9. Nero
Chapter 9
Nero
H aving the memory of an elephant was great when you needed to remember the face of someone you were dead set on murdering. Like Efren, the sous chef kissing Ari’s hand in a large public display. I can tell the whole thing flusters her. She refuses to look me in the eyes afterward.
There’s this possessive need to punch the son of a bitch in the face, but I have to keep my composure. Besides, Ariella doesn’t belong to me. She is my client.
Right.
The devil on my shoulder mocks me. Without a doubt, if Ariella Reyes were not my client, I would have had her kneeling before me months ago. I hate how often I have to fight back the pestering fucking need to taste her and to show her pleasure beyond the confines of what she believes. It was a constant torture for me to wonder how many men had tasted her lips. Her fucking pouty lips.
Last night, when she touched my scars, it was like she touched some desolate place inside me. I wanted to kiss her then. I wanted to do more than fucking kiss her, and that was the problem. Thankfully the fucker that is my conscious reminds me she’s not mine.
That’s the largest hurdle I throw at myself. She doesn’t belong to me. She never will. Even when every one of her smiles holds me hostage. When the very idea of any stranger having her before me unravels me. I face the facts every damn time. She doesn’t belong to me.
I tap my fingers on the counter. Eager for the fucker interrupting us to leave.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Ariella continues to listen to Efren’s story, but her eyes are on the motion of my fingers. My eyes stay glued to her as they continue to chatter.
When I have enough willpower to detach my gaze from her, I look up to see Leatherface and Kostya sitting in a corner booth on the opposite end of the restaurant. He has his back to me. I can tell it’s him, not just by the large tattoo on the back of his shaven head, but I can spot any of my brothers in a crowded room.
I knew each of their individual struggles, and I could sense their energy. Leatherface’s energy always felt angry, but none of us could ever guess if it was anger towards the world or in himself.
This morning, I received a text that he would be here, but I didn’t register the notification. I hadn’t even heard Ari get up an hour after I got back to the penthouse. I was passed out cold until Guapo started whimpering outside my door, and I rushed down here to find Jasper and Louie waiting for Leatherface.
I bring the coffee to my lips, sip the last drip, and then lower the cup, exerting more force than necessary. The bang on the table causes other people to turn and look, but it has the desired effect when Efren kindly excuses himself.
“Is everything alright?” Ari asks, and I nod.
“Why wouldn’t it be Manikà?” I reply, lowering my eyes on her.
It’s the only way I know how to answer because saying, “I want all your time, all your laughter, and all your fucking attention,” not only sounds pathetic, but it violates the whole client-employee relationship.
Ari purses her lips to the side the way she does when she’s stopping herself from talking. I hate when she does it because I feel like someone at some point in her life told her she talked too much. She did talk too fucking much, but I liked it. Fuck, I was starting to love it.
I spoke too little, and silence made me feel like a little kid again, confined to the closet because I did something to set Evangeline off. I couldn’t deal with the silence.
“Manikà kind of sounds like muneca. Is Tagalog similar to Spanish?” Ari asks.
“Yes. The people of the Philippines were also victims of Spanish colonization.”
“Fucking colonizers.” She says, nodding.
The historical lesson is cut short. Shots fire in the distance, and my body lurches forward. I throw my weight onto Ari. She trembles beneath me as the shots sound closer and bullets fly around us.
Pop
Pop
Pop
Her back is to the booth, and my body covers hers. Guapo hides below the table. She grips my forearms in her shaking hands.
I lift slightly to give her room and place my index finger to my lips. The rosary I wear drags between us, and she reaches up to touch the beads that have fallen to her chest.
Her green eyes fill with concern when she looks at me. I palm her face. It’s a simple touch. The only way I can reassure her without words.
You’re going to be okay.
I’ll protect you.
Loud frequencies of the fire alarm begin to sound. I grab the gun from my boot and the other from the holster on my side.
“Do you know how to use this?” I whisper, and she nods. Her hands shake, but she grabs the gun in hers.
