Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance (21 page)

“Aleksio…”

“What do you want, baby?”

I want him to call me a whore again. The word has a sharp point that I want to feel.

He strokes a finger between my legs, up and down, hitting nerves. His fingers graze over my pussy.

I tremble with his every move. I’m becoming more and more his with every stroke.

“No matter where you run I’ll always find you.” His strokes are strong and steady. He’s found the spot that’s sending me partway into the stratosphere. “Because you’re my dirty fucking whore and this is mine.” It feels like he’s sliding all four fingers through my pussy. “This is mine to use how I want, got it?”

“Yes,” I breathe.

He keeps going, stoking the energy higher. “And right now I want you relaxed and dripping so I can do you hard.” He slides two fingers into me, invading me, pushing me into oblivion. Shapes pulse and build whenever I close my eyes. He’s not holding me anymore, but I’m not going anywhere.

He picks me up and carries me to the desk. He shoves everything off it—the files he so carefully stacked, the mugs, the laptop. “Lie back for me, baby.”

I lie back. I want him so bad I can’t think. I’m flying. Trembling. I’m completely his.

He pushes open my legs and stands above me, then he yanks his belt open with a hard jerk and starts unbuttoning his dress slacks, regarding me hungrily. The heat of his gaze is too much, and I press my knees together.

He shakes his head. “No, this is mine, remember?” He pushes my legs apart again. “Touch yourself.”

“Wh-what?”

He pulls out his log of a cock, dark and veiny and fiercely beautiful. I get hot remembering the way he shoved it down my throat. “You have to touch yourself right now.” It’s part plea and part decree.

I touch myself. He watches me with that invasive gaze of his. Everything between us feels impossible. Like everything is lost and all we have is this impossible madness, and it feels good.

Our impossible madness feels like the only true thing in the world.

I touch myself for him.

He climbs up on the desk with his pants half down. He kneels over me, his pants like a band around my chest. “Open, whore. This mouth is mine, too.”

I open my mouth and he arches into me, shoving his cock between my lips. I’m spinning, stroking myself, bending to his will, taking him.

“That’s it,” he says. “Suck it. Feel me moving in your mouth. I want you to feel every throbbing vein. That’s what you do to me.”

I whimper.

“Shhhh, baby.” He hovers over me and grabs something from somewhere beyond my head. He places it in my hand. It’s round and smooth. “That’s a paperweight. You can crack my skull when you get tired of what I do to you. That’s your safe word.”

I grunt. It’s all I can do.

“Kill me, fuck me, love me,” he gasps, invading my throat.

I move under him, panting through my nose. I’m about to come.

“Oh no, you don’t.” He pulls out and gets off of me, pulling my hand away from my crotch. “Wider. Open up for me, give me everything, baby.” He grabs my knees, spreading me wider himself. He holds me there, holds me open.

The air on my throbbing pussy is wickedly cool.

I groan as he penetrates me with his fingers, pushing in deep and merciless. He nips the side of my thigh, and I gasp. He’s doing something with his fingers, curling them as he slides them inside me, like he means to pull an orgasm right out of me.

I’m panting, needing him to never stop. He kisses down my belly. Down, down, he goes until he touches his tongue to my clit. I let out a cry. He licks once. It’s not a dainty lick, it’s a hard, mad, rough lick. A lick and a suck while he moves his fingers inside me.

He does it again, and I drop the paperweight. It shatters below. He licks me again and again, and I shatter, too, into a zillion pieces.

My cries are throaty and low and like an animal and I don’t even care. I’ve lost touch with everything normal.

“I like you like this. Like an animal broken for me. Touch yourself some more. Keep yourself swollen and ready for me.”

I feel shy and exposed now that I’ve come down from coming, but I touch myself like he says. I think I’d do almost anything for him.

“What are you?”

“Your fucking whore to use.”

His hands tremble as he rolls on a condom, panting. “God, Mira,” he whispers. “I can’t…I can’t…”

He’s not making any sense. Not that it matters.

Roughly, he shoves away my hand, like it was too much for him to watch me touch myself for even for a second more. He’s over me, so gorgeous. I feel his fat, hard head between my legs. He’s pushing into me, shoving into me, looming over me.

He presses my arms over my head and slides in.

