A Thousand Cuts (Underworld Kings)

He stared at Harris. He’d been gazed at by some of the sickest and most loathsome motherfuckers in the world. People who had done terrible things. Never had he been affected by a gaze from a man talking about love.

“I wish I had killed her,” he whispered. “If she had to die, if I couldn’t prevent it, I wish it was me who got to do it. That way, I’d have the most amount of time with her, while she was still breathing. So I wouldn’t miss a single fucking second of her heartbeats. I wouldn’t give a fuck about what happened to me after, as long as I got the last of her moments on this earth. But someone took that from me.”

Suddenly he didn’t look like a kid.

Fuck, he didn’t look like a human being.

He stood. The screech of his chair along the floor was eye watering.

“Someone stole that from me,” he repeated, looking between the two men. Both had years on him, but somehow, he made Harris feel like a fucking child. It unnerved him to be stared at like that.

“You’re wasting your time thinking it was me,” Cristian said. “But you’re just doing your job, and if you’re good at it, you’ll figure out it wasn’t me soon enough. But I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure I do your job better than you. That I find the thief who took the most important thing in my world. And then I’ll watch them take their last breath. I’ll make sure it’s me who ends their life.”

Harris knew that he was serious. Knew that whatever goodness, innocence that might’ve been inside this boy, was long gone. He was a man now. He was a Made Man. And eventually, he’d have to bring him down. Before he became even more dangerous than the Don himself.

Chapter Two

Twenty-Five Years Later

Sienna

He was staring at me.

He had been staring at me.

For the past hour.

I’d noticed him staring at me precisely fifty-nine minutes, fifty-five seconds ago. Because you noticed when a man like that was staring at you. And then you kept track of the minutes, the fucking seconds that he had been staring.

Like me, he was sitting on his own. He had a glass of red wine in front of him and a plate of food. One he hadn’t touched.

I was also sitting in front of an entire plate of food I hadn’t touched. The half full Old Fashioned in front of me had been ordered because you could not go through an hour of a hot guy staring at you without alcohol. I would’ve loved about four more, but the man staring at me was watching my every move, and I didn’t want him to think I was here to get bombed on my own on a Tuesday at two in the afternoon.

I’d come equipped with my dining alone survival kit: my phone, my book and a couple of contracts I needed to go over. All of them, like my food, were untouched. It was a shame too, because I was into this book, because the contracts really needed to be looked at and because I was starving. Though I was wearing expensive shoes, clothes and earned a very good salary, I also lived in a nice apartment in New York, and was not exactly in a position to leave a thirty-dollar bowl of pasta untouched on the table. Also, this was the best pasta in the city, it was some kind of gastronomical crime to do so.

But when a man who looked like that was staring at you, there was no way you could do anything but submit to him.

Submit.

The need to do just that thrummed through my body.

His eyes were blue, turquoise. They seemed to glow from across the room. They burned into me. No hesitation, no game playing. He was making it known that he wanted me. He was making it known that he was going to dominate me. Control me.

Though it seemed impossible that I could deduce that from a man staring at me for an hour, a woman knows.

He was older than me. By a lot. A decade at least. There was a generous amount of salt in his pepper hair. It was styled effortlessly, slick so it accentuated his sharp jaw, a shadow of stubble covering it. His features were all angles, masculine, as if they were carved from marble. A heavy, dark brow only made his eyes glow that much more.

He was wearing a suit, black, expensive for sure. Open collar, so I could see the tanned cords of his muscled neck. His shoulders were broad, and I knew they’d be muscular too if I could see them. Despite the fact that he was sitting down, I knew he’d be tall. Everything about him was big, imposing, powerful, dangerous. It was fucking intoxicating.