“Good Girl. When it’s clear, we will run straight to the security room. We got to be quick, okay?” I instruct her before I slowly lift myself and check the surroundings.
I find Leatherface in the corner booth, crouched in front of Kostya with a gun in his hand. People are running out of the restaurant, but I can’t locate the shooters. Speed is my only ally right now.
A minute passes by, and adrenaline courses through my body. I’m torn about which way to rush, but my body does what it wants. I don’t go toward my club president like I should. I don’t even look for Jasper or Louie as I pull Ari up and grab Guapo.
I pull them forward and take one final glance at Leather’s face. He sees me, but I don’t have time to guess his thoughts. I’ll deal with any repercussions from the club later. Right now, my mind only focuses on getting Ariella out of here.
Looking down, I’m relieved she’s in some running shoes. I nod in front of us, and she rushes out in front of me through the chaos of frantic people. I don’t stall, and I don’t stop. Not until I’ve caught up to her outside the security room. No time is wasted. I scan my thumbprint and pull Ari into the room. Checking to make sure the door locked behind us.
The room looks like the standard guestroom at Calavera Hotels. As a security measure, it blends in with the other rooms, but it is where most of the arsenals are hidden.
I look around the room to make sure we’re alone. There’s a small comfort in the black matte interior and the gold skull lamps. The rooms on this floor are the least expensive rooms in the hotel. Yet it still felt like royalty compared to the apartments I lived in over the years with Evangeline.
Guapo has already taken his place on a black vintage chair in the corner of the room. Ari makes her way to the queen-size bed in the corner. I move to the closet to find the gun vault hidden in the crawl space, which has been raided.
Putagina mo.
I turn my ear to the door. The sound of guns firing continues in the distance. Turning back, I find Ari slumped down the side of the bed and onto the floor. She’s wearing pink leggings and a matching pink crop top. Sitting on her knees, the right side of her body leans onto the end of the bed. The dullness has returned to her eyes, and her face is pale.
Fuck. She’s checking out again.
I listen outside the door one more time before tucking my gun back into my pants and moving to the bed. She looks up at me, her green eyes rimmed with tears. Looking down at her, I realize how fragile she looks. Innocent even.
I reach my hand out and run my hand through the strands of her hair. The soft purr she makes knocks on that door of desire within me.
Running my hand through her hair wasn’t something I should do, but she’s scared right now. She scoots in closer to me and lays her head against my knee. Something too natural for me not to get erect over.
Pull it the fuck together.
I threaten my cock who is very unaware that this is neither the time nor place.
From the moment I started working through my fucking mommy issues, I realized how much of me desired to be in control. Not just control but this unsainted need to dominate and care for a woman in all the ways I was never cared for. I run my hand through Ariella’s hair and tuck the flyaways behind her ear. I bit down on my bottom lip when I see the small beauty marks hiding behind her ear. I want to kiss them. Taste the very softness of her skin on my lips.
When it came to love, I was a lost cause. I could never offer a woman my heart, but I took pride in bringing them pleasure. And right now, there is a carnal need to pleasure her in the most ungodly ways.
My sexual needs aren’t fully met if I don’t have complete dominance. So many women were afraid to venture out as submissives because men failed to confuse dominance with control, but it was more than that.
When I began my journey as a Pleasure Dom, I learned dominance was so much more than ownership. You had to have compassion and respect. A good Dom understood his submissive’s limitations and taught her how to free herself through vulnerability and trust.
Never has the desire to care for someone been as strong as it is right now in this moment. With the one person who did not even have a clue what this type of lifestyle looked like.
There was a big difference between Ariella and the women I met at sex clubs. She was also a nurturer. I loved being dominant, but there was something gut-wrenching about her attempts to care for me.
The meals she prepares for me, the notes she leaves with the smiley faces and hearts, the fucking obnoxious way she would say “Be safe” every night before I left to the club. The more she did these things for me, the more I felt I needed to protect her at all costs.
