Katalina had permanently marked herself with the words I’d said to her the first night we met:
You’ll live because if you don’t, you’ll die.
Around it all were skulls and roses and dying flowers of all sorts, wrapped in jewels and strings of pearls in the most intricate detail I’d seen in a long time.
I’d never gotten that good a look at it all until tonight. It was art that represented her more than I think she would ever know. I saw her in the world of the family, trapped as a prized possession, trapped by the beauty she flaunted for us. She let herself be used over and over again as bait, and even if she didn’t know it, it would kill her. The family would kill her just like they did everyone.
It was a beautiful lifestyle, but one that tangled you up and suffocated you until you were lying there bleeding out.
She’d made that bed. I couldn’t change it for her, and I didn’t need to get wrapped up with her.
Except she’d marked herself with my words.
Like she’d wanted to be mine.
My cock couldn’t forget it, and I couldn’t forget the way her neck tasted when I’d lost control. I needed to have her once, needed a reminder that I didn’t have time for the shit she pulled, especially when there was no way her body would be as good as her bait.
When we walked back into Heathen’s, she grabbed a few of her things she’d left near the bar. “I think I’ll go call Bastian.”
She purred his name, and the sound of it sliced through me like a knife sliced skin. “You’re a fucking instigator, I swear.”
The dim lighting of the bar allowed for some privacy to the untrained eye. A few customers idled around, drinking, minding their own business. The regulars were there, some leaning on the lip of the polished mahogany bar. The family and I had designed a space where people went to feel at home and lose themselves. It felt familiar with its wood floors and soft rock hits playing in the background on weeknights. The weekends, when college was in session, got rowdier.
The bar wasn’t grimy, but it was lived in, worked over into a comfortable space. The college kids loved it, the ones out of college frequented it, and it held an almost iconic place within the city.
To me, it was my first successful venture as a businessman, and it had blossomed into other profitable bars throughout a couple of cities. They made for perfect gathering places for the family or a place to unwind when I needed it.
A place no one questioned anything I did, even if it was shoving Katie.
I grabbed her by the elbow and yanked her toward the back door of the bar.
She stumbled as I shoved her forward and smacked the swinging door open so she could fall through. “Are you kidding me?” I heard her say.
I moved after her into the back storage room. Bottles lined the shelves as the motion light overhead flickered on.
She turned to face me, her wavy bob flaring out as she did. “Don’t ever freaking push me, Rome!”
“You’re fine.” I rolled my eyes. “You basically walked back here yourself.”
She scoffed. “What happened to screaming at Georgie for manhandling me, huh? What happened to ‘no man should put his hands on me’?”
“Except me.” I eyed her up and down, taunting her with the something we’d always known was between us. “Definitely not Bastian.”
“Well, Bastian and every other man on the face of this earth seems to at least flirt with the idea of being with me, Rome. You’re hot as hell one minute and cold as ice the next.” She crossed her arms over her chest, and it exaggerated her cleavage, exaggerated everything I shouldn’t have.
“I’m not interested. My dick might be, though.”
Her gray eyes narrowed. “Right. You saying that’s all I’m capable of?”
“A better man will show you that’s not true. I’m just not him.”
“Whatever.” She waved a hand like the conversation didn’t concern her, like it was a fly buzzing around her head. “Are you going to tell Mario and Bastian you blew my relationship with Georgie tonight? Because that’s really all we should be discussing.”
I crowded her into the wooden table that was up against the back wall. “Fine. It needs to be discussed, anyway. First, Bastian knows you were baiting Georgie?”
“Of course.” She put her hands on my chest to stop my approach.
“That fucker is pissing me off more and more. Second, I’m not telling them shit. You ruined it the minute you walked in here and he put his hands on you.”
“I thought he was out of town. If I’d known he’d show up, I wouldn’t have—”
“You wouldn’t have come here?” I smiled. “Why, Kate-Bait? You scared to bring your boys here? We heathens aren’t that bad.”
