Page 121 of Villainous Kingpin

I closed my eyes for a moment, cursing my stupid nightmares and cursing Gio even more.

When I opened my eyes, it was to Bas watching me, but this time there was no taunting or smugness on his face. God, it would be so much easier if he was a boy and I was a girl without all the fucked up baggage behind us. Or without DiLustro's ambition to rule the world.

But Basilio was his father’s son.

“Who hurt you?” His demand was uttered in a low voice, full of threat, though it wasn’t aimed at me.

“Nobody.”

Tense silence filled the space between us and a haunted expression flickered in his eyes before the cold mask took hold of his face.

“Do you often have nightmares?” he asked in a toneless voice.

Yes.“No,” I lied.

I hated how weak and terrified his father made me feel. Vulnerable and breakable. One extra moment of hesitation, and his father would have raped me. And Bas left me to his father. To destroy me, like he had destroyed my mother.

Instead, I shot him. God, I wished I killed him. To avenge my mother. Was Bas here to avenge his father?

Bas stood up and I realized he still wore clothes, though his shirt was carelessly unbuttoned and his tie hung loose. It was as if he ran over here just as he was about to get undressed.

My eyes locked on his abs and that tattoo that I always admired in the past. The kingpin skull. I curled my fingers into my palms, fighting the urge to reach out and touch him. I still remembered how hard his muscles were under my palms and how warm his skin felt under my fingertips.

He moved closer to me, then sank down to his hunches, our faces only inches apart. This close, his gaze was more black than I’d ever seen it before.

“You left me.”

Three words. Two hearts. One broken promise.

CHAPTER48

Basilio

Iwaited for her to say something. Anything.

She said nothing, but the ghosts in her eyes were unmistakable. When I heard her screams in the middle of the night, the terror lacing her voice, it almost brought me to my knees. I couldn’t wake her up, her skin glistening with sweat as she thrashed.

So I did the only thing I knew. The thing my mamma used to do the nights I was scared of my father. I started talking to her, keeping my voice low. She couldn’t hear me, but it seemed to soothe her. I told her how I searched for her, night and day. How I’d never given her up because to give up meant living in the permanent darkness.

She was my light. My sun.

Without her, there was only darkness.

She was my calm in the storm.

When she walked away from me, she took the only light in my life, as well as my heart. Or maybe it just stopped working, I wasn’t sure.

She was the reason I survived my wretched father and all the brutality in my world. All the roads led me to her and God help me, I’d keep her.

At. All. Fucking. Costs.

I was nothing without her. Just a mirror image of my father and I fucking hated that.

Yet to her, I was nobody now. Nothing.

My teeth clenched, my gaze turned hard and I smiled darkly.

“You left me without a backward glance, principessa,” I growled. “Why?”