They didn’t. It was me, alone, wandering through downtown in the early hours of the morning, barely aware of my surroundings as I paced through the city.
It was all on her. Her pathetic little soul begging mine for peace. Her burning heart flaring up to lash out, even in her weakest moments. Her fear, so pretty. Her eyes, so wide and hurt.
Her need for touch and pain, blurring together to take her to the heights.
She was a masochist, and I knew it, even if she didn’t truly know it herself.
She put her need for release through pain down to whatever traumas she’d pushed into her depths, but she was wrong. I’d seen enough paintoy sluts to know what she was. She was one of them. I’d put every ounce of my fortune on it.
It was the swell in my pants that told me just how desperate a paintoy she really was. She had potential to be the best of the best, and I felt it with every single beat of my filthy heart.
But no. NO. She was a Constantine. Her pain had to be about my pleasure, not hers.
I knew Violent Delights would be empty, and even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have scratched the itch that Elaine Constantine had triggered in me. I could’ve summoned up a fresh girl to hurt, picking any type of slut of my choosing, but that wouldn’t have scratched it either.
I could’ve even picked up a woman from the street and played my cash purchase game with a total stranger, but I didn’t.
I did nothing, just kept walking through the night until the sun finally poked its head above the towers, thinking about Elaine Constantine and the hellfire I needed to rain down on her family.
I wished I’d never seen the bitch up close in the first place. I wished I’d have pursued Tinsley Constantine like I’d set out to do that night. Hurting a girl on her birthday in the Constantine compound would have been a stab in the heart to her whole family tree. A crazy one, but one long overdue.
NYC was bustling with Sunday morning life when I finally came to my senses and called Hunter Sparro up on my cell. He was still in bed when he answered, his voice slurred with a clear hangover from the night before. I could read him a mile off.
That’s what friendship does to you after the best part of a lifetime, of course. It allows you to read each other as well as you can read yourself.
I heard a woman’s voice next to him, moaning out a who is it? and realized it must be a repeat conquest considering that she was asking the question with such a groan. Familiarity. Hardly a usual occurrence for a playboy. He rarely petted the same pussy twice.
“I’m coming over,” I told him, and he grunted a sigh.
“What the fuck, Luke? It’s barely eight a.m.”
“I’m coming over now,” I said. “Get that bitch out of your bed, will you?”
“Sure thing, whatever,” he said, and hung up.
I hailed a cab, knowing full well the slut would be gone from his apartment by the time I got there. Sure enough, Hunter was padding around his living room, dressed in nothing but some low-slung pants as I stepped across his threshold.
I dropped myself onto his sofa and let out a breath as he rubbed his eyes and stared down at me.
“What the fuck brings you here on a Sunday morning?” he asked, and I spat it out before I came to my senses.
“Elaine fucking Constantine brings me here on a Sunday morning.”
He looked at me like I’d taken a knock to the head since he’d last seen me.
“Why the holy crap would Elaine Constantine do anything to you? Please tell me you’ve stayed away from her. Your dad will lose his shit. Her family will start a war.” He paused. “I mean, if you’ve finished her . . .”
I almost wished I had done. It would save the embarrassment and absurdity of what I’d truly been doing to the bitch.
Predictably for Hunter, my one true friend in the world, he read my mind.
“You fucked her, didn’t you? You fucked her and left her breathing.”
“Not quite,” I told him, and cursed myself under my breath.
He crouched down in front of me, eyes searching for signs I’d taken a battering to my brain. “Not quite as in what? What the hell’s going on?”
I shouldn’t have told him any of it. I should’ve put it to bed in my mind and turned my back on it for all time, or at least until I had some method to hurting her and making her family pay. Yet, I didn’t. I was still twisted up enough from her bullshit ways that I didn’t.
“Tinsley Constantine’s masked ball,” I said, and he pulled a face.