Ace Of Spades_A Dark Erotic Romance Read online

  “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Then agree to work with me.”

  “Agree to––what? Are you seriously trying to change the subject right now?” she snapped, standing up from the couch.

  “No, I’m offering to take our relationship to the next level and be a partner instead of an enemy.”

  She laughed, humorlessly, and quirked a brow. “What do you get out of that, Mateo? I know this isn’t being offered from the kindness of your missing heart, so please don’t sit here and pretend you’re some selfless saint, we both know that’s utter bullshit.”

  “We can be something amazing together. I know I hurt you, I know what you’re afraid of.”

  I ignored her dirty mouth for once and persisted. Her refusal is what utter bullshit was.

  She was scared of falling in deeper with me, but we both knew she was already stuck. I’d do anything to keep her safe and give her a life where she had everything she desired. I wanted to place her on a pedestal and treat her like the cutthroat queen I knew she was.

  “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “I’m the most invaluable asset you’ll ever have.”

  She tried to look away, I wouldn’t allow it.

  Gently lifting her chin with my knuckle, I peered down at her.

  “Don’t look away, amada. If someone can’t maintain eye contact, they’re either guilty of something or afraid, a lot of times both.”

  “I’ve saved your life when Alex failed to end it, I watched over you for five years, and I got rid of a body on your behalf. I think that says you can trust me.”

  It took her a second to understand what I was referring to. Her eyes slightly widened in and she stepped back.

  I let her have the few inches of space to process another tidbit of revelations. Seems I was quite full of those lately.

  “You?” she questioned, disbelievingly.

  “What else could it be other than fate that had me around every time you’ve ever needed me the most? From the botched suicide hit to the piece of shit that tried to take what wasn’t his and slit your thigh open.”

  She opened her mouth, closing it when words refused to come out. Her gaze went from the blue screen and then bounced back to me.

  Reaching out, I tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and cupped the side of her face.

  “Why would you do that? You…saved my life that night. I knew something about you was familiar,” she said quietly.

  “Doesn’t all that prove I’m trustworthy?” I deflected back at her.

  I couldn’t let her know how deep my obsession ran. It was an incurable sickness spreading through my bones.

  I’d let Alex Norway live for years, letting him think he was safe, setting him up to be her second kill.

  Her first was the man she fought off and took the knife from. I watched from a distance as she dug the blade into him like she was carving up a turkey.

  No one came running to investigate his screams and pleas, not in this neighborhood.

  By the time Elias and I approached him his intestines were spilling out onto the pavement.

  He’d lost control of his bowels. I put a bullet in the fucker’s skull and then took him to my gators.

  He was someone no one would ever miss, a street fiend from the ghetto that went after the wrong girl.

  I couldn’t fault her leaving him behind the way she did. Most people didn’t have multiple places they could dispose of dead bodies.

  She was wise enough not to go to the police. Her scar looked the way it did from her stitching it up herself.

  Elena may not have grown up in Vice City, but she had impeccable street smarts from being forced to live in the worst parts of an inner city.

  “Alex…he’s the guy you had me burn with a blow torch and then dunk in acid?” Her brows rose, and a slight smile graced her pretty face.

  “I told you there was a reason for everything I did,” I smirked, slightly caught off guard when she launched herself forward, into my arms.

  “Thank you,” she mumbled against my chest.

  “You don’t have to thank me, anjo. Just be yourself from now on and understand I never do anything with the intent to hurt your heart.”

  She squeezed me tighter, causing me to sigh. I ran a hand through her hair in a soothing motion. She fit perfectly against me; the woman had become part of me.

  Her body was supple and soft, but her sweet tortured soul was made of cast iron.

  She hadn’t broken once, never even brought up wanting to fold. Any doubts I had about what came next dilapidated with every pull of her cherry blossom scent that filtered into my corrupted lungs.

  “There’s someone at the stables who would be more than happy to explain this surveillance video to you,” I casually mentioned after a few moments of silence.

  She lifted her head and stepped back just enough to see my face.

  “Then we need to go to the stables.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I was ready to go inside this time.

  Honestly, that was pretty much all I was ready for. My head was spinning with so many goddamn questions I wanted to throw up. Not even the smell of sea salt was making me feel better.

  The sun now sat high in the sky, drying up all evidence of the previous day’s rain, reminded me I hadn’t checked in with my friends, which made me feel like shit.

  “I need to get hold of Peyton and Melody before they freak out.”

  Instead of verbally responding, Mateo lifted his cell from his inner pocket, controlling the UTV tram with one hand.

  “Here,” he said after unlocking the screen, offering it to me.

  “Uh, thanks,” I mumbled, quickly dialing Peyton’s number. When he didn’t answer, I tried Melody, getting no response from her either.

  “They’re not picking up,” I more said to myself than Mateo, shooting them each the same text that said I was okay.

  “I’ll send someone to do a well-check.”

  “You’d do that?” I internally cringed at how surprised I sounded.

  “They’re important to you, which in turn makes them important to me,” he replied after a minute.

  I nodded, feeling a little awkward as I thanked him again.

