Owned: A Mafia Menage Romance (18 page)

“Nice, right?” I ask him. “Did you pick all this out, Marie?”

She stands on the bottom stair, her hands wrapped around the carved acorn top of the newel post. I can see her knuckles are white as she claws against the oak.

“You shouldn't do that, darling,” I scold her gently. “That must be an antique.”

“You… You both have to go. Please leave. Please, now…”

Roman rolls his eyes at me and sighs loudly, picking up two large boxes and beginning to shuffle up the stairs. Marie looks after him with an expression of utter alarm.

“All clear?” Roman asks me.

“Down here, yeah. I didn’t do upstairs yet.”

“You guys need to leave!” she insists.

“Were not leaving, Marie. Not yet,” I say to her gently.

I can hear her breath coming out in small gasps as she follows behind me. At the top of the stairs Roman looks down the hall and then takes three steps to the first doorway and pushes it open. There's a huge four-poster bed in the center with an upholstered bench at the end of it and large, ornate dressers on either wall.

“Is this your room?” I ask her. She nods mutely.

With a shrug, Roman enters and drops his boxes abruptly on the bench, then turns on his heel and heads back for the stairs to go get more.

Immediately I start sweeping the room but I hardly have to. I can see the tiny black cameras in opposite corners. Somebody didn’t even bother to hide these.

“Well, you must have been very good in this room,” I say as I pull them down. “It was smart of you to keep your catting around to more, uh, discreet locations.”

Her cheeks redden dangerously as she chokes back an outraged gasp.

“Don’t worry, kitten,” I assure her with a wink. “I won’t tell. You got another bedroom here somewhere?”

She nods again but doesn't seem to be able to tell me anything so I just walk down the hallway until I find another door and open it. Nope, a bathroom. A nice bathroom, though, with a marble shower big enough for at least three people. So that's good. The third door I try opens onto a bright, sunny room with shimmering silvery curtains and a king sized bed in the middle of it.

“Well, this will do,” I say, mostly to myself at this point. Though I would love to press the point and just move into her bedroom, maybe I should take it slower. Give her more time to adjust. I don’t want to wake up with a knife in my back right away, anyway. “This will do quite nicely.”

I can hear her follow me into the room as I come in and push my box into a corner. The RF detector indicates this room is clean so I finally nudge the antenna back in and slide it back into my pocket. The baggie full of tech shards is useless now. I just drop that in my box.

I really don't have that much to unpack and it's only going to take a few trips. I sure hope she regains the power of speech by the time I'm done, or it's going to be a very long night.

Her fingers press at her bottom lip and her lower eyelids are glistening with tears. This basically shoots an arrow through my chest and for some reason I feel horribly, terribly sorry, then slightly irritated if I'm telling the truth.

“All right, what is it?” I sigh. She doesn't say anything for a few seconds and that is just starting to get on my nerves. “Marie? If you want to say something, please say it.”

“Leave…” she whispers pitifully. “Please, just leave.”

My hands fall helplessly against my thighs. “I can't, darling. You know this. Besides, who will protect you if we’re not here?”

"Well, Nuncio, Paulie...”

“All gone.”

She startles, fluttering her eyelashes. “Gone?”

I nod, giving her a few seconds to let that sink in. “All gone, Princess. Gone for good. It's just us now.”

Shaking her head, she holds herself tightly around her middle. “No, that's not possible,” she whispers. “Daddy would never —”

“— did you think that your daddy's people were going to stay here forever? You’re a married woman now, Marie. You're not just a little Princess anymore. You’ve got a husband now… Well, two —”

“Oh my God,” she gasps. "This is crazy. This is
crazy
!”

Okay, what am I supposed to do here? For a second I think that she's actually going to just lose it right in front of me. Like, actually tremble herself into tiny little pieces on the floor.

“Marie,” I sigh, keeping my voice as gentle as possible, “darling, it's all right. Everything is going to be fine.”

She presses her lips together but her eyes seek mine, begging me silently to tell her again. Now I understand. That's what she needs, someone to tell her everything is going to be all right.

I give her a few seconds and then fold my arms around her. She melts against me, sending that same series of arrows through my heart. Jesus, this one really does get to me. I drop a kiss against her forehead, lingering for just as long as I dare to.

“Marie, it really is all right. Let's just try it, okay? We’re all in this together now.”

“Try what?” she says, muffled against my shirt. The sensation of her breath on my chest is really quite intense.

Roman comes clomping up the stairs again and pauses in the doorway. He cocks an eyebrow at me and then takes a couple of steps into the room. “What are we doing?” he says gruffly.

“I was just explaining to Marie that we are going to try to be here… Together. While we figure this whole thing out.”

“Figure it out?” she repeats uncertainly. She pulls back slightly and stares up at me with those giant brown eyes again. For her safety and mine, I release her and take a half step backward.

“Hm, yes,” I say convincingly. “We’ll do the nuclear family thing, as far as anybody knows. Roman and I will figure out what's really going on, you know… Those guys in the airport and whatnot. We’ll lay low for a while, the families will get together. And then we'll see.”

“We'll see what?”

“We’ll see what we will see,” I say, searching for words that make some kind of sense in some kind of order. I don't even know exactly what I'm trying to say here, I'm just trying to lighten the mood. “If it works out, great. If it doesn't…”

“Then we could stop?” she says with a little bit more hope in her voice than I was really wanting to hear.

Sighing, I nod. Okay. She's not on board. Well, what did I really expect? “Yes, Princess,” I assure her. “If it doesn't work, then we'll stop.”

