Chapter 3 #2
“Yeah, but how’d she even get in the room?” Sebastian scowls.
“She used a guest password.”
I’d like to say I pushed all thoughts of Evelina Nikitin out of my head the very second I scared her off the other night before proceeding to lose myself in a harem of pussy.
But I did not.
Any of it.
Instead, I questioned the men at the door about the woman who’d just left.
That's how I found out she used the guest password, arcana sub silentio, not the Syndicate members password.
Which also means I figured out how the fuck she got that password, thank you very much Val for not locking your fucking phone.
So yeah, that's how she knew about the party to begin with. But it still leaves one mystery:
Why the hell did she come to me?
I mean, yes, I know her basic reason. It would have been easy enough to deduce even if she hadn't told me. Six months ago, after Pavel Nikitin tried to kill his own son and my brother, Roman took the throne and had Pavel banished to Russia. If it were me, I would have simply cut off his fucking head, but I can appreciate complicated relationships with one’s father.
So that’s why she ostensibly needs help: because Pavel is walking around Moscow without power or money, with a gigantic target on his back.
That still doesn’t explain why his princess ballerina of a daughter is sneaking into Syndicate parties at members-only kink clubs to ask yours truly for help, though.
My jaw tightens and my eyes narrow as I replay the feel of her pulse twitching under my fingertips. The softness of her skin. The delicious tremble of her fear. The faint scent of lilac and vanilla when I leaned close to her ear.
“Vaughn.”
I drag myself away from that particularly distracting train of thought and glance at Gideon. He’s holding up his phone, showing a text that's just come in:
Miss O
All set up here. Don’t fucking burn me.
Dark hunger flexes and cracks its neck inside me, and I turn to grin at my friends. “Go time.”
“Fuck yes,” Sebastian groans with a genuine undertone of sexual excitement in his voice.
“Think I just came,” Carson grins in the darkness.
The four of us make our way silently past the garden wall, through the rose bushes, around the pool, and finally into the huge house via the back door that Miss O was kind enough to leave open for us.
“Who wants to do improv with Miss O?” I hiss as we pause at the bottom of the grand staircase.
“Not it,” Carson mutters, touching his nose. Gideon shakes his head quickly.
“Fuck, I’ll do it,” Sebastian grunts. “She doesn’t scare me.”
“That’s because you weren't there the night she helped us set up that Swedish diplomat,” Carson spits, making a face. “You missed the horror show of watching her stomp on the poor dude’s nuts.” He gulps. “In fucking stilettos.”
We creep single file up the stairs, pausing in the hallway outside a bedroom where we can hear a wooden paddle slapping against bare skin, followed by the giddy groans of a man.
I glance at Seb and nod.
Showtime.
Sebastian bursts through the door first, yelling like a fucking madman.
The man chained to an iron Saint Andrew's cross on the wall immediately shits himself, screaming in terror around the ball-gag stuffed into his mouth.
Miss O, true professional that she is, makes a great show of dropping her sadistic Hard Domme facade and screaming in what truly sounds like fear when Sebastian grabs her around the waist and starts bellowing about “burying her in the woods” as he drags her from the room.
She does manage to sneak in a quick wink at me on the way out.
That leaves Carson, Gideon, and me alone with one Cyril Weathers.
Wearing a cock cage.
“My my my,” I sigh, rolling my neck and slowly pulling a gleaming knife out of my coat. “This, Cyril, is what they call being up a shit creek without a paddle.”
“But literally,” Carson says, his nose wrinkling as he waves a hand in front of his face and nods at the actual shit Cyril just deposited on the floor beneath his spread and bound legs.
I walk over to the chained man. He whimpers pathetically as I slide the tip of my knife up his cheek, slipping it under the leather strap of the ball gag. With a flick of my wrist, the strap is severed, letting the gag and a mouthful of Cyril’s spit dribble down his bare chest.
“Bancroft!” Cyril squeaks, his initial terror subsiding a little. I watch as it slowly morphs into a delightful mix of shame, a different kind of fear, and a horrified realization of what's unfolding around him.
“Wh-what’s the meaning of this!?” he blurts, desperately trying to appear angry…which, let’s be real, is pretty hard to do when your dick is locked in a cage and there’s shit running down your legs.
