13
A s it turned out, married life really did have its perks, and a lovely body Roman could possess every morning was just one of them.
“Fuck,” he swore harshly, his rock-hard cock pushing into his wife at a relentless pace.
He could already feel the onset of an orgasm starting in his groin as the pleasure became too much.
Alessandra leaned back onto her palms that were pressed behind her on the vanity, allowing him to go even deeper.
Her tits bounced with each slam of his hips, and he leaned forward to take a nipple into his mouth.
She sighed with pleasure, legs tightening around his waist. One hand came up to grab his nape, holding him close.
Before long, she rewarded him with a quiet cry as she tumbled over the edge, her fingers inching up and pulling on his hair almost painfully.
With a hiss, he let go, coming inside of her as heat shot from his cock all the way down to his toes.
Afterward, they showered together and got ready for a new day. Roman put on a suit, and Alessandra donned a yellow summer dress for her first driving lesson.
“You look nice,” he said, stealing a kiss when she passed him in the kitchen on her way to the coffee machine.
Lately, he couldn't keep his hands off her.
In the two and a half weeks since she had officially become a part of his life, he always found himself thinking about her when he wasn't home.
As distracting and sometimes irritating as that was, she gave him a reason to want to come home every night, and it was a nice change from the alternative that had been his norm in the past. “Andrei will pick you up at nine.”
“Okay.” She smiled, kissing him back and bouncing on her feet as she grabbed a mug from the cupboard. She was in high spirits today, he noted with some amusement, gaze lingering on the swell of her ass.
Checking his watch, Roman realized he had about thirty minutes until he had to be at Beluga1 for the bi-weekly Bratva meeting.
Needless to say, he wasn't looking forward to an hour of listening to his father drone about numbers in the form of gains and losses. If you asked him, the meeting could’ve been held only once a month.
But Vitaly liked to hear himself talk a little too much, and nobody could say shit about it.
“Alessa,” he said distractedly, his mind already going over the details of a shipment he had to supervise that evening.
She turned with the still empty mug in hand. “Yeah?”
“I’ll be home late tonight.” Grabbing his suit jacket from the back of a stool, he shrugged it on. “Let Andrei know if you need to go somewhere else today.”
“You know I can always take a cab, right? I'm sure he has better things to do than drive me around the city.”
“I don't want you in a car with a stranger. Until you get your license, Andrei will drive you.”
It wasn't that he feared anything could happen to her in Bratva territory, but they didn't control the entire city of Chicago, and he didn't want her to get in a car with the wrong person.
The Armenians were an unpredictable bunch, and since tensions still lingered after their failed truce with the Italians, he trusted them even less than before.
She nodded dutifully, accepting his decision without a fuss.
Taking one last sip of his coffee, he kissed her cheek and left the house.
???
“Roman.” Nikolai's hand landed on his back, followed by a chuckle. “How’s the young Italian pussy treating you?”
Roman froze where he stood, white-hot anger engulfing him instantly. He turned his head to pin the other Brigadier with a hostile glare. “Talk about her like that again and I'll smash your fucking head against this wall.”
Strike two . One more, and the man would be dead before he even realized what hit him.
The sleazy grin melted from Nikolai's face. “No need to get so riled up about it. It's all in good fun.”
“She is my wife, and you will show her the respect she is entitled to.”
The other man gave a curt nod, though his eyes shone with contempt. Roman walked away before he went with his instinct and ended him on the spot. He grabbed a chair and sat down beside Stepan who was busy typing something on his phone.
“He's a douchebag,” Stepan said, not raising his eyes from the screen in front of him. Within the Bratva, he was the closest thing Roman had to a friend. Only two years older than Roman, he was quiet by nature, but a force to be reckoned with when angry.
“I know,” Roman muttered, throwing a dirty look across the room toward the reason his morning had started with a surge in his blood pressure. Nikolai shook the hand of another Brigadier, smiling and joking as if he hadn’t just pissed Roman off a second ago.
Stepan put the phone away and looked up, the hint of a smile tugging at his lips. “So, how is the wife?”
“Fuck you.”
His friend laughed quietly.
The voices in the room quieted down when Vitaly made an appearance with Oleg's omnipresent shadow following him into the office.
Wearing a pinstripe suit paired with a burgundy shirt and a thick, gold chain around his neck, the man looked like a walking cliché.
He sat behind the mahogany desk, making himself comfortable in the tan leather chair.
Roman briefly met his father’s steely eyes, and he didn’t like what he saw in them. Knowing Vitaly as well as he did, he realized he wouldn’t be able to leave the meeting without first talking to him in private.
That suspicion came true an hour later when the men in the room started to leave. Roman got up, determined to follow after them, when Vitaly’s voice stopped him in his tracks. “Roman, a word.”
Letting out a quiet breath, he turned to his father and tried to keep a neutral expression. He had a full day ahead of him, and the thought of being in that office a minute longer than he had to, irritated him to no end. He kept his hands in his pockets and waited.
“That girl of yours,” Vitaly said, keeping his gaze on a stack of papers in front of him. “You need to handle her better.”
It had been a week and a half since that family dinner he’d attended with Alessandra. And even though he already knew this was coming, Roman decided to feign ignorance. “What do you mean?”
From across the desk, sharp blue eyes met his. “You know exactly what I mean. She is a spoiled brat who requires a firm hand to become the wife you need.”
“How do you know what I need?”
“Do not mock me, boy. It's bad enough that filthy Italian blood runs through her veins—the last thing she should have is an attitude .”
“You seem to forget that you were the one to insist I should marry her. I didn't choose her for a wife, and it’s not my problem that you find her lacking. As for myself, I see nothing wrong with her attitude, as you call it.”
