Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 125243 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 501(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125243 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 501(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
“Answer me, goddamn it!” I kick out so firmly I knock him back two spots. His crash into the table housing champagne glasses should fill me with victory.
I feel nothing close to a winner.
“I have rights. You said it earlier. Things are different in Carlisle, so you have no right to…”
My words trail off as he clicks his fingers at someone to his left. They hand him a large strip of duct tape, and unease tumbles through my stomach like a washing machine.
“What’s that for—” He flattens the duct tape over my mouth, silencing me.
Being silenced doesn’t end my fight. I keep thrashing and kicking. My movements are so abrupt that if Matteo had forgotten he shredded my panties off my body, he can’t anymore. The hem of my dress almost resembles a belt. It sits dangerously high on my thighs, mere millimeters from exposing me to the half a dozen men who followed us into the jet.
And I’m not the only one noticing.
With his narrowed gaze burning my skin, Matteo clicks his fingers again. When he’s only given a strip of tape long enough to secure my wrist to the armchair, he snatches the tape out of the man’s grasp before he pulls off a piece as long as he is tall.
He tugs down my dress’s hem before securing the fragile fabric to my knees with tape.
My nostrils flare. He’s acting like a possessive jerk, which makes no sense. He said just minutes ago that he bartered only for me to suck his dick. I coughed up the goods in minutes. It might have been before I told him I still wanted to marry Antonio, but he had decided before then.
He instructed the driver to take the long way to Lombardo—the exact name of this private airstrip. That was before I sucked his dick, and long before I reminded him of my plans.
He always intended to get rid of me. He just made sure he got off first.
Pig.
After securing a large piece of tape to the minute bit of cleavage the V-neckline of my dress exposes, he dumps a duffel bag at my feet.
“There’s enough in there to set you up anywhere you want to go.” After wetting his dry lips, he lifts and locks his eyes with mine. “You can go anywhere you want… except back to him.”
Tears burn behind my eyes.
I can’t leave. I don’t have a choice. I must marry Antonio. It is the only option.
Matteo doesn’t seem skilled at mind reading.
After a brief glance at my flustered cheeks and panting chest, he moves back toward the exit. Tears prick my eyes when the wind outside flaps out his jacket.
It could be my imagination—my panic is at an all-time high—but I swear he murmurs, “Goodbye, la mia tigrotta,” half a second before the air hostesses close the jet’s door with him on one side and me on the other.
Chapter 5
Matteo
Cool night air slices through my coat like a blade when I finally leave the basement of the Adami estate. It’s refreshing after spending hours below ground, causing havoc. A metal door slams shut behind us with an echoing finality that vibrates through my bones and settles in a place I don’t let anyone see.
A long torture scene in a basement reveals the ugliest truths about our world that seep into the bloodstream. Nothing can wash them away. They’re too dark and deprived, and they whir beneath my skin long after the lights go out.
Antonio Adami is still alive. He shouldn’t be. He would have been a memory by now—a stain on the concrete, a problem erased—if Azra hadn’t heeded my warning.
She didn’t say his name again. Not once.
Well, not vocally.
I heard her silent pleas when I taped her to the chair in the private jet.
For some fucked-up reason, she wanted to continue her arrangement with Antonio.
Fucked if I know why, but the thought made me furious.
I went harder on Antonio than I’d intended when I returned to the Adami compound to assist Nico and Elio with the retribution we’d arrived to exact.
He’s alive, but it’ll take him more than a few weeks to lick his wounds.
He may never get over hearing in explicit detail how well his once-fiancée gives head to a cut penis. I told my story with so much truth that he hardly flinched as I carelessly removed his foreskin from the flabby bit of muscle I’ll remove completely if it ever gets within sniffing distance of Azra again.
His beatdown after his circumcision with a blunt knife should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Azra kept slipping into my thoughts like smoke under a door, impossible to block out and ignore. I’m irritated as fuck by how quickly she unraveled me. I spent years building walls higher than anyone could scale, but somehow, she climbed the summit without even breaking a sweat.