Page 8

CHAPTER 8

Alessandro

“ I t’s my house,” I reply.

As I take a step forward, she immediately takes one backward, her eyes wide with fright. Good. She should be very afraid.

Before, Sienna stared at me with the sort of naked fascination I only ever stared at art with. Now, her body is tense, her gaze flitting about in search of escape like a caged bird.

The glass slides shut behind me, and I stalk forward.

With a whimper, she jumps out of my way, her back pressed against one wall. Her curly hair is loose around her face, and the wildness of her hair is a startling contrast to the demure white dress she has on.

“What am I doing in your house? I want to go home. I don’t want to be here, please,” she blurts out in a shaky voice.

I drop into one of the chairs and lean back into it. Then, I motion to the other chair. “Take a seat.”

“Please, Vincent, just tell me what’s going on,” she pleads. “I—I don’t understand any of this. Did you kidnap me? Why? I barely even know you.”

I smile at the way her fear makes my blood tingle in my veins. It’s a far sweeter high than any orgasm I’ve ever gotten from Dayna’s pussy.

“Sit down, Sienna,” I repeat. I’m not a fan of repeating myself, and if she were one of my men, I would have put a bullet through her head.

“What do you want with me?” Her voice gets even more desperate. “Is this about—” She swallows, then clears her throat. “Is this about sex?”

“Sex?” I raise one eyebrow.

“Did you bring me here to have your way with me?”

How cute, I think sardonically.

“Do you think a man like me needs to resort to kidnapping women to get my cock wet?”

She flinches at my crass words. “So what’s this then? Why am I here? Just let me go.”

“Sit the fuck down,” I growl in a voice that makes grown men tremble, but Sienna just blinks at me.

“Whatever your plan is, you’re making a mistake,” she insists.

Nobody can accuse me of not being patient with her. I’ve tried asking, and since that didn’t work, I guess it’s time to try something else.

In a flash, I dig my gun out and aim it at her.

An ear-splitting scream tears through the air just as I fire. She squeezes her eyes shut, and her face drains of all color.

“Now,” I say in a voice dripping with annoyance, “are you going to sit down or not?”

Her lashes flutter open, and those big hazel eyes meet mine for a second before sliding to the hole in the wall barely an inch from her head. When her eyes meet mine again, I almost smile at the soul-deep terror in her gaze.

Sienna has just realized what I am. Not Vincent, the wealthy businessman who has an eye for art. Not the stranger who fascinates her.

I’m something else.

Danger.

She staggers to the second chair and drops into it, her gaze never leaving mine.

“W—who are you?” she croaks, her lips trembling.

“I’m your destruction,” I tell her. “But to others, I’m Alessandro Mancini.”

Her complexion goes bone white, and I narrow my eyes at her. “You know who I am.” It’s not a question but a statement. From the way she’s now trembling, it’s obvious she knows something.

Her head moves imperceptibly up and down in a slight nod.

“Oh?” This is going to be more fun than I thought. “What is it that you know?”

“That you’re a monster,” she spits. “Do you plan to kill me?”

Anger bubbles to the surface, and only my years of keeping myself under control stop me from hunting her father down and blowing his brains out.

Ivan D’Addario is the real monster in this story, but then again, it’s a good thing I don’t mind being the bad guy. I’m not a good man by any definition of the word, so in a way, I’m exactly the monster she accuses me of being.

“Where will the fun be in that?” I ask. “I don’t plan on killing you if you don’t give me a reason to. Do you know what that means? It means you have to do exactly what I say you should do, exactly when I say you should do it. If I say jump, you ask how high.”

“My father won’t let you get away with this,” she growls, full of fake bravado.

“No one will ever find you here,” I tell her honestly. Not only is there no evidence that this building belongs to me, but I also made sure to leave nothing that can trace me back here.

There are only three people in the world who know this place exists—oh wait, make that two. One became shark food earlier today.

“My father?—”

“Do not mention him again,” I snarl, “or you’ll be entirely responsible for his untimely death.”

She freezes. “Impossible. You can’t harm him. If you could, you would have done it a long time ago.”

“I don’t just want to kill Ivan D’Addario. I want him to die the most excruciating death on earth. A death that is worse than any torture I could ever come up with, and trust me, I’ve had time to think up a ton of creative tortures.” My gaze flicks down to where her hands have a death grip on the arms of the chair. “And I’ve ultimately decided that the best suffering for your father is death by grief.”

“W—what?” she stammers. “What does that mean?”

“It means your dear father is going to die slowly. He’ll go insane trying to find you, and I’ll make sure to taunt him with his failure till all he can see, think, breathe, and hear is his own impotence in protecting the person he cares the most about.” I cross my legs. “All while you stay in this fortress and wither away with the knowledge that you have played your own part in being his downfall.”

