14 Chapter 13 (2/2)

'What'd I miss?' Dornan asked, folding his arms across the Gypsy Brothers crest that adorned the leather cut he wore.

His father turned his eyes up to acknowledge him before returning to the map in front of him. 'Los Angeles,' he said briskly. 'Who else do we know who supplies?'

Dornan frowned. 'That's the thing about a monopoly,' he answered. 'n.o.body else supplies, Pop. We're it.'

Emilio didn't look impressed.

'We've got a s.h.i.+pment of meth coming, right?'

Emilio continued to stare at his son, a small shrug of his shoulder the only indication he had heard the question.

'We push that,' Dornan suggested. 'Discounted until we can get our c.o.ke situation covered.'

Emilio grunted. His indifference infuriated Dornan.

'We done here?' Dornan asked. 'These boys can accompany the s.h.i.+pment personally this time. It's due tonight, is it not?'

'Midnight,' Emilio answered. 'At the dock.'

Dornan nodded. When no one moved, he threw his hands up.

'Everyone get that? Nine o'clock at the dock.' He glanced at his watch, seeing they still had a few hours to kill. 'Leave now. Go get something to eat. I'll see you boys out there.'

Viper, who'd been silent until this point, suddenly spoke up. 'You're not coming with us, D?'

Dornan shook his head, avoiding his father's amused stare. 'I said, I'll meet you there. Get out of here, all of you.'

They filed out of the room, the heavy kitchen door slamming after them. Dornan pressed his palms flat on the table and studied his father.

'Was there something else?' Emilio asked, looking up from the papers in front of him.

Dornan shook his head, pressing off the table with his hands and leaving the room.

But he'd lied. There was something else. Her name was Mariana.

And she'd asked him to come back.

Dornan didn't enter her room once he was downstairs. Instead, he stood outside the door, pressing his eye to the peephole that showed a fish-eye view of the small room. Yeah, he was a f.u.c.king pervert. It didn't bother him. She was a grown woman, and she had asked him to come back.

For a while, she paced, probably waiting for him to return. He bore the time patiently, dismissing the hunger in his stomach after a full day on the road. Once he went upstairs, he'd be on the phone and screaming at the rest of the guys to try and get some product out onto the street. So he took his time, and he watched the girl pace in her tiny room.

Three paces, turn, three paces. She did this over and over again, and he imagined for a moment that she was doing it for him. But she seemed oblivious to his peeping, her stride getting quicker, her face turning from carefully controlled detachment to an anxious rage. She stopped at the far end of the room, her back to him, and struck out at the wall in front of her. She kicked it a couple of times too, but most of her energy seemed intent on using her fists to smash the f.u.c.king wall to smithereens. It wasn't as if she was trying to escape — the wall was solid limestone, anyone could see that. No, the little Colombian girl that made his c.o.c.k ache was mad. Ropeable. Absolutely f.u.c.king enraged.

He watched her a little longer, a vague sense of concern pressing at him as he saw the blood dripping from her knuckles. She stopped hitting the wall, but she didn't stop hurting herself. She marched over to the suitcase he'd left inside the door, opened it and spilled the contents onto the ground. Selecting a small round compact from the pile of clothes and make-up, she opened it and threw it at the ground. The mirror shattered into several pieces, and he watched with interest as she knelt down and selected one of the larger pieces.

He a.s.sumed she was going to hide it, use it as a weapon for when he re-entered the room, but what she did next surprised the h.e.l.l out of him. She took the piece of mirrored gla.s.s in her hand, sat on the narrow bed that took up one corner of the room, and held out her wrist.

Is she going to …?

She was. She dragged the sharp tip of the gla.s.s down the inside of her wrist, and fresh blood sprang forth. The sight excited him — yeah, he was a sick motherf.u.c.ker. He enjoyed the sight of blood. He wanted to burst into the room, kneel in front of her, and lick the deep cut in her arm from end to end.

As long as she didn't stab him in the neck while he did it.

Make sure she isn't marked.

His father's words came back to taunt him, and it gave him the perfect excuse to interrupt her psychotic attempt at self-mutilation.

Make sure she is untouched.