I look into his eyes as he fills me. He’s impossibly thick inside me. Us together feels real and forever. The most honesty there can ever be in this world of lies.

“You feel better than I ever dreamed.” He moves in and out of me, harder and harder.

“You do, too.”

I’m on the knife edge of another orgasm, trying to make it last, but the way he’s panting, just gone, gone, gone, sends me over the edge, screaming his name.

And then he comes with a shout, clutching me, crushing me. I love the way he feels, the way he hurts.

After he comes, he stills, fully sheathed in me. It’s a long time before he pulls out.

I lie there boneless while he limps over to the wet bar. He grabs a bright blue towel and limps back.

“Your ankle.”

His lips quirk. “My
ankle
.” Like it’s so funny. “Lie the fuck still. This pussy is mine, and I plan to take perfect care of it.” He wipes between my legs—gently, thoroughly, gazing into my eyes.

I can feel myself getting addicted to his edge, to his possessiveness. Part of me wants to lie there and be his thing forever, like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

Except it does exist.

When he decides my pussy is back to its perfect, pristine condition, he tosses the towel and lies down next to me on the desk, clothes half-off. He pushes my hair off my shoulder. “You look sad.”

I am sad. I’m sad for him. For us. “Our worlds are so different. You see darkness everywhere. Happy baby animals make you think of death and blood.”

“I guess I ruined happy baby animals for you.”

“You didn’t ruin them for me. You showed me your heart.”

He traces the line of my cheekbone.

“Be better than him, Aleksio.”

“It’s too late.”

“Fuck you,” I say. “You think I don’t know what you are, what you can be? I remember you as a kid. Maybe you don’t remember, but I do. I remember when you were good. I knew your heart, and yeah, you kicked down a few sandcastles in your time, but you had a good heart. I remember.”

“Are we back to this again?”

“You have a good heart. And if you would just let yourself feel anything, feel just one thing, you would feel your good heart, and you would know you were better than him. Better than all of this animal shit.”

“Do you I need to fuck you senseless again?”

“Aleksio. You can make me want to fuck dirty and be talked to…dirty. But you won’t make me forget your beautiful heart. Why not leave all this? You could come back with me.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? You’re alive. Fuck the crime empire. Your father left you and your brothers huge amounts of money. You can do what you want.”

“It’s not that simple. I can’t just turn and run.”

“You won’t, you mean.”

He slides a knuckle over my lower lip.

“I need to go back to my life,” I say. “In the Bronx. You can’t stop me.”

His phone rings. He watches my eyes.

“Your fucking crime empire awaits.”

“Ignore it,” he says.

It rings again.

I slide off the desk and hand it to him. I need space. He takes it, not moving his gaze from mine. “Yeah.” Then he looks away. His brows furrow. “Who is this?”

I hear a woman’s voice.

“Hold on.” He passes it to me. “Lila.”

I take it and sit up. “Lila?”

“Mira,” she says.

He jerks the phone out of my hand and puts it on speaker so that he can listen, too.

“Is everything okay?” I ask.

“Fine,” she said. “Donald and Shauna Knutson are in the hospital—they’re badly beaten, but they’re going to live.”

“I’m glad,” I say. “Will they let you see them?”

“Soon.” She pauses. “Ronson’s out there pulling in their boat.” I get the feeling this is why she called—she can finally speak now that Ronson’s not there. Even with Ronson gone, she sounds furtive, like she’s imagining she might be overheard if she’s not careful. “I wanted to tell you something about Keith. But I want your word…I don’t want the Knutsons to get in trouble. But if Keith has brothers…”

I shoot a look at Aleksio. I’m ready to give my word, but is he? He understands. He gives me a nod. “I give you my word,” I say. “Whatever you have to say, the Knutsons will not be hurt by this.”

“That little boy, Keith, he was wild, like we said,” she says. “The Knutsons adopted a number of children. They opened their home. They were good people. But not with Keith. He would fight, and it was bad between him and Donald. It wasn’t a legal adoption, you see. Things weren’t right.”

Aleksio’s face has gone stony. I can practically read his mind:
What the fuck did they do
? I give him a warning look.

He twirls his finger in a circle, eager to get the story.

“What happened?” I say. “You can trust me.”