  Seriously, had the guy undergone a personality change after we had sex?

  I looked out at the surrounding land and got lost in my head for a bit.

  The lethal, stunning man beside me had saved my life and watched over me for years. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t grateful, not when he was the sole reason I was sitting where I was, alive and breathing. His scent had stuck with me all this time, I’d suspected, but I’d never been positive.

  I didn’t trust him to disclose everything to me, but I trusted him with my life. If someone fucked with me, he’d make sure it was the last thing they ever did.

  “Do you know where my father is?” I asked, staring at a brown colt happily frolicking in one of the paddocks we were passing.

  “He’s not alive, Elena,” he responded slowly. It sounded like he wanted to add more and stopped himself.

  “But I thought…,” huffing out a breath. I scrubbed a hand over my face. I couldn’t say I’d been overjoyed with the idea of my father being back from the dead, not if he really had concocted a plan that destroyed my sister and killed my mother, but I still missed him.

  Keeping my mouth closed, I decided to watch how thing’s played out for a while. If I needed to make a move, then I’d make a move. Intuition was telling me I would have all my answers much sooner than later. I knew I couldn’t fall apart when I was this close.

  Mateo steered the UTV around to the back of the massive stable and parked. The same two guards I’d seen the last time we’d been here stood by the large metal door.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “As I’ll ever be,” I replied, getting out of the tram.

  From the first experience, I knew this place was more than just a building that housed pretty t
horoughbreds,

  I was prepared for what I could see inside. My stomach fluttered with nerves and a jolt of excitement.

  One of the guards greeted Mateo, acknowledging me with a head nod before making a move to open the large steel door.

  We stepped inside, and the first thing I saw was my Uncle Samuel in the center of the room. His lips were bloodied, and his face was swollen on the entire right side.

  One cheek sat slightly higher than the other, mashing his eye shut. He was secured to with a thick chain wrapped around his legs and torso; still in the clothes from the night he’d been dragged out of an art gala Mateo and I attended together.

  “Ugh, he smells.” I cuffed my nose and swallowed the urge to dry heave.

  “He’s sitting in days old shit and piss,” Mateo pointed out with a bemused expression.

  “I was wondering when you two would come down,” Elias’ voice carried from the back portion of the room.

  He exited through the metal gate that was in place to secure their yayo, marijuana, and drug packers behind it. He was pushing a trolley loaded with name brand shoes.

  “These are ready to go,” he said to Mateo, parking his merchandise by the entrance to the hallway before coming to stand by me with a boyish smile painted on his face.

  “Good,” Mateo replied, lazily circling my uncle. He stopped right behind him and looked across the room, spouting something off in Portuguese. Whatever it was had two guards moving towards one of the large oil drums,

  His golden eyes flashed to mine as he removed my uncle’s gag. “Samuel, why don’t you tell Elena what happened to her father?”

  Everyone inside the room knew it was more of a demand than a question.

  I moved closer, stopping when the tip of my foot bumped a toolbox I hadn’t noticed before.

  “If I talk, you kill me,” Samuel rasped.

  “If you don’t talk he kills you,” I replied before Mateo could. The statement earned me a bright dimpled smile from him.

  “Actually, she’s going to make you talk, and if you don’t, she’ll kill you,” he corrected. “Grab the pliers, anjo.”

  Not questioning what he intended to do with them; I knelt down and opened the toolbox, grabbing the pair of red handled pliers that were resting right on top. Elias followed behind me, going to Samuel’s left side when I went right.

  “Are you going to speak now?” Mateo asked him.

  “You can go fuck yourself. I won’t betray her,” Samuel seethed.

  “Okay, we’ll see,” Mateo gently slapped his swollen cheek, twice.

  He settled his gaze once more on me.

  “Take out his teeth, if you want to hear what he to say, then you’ll have to make him talk.”

  I knew he could have just told me whatever it was Samuel knew, but maybe it was better this way. If I were going to be with him, truly, I would need some major balls of steel.

  I refused to be the typical pretty housewife that racked up his credit card bills and baked cherry pies, waiting for him to stop playing big bad kingpin. I wanted to be beside him, occasionally on top of him, but I would never stand behind him. I’d agreed to play a role before. Now I was dead set on making it my reality.

  I stepped forward, glad I was in sweatpants and not a damn party dress like the last time I’d tortured a man.

  Without me noticing, Elias had slipped on a pair of black leather gloves.

  He looked at me with silent encouragement written on his face. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

  “I’m ready,” I affirmed, trying to ignore the sensation of Mateo’s eyes burning a hole in the side of my face.

  Elias nodded and wedged his fingers into Samuel’s mouth. Using both hands, he wrenched it wide open, keeping a death grip on his jaw.

  I lined the tip of the pliers up with Samuel’s front, bottom molar.

  “You can do this, anjo,” Mateo stated when he saw I was about to hesitate.

  Looking down at my uncle, right in his eyes, flashing back to the unmistakable hurt and rage I’d seen on my father’s face, and got to work.

  I couldn’t get the damn thing out until after trying for a good five minutes to separate the tooth from its root.

