Chapter Twenty-Two
Callen
My gaze hadn’t left her, not for one second, as I watched her work her four-hour shift at the diner, and even now, as she sits next to me in my car, she’s all I can see in my mind’s eye.
But then again, it’s easy to watch her move, smile, breathe, and feel her soft, innocent presence all around me. Doesn’t help my cock in any way, and neither does her scent. She isn’t wearing any of the hundreds of bottles of perfume in her closet. Instead, she smells fresh and powdery with a hint of rose. Every time she moves, the fragrance of her shampoo—vanilla or something else—hits me hard.
I flustered her when I told her I would lay my whole cock inside her, raw, if we found her not wearing her wedding ring again. The way her eyes widened, and that soft, shocked gasp escaped her lips made me think of her pussy fluttering against the hardness of my dick inside her.
The hem of her checkered skirt flares out to just above her knees, and now seated next to me, she gives me a sweet hint of her silky thighs. She’s removed her jacket since I made sure the car was warm enough for her, and the perfect shape of her breasts is molded through the matching shirt she’s wearing, and I remember what her nipples feel like in my mouth, feeding me.
She’s barely wearing any makeup, and her hair is tied into a ponytail, leaving the thick, soft satin length hanging down her back. Even after a four-hour shift, she still looks as fresh as she did when she walked out of the house toward me.
Fuck. This girl has us wrapped around her little finger and doesn’t even know it. All she has to do is breathe, and we’re fucked. She may want to kill us with her bare hands right now, but she doesn’t know we would move the world for her and everyone in it if she asked.
The Ursid men have always taken what they wanted—no questions asked, no permission sought. It’s not entitlement when it comes to us taking what we want; it’s a primal need, and we’re ruled by that. It’s in our DNA. And Livia speaks to the most basic part of our beings in a way we didn’t think possible.
She’s smart, brave, and kind, and she treats everyone with the same respect and the same sweet smile on her face. From the homeless people she went looking for to feed in the alley to the customers at the diner. Well, she doesn’t smile at us when she looks our way, and that makes me grin.
Despite being so young and helpless, she”s determined to let us know she isn’t scared of us, even if she is. Doesn’t she know we’ll never hurt her, not that way at least?
We’re never letting her go. No other man on this planet will ever touch her. In time, she’ll realize that since we aren’t known for verbal declarations, we’ll be showing her instead that she rules our world.
I stop at a red light, and a message comes through on my phone. There are actually two messages, and both are tasks I need to take care of. Well, one is a business task, and the other is personal.
~~~****~~~~
Livia
I honestly don’t think I can continue doing this with these men. All three of them send my body into a vortex of darkness, where I’m fighting to remain myself against this other person inside me I don’t recognize, whose world gets muddled and whose body gets hot and flustered in their company.
The only thing I know is that my life will never be the same again.
“Do you mind if we make a stop first? Two stops, actually,” the man sitting beside me, who consumes me and makes breathing a struggle, says.
I shake my head, although I know Callen is only being polite by asking me. I’m just their glorified prisoner after all, since the one thing I asked was to go home, and that didn’t turn out well for me at all—I’m still here, ruled by these three men who think they own me. It’s dangerous on so many levels for me to be tethered to them like this.
My gaze drops to Callen’s hands on the wheel yet again as he makes a left turn. He handles the car as if he’s seduced it, and it’ll do anything for him with the merest prompt.
“Maybe you can help me?”
“With what?” I ask without hesitation.
“With saving a little girl,” Callen says.
“Whose child, is it?”
“The child of a mother who was eaten by a bear.”
“Is that a joke? A Three Bears joke?” I ask, but there’s a frown on my face. We’ve moved through the city and are heading to what looks like a very dangerous, rough part that is probably run by gangs. Where Jimmy’s is located looks like a plush neighborhood compared to this.
“It’s not a joke, unfortunately,” Callen says, unperturbed or completely oblivious to the groups of men we pass standing on corners and making a concerted effort to show they’re armed.
“She was put in a glass cage with a bear that was deliberately starved.”
“Who would do such a thing?” I ask with shocked incredulity in my voice.
“Kirill Yenin.”
“What?” I whisper. Intuitively, I know Callen is telling me the truth. I’m just having a hard time believing my father wanted me to marry a man like that.
“Yenin is a dangerous man, Livia, with an army and an ambition to rule the world.”
My mind spins nonstop. They’ve told me Kirill Yenin, who is supposed to be my father’s new partner at the law firm, is the head of a Russian mafia outfit, while I believed he was a lawyer. They told me my father works for Kirill Yenin, which essentially means he’s working for a crime boss. A sick, depraved crime boss by the sounds of it.
And yet, the three men who have kidnapped me are heads of a crime syndicate themselves. How am I embroiled in this world now?
“And you’re not dangerous? How are you any different from him? You’re the heads of the Ursid Syndicate. Celine says you’re the most dangerous men on the planet. How different are you from throwing a woman in a cage with a bear?” I demand as a bubble of fury bursts inside me, daring to look at Callen until he takes his eyes off the road to look back at me.
“The difference between us is that the woman would have had to have done something really wrong for us to feed her to a bear. Like, hurt you,” he says before he turns his attention back on the road. The edge in his voice when he delivered those words sticks with me.
At once, I also understand that he speaks for Deacon and Mason as well when it comes to me, making it clear that I’m their property. I belong to the three of them, never mind how much I hate it. Or how much I hate them.
“The woman Kirill had killed was for entertainment. She was nothing but a crack addict, and he controlled her with a bag of coke.”
I swallow at the information Callen has given me, but I’m not given much time to ingest it before we stop at a building—probably once a block of apartments—that is so dilapidated it looks scary. Graffiti covers parts of the walls that are still standing. Most of the windows are boarded up with cardboard.
Callen exits the car and opens the passenger door for me. I climb out confidently before I realize I should be feeling very scared to be in this area, yet I’m not… because I’m with Callen.
He gets my jacket and puts it on for me as a group of men come toward us, flicking their knives and laughing. One of them is carrying a gun and making it known.
Callen puts his hand on my lower back; his touch burns through the thickness of my coat right down to my skin. For a moment, I wonder if I’m going to die here or, worse, get raped, but as soon as the men start to get closer, they immediately start to stall. Before I know it, they’ve bowed their heads and stepped aside.
I whip my gaze up to Callen, and his expression hasn’t so much as changed one bit to warrant that kind of behavior from those thugs. Does his mafia reputation precede him? That is the only answer.
He takes my hand, but as I follow him into the building, a sickening feeling washes over me. I try not to gag as a rancid smell starts to suffocate me. It smells like soiled mattresses, smoke, and sickness.
We pass people huddled together in the cold, all their belongings in the world scattered around them. Some are so drugged they look demented. A man barks at me, and I instinctively curl myself into Callen’s body. He holds me tighter as we walk through what looks like the basement of the building, where people have made their homes in small sections.
Callen stops when we come to an older woman; her face is so haggard that her eyes and lips are hidden under hanging skin. She notices us and backs away toward a baby cot behind her. I look over her shoulder and see a little girl with eyes so big and blue and sad, my heart breaks, standing in the cot, holding the bars with her little hands.
“Please don’t, Mister. I beg you. Take me. I’ll do anything you want.” The old woman comes toward Callen, drops to her frail knees, and looks as if she wants to open his pants. “Please take me instead.”
I’m shocked by the scene unfolding before me, and I immediately bend down to help the woman up, but Callen beats me to it and sets her back on her feet.
“Please don’t take her. I beg you. She’s just a child. Please,” she says, and she starts to wail with so much agony in her voice that tears fill my eyes.