She rolled her eyes. “The Heathen’s bar boys are fine. No one gets involved except you.”
“If he hadn’t put his hands on you, I would have let it slide.”
“I can handle a man’s hands on me.”
I gripped her hips in response, and she hissed when I squeezed and then lifted her up onto the table. “A man like that on a body like yours is a waste.”
She looked toward the ceiling like she was trying to avoid the inevitable. When her eyes locked with mine again, her legs wound around my hips and locked on to me too. We’d only done this dance a few times before. We weren’t meant to react to one another, and yet when we got close enough, we ignited and exploded.
“This doesn’t mean a thing,” she whispered and then bit her bottom lip as she looked at mine. “I do what needs to be done for the family, always. This attraction between you and me is just an indulgence, a dumb one at that.”
I hummed low as I slid one hand up her smooth thigh. We were pushing each other, and I felt us getting close to something we usually didn’t.
Tonight, we’d pushed our history too far. She’d brought a man in who’d reminded me of her vulnerability. She’d baited me like she did so well, even when she didn’t know she was doing it.
I was taking the bait this time, even though I knew she was too frustrating, too volatile, and too chaotic to combine with my own wreckage. Us together, we were mayhem and ruination and mass destruction.
We both knew it, and still my hand slid higher and higher.
“You want to do this?” I rolled the question out like a boulder, knowing it would crush our sexual desires. This was Katalina, the girl I’d stared at the night she’d been inducted into the family, the girl who’d stared blankly ahead and didn’t bat an eyelash as I’d taken the supposed love of her life in front of her.
We were both dead inside.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Her voice shook as she said it.
“Because you aren’t in control of this.”
She smiled, but her lips quivered. “Of course I am.”
“No, Katalina. We keep hooking up, we’re bound to go off, and you can’t control a nuclear bomb.”
“Just watch me.” She grabbed my shirt, and I admit she controlled the kiss. She dove into my mouth like it was hers to ravage. Leveraging her ass on the table, she dug her heels hard into my back, and her hands were on my pants zipper so fast, I barely kept up.
When I slid my hand to her panty line, I found nothing there. “Damn, not much of a barrier from the world. I should have known.”
“I like to feel it, Rome. Every place I’m in, every situation I put myself in, I have the little knowledge that I could slide this skirt up and be taken by someone. Every bomb that goes off, I get to feel the explosion, and being that close to the edge makes me feel alive.”
“There’s something wrong with you,” I grumbled, but my fingers slid into her, and she was so wet and tight, I knew I wouldn’t back away, even if the whole world was wrong with her. Then she fisted my cock, and I bit down on my cheek to distract myself from coming before we even got started.
“Don’t act like I’m the only one with problems. You’ve been eyeing me up since the first night you saw me.”
I slammed a hand down on the table to shift some control back to me. “Don’t talk about that night.”
She rocked into my other hand and dropped her head back to expose her neck as she rode my fingers. She closed her eyes, trying to find her high. “Then, fuck me silent, Rome. I need someone to take me.”
I heard the plea under her command, the hitch in her voice. Katalina was broken, shattered, left in jagged little pieces all over the floor. She wanted someone to make her feel something, to make life worth living, but I wasn’t that person. I wasn’t sure there was a person out there who could make her feel a thing. I was damn near positive they didn’t exist, because I knew they didn’t exist for me.
“You’re not going to feel anything, Katalina.”
Her slate eyes shot open, the storm in them dim and painful and raw. “No. I won’t. You won’t either. That’s the beauty of what we’re about to do.”
She spread her legs wider, and I slammed into her. She wrapped her arms and legs around me as I pumped into her faster and faster. Clawing at my back and biting my neck, she didn’t fuck nicely. She left her mark all over me, probably like she did to all her victims. And we were her victims. Katalina was poised as bait but never ended up just that.
I left my mark on her by sucking too hard on her neck, devouring her mouth when I should have pulled back, and gripping her hard enough to bruise.
Our touches were painful.
Just the way we liked them.