  I squeezed the pliers all the way together, clamping and twisting to loosen it up. The tooth cracked, and a piece of it broke off completely.

  There was blood and saliva running down either side of his face by the time I got around to the third tooth. Aside from trying to call me every name in the book with a mouthful of bloodied spit, he still wouldn’t talk.

  Mateo, who’d been watching the entire time, suddenly called out something in his native tongue again.

  “We have to meet Sergio and oversee a shipment, amada. Do you think you can handle this?”

  When he asked me that, it felt like every pair of eyes in the room honed in on me to see how I would react. He’d said ‘we’. At first notion, I thought this was a test, and I suppose it could be considered as one.

  I was the only woman in a room full of his men that wasn’t currently packing yayo into the bottom of high heels.

  The Remmington’s were an old money powerhouse involved in drugs, gambling, trafficking, and extortion. This life could be as beautiful as it was dark and cruel.

  I needed to set the record straight, assert myself and prove to people that I was capable of handling this lifestyle and being the queen to Mateo’s king.

  His name would carry me far; I’d be respected out of people’s fear and love for him, but that wasn’t good enough for me, and he knew it. I wanted the same fear and respect on my own name, Elena Rias. One day soon as Elena Remmington.

  This was the best place to start. And with that realization, I understood why he wanted me to do this alone. He had the same ideals as I did.

  Mateo didn’t want a docile pageant princess to warm his bed.

  He wanted a ruthless, fucking queen that wasn’t afraid to get her hands a little bloody before picking the kids up from school.

  “I can do this,” I replied, smiling reassuringly.

  He came to stand in front of me, shooting off another command before kissing me deeply.

  With blood and saliva on my hands, I didn’t make a move to hold him, but I returned his gesture in earnest, softly moaning when he cupped my ass and pulled me flush against his body, anyway.

  “You look beautiful right now. If I weren’t such a possessive, deranged asshole, I’d bend you over and fuck you raw right here,” he murmured.

  “Go do what kingpins do,” I laughed, stepping away.

  “I’ll see you soon. They’re to do whatever you say,” He nodded towards the guards on the far side of the room.

  He grabbed my dirty hand and placed a solid kiss on the back of it before finally making his way to the exit.

  “Good luck,” Elias patted my shoulder and followed after him. A second later a man came to retrieve the trolley.

  I stared at the large metal door once it closed again. Feeling few sets of eyes on me, I pulled myself back to the current situation.

  I tossed the pliers down and walked back to the toolbox. This time I removed a hammer and a pack of long skinny nails.

  Chapter Twelve

  The man was resilient as hell. I’d give him that.

  After taking a nail, wedging it between his nail-bed and skin, I tapped the end of it with the hammer. The point slid right through the flesh, forcing the nail up from underneath and splitting it right down the middle.

  I couldn’t really explain the mindset I settled in as I did this.

  This part of me had been suppressed so long I wasn’t the least bit be surprised at what I was capable of.

  The blood on my hands didn’t bother me, his agonizing screams carrying across the rafters and making a few of the guards shift uncomfortably, didn’t bother me. I already struggled with being empathetic and the lack of remorse came with the territory. You switched it off and did what you needed to do.

  By the fourth nail, I soon
realized the issue was that he was too resilient. It was actually rather stupid on his end not to say anything at all. It meant the person he was protecting was someone he cared about, immensely.

  I stared at his ruddy, messy face, feeling the truth of my self-made discovery sinking down to my brittle bones.

  “The Ace is my mother,” I stated calmly, for once feeling anything but.

  Me speaking the truth aloud had Samuel’s entire demeanor changing.

  He began to laugh and sob hysterically at the same time, spewing slobber tinged blood all down the front of him.

  “Congragu-fucking-lations. When she finds out what you’ve done, she’s going to do the job her errand boys failed to do twice,” he wheezed.

  Errand boys?

  Alex was clearly one; I had no idea who the other could be.

  He tried to smile at me; I corrected his smugness by bringing the hammer down onto his knee as hard as I could, happily shattering his kneecap. His cry of pain was muffled when I took hold of his jaw and squeezed with every muscle I had in my hand.

  Acutely aware of all the eyes and ears on me, I leaned down and smiled brightly, looking him straight in the eyes.

  “You’ve been so much help, but I no longer need you anymore.”

  I stepped back, silently communicating with the main guards Mateo had earlier.

  I wanted to run from the stable, scream, cry, and beat the shit out of something, anything to make it all feel…less. Less painful, less enraging, less fucking obvious that my mother was a legitimate psychopath who failed as a parent.

  I had to remain strong, though. I was never to give someone a window of opportunity to exploit a weakness.

  “Get it over with,” Samuel spit at my feet.

  “There is no easy way out for you, Uncle Sam,” I stated sweetly, smiling again at the look on his face when he caught sight of the barrel being brought over.

  “No,” he began shaking his head back and forth, repeating the word over and over again.

  The plea fell on deaf ears.

  He’d betrayed my father, possibly assisted in the death of my sister, and schemed on my life.

  They say violence isn’t the answer, but yes it fucking is.