She jumps to her feet, hands fisted at her side. “You can’t do this! My father is a good man. What has he ever done to you?”

“Sit down, Sienna,” I tell her impassively, “If you get up again, I’ll toss you into the closet, and you’ll spend the next few months in the dark.”

“Months,” she repeats slowly in a rasp. “Oh God.”

Then she does the most foolish thing ever. She races to the glass and starts banging again.

“Help me! Help me! Somebody help, please,” she wails.

I watch her, my fingers twitching for my gun.

“Please. Oh, God.” Her legs give out under her, and she crashes to her knees with her head pressed to the glass.

“Don’t waste your breath,” I inform her. “We’re all alone here. And by here, I mean we’re on the fifteenth floor of a twenty-story building that belongs to one of my false firms registered under a false, untraceable name. There are three people in this whole building.”

Her shoulders begin to tremble, and I hear a sob rip out of her throat.

“Myself, you, and a man who would scoop out his own eyeballs with a blunt spoon if I asked him to,” I add.

She climbs to her feet and whirls at me. “You’re a monster! You tricked me. I can’t believe I—” The words end with a sob, tears trailing down her cheeks.

I freeze. She what? What was she about to say? And why the hell am I curious about it? I don’t care if Sienna thought I had been her knight in shining armor.

“My father told me all about you, Alessandro Mancini.” She spits the name like it’s a bad taste in her mouth. “You’re a drug dealer, a killer, and a man who sits on his self-made throne of blood money and thinks he’s the king of the city.”

“While your father is the protagonist out to catch the bad guys and toss them in jail where they belong?” I ask mockingly.

“He’s a good man,” she reiterates.

“He’s just another dirty bastard who’s too much of a coward to own up to what he is.”

“What has he ever done to you?”

Pasquale’s smiling face flitters through my mind. He was always smiling. The complete opposite of me. He was never cut out for this world. My brother would have been suited for a life behind a bar, mixing drinks and flirting with every woman he came across. Or working in the shitty mechanic shop he had walked away from.

I rise to my feet and dig my fingers into the pockets of my pants.

“Your father is responsible for the death of my brother.”

“Impossible! My father will never hurt anyone. He protects people, not hurt them,” she roars. “He’s proof that the justice system is not completely messed up.”

“He’s another bastard in a long line of people who should never have been in charge of someone’s fate,” I grit out. “A day before the final court ruling, the prosecutor—your dear father—met up with the judge overseeing the case in the middle of the night in an empty parking lot.”

I advance toward her. “Tell me, Sienna, what would make the prosecutor and the judge have such an illicit meeting if not foul play?”

“No,” she breathes. “I—Impossible. He would never.”

“Four days after the ruling, where my brother was sentenced to life imprisonment, your dear, perfect father was seen sitting in a hotel bar, and just a seat down, guess who was there.”

“Stop it. You’re lying!” she shrieks.

“It was none other than Maksim Popov, the man who had actually been the one to kill a family in cold blood, the man who had sliced the pregnant mother’s belly?—”

Sienna presses her palms against my chest and tries to push me away. “Stop lying. Papa will never. You’re trying to turn me against him.” Tears flow from her eyes. “You don’t have a brother. You’re lying.”

“Pasquale wasn’t my brother by blood, but he was my brother in every other way that mattered.”

Her hands fist the front of my shirt. “I’ll talk to my father. He can reopen the case. He can save your brother.”

“Save?” I scoff. Then I lean toward her. “Pasquale is past saving now, little bird. The same Russian bastard who had orchestrated Pasquale’s arrest with help from Ivan sent word to his men on the inside. Do you want to know what they did to him? Do you want to know what they did to my brother?”

“No! Stop!”

I lean closer until my breath washes over her lips, so close that her plump mouth is just a hairsbreadth from mine. I can see the kaleidoscope of colors in her eyes, and for a second, it’s enough to distract me.

“They beat him with metal rods. He was outnumbered seven to one. He was unrecognizable when they left him in that room.” And then I tell her the worst part of all of it. “The last thing I ever said to him was that I was going to fix it. Fix everything.”

She shakes her head, one trembling hand flying to her mouth.

“Your father is going to pay for what he’s done. First will come the anger, the burning desire to find you, but with every dead end, he’ll start to lose hope until he knows he’s lost. He’ll grieve you while knowing you’re alive. His imagination will run wild with what you’re going through.” I chuckle. “I’ll break Ivan D’Addario into tiny, irrecoverable pieces.”

“A—and me?” she asks softly, “What do you plan on doing with me once you’ve gotten the revenge you want?”

We both know I won’t ever let her leave here alive, so I don’t bother responding.

“Welcome to the worst days of your life, Sienna.”

I leave her standing there, wearing a defeated expression. A smile curves my lips as I leave the room and walk through the hallway. Now that I have all my pieces in place, it is time to start the game.