I glance over my shoulder to see Roman glaring daggers at me. Maybe he didn’t really feel I was authorized to make that offer, but what am I gonna do? She’s staring at me like that, and I'm a little bit helpless. I’m just a man.

“Sounds good to me,” he growls, and stomps back out the doorway.

“So all that stuff about… About being owned and stuff? That was just, what? Just the way you guys talk or something?”

“Oh, no no no,” I chuckle, shaking my head. “We definitely own you, there's no mistake about that. That's all been arranged.”

“Well… Then I don't understand!” she says, her eyes flashing. She knuckles her hips and switches her weight to one side, scowling. “What kind of bullshit line is that anyway then?
If it doesn't work out?
 What kind of a game are you playing, Alek?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Easy, girl!” I say with my hands up. She really is at her best when she thinks she's being sassy. I'm going to try not to take advantage of that.

“Don't tell me to go
 easy girl
!
”

I shrug. “I'll say what I want. You’re really in no position to complain.”

“Christ. You are really a piece of work, you know that?”

“Yeah. I hear that one all the time, actually.”

“AAUGH!” she yells suddenly and stomps off. I find her standing in the kitchen, turning helplessly in a circle. There aren’t any boiling pots or knife arrays so I think we’re probably okay for the moment.

“Come on, Marie. Don’t be like that. Tell you what: I’ll put it another way. You be a good girl, be nice, be obedient. And I'll be a good boy. I'll be gentle, I'll protect you. Deal?”

Peering at me suspiciously, she purses her lips as though considering it. What's to consider? Is there a better deal on the table?

“For how long?"

“Oh, okay… Reasonable question. Let's say… Six months.
You
try it for six months.
We’ll
try it for six months. That should get everybody off your back who's interested in you and Roman being together. If it doesn't work? We'll figure something else out.”

She shakes her head, chuckling with no humor. “That's not how it works with us, Alek. Italians don't just split up. We don't divorce, nothing. That thing there, with the priest and all those people? That was serious business. We do not fuck around.”

Somehow, this makes me like her even more. Even with all her huffing and puffing, she has a clear sense of what she has to do and I know she’s going to do it. More importantly, she knows too.

In a weird way, she is just like us.

“And yet,” I point out, “here you are with two big strong Russian men in your house. You’ve already broken the rules, Princess.”

She opens her mouth to say something, then clamps her lips shut stubbornly.

“Yeah, that's what I thought,” I tell her. “You already know it. We've already broken so many rules, Princess, what's a few more?”

“This is crazy,” she says for the thousandth time, her hand fluttering up to her forehead as though rubbing at her scalp is going to somehow stir her thoughts back into sanity.

“Yes, totally,” I agree, and I finally let myself pull her into my arms again. It's like slaking a thirst to have her near me. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself if this feeling continues. It's going to be very difficult to control myself.

“You know, Roman might not tell you this, but he's really very happy.”

Knitting her eyebrows, she shakes her head. “He doesn't look happy.”

I tip my head from side to side. Every time I move, I can feel her body against my body shifting slightly. I know she can feel my cock getting harder, and I sort of wish it wasn't because I don't want to scare her off. Then again, I kind of like her when she’s scared too.

Oh well, what are you gonna do?

“Yeah, well… Roman can be a little hard to read.”

She rolls her eyes, clearly not believing me.

“If you're confused, just ask me,” I whisper, dipping my head to run my nose along her hairline. She has this feral smell underneath everything, this small mammal smell. “I always know what he’s thinking. I can tell you.”

“Well, is he really… What he says he is?” she asks me in a small voice.

“What does he say he is?”

Blinking, she stares at me for long seconds before answering. “A monster, Alek. He says he's a monster.”

“Ah, that. Well, yes. Of course he is. But now he is
your
monster, Marie. All yours.”

MARIE

I've officially lost my mind.

If you would have asked me two weeks ago what I would be doing today, I would probably have told you something like reorganizing my closet… Trying to get Gianna to hang out with me when she wasn't studying… Stashing a little money here and there for my great plan to escape this life and start something new.

Would I have said
married
? No. Would I have said shacking up with a Russian hitman… Make that two Russian mob guys? Two??

No. I would never have said that. I would never have guessed this.

My life went from tolerably boring, confined, slightly aggravating to batshit crazytown overnight. Utterly bananas. I thought I had it bad before, but I really had no idea, absolutely
no
idea what Daddy had in store for me.

And now I can't get out of it. I'm stuck.

Even as Alek and Roman were moving their crap into my house, shoving my furniture around like it was all part of a doll house or something, tracking their filthy footprints on every rug and floorboard in the entire place, my brain was on fire. I was in absolute panic mode, trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do next.

I mean, this is insanity, right? Who does this?

And yet, I can barely look away. It's like a train wreck in slow motion. There goes my life, exploding in billows of fire and smoke and flying shrapnel everywhere. And I have no idea what to do about it.

Before, I could kind of convince myself that I had my secret plan. I sort of held it close, petting it and stroking it and thinking about the tiny details of it when I needed something to comfort me, when everything seemed hopeless.

If Daddy was all over me about what I was doing and where I was going and who I was hanging out with, I could just silently think about my escape route and instantly feel a little better, like there was a breath of fresh air pouring into my prison cell.

But that's totally gone. Smashed to bits like all of those little cameras and microphones and stuff that Alek was so thrilled about finding all over my house.