“I’ll keep your secrets as I’ve promised. I will obey you as I swore before God. But I won’t kiss you.”
He pinched my chin and turned my face to his. “You are my wife. You will kiss me when I say.”
A thrill ran through me. As I suspected, he only possessed so much willpower.
The same thought must’ve dawned on him because he released my face and picked up my robe. “Go to bed.”
I put my hands over my breasts. “You’re rejecting me?”
He held the robe open, and I reluctantly slipped into it. “You’re on your period anyway,” he said.
“You said that wouldn’t stop you.”
“And it won’t.” A wolfish grin spread across his face as he adjusted the shoulder of the robe so it didn’t touch the tattoo. “With the life I’ve led, do you think a little blood scares me?”
“Then why are you sending me away?”
He tied my sash into a firm knot. “Do you have any idea what you’re asking for?”
Disappointment seeped through me. My only weapon against him had failed me. “I’m not asking for anything,” I said sharply. “I’m giving you what you need.”
“And I’m not asking you to submit to the inevitable,” he said. “Only that you come to me because you want to.”
“That will never happen.”
“Then I will never fuck you, because I am not a rapist.” He walked around to my back, gathering my hair in a loose ponytail and freeing it from the collar of the robe. With his mouth at my ear, he said, “Don’t get me wrong. I could bend your naked body over every flat surface of this office. I could chain your ankles to my bed post and fuck you raw for days on end. I could push your tits up against the window and make you look down on everyone as I finger you with such restraint that you’d beg me to finish you off while your juices drip over my hand and run down the glass.”
I couldn’t breathe. My thighs shook, and it wasn’t from fear. An entire world of possibility opened up to me—a frightening world in which I actually wanted to experience all the things Cristiano had just said. In which I craved to be humiliated, dominated, and ruined by the king himself.
“Nobody’s stopping you, Cristiano,” I said breathlessly.
“You know what’s stopping me.”
“You’re not interested,” I said to provoke him.
“Back up and feel how interested I am.”
I did, closing the distance between us. My heart pounded as I pressed my ass against his hardness. I reached back to touch him, but he caught my wrist. “I could do all those things to you and more, Natalia. But it would mean nothing to me if you didn’t want it. Go back upstairs and don’t come to me again until your sweet pussy is so wet with need for me, that if you sat on my lap, I’d slide right in.”
I opened my mouth, silently gasping from his words, from the tidal wave of arousal that washed over me. I wanted all of that. But his determination not to break spoke volumes.
Nothing scared a man as powerful as Cristiano. But this did. The fear of becoming his father ran deep in him. As deep as his cock was hard.
“Fly away, mariposa,” he said heatedly in my ear. “I can picture exactly what I want to do with you first, and I’m dangerously close to giving in.”
I drew back my shoulders triumphantly. “What do you want?”
“To see how far down your throat I can fit my cock.”
I inhaled sharply, shocked, and yet the words were nothing to him. He tossed them between us like a bag of groceries, amused at how I stood there gaping.
“I have work to do.” He turned his back. “Go.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. The idea of a penis in my throat was enough to send me upstairs—but slowly. I could barely walk as desire mounted in me. Why? It was beyond wrong to be aroused at the idea of taking Cristiano so brutally in my mouth. If Diego had ever said such a thing to me, I might never have spoken to him again. But to hear Cristiano tell me what he wanted to do to me so resolutely, without apology, my instinct to kneel and let him push the boundaries of my comfort—and my body—was alarming. I was tempted to throw myself at his mercy and have him exert his ceaseless dominance over my mouth. And equal was my craving to get him to pass his limits and give in to his desires—so he could hate himself for it.
Something was changing, but it wasn’t in him. It was in me.
Yet, perhaps changing was the wrong word. What if all along, I’d wanted those filthy things he’d said, but I’d been denying myself?
I’d known when he’d taken me in his arms at the costume party despite my refusal that my power came from his weakness for me.
I had failed tonight, yet it didn’t feel like it. I’d tested the waters, and they were warm and inviting. Having something he wanted—to fuck me—and something he could never have—my devotion—emboldened me.
Just as much as my building desire for him terrified me.
18
Natalia
I woke in the dead of night to a warm, soothing touch. I didn’t remember falling asleep, only lying on my stomach, replaying Cristiano’s filthy, arousing words over and over again. I’d had to resist from touching myself so he wouldn’t walk in and catch me in the act. So he wouldn’t see firsthand the effect he was having on me.
Cristiano cleaned my tattoo with a damp towel so gently that I closed my eyes and let him finish without protest.
Afterward, he cleared my hair from my neck and smoothed his hand over my back as my mother had done when I was small. “Marked but still flawless,” he murmured.
I drifted. Maybe. I wasn’t sure. He’d stopped touching me but still weighed down my side of the bed. I opened my eyes, blinking over my shoulder until he came into view, sitting with his head in his hands.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered.
He shook his head. I didn’t actually expect him to confide in me, but he said, “A problem I can’t solve. Every time I get close, I seem to end up further from the answer.”
