Beast: A Hate Story, The Beginning

ace becoming visible in the red light. A small smile crept across his face.

Anteros narrowed his eyes. The delicate curtains swayed with the movement of clothes being discarded on the other side. The beat thrummed in a certain demanding pattern. Crazy A never blinked, meeting his stare eye for eye. He could feel the stares of his other Wolves, their attention rapt and unsure.

“Everyone in this room has permission to kill Francesca Notte if she lives past the thirty-first of December,” Anteros declared with a growl, standing up.

Crazy A leaned back against the velvet booth, his smile disappearing in the shadows.

“I’m good,” Little O said, throwing his hands up.

“Me too,” Big O said. “I trust you to finish it.”

“There are already too many dicks in this sword fight,” Pretty Boy said, folding his arms.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Anteros said, pulling aside the diaphanous curtains, “I’m going to go get my dick sucked.”

The woman sucked him, pulling his cock into her mouth in a talented fashion. She’d given him a name that he couldn’t remember, it was probably fake, something like Desire or Passion. She wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t doing anything for him—at all. There was something about her, something that just wasn’t right.

Anteros lifted the hair from her neck, sweeping it past her shoulders until it was gathered in his hands. It was soft as silk.

Fuck.

Frankie was like some kind of goddess before him. Looking up at him, his cock in her hand, as if waiting for him, he realized it was he who had been waiting. Waiting for this.

He was going to remember this—the look of utter submission in her eyes. His cock perched on her full, pink lips. The feel of her hair in his hands as she prepared to take him. It was all seared on his brain matter.

Then she was on him, her mouth taking as much of him as she could. Her tongue was flat against his cock as she tried to swallow him, but he was too big. She looked up at him, earnest, sexy. So fucking sexy. He’d never been so turned on by a blow job before.

With a frustrated shove, Anteros pushed whatever-her-name-was off of him and zipped up his trousers.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he said, rubbing a palm to his forehead. Too much to drink. He’d had too much to drink.

“Wait,” she said, wiping her mouth off. “You owe me.”

“For that?” Anteros laughed.

“It’s not my fault your dick doesn’t work,” she said, standing up. Anteros grabbed her neck, thrusting her against the wall. Her mouth popped open, gasping for breath, face purpling. It would be easy to kill her, easy to let her life drain from her body. Desire, Passion, whatever she called herself—technically she belonged to Anteros.

He owned the entire club.

Owned her.

With a growl, Anteros dropped her.

She clutched her bruised throat, looking up at him hatefully. “I’m going to tell Bruno and you’re going to be so fucked.”

Anteros bent down. “Bruno works for me, sweetheart.” She paled and he watched without emotion as she spun quickly away, scrambling out of the dark, gemstone-colored room.

By the time Anteros got back to the penthouse, he was still good and drunk. After kicking the whore out, he’d gone out and grabbed a bottle of whiskey off the top shelf, deciding to walk back home. It had been years since he’d been drunk. He wasn’t a fan of liquor, usually just drank it because it was custom. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually walked through the city, either. There’d been no need, and it wasn’t as secure.

His car was constructed with the best materials to be bulletproof. It appeared a normal town car, but it could stop damn near anything. That night he ditched Nikolai and walked through the snowy streets of Manhattan with a bottle of whiskey.

“Mi accingo pazza!” Anteros yelled, thrusting the whiskey into the face of a man he passed. The man jumped back, looked at Anteros with unease, then walked away.

“Fucking drunks,” he heard the man mumble under his breath. Anteros watched the man walk away then swallowed the last of the whiskey. He chucked the bottle on the sidewalk, watching it shatter into a thousand pieces.

When he got home, he stumbled down the hallway, skipping his bedroom. Anteros walked the few feet until he was outside the now all too familiar white wood door and pushed it open. Frankie was fast asleep in her bed. Her hair shone like satin, the color of chocolate, melting all over her pillow. He wanted to tug it, to grasp it, to feel the way it would fall through his fingers like water. She gave a little sigh, burrowing deeper into her blanket.

He knew she had to die.