Marrying the Mob Prince
Chapter 1 of book 3

CAINAN

Who should I save?

I paced the narrow hallway, wrestling with an impossible decision. Door 13 was the farthest gone, but the girl behind Door 9 was the youngest. Barely eighteen. She'd just been trafficked and still had fight in her, unlike the broken woman who'd huddled in the corner when I'd visited her.

I was mostly deaf in my left ear, but the remaining cells screamed, the high-pitched notes stabbing my brain. My tinnitus acted up the most when I was stressed. Lately, that was all day. Every day.

I wiped the sweat clinging to my brow and glanced at my watch. I wrenched open the door and stepped inside. Light flared overhead, illuminating a girl trapped in a concrete prison. She scrambled to her feet, wobbling like a filly. The girl had the awkward look of a teenager who hadn't yet settled into her body.

Which is why she'd been taken. The perverts I'd worked hard to destroy had endless appetites for the young and beautiful. After the girls were kidnapped, they were thrown into a windowless dungeon with no comforts aside from a camp bed. With good behavior, girls won privileges. Upgrades. Those who never behaved stayed in this room. She had been here for six days.

"Oh look, Satan's spawn is back." The girl bared her very white teeth. "I'll never do what you want, so you might as well turn around and walk through that portal of hell that you came from!"

"Satan's spawn is setting you free."

A gut-wrenching ray of hope shone on her wasted face, hollowing out her cheeks, before she wiped it away. "I don't believe you."

"We need to leave now." I crossed the room and seized her arm, dragging her from the filthy mattress to the doorway.

"Get your fucking hands off me!"

"If you don't shut up, you'll never see your family again. Understand?"

Trembling, she nodded.

I yanked her into the empty hallway. Without pausing, I led her though a series of corridors and doorways. I walked through camera blind spots until we reached the service exit. My heart hammered as I pushed the door. She let out a choked gasp as we stepped into an alley glazed over with watery sunshine. Light poured over her, highlighting her innocence.

"You're really letting me go?"

"That town car will take you wherever you like." I gestured at the car, my voice lowering. "Tell anybody what I did for you, and I'll kill you."

She twisted out of my grip and her back hit the brick wall. Her terrified eyes blinked. Then she took off at full speed, hurtling down the opposite end, away from the car and toward the cameras pointed around the block.

I checked my watch and texted my driver.

Me: She ran. See her home safely.

I dropped the phone into my pocket. Then I reentered Sanctum. It wouldn't do if the cameras caught me at the same time she went missing.

Instead of taking the same route, I slipped back into the club's main floor, which was filled with oblivious rich men who had no idea that women were kept in cells upstairs. I ordered a stiff drink at the bar. Then I entered the opulent Inner Sanctum with checkered marble floors and found a quiet corner with a padded leather loveseat. The soft, golden light of the giant crystal chandelier cast a fairytale-like glow over the debauchery. Faint outlines of naked women played in my peripheral vision, but I ignored them as I shot off a text to my girlfriend.

Me: Are you awake, beautiful?

Claire: I am. :) What are you up to?

Me: Thinking about your body and what I intend to do with it.

Me: I want your mouth. I want the warmth of your little body. I have plans for you, baby.

Three dots appeared next to my message, but she never replied. Smirking, I imagined Claire fiddling with her phone. I put it away and returned to my glass. I drank until my throat burned. Every day, I obliterated my mind with substances until I gained a measure of peace that allowed me to sleep a few hours. Drinking helped. It was the Band-Aid holding my cracked head together. But it wouldn't last much longer. Eventually, this tiresome façade would crumble and I would welcome death, but until then...I had work to do.

After a while, I was so drunk that I could hardly feel my face, let alone my tangled feelings.

"Cainan. We need to talk."

The grave undertone of a Russian accent dragged my attention over the rim of my glass to a grizzly older man in a navy blazer, a pain in the ass by the name of Alexei Kozlov. He was one of the scumbags heading this trafficking enterprise at the heart of Boston. He'd recently suffered the loss of his son and since then, he'd been insufferable.