A vein in Vitaly's temple bulged. “You will handle her, or I will.”
Roman gritted his teeth, fighting to keep calm.
They’d had a different version of the same conversation that evening after dinner, but Vitaly just couldn’t seem to drop the subject.
Parent or not, Roman didn’t take well to anyone’s threats.
“You will stay out of my relationship with her. Since you forced her on me, I will handle her however I see fit.”
His father stared at him, seeming to weight something in his mind. When he spoke again, his voice had quieted down somewhat. “I never thought you weak, son. Don't start being so now—over some girl , no less.”
“Is that all you had to say to me?”
“Yes.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Leave now.”
Not lingering a second longer, Roman turned on his heels and exited the office. On his way to the car, his temples started to throb with the first pulsations of a pesky headache. Unlocking the doors, he climbed inside and shot out of the nightclub's parking lot like a bat out of hell.
Gripping the steering wheel into his clenched fists, he realized that he didn't want to analyze why it bothered him so much that Vitaly was being such a jerk to Alessandra.
It shouldn't have come as a surprise, given how much bad blood there was between their families.
But if his father thought that he could control every single aspect of his life, the man had another thing coming.
Alessandra was now his , and Roman was going to deal with her however he damn well pleased.
???
If Roman's morning had started off badly, his night was going even worse.
Staring inside the truck's empty trailer, he had a hard time grasping the reality unfolding in front of his eyes.
Not a single bottle of the imported liquor or a gram of the cocaine bricks that had been stashed between alcohol crates was to be found in the vast expanse of the cargo space. The trailer was eerily dark and quiet.
Beside the front wheels of the truck, the driver and one of the security guards were lying in a pool of their own blood, shot dead with a well-placed bullet straight between the eyes. Now, on top of having to deal with the monetary loss, Roman also had to get rid of the bodies.
“We searched the scrapyard. There's no one here besides the other security guard. He says he was running late and arrived just a couple of minutes before we did.”
Roman turned to Andrei with a frown. “How fucking convenient. Where is he?”
Andrei jerked his head behind him, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. Roman shifted his eyes that way to see the man in question sitting on the hood of a rusty Chevy with a dazed expression on his stupid face. Pulling out his gun, he started in that direction.
“You have ten seconds to explain yourself,” he barked at the young man whose eyes bulged out almost comically at the sight of the gun being pointed at his head. Unfortunately, there was nothing remotely funny about the predicament Roman found himself in.
“I—, I didn't see anything. Swear to God. I was late for my shift because I had some problems at home with my kid. He’s sick, you see, and I had to wait for my wife to get back from the drug store before I left the house.”
“Is that right?”
The man nodded his head vigorously. “I’m not lying, man. Please. I don't know anything.”
“It was just you and your dead buddy on duty tonight?”
“Yeah.”
Roman swore profusely. There should have always been at least three guards when a shipment came through.
John knew this. There was a reason why the Bratva worked with him, and that reason was that he did good business.
He was discreet and loyal. Smart. At least, that’s what Roman had thought until now.
“Where’s your fucking boss?”
“H-home, I think.” The guard looked a little bewildered by the question. “I-it’s late.”
If either John or one of his employees had suddenly decided to switch sides and betray Vitaly, they were going to pay with their worthless lives. Lowering the gun, Roman dug into his pocket for his phone. He found John’s number and waited for the call to connect.
“Yeah?” the man’s sleepy voice came through.
“Get your ass to the scrapyard,” Roman hissed, not wanting to discuss anything over the phone. “ Now .”
He hung up and turned to Andrei. “Search around the truck, see if they left any evidence.” He jerked his head in the guard’s direction. “And take care of this one.”
There were no surveillance cameras, which was convenient most of the times, but not tonight.
As for the guard, since he hadn’t done his job, he was going to receive a not-so-friendly reminder of who he was dealing with.
Whether that reminder meant a few broken bones or his dead body floating in the Chicago River, depended on his cooperation and maybe Andrei’s mood when he was done with him.
Andrei puffed out a cloud of smoke and nodded, despite the guard’s panicked expression. “Yeah, I'll do that. My money's on the Armenians. They must be pissed about our deal with the Italians.”
“Fucking Davit,” Roman muttered through his teeth, tucking his gun away and reaching into his pocket for his own pack of cigarettes.
He needed more than a smoke to take the edge off, but the cigarette he shoved between his lips would have to do for the moment.
Andrei offered him his lighter, which he took absentmindedly. “You drove my wife home today?”
“Yeah, after her driving lesson.”
Roman glanced away, suddenly annoyed that his mind was flying to the girl warming his bed, even in a time when his focus should be elsewhere. “Get rid of the bodies. I have to call Vitaly.”
Andrei left to do as he had been instructed, and Roman took a few steps so prying ears wouldn't hear his side of the conversation. He loathed that he had to call his father with such news after their verbal altercation in the morning.
“What happened?” Vitaly answered in a gruff voice. He already knew his son never called this late at night without a good reason.
“That thing we were waiting for; it's gone,” Roman said vaguely, always cautious about revealing too much over the phone, even to his father.
“What?” Vitaly hissed. “Who?”
“We don't know yet. We're searching the area.”
“Get here as soon as you're done.” The line went dead.
Roman lowered the phone and rubbed his eyes with rough fingers. Smoke from his cigarette assaulted his nostrils, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care.
“Boss.”
He turned his head to one of his men walking toward him. “What?”
“We found the dog. It looks like it was poisoned. They killed everything in sight.”
Roman let out a heavy sigh.
Fucking Armenians .