It’s perfection the way we are positioned right now. Ariella is seated on her knees with her hands in her lap as I tower above her. The beast inside me begs to be unleashed. He’s starving and desperate to devour every inch of her until she’s sobbing from the very pleasure rippling through her.
I continue to glide my fingers through her long blonde strands. I don’t have to see her face to know she’s slipping away. There’s a thin veil between who she pretends to be and the dark parts of her that she hides from the world. Dark parts where her trauma lurks and her demons beg to be caressed.
I remove my hand from her head, and she looks up at me. Silent tears fall from her eyes. I glide my knuckle up her face, catching it. The aching need to feel her lips on every part of me arises again. It’s nothing like I’ve ever felt before. My knuckles fall to graze the outline of her jaw.
“You okay, Princess?” I ask, unable to stop touching her. She closes her eyes, and tears stream loose.
“Look at me,” I tell her, tilting her face up to me. Her green eyes darken. The bright embers now a haunted forest.
“I’m gonna die.” She mumbles.
“God, I’m gonna die, and I’ve never done anything important with my life,” she cries louder.
“I’m gonna die a fucking virgin!”
My hand freezes at her confession. A virgin? Ariella Reyes?
I want to think she’s lying, but she has nothing to gain from lying. Ariella isn’t like the women I fuck for fun who pretend to be virgins. I have no doubt in my mind that she is a virgin.
An unmarked and unclaimed doll that I wanted to play with. Before I lose control, I shoot up from the bed and walk to the window.
She has never been touched the way I was fighting myself not to touch her. I press my hand against the window and tap my index finger against it. I look to see ambulances outside and police surrounding the building.
I let out a small sigh and tell the darkening aroused parts of me for the hundredth fucking time that now is not the time. There’s a fucking threat outside of this room. It wasn’t the time to start fantasizing over virgins, much less my fucking client. Ariella gets up and paces across the hotel room, repeating her same dilemma on repeat.
“Oh my god, I’m going to die a virgin.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
Not helping.
After the third time, she repeats that she’s going to die a virgin, and I snap.
“You’re not going to die, Ari! Sit down!”
Immediately her ass falls to the bed.
I walk up to the door and press my ear to it again. I’m restless with this itch to go out there and check if it’s safe for us to leave, but I can’t leave her alone. Not when she’s in this state, and certainly not with a loaded gun in her hand.
She lays down on the bed, bringing her knees up to her stomach, and clutches the weapon I gave her to her chest. With her eyes closed, she begins to rock herself in a soothing motion.
Guapo moves to comfort her, and I look out the peephole. I’m about to tell her it looks clear to leave, but then I hear her sobbing.
“Please, I’ll take her place. Please stop hurting her.”
I look around to see who or what she’s talking to. I walk to find her eyes blank as she continues to rock back and forth. It’s something out of a horror movie the way she fails to register me.
She keeps repeating the same thing, stuck in some living nightmare. I hate that I recognize what’s going on immediately, but I do. I am very well equipped with the monsters that torture you during psychosis.
Evangeline struggled with her own psychosis. I would see the same blank expression in her eyes. When she would release her rage onto me, she would often hallucinate things. Call me by my father’s name while she shouted his sins out loud. Her fists would fly even when I begged her to stop.
That was the most challenging part of everything I dealt with. It was hard not to be mad at my father once I knew the things he did to my mother. I carried her anger and hated him for the monster he created. Feeling of sympathy were confusing to me as a child. Why, amid my own suffering, did I still feel empathy for the very person hell-bent on seeing me hurt?
“Ari!” I call out her name, but she doesn’t respond.
I grab the gun from her immediately as a wave of panic washes over me. My trauma wants to emerge from the dark corners of my mind, but I push that bitch back.
I know the memories that will spill out. The same ones that torture me in my sleep. Flashbacks of times when I was reduced to nothing. A shell of a human, surviving only to hope the next time it would finally end in my death.
SHUT THE FUCK UP .
I scream into my mind. Pushing back on my trauma, I focus on the woman in front of me.
