier lights the marble-floored foyer. There are no whips or instruments of torture announcing the true function of this place. In fact, as I walk down a short hallway and enter the main reception area of the club, the strains of Evanescence-type music and the sound of clinking glasses would fool anyone into thinking this is an ordinary club. To be fair, at this time of the morning, most patrons are secreted away in their various rooms so the usual hints are well hidden.
No so well hidden is the woman hanging right above my head as I enter the heart of the ground-floor club area, completely naked and bound with chains, her long red hair hanging free, and her legs splayed open. Her eyes are fixed at a specific point on the ceiling, where a phallic-shaped bowl tilts hot, blood-red wax straight between her legs. With each hit, she flinches, and tears spill freely down her temples.
Although there are about two dozen members milling around, she’s the only one receiving her punishment in plain sight. I side step the silver wax-collecting receptacle on the floor beneath her and make my way to the hostess’s area.
The girl behind the desk looks up, her eyes widening a touch when she sees me. As I hand her my coat, I see her checking me out but she, unlike Cici, is careful not to engage me in conversation. She hands over the dark purple key card that will grant me admittance into the sanctum sanctorum six floors above.
“The Black Widow?” I ask. My voice is gruff, almost hoarse, but she hears me.
“On the third floor with a client,” she responds, eyes of indeterminate color meeting mine for a second before she lowers her gaze. “She’s almost done. Shall I let her know you’re here?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She nods and turns away. A waitress comes toward me with a tumbler of Scotch on a silver platter. I take it and knock it back then make my way to the private elevator. With a swipe of my card, the doors open.
Seconds later, I’m on the sixth floor. Black carpeting and expensively paneled walls muffle my footsteps as I head to the room at the end of the long hallway. On both sides, steel doors and soundproof walls seal away men and women giving in to their basest proclivities in the name of punishment. Some are as innocuous as a “teacher” forcing a “student” to read dense poetry. Others are…not.
The Black Widow is in charge of making sure we don’t step outside the law or breach safety rules, but as owner of the establishment, I’m privy to all members and potential members’ punishment requests should I wish to see them. I’ve seen a few. Enough to know, were greed and money my priorities, my bank balance would be ten times fatter than it currently is since I’ve declined more members’ applications than I’ve accepted.
Nothing much in this life makes my stomach turn. Not anymore. But even I know to leave some things alone.
Besides, with my years-long plan to bring down the Rutherford kingdom now approaching its crescendo, I don’t need further
distractions. Keeping people like Vardan Petrosyan on my side is more than enough work.
Standing in front of the cold steel door that is the entrance to my personal hell party, I hesitate. Would I be better off taking the safer route of getting hammered and sleeping it off?
No.
I’ll only wake up in a worse state. A state where the temptation to slide behind the wheel of my McLaren Spider and hunt down my father may get too big to contain. It’s happened before. I’ve stood over his bed and stared down at him. In the inky, soulless black of that night, homicide was as soft and seductive and deadly as a kiss. To this day, I have no recollection of how I walked away. What triggered me to step back? I don’t want to know.
All I know is that the time to be back in that room isn’t here yet. It’s coming. But until then…
I reach out and touch the door. The cold from the steel seeps into my pores, chills enough to ground me in the present. With my left hand, I swipe the card again. I push the door open, take a breath, and step into the room.
“Lights.”
Sensors heed my voice, and the room is bathed in soft light. I prowl forward into the windowless, drapeless room, my attention on the single piece of furniture in the space. Behind me, the door swings closed on a soft whispered click, sealing me into my prison. Three steps down and I’m in the dead center of the circular, sunken room.
Another few steps and I stand before it.
The chair is wide and low and squat, with four iron claws bolted into the floor. It could’ve afforded comfort if I’d allowed it. Instead it is stark, the cast iron back high and rigid enough to make my spine protest even before I’ve taken a seat. The broad metal armrests are also sturdy to accommodate the hours I intend to spend in the chair. Beside the front legs, two metal cuffs lie open, attached to titanium chains.