I sat up, pulling the sheet with me and tucking it under my arms. The raw emotion in his face made my heart do something funny. Something unwelcome. I didn’t need to have spent much time with Cristiano to understand he wouldn’t show this side of himself to many people. For any cartel leader, vulnerability could mean death. But for Cristiano, control was everything, and in this moment, I sensed he didn’t have it.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Be useful.”
Of course.
There was only one way he saw me as useful, and that was on my back. I was an idiot for offering my condolences. I started to lie back down to sleep when he spoke again. “Advise me.”
“What?”
“Be useful and advise me on this issue,” he said.
“You have men for that.”
“They tell me to drop it.” He shrugged one shoulder. “That I’ve been pursuing it too long. They don’t see the pay off, only that I’m emotionally attached.”
Having had the most emotional attachment possible severed—that between a mother and daughter—I understood. “There’s no room for emotional attachments when you choose this life.”
He stared at me as if he’d seen a ghost and his voice dropped so low I had to lean in to hear him. “Do you really believe that?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “They’re dangerous. But I wouldn’t want to know anyone who didn’t have them—those attachments remind us that we’re human.”
Elbows on his knees, he bent his head and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Despite what you may think, I am human. I do feel the loss of things I once had and crave those I never can, no matter how badly I want them.”
“What things?” I asked.
“My needs aren’t different just because I’m . . .” He gestured at himself. “This.”
My heart tugged. Of course I’d known I didn’t have to show Cristiano the monster inside himself. He knew his demons, as we all did.
“Never get attached
,” he said. “Never.”
I sensed he was speaking from experience—intimate experience. He’d learned that lesson the hard way. “Who taught you that?”
He hesitated, then looked over at me, both drinking me in and fighting himself. “My father. But I am attached. So, tell me, Natalia. What would you do in my position? I have a gut instinct I can’t ignore. A theory I can’t prove. A need that only this missing piece can meet.”
He’d shown me carnal need earlier, but this one ran deeper. Why come to me for help? He was the one man in my life who shouldn’t care about anything more than my body. And what he was asking here was no small thing—my opinion, my advice. On cartel business.
For that grave reason alone, I attempted to put aside my situation and walk in his shoes. He had more than a cartel in his care. He had an entire town, and most people in it had suffered in some form or another. They depended on him. He’d been described to me as a leader, provider, savior—even a guiding light. I hadn’t believed any of it until I’d seen it with my own eyes. Most men would either buckle under the pressure or let that kind of authority go to their heads. Maybe he had done both, but he was still standing.
Or sitting, rather—at my bedside, so he could talk this through with me.
I shifted against the headboard. “What do you stand to lose?”
“There may never be pay off, but there will always be risk.” He blew out a sigh, thinking. “My resources are better spent other places—commanding a business that allows me to keep the Badlands running. I’d be taking up resources that save lives.”
Helping others was more than important to him. It was his way of life. I still wasn’t sure why, or if he had ulterior motives, but if people were better off in the end, wasn’t that for the best? “And what do you have to gain?”
He dropped his hands between his knees. “Peace of mind. And something I want very much. Suddenly, it’s within reach—if I’m right and can prove my suspicions.”
I inched a little closer. “Is it dangerous?”
His eyebrows cinched. “How so?”
“You traffic weapons. Is it something that will give you inexorable power over other cartels?”
“What if it was? Would you tell me to grab it before someone else could?”
I pulled my knees against my chest under the sheet. The right weapon in the wrong hands could be devastating. But to use it as an offense wasn’t any better. Obliterating others to save myself was something I didn’t think I could live with. “No.”
“Smart girl. A weapon of mass destruction was a good guess,” he said. “But wrong answer. We’ll have to work on that.”
I frowned, a sliver of dread twisting through me.
“This mission isn’t just for me, but my reasons for pursuing it are selfish—”
“How?”
He blinked at me, moonlight bathing him. Even when I’d hated him fiercely, I hadn’t been able to ignore how devastatingly handsome he was. But in this moment, with his pain showing, his beauty was a thing of wonder. “It’s selfish because as someone who’s had nothing, I recognize how much I have now,” he said. “And I’m grateful for it. But I want more, Natalia.”
“More?” I asked under a coat of goose bumps. “Power? Money?”
“It’s not about money. I’ve already spent enough money and time pursuing it, only to come up empty-handed.”
“Then why continue?”
He cupped one hand over the other, forming a fist nearly as big as a child’s head. His knuckles whitened, and a familiar tremor moved through me. I’d seen this kind of contained fury before, and I’d missed it—in Diego. “Revenge?”
He stared straight ahead. “When is it ever not about that?” he asked.
“But it’s never only that.” Cristiano, like his brother, had also witnessed his parents’ death. It was a scene I’d envisioned many times, but for the first time, I saw him in the room, too—not just Diego. “Revenge stems from other things, like pain. Are you in pain?”
Slowly, to my surprise, he nodded, but to my even greater surprise, it broke my heart a little. They’d only been boys. This boy, in front of me, had experienced something from which he hadn’t healed. And he was here now, asking for permission to find what he needed. Maybe even looking to me for more. That was a new kind of power, not sexual or physical, and not the kind of emotional we’d been dealing with up until this point. These wounds lived deep, amongst distrust and lost hope.
