Soulless (Starcrossed Lovers Trilogy 2)

I downed my coffee. She’d done a good job of it.

“I’ll be wearing one of your shirts today,” she told me. “You can punish me for it when you get home all you want, but I’ll still be wearing it.”

There it was again, another ridiculous statement. Home. When you get home.

“When you get back,” she followed up, but it was too late.

“This isn’t my fucking home,” I hissed. “It’s some backwater shithole of a dungeon I’m torturing you in before I break your pretty neck. Don’t for a second think I’m home in this wreck.”

“That’s how you’re gonna do it? Break my neck? That’s way too quick a kill by Lucian Morelli standards. Don’t tell me you’re going soft in your old age.”

She lifted her smirking jaw to me. My free hand shot to her exposed throat and fucking squeezed.

“Break it right now, shall I? Maybe you don’t deserve a slow death.”

“Like you’d ever be able to resist,” she choked out.

I let go of her throat and forced my fingers into her gasping mouth, shunted her backwards as she gargled her own spit and retched against me. Retched until it ran down her nostrils and her eyes watered as I twisted my fingers into her throat.

When I pulled my hand free, she doubled over, gasping like a sorry bitch as her drool puddled on the floor.

“Get that filthy shit cleaned up before I get back,” I told her, only just resisting the urge to fuck her up some more.

“Whatever,” she said as I walked away and caught sight of the time on the clock above the counter.

Fucking hell, I was later than even I’d expected. I was never late . . . not before Elaine Constantine became my toy fucking dolly.

I didn’t bother saying goodbye, just marched my way right on out of there. The Merc was waiting in the garage and so was the road ahead, all damn sixty minutes of it.

I knew what was looming – Seamus and Duncan and their lowlife attempts at kissing Father’s backside. They could go fuck themselves.

Sure enough they were hovering when I arrived in my suite at Morelli Holdings. Seamus was on his cell trying to sound as slick and professional as possible, and Duncan was flicking through paperwork he had no right to be flicking through. I snatched it from him as soon as I was in reaching distance.

“Get the fuck out of my suite.”

The cunt had the audacity to laugh at me. “It’s not your suite. It’s your daddy’s. He knows we’re here this morning. He also knows you weren’t.”

Fuck’s sake.

“I’ll be handling my father,” I told them both with a snarl. “Believe me, you have no place here, and you’ll be getting the fuck out of my building.”

It was Seamus who laughed this time, dropping his cell onto my desk.

“You’d better go handle him then, hadn’t you? He’s downstairs on floor nine.” He tutted like a prick. “Believe me, he’s not a happy daddy this morning.”

Somehow I knew the assholes were