The Skull King (Skull 1)

“I’m sure I’m sharing you…so I don’t want to overstep my boundary.”

I’d rather she not know she was the only woman in my bed. Might make her draw the wrong conclusions. Might make her think she actually meant something to me when she didn’t mean anything. “Get your ass over here.” I hung up.

Heath didn’t turn around to look at me. He continued to face the TV with his glass in his hand. “Your mistress?”

I came back to the couch and finished my gin. No way I was letting that go to waste.

Heath continued to stare at me. “We talk about Purple Dress but not this woman?”

I changed the subject. “What’s her name, anyway?”

“I don’t give a shit. What’s yours?”

I set down my empty glass. “Doesn’t matter.”

“You seem smitten with her.”

“She’s gorgeous.”

“They’re all gorgeous. Any decent woman with a wet pussy is gorgeous to me.”

“Well, I haven’t been in prison for six months, so my standards are a bit higher.”

“Pussy is pussy. What’s the point of standards? It doesn’t matter how hot a woman is when she’s giving head. She’s either good or not good. Period.”

I didn’t have a lot of time on my hands, and since I was picky about how I spent my free time, I wanted to be selective. I wanted a woman who really made my back tighten. I’d spent my twenties fucking anything that moved, but I was too old for that shit. If I really needed a lay and I was in a hurry, I just dropped a few thousand euros for the best call girl in the city.

“You gonna tell me her name or what?”

“Stay away from her. Come to my floor, and I’ll slit your throat.” Whether we were blood-related or not, I would kill anyone who crossed my boundaries.

He grinned. “Afraid I’ll take her away from you? A threesome with twins might turn her on.”

I only shot him a glare in response.

“Or maybe when you run out of gas, I could finish her off.”

I slammed the bottle of vodka on the table so it turned into shards. “I’ll shove this up your ass and bleed you from the inside out.”

Heath only looked amused. “You’re awfully possessive of a woman who already belongs to someone else.”

“She doesn’t belong to him. She’s just his prisoner.”

“Prisoner, huh?” he asked. “He bought her from the Underground?”

If she had been on sale at the Underground, I would have bought her for myself. “No. I don’t know the full story, but he was going to execute her boyfriend. The only way she could save him was by agreeing to marry him. Her boyfriend married someone else and has a kid. But she’s stuck.”

“Wow…what a fucking asshole.”

“Which one?” I set the shattered bottle on the table so he could clean it up later.

“Both. But definitely the boyfriend.”

I wouldn’t mind shoving that broken bottle down his throat and watching him bleed to death. It was despicable that he’d allowed that to happen, but more despicable that he’d moved on so quickly afterward. Now she was serving a life sentence for falling for a man who never deserved her.

“The husband was just taking advantage of a good situation. Can’t say I blame him.”

“I disagree. A lifetime commitment is harsh for a woman who was just trying to save someone else.”

He shrugged. “If this woman is as beautiful as I suspect she is, it doesn’t surprise me that a man would play dirty to keep her. And you sell women at the Underground, so I’m surprised you would say that.”

“I don’t sell them. It’s been a tradition long before I came into the picture.”

“You’re the face of the Skull Kings—so you’re responsible for everything. You can’t pick and choose, man.”

The auction continued to exist because it was so lucrative. It’d been happening for decades, since I was a child. It was easy money, and it was untouchable. Our men snatched the women, then sold them off like livestock. It was one of the commodities the Skull Kings were best known for. Even if I wanted to reject it, they would fight me every step of the way—not that I cared to stop it. There were a lot of terrible things out there, and trafficking was only one of them. It would exist until there were no humans left on the earth.

“So you really aren’t going to tell me her name?”

“You aren’t going to meet her, so what’s the point?”

“You want me to keep calling her your mistress?” he asked, his eyebrow raised. “Or I can think of a few nicknames that would be more suitable—”

“Cassini.” My brother would start with the most disgusting names and only make them dirtier.

“Cassini…pretty.”

It was a sexy name on the tip of my tongue. Women had such ordinary names that it seemed like I’d already said most of them in bed. But I definitely hadn’t said the name Cassini ever before. And it was a name I would never forget.