“I’ve been through this with Diego,” I said. “If it’s revenge you seek, leave it. If it’s against me or my father, I beg you to see how we’ve already suffered.”
“It’s not against you, my lovely wife. I promised you earlier tonight, and I meant it—where you’re concerned, I’m done scheming. But for you, I still want many things. Not just revenge, but closure, happiness, even love.”
My throat threatened to close with the conviction in his voice. Revenge and closure. Those two things could tempt the devil. They fit easily into my life, but into many areas—revenge and closure for my mother. My father. Or against Diego. Cristiano too. Happiness and love were murkier—and much scarier coming from Cristiano’s mouth. “You’re a formidable man. I don’t need to tell you that.”
“I am.”
“So why can’t you take this like you do everything else?”
“It can only be given.”
An eerie feeling fell over me with the familiar words. I had been given to him. So was it a person? Was he trying to command the same loyalty, devotion, and fidelity from someone else that he’d tried to from me?
“I have tried taking it regardless,” he said with resignation. “Now, what I wonder, is just how much I’d give up.” He paused, running both hands over his face. “I have unmet needs. And a fierce desire for answers. I want to regain a sense of what I lost. I want . . .”
My heart pounded with the yearning to understand how I could give such a powerful man and equally broken boy what he wanted. Maybe even what he needed. “What?” I asked softly.
“If I go on, I may confront things I’m not sure I want to know. And in the end, there’s no guarantee I’ll get what I want.” His jaw firmed as if it was difficult to admit. “That I’ll even meet those needs.”
It was clear to me he needed to do this. There was nothing Cristiano couldn’t have if he set his mind to it. But I also knew Cristiano had to figure that out on his own—and I could help him get there.
“Not knowing the truth will drive me mad.” Frustration seeped into his voice. “But if I keep looking for it, I may go mad before I get there.”
“Then leave it,” I said.
He pulled back, his eyes finding mine. “Just like that?”
“Could you get hurt?”
“Tell me you don’t want me to, and I’ll promise you I won’t.”
I bit my lip to hide a smile, thankful for darkness to conceal my pinkening cheeks. “Will it hurt others?” I asked.
“Only those who deserve it.”
“Did those men tonight deserve it?”
“You tell me.” The silhouette of his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “I don’t need to explain where they meant to take Sandra and those girls—or what they meant to do.”
I’d seen the bound-and-gagged with my own eyes. I’d seen more these past couple weeks than I had in a lifetime, beginning with the inside of a sicario’s head. Papá had tried to keep me from witnessing the dark side of this world, and pretty much everything else—while Cristiano had made me watch him deliver death by machete.
Was he steeling me for things that may come my way? Our way? Protecting me by arming me? He’d put his body in front of mine more than once, and deep down I knew he would again if I needed him to. But if ever the day came that he wasn’t there, then what?
“My father and Diego never would’ve brought me along tonight,” I said.
“It was risky,” he admitted. “But such is life. The more you see, the less it will shock you if you ever enco
unter it. I can’t have you puking every time you see blood and guts, or this marriage will never work.”
My stomach protested, despite the fact that it was another attempt at a sinister joke.
“I wouldn’t have brought you if I wasn’t ninety-nine percent confident in my team,” he said.
“And the one percent?”
“One-hundred percent confidence is a death wish. And if you weren’t confident in me, you wouldn’t have come. Were you scared?”
I stared back at him. “Yes. But I won’t be as scared next time.”
“And even less the time after that,” he said with a nod of approval. “Do you see me differently now?”
I tilted my head. Contoured by shadows, his bicep flexed. I did see him differently. He had always been a man who could hurt me and innocent people. But now, he was also a man who could hurt others. Those who weren’t innocent. The ones immune to the law. Sinners to which God had seemingly turned a blind eye. There were plenty of those around who were never made to pay for their crimes.
I had a very powerful husband, not just in physique, but in dominion. His reach was long, far, and unforgiving.
If I’d learned anything from my mother, it was that behind every powerful man stood a stronger woman.
And if I’d learned one thing from Jazmín, it was that I could control a powerful man with my mouth—and not by telling him what to do.
Indecision warred on his face. The dark, hauntingly beautiful face that hid fears, grief, and heartbreak. I could tell with eyes like his that he’d seen things. He already knew the answer he was looking for, but he needed me to confirm it.
Would I let him suffer, or would I free him to pursue and conquer what ailed him?
I glanced at my hands and considered the best way to urge him forward. What came to mind was the universal currency around here—one we’d both been dealing in. Power, and it came in endless forms. “How much money do you have?” I asked.
His eyebrow rose at the brusque change in topic. “Enough,” he said. “And more coming in every day. You’ll never have to worry.”
I peeled back the sheet, put one foot on the ground, and then the other. After rising from the bed, I stepped softly until I stood before him. He followed my every move with bottomless eyes, willing me closer so he could suck me into his universe.
Violent Ends (White Monarch Book 2) Page 23