“This, Cyril, is your official notice.” I smile. “If you recall, the last time we spoke, you were not very nice when it came to sharing your views about me joining the board of directors of Knightsblood.”
Cyril sits as treasurer on the board of directors for Knightsblood University, one of the mafia world’s greatest little secrets.
Knightsblood, barely ten miles from where we are right now, is basically the mafia version of Harvard, Yale and Princeton all rolled into one.
A very old-school, old-money, exclusive-as-fuck “ivy league for the underworld”, where the heirs and offspring of Russian pakhans, mafia dons, kingpins, Yakuza oyabuns, and more come to get a world-class education.
…And also make the connections they’ll need later when they eventually ascend their respective thrones back home.
I never went to college. Neither did Sebastian, Carson, or Gideon. So my desire to join the board of directors has nothing to do with "revisiting my youth" or "giving back to the college" or any of that bullshit.
Like everything I do, it comes from a place of ambition.
Soon, one of the current board members, Andrés Torvallés, heir to the hugely powerful Torvallés family in Spain, is going to be…
resigning. I already have the rest of the members in my pocket, who will gladly vote me onto the board, Then it's just a short step to becoming chairman of that board.
But a vote for chairman has to be unanimous.
And I am going to be chairman.
Again, this isn’t because I secretly harbor a deep love of meetings and paperwork. It’s because when I see Knightsblood, I see opportunity.
The most powerful criminal organizations on earth are not the ones you’ve heard of, or who get turned into movie tropes. The Comorra. The Bratva. The Cartel. These are obviously powerful, insanely well financed groups.
But the real power is bigger than petty crime, trafficking, and getting muddied in the street-level dramas of organized crime. Entities like the Torvallés or d’Auvrelle families have been around for centuries and influence global politics and history.
That is real power. But getting there means evolving.
That’s where inserting myself into position of power within Knightsblood comes into play.
If I control the board, it means I control the university.
It means that I can influence the future of the underworld on a global scale.
It gives me a monopoly on information, with access to all sorts of normally confidential information regarding some of the most powerful mafia families on the planet.
It means I become a powerbroker on a scale almost never before seen in the criminal underworld.
So that’s why I need onto the board of directors for Knightsblood. And right now, it’s only Cyril standing in my way.
Killing him would be far easier. But given that Andrés will be…departing the board very shortly, very abruptly, another member doing the same would start to raise questions I don’t need asked.
So we’re doing it this way.
Cyril’s face pales. “Look, Vaughn, I’m sorry, okay?! It wasn’t a personal attack, I just don’t feel that the college needs to entangle itself with—”
“Oh, you’ve made your thoughts on the matter crystal clear,” I say, smiling icily at him. I turn to Carson. “Mr. Photographer, I believe our model is ready for his close-up.”
Carson makes a face. “Fuck that, I don’t want this shit on my phone.”
“As if that would be the worst thing your phone ever saw,” Gideon grunts. “Fine, I’ll do it.”
He pulls his phone out and starts snapping pictures of a naked, shit-streaked, cock-caged Cyril, bound to a BDSM cross.
“Jesus Christ,” Cyril chokes as he starts to cry.
“I sincerely doubt the Father, The Son, or The Hole Spirit wants to be involved in any of this,” I say with a wry smile. “Now, you know what this means, right?” I step closer. “In case you’re unclear, the answer is, it means you’re fucking mine now.”
Cyril looks pathetic and broken as he lifts his eyes to mine. “Or…or you’ll tell my wife?”
I smile and shake my head. Then I sigh, reaching out and patting his cheek patronizingly.
“You think my threat is ending your marriage? No, Cyril.” I shake my head again and then bring my knife up.
Cyril whimpers as I lift his chin with the tip of the blade.
“If you step out of line, I won’t tell your wife about your kinky proclivities and your night with a Dominatrix. ”
I lean closer, letting him inhale my darkness as I loom right in his face.
“I’ll cut your wife into little pieces in front of you and feed her to you one bite at a time.”
It’s not until we’re heading back to the city that I allow myself to admit that as much fun as that was, there’s been something else taking up massive amounts of real estate in my head.
Someone else.
Someone who never should have come to that party the other night with her pathetic request for help, and thereby gotten my attention.
Evelina Nikitin might think I’m a monster. And she'd be right.
But she doesn’t know the fucking half of it.