“It’s true, the story Ronson told. Donald Knutson and the boys went up to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, but the story always felt a bit off to me, in terms of how deep they went. They went so deep in—you don’t bring kids that deep in for that length of trip.” She pauses.

“So it sounded odd, something not right,” I coax.

“Don Knutson always did say Keith belonged with the animals. He liked to wander off. He was smart, curious, and constantly wandering off. And Donald Knutson would go through periods of impulsive behavior. Poor judgment. They completed these illegal adoptions, you see. They had money.”

I look at Aleksio. This is sounding bad.

“The place they camped that year, they went far up into a remote area. This area, it’s wilderness as vast as the Sahara. Do you know it?”

“No.”

“There are places inside that wilderness area nobody goes. It’s not easy to search.”

“Very remote,” I say.

“I always wondered about the drowning story. Could he have wandered off? Or been left? There was so much trouble with him. And because they believed him drowned, they didn’t search for him as thoroughly as they would have, had he been lost.”

Aleksio looks like he wants to kill somebody. I put my finger to my lips as she goes on.

“I put it out of my mind, having nothing but speculation, but then two years ago, a private investigator came to visit the Knutsons. The Knutsons were on a cruise at the time, so he came to our house to ask about Keith. Keith had been gone ten years by then. He told me that a wild boy had been found by campers—”

“Wait. What?” I widen my eyes at Aleksio.

“A savage boy, maybe eighteen years old, a boy who seemed to have grown up in the woods. Found by campers, half-dead from a wounded leg. The years lined up. If Keith was lost at eight, and this was ten years later, he would be eighteen.”

“Ten years in the woods?”

“I don’t know how the investigator got involved,” she continues. “This wild boy, he was big news up north. He made a stir on the social media. They had a name for him. I don’t remember. The investigator described him, asked if it could be Keith.” Her voice reduces to a whisper. “But I lied and I told him no. I made up a story about a birthmark. It was wrong of me to lie, but no good could have come from reuniting Don Knutson and Keith. It seemed the most harmful thing in the world for them both. God help me, that is the decision that I made. But blood brothers, that’s different. I could see how your friends grieved for their brother. Ronson was against me getting involved, you see.”

“I’m so glad you called. So glad, so grateful. Do you remember the name of the investigator?”

“He gave me a card. Quickly. Do you have a pen?”

“Yes.” I motion to Aleksio. He grabs a pen and looks around for a piece of paper. My eyes fall to the folders he’d shoved off the desk. I’m thinking he could write on one of those. That’s when I catch sight of a familiar name on one of the tabs. Vanessa Nikolla.

I stiffen.

What’s he doing with a file on my mother? He moved it when we came in…and it seemed strange. What is he hiding from me?

“Okay,” he says, pen poised over a notepad.

I study the file discreetly while Aleksio takes down the information Lila gives. The folder looks old. Official. There’s a routing grid on the outside of it with initials.

Lila is going on about what she knows. “The investigator was older. Very sickly,” she says. “I hope that those boys find their brother. That they can heal. I could see the resemblance.”

I thank her and click off. Aleksio kisses me. “Thank you!” Then he yells for Viktor.

“You should thank Lila.”

Viktor bounds in with two of his guys. “What’s wrong?”

Aleksio goes to him, full of emotion. “Kiro might be alive.”

Aleksio

I
leave Mira
at the house with Tito watching her. She seems willing to stay, at least long enough to see this Kiro lead through—I think she’s as interested in seeing him alive as I am. Still, I tell Tito he can’t let her leave.

Viktor and Yuri and I drive through the night, racing to reach the investigator. Karl Hawthorne. He’s in some sort of nursing facility in northern Wisconsin.

I drive. Viktor is unusually silent in the passenger seat, consumed by whatever is on his phone. He’s not doing anything on it, just staring at it. Not even scrolling. His lip where I hit him seems to have gotten fatter overnight, but his eye looks better.

“What the fuck are you watching? Are you finding something new?”

“Nothing new,” he says.

We found the story about the wild boy Lila was talking about pretty easily. He did make a stir on social media around two years ago. Nobody ever got a photo of him, but crews were camped out. They even gave him a name—Savage Adonis. There was a lot of media hunger for a handsome wild boy until it was determined to be a hoax. But what if it wasn’t?