“Ariella!” I scream again, this time shaking her until she steps back into reality.
Is this how Doctor fucking Phil would handle this? No. But I’m not that puto.
I wait until her eyes readjust to the room and then find mine. Grabbing her hand in mine, I let out a sigh of relief. She trembles next to me, and I pull her onto my lap.
“Where’d you go, Princess?” I say, lowering my voice to her ear as I cradle her into my chest.
“He’s came back for me. He’s gonna hurt me again.” she cries.
She continues to ramble, but nothing she says makes sense. Physically, she’s in my arms, but mentally, she’s stuck somewhere else. I don’t care. I’ll fucking fight her hallucinations if I have to.
“Listen, Ariella, as long as I’m with you, no one is going to hurt you. You understand?” I whisper to her.
She pulls herself out of my embrace and stands. Her face is blotched from all the sadness seeping out of her. Looking around the room, she grounds herself back into reality. She dries her eyes and regains control over herself before returning to the bed next to me. Clearing her throat, she turns to face me.
“What Cassiel did to Gen and me wasn’t the first time we had been kidnapped,” she begins. “When we were little, we were kidnapped.”
She clears her throat again, her hands fidgeting in her lap. Grabbing them in mine, I wait for her to continue. She needs to liberate herself from whatever is tormenting her.
“It happened fast. I still don’t know how, but I remember holding each other’s hands the entire time we were trapped in that basement. The cops always asked me what I could remember on the ride there, but I could only remember Gen’s hand in mine.” She stares down into her lap, where my hand is holding tightly onto hers.
“What happened?” I ask. My voice is calm even though my insides are boiling.
“The man who took us, he never hurt us. Not in the way I expected him to or in the ways they had to examine me afterward at the hospital. But he made us do things.” She says, her voice cracking on the last word.
I press my forehead into hers and close my eyes. Every murderous thought in my brain circulates around the thoughts of what a grown man could do to a young girl.
“What kind of things?” I ask.
She releases my hand and stands to her feet. Her arms wrap around her middle as she walks to the large window. Looking out for someone or something.
“The guy who took us, he would make us strip down until we were naked and take pictures of us. Sometimes, he would bring another man in and have us pose next to him.”
She’s fumbling with her hands again. I keep my eyes on them while pure masculine rage builds in me. The kind ready to wage wars and cut off kings’ heads. I want her to stop. I don’t want this to get any worse than I can imagine.
“One night after he drugs us, I wake up, and Genesis isn’t there. I reach out my hand beside me, and she’s gone. I spent the whole day sobbing. I felt like my whole chest was going to explode. I prayed that God would take me quickly. You know? Like I could at least have that mercy.” she divulges.
I didn’t just know that feeling. It was an old friend of mine. One that appeared the moment I stopped trusting the concept of mercy. It was foreign in this world. She wipes the fresh tears and shakes her head.
“Anyway, Gen came back that night. She snuck in next to me and grabbed my hand, but she refused to look at me. My dad came for us the next morning. He broke through the door and found the man dead in a pool of his own blood.
The shed in the back was set on fire. That’s how my dad found us. It’s where we found Guapo. He was trying to escape those men, too.” She reaches down, grabs Guapo, and pulls him to her.
“Ari-I’m so sorry.” I move and pull her into me, wrapping my arms around her.
“I saw him, Nero. I swear I saw his face in the Lobby. He’s looking for me.” She cries.
“Hey, hey, look at me. He’s dead. He cannot touch you ever again.” She sobs into me, and I kiss the top of her head.
I keep her there, wrapped in my arms. It’s the only place I know she’ll always be safe. There’s no client-employee relationship. Just our two hurting hearts bleeding into one another. Creating our own place of refuge.
My phone rings, and I ignore it. By the fourth attempt, Ari pulls away from my chest, and I release her to answer it.
“Hello.” Jasper’s voice sounds on the other end. I barely register what he’s saying, but I get the essential parts.
Cassiel. Shot. Life Support. The Italians.