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I balanced my drink on my knee. "What can I do for you, Mr. Kozlov?"

He took the seat next to mine with a labored, pained sigh, my nose stinging with the stench of Old Spice. His rheumy eyes swept across the room before they settled on me.

"I want you to kill the reporter's sister."

I humored him with a smile. "I'm not a hitman, Mr. Kozlov."

"I know. But you have connections that the rest of us don't. You could have that cunt strung up before tomorrow. You could get one of your Mafia friends to do it."

I shouldn't be surprised. He'd only hinted at it five thousand times. Not long ago, a journalist started investigating Sanctum and flew too close to the sun. The geniuses in charge sent a man to shut her up-that person was Kozlov's son. He was supposed to intimidate her. Instead he attacked her. The girl defended herself. Killed him. And now, Kozlov wanted revenge.

"Mr. Kozlov," I began somberly. "I was saddened to hear about your son's passing. I can't imagine what you must be going through, but I can't think of a worse idea than murdering the family member of a reporter who wrote an exposé on Sanctum."

"My boy was killed."

I bowed my head. "A sad day for us all."

"I want that little bitch dead."

"What you want is irrelevant." I shrugged, playing with the lip of my glass. "We voted to leave Indie Starling alone so long as she kept her trap shut. And she has."

"I'm not asking you to touch Indie. I want the sister punished."

I opened my mouth to give him another fake-sympathy speech, but judging by the fury trembling his lip, Alexei Kozlov would not let this go. I didn't know why. His son had been a simpering, useless idiot before he'd gotten himself murdered. I sipped my drink. "So you want me to murder Claire Starling."

"Correct."

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"You realize I'm dating her, right?"

A loud bang erupted as he slammed his fist onto the coffee table. "You were ordered to get justice for my son!"

"My orders were to contain the problem. Which I've done to everyone's satisfaction except yours."

"You were supposed to humiliate the cunt, not treat her like a girlfriend."

"She's hardly my girlfriend, Mr. Kozlov." Bass beats pounded into my skull as the whiskey worked its way through my system. "She's my pet that I intend to use, abuse, and toss aside. And while I'm enjoying her, I have no intention of ending her life."

"He was my only son," he mumbled, digging a crumpled napkin from his jacket pocket. "You don't know what it's like to lose a child."

As he dotted at his dry eyes, I restrained my impulse to vomit. I could've laughed at this nauseating display. My empathy for this guy was at a fat zero. The man who fucked a rotation of sex slaves did not get to wave the dead son card in my face.

The only reason I'd started dating Claire was to stop the others from killing her. Although...I wasn't exactly Prince Charming. She didn't know that I'd spent our dates picturing how I'd corrupt her. How I'd defile her tight body. She had no fucking clue of my depravity. I was the worst man in the world for her, but Claire flew right into my hand and ate from my palm, oblivious to my claws.

Kozlov's obsessive ranting yanked my thoughts from my petite beauty to this unpleasant wretch, whose hands clenched and unclenched on his knees.

"...I want her brought into Sanctum. I want her tortured. I want her holes filled with cum. Cainan, I won't rest until she's been recorded getting fucked by every member in our establishment. Then I'll send the video to her sister."

"Once again, Mr. Kozlov, I am dating Claire Starling." My brittle smile vanished as my tone grew cold and hard. "Are you not familiar with the concept of ownership? She is mine. Mine to play with, mine to fuck, mine to do whatever I wish. If I replace out you've touched a hair on her pretty head-I'll kill someone else in your family. Perhaps your mother."

His widened eyes showed the whites all around. "H-how dare you threaten me?"

I drained the glass and tossed it on the table. My pocket buzzed, sparing me any further response. "I have to take this. Excuse me."

I grabbed my phone and left him on the loveseat, crossing the room into the employee's entrance, where I ducked into an office. I answered, expecting my driver's loud Italian-American accent to blast through the speaker. Instead a wet cough greeted me, followed by a voice that chilled my blood.

"Cainan, it's your father."