Well, that one was a little more difficult, but he'd do his best to make sure he at least didn't leave bruises on her if he found himself unable to resist. He'd never raped a woman, but he'd never needed to — they usually found his enthusiasm a turn-on more than anything. He might have coerced or blackmailed, but he'd never straight-up held a woman down and driven himself inside her against her will.

Yet.

He liked to think he never would, but he was his father's son. The darkness that flowed through his veins disgusted him, but trying to resist it had only ever made things worse. When he tried to control the darkness inside him it didn't abate, but stored up in increments, until it inevitably bubbled up like poison, rendering his violence uncontrollable. He'd killed people over trivial matters when he let things get too pent up, so he figured it was better to destroy the people who were the source of his rage in the first place. Even as he justified the blood on his hands to himself, he knew that he was a bad man. Hopefully, though, he wasn't the worst.

Make sure she isn't marked.

Dornan groaned as he opened the door and saw Ana sitting on the bed, sobbing incoherently as she bled all over herself.

'What are you doing?' he asked her as he closed the door behind him. He expected her to try and hide the gla.s.s, or run from him, or attack him. He expected something. What he didn't expect was for her to continue what she was doing, dragging the sharp gla.s.s down her arm as if he wasn't there, as she muttered and shook and wept.

'Hey!' he said, a little louder this time. He crossed the room in two quick steps and grabbed hold of the hand that held the offending weapon, squeezing hard until she was forced to drop it. The gla.s.s fell to the ground, breaking into two bloodied, uneven shards.

'Seven years bad luck,' he said flippantly, looking from the gla.s.s to her glazed eyes. He felt relief when she glared at him, the daze seemingly broken.

'Are you kidding me?' she growled. 'I think I've got a lifetime of bad luck ahead of me, don't you?'

He kicked the gla.s.s away and sat beside her on the bed, close enough that his jeans brushed her blood-smeared thigh. 'What did you do that for?' he asked, genuinely curious.

She shot him a look so scathing, it made him want to shrink back — only, he was Dornan f.u.c.king Ross, and he shrank back from n.o.body, not even his own father.

'I know you were watching me,' she replied, and it made him smile.

'I like watching you,' he said, shocked by his own honesty. 'Does that bother you?'

She continued to stare boldly at him. 'Your father's men killed my boyfriend last night,' she said, making a choking noise at the back of her throat.

There it was. Her anguish. Her struggle. Her why.

'I'm sorry,' he said, noticing how the blood was still pouring from her wrist. She'd cut deeper than he'd first thought. 'May I?' he gestured towards her wrist and she shrugged, which he took as an invitation. He gathered his grip around the underside of her wrist and cradled it up to the light, gently inspecting the cut.

'Are you trying to kill yourself?' he asked, probing at the wound with his fingers to determine its depth, all the while biting down on the tip of his tongue to stop it from darting out and licking up her blood.

'Of course not,' she retorted, pulling her hand away. But Dornan didn't release his grip on her, and they stared each other down in a silent battle of eyes and wills.

'Don't you ever want to hurt yourself because you can't hurt the person who f.u.c.ked everything up?'

Her words were frank and revealing, making him ponder them. Every time he smashed his own fists into a boxing bag, or a wh.o.r.e, or another Gypsy Brother, he relished the pain, and welcomed the relief that spilling his own blood offered.

'Let me guess,' Dornan said, rubbing his thumb along her cut as she watched in silence. 'My father?'

She snapped her gaze back to him, a sadness bursting forth from her that made him drop her wrist and stand up, lest that sadness infect him in some way.

'Yes,' she said brokenly. 'Your father. And mine.'

He didn't take his eyes from her until he remembered the blood, and looked down to see it coating his palms.

'You like blood, don't you?' she asked suddenly. 'Other people would recoil at the sight of it, but not you. You wear it like an old outfit. It suits you.'

Anyone else would have been embarra.s.sed to admit it, but not Dornan. He traded in lives and in blood, so why shouldn't he like it? And in this case, she had spilled it of her own volition, which made him all the more excited.

'I like your blood,' he replied, smiling wolfishly. 'I like it very much.'

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