Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
LUKA
They say there are only sixteen types of people. Everybody has a type they mesh best with, but what about the type that gets under your skin, the type that invades your every waking thought? And you get up in the morning with dream fragments of them at the edges of your mind?
My consciousness tends to be a very dense element, which is to say, nothing gets in, and nothing gets out.
Except for Edie, apparently.
But at least I slept. That’s new.
I grab a coffee and respond to a dozen texts about a Bratva situation that’s gotten out of control. I ping Storm and tell him to pick me up in an hour. Places to go, Russians to kill. Running this clan would be a lot smoother if my brother hadn’t done such a shit job of management.
I wander to the window and look down at the people racing this way and that.
My new penthouse is in Esterford Tower, a glass monstrosity reviled up and down 237th Street for its cold, sterile look, but I like it.
I check where Edie is, only to find she’s turned off the tracking.
What the fuck?
I clench my teeth, pissed off that she’s done that and even more pissed off that I give a shit. What do I care where she is when she’s not with me?
I shoot her a text:
turn on the tracking.
The three dots appear. She’s typing. Then the dots disappear before she’s back to typing.
That wasn’t our deal
Turn it on.
You text I come that was our deal
I stare at the phone in disbelief. She’s right, but I’m not in the mood for this pushback. And why won’t she do it? Is she hiding something?
Do I need to call you over here and put you over my knee?
You text I come...is this texting for me to come
I frown. If I didn’t have such a busy day, she’d be back in my bed so fast. I’d be schooling her on how you don’t say no to me, and maybe on punctuation, too.
And I’d make her tell me how she knows Arianiti.
And she’d give me that scorn before consuming every inch of her.
I’d make her tell me how much she hates criminals while I fuck her stunningly fuckable mouth.
And would it kill her to use a little punctuation?
Take a picture of your lips .
Dots.
Will she say no to that, too? Everything in me is standing at attention, not just my cock but all the deepest parts of me. I want her to say no, and I want to get into things with her.
This time she complies, and there they are, those frowny, unhappy lips that fit together in the hottest pout ever.
keep them ready for my cock.
I toss aside the phone and do my morning stretching routine, designed by a disreputable but brilliant doctor in Dubai to keep the scar tissue from hardening, right at the windows that soar up to the ceiling.
“Very you,” Orton had said when he first saw this obelisk of a building. “You can see out, but nobody can see in. So fucking you. So on the nose.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I bought this place lock, stock, and barrel the day I arrived in New York, flush with millions that Orton, Storm, and I had pulled from a hidden nook deep in the Norilsk mines of Northern Siberia.
“I’ll take it all, furnishings and everything,” I said.
“You don’t really want this stuff.” The selling agent picked up a framed picture of a covered bridge. There was another with a horse and another with a woman waving from the Eiffel Tower. “You don’t even know this person.”
“I want all of it,” I’d said. “Everything here.”
“Wouldn’t you want your own pictures? Imagine a vignette in the corner with treasured objects from your travels.
” She walked over to a shelf with lots of books and showed me how they were just cardboard boxes with sides made to look like spines.
“I could give you the name of an interior decorator who’d handle it all to your tastes.
Home decor is a way to express what’s inside of you. ”
“How can I explain this?” I’d given her a hard look. “With some people, it’s best that they don’t express themselves.”
At that, she gave me all of it.
I wasn’t bullshitting. Expressing myself, whatever that would look like, surely wouldn’t end well, but more than that, a home is a transaction, just like a relationship.
I go through my schedule, seeing that I can pull Edie in tonight. In the meantime, she has the day off.
What does a woman like that do on a day off? Does she shop? Read? Watch movies? Do spa treatments?
I try to imagine her in all of those scenarios, and then I remind myself it’s just about the fucking.
Until a dark thought comes to me—what if she’s not on vacation? What if she’s taking clients secretly on the side? What if it’s not up to her? She may operate through some kind of a handler or an agency.
Heat rushes up the back of my neck as I imagine another man ripping off her clothes. Another man putting his hands on her. Fucking her and getting all that scorn.
I told her I’d rip a guy’s balls off if she did that. Did she understand I meant it?
If I could look into her eyes while I asked her, I’d know if she’d been with anybody else.
That defiant fire in her gaze would flicker differently; her contempt is untainted when she looks at me, and it wouldn’t burn so bright through a lie.
She’s mine—those eyes, that mouth, every inch of her body and what it does when I touch it. Mine alone.
Before I can stop myself, I’m texting her a warning. I hit send and throw the phone back on the chair.
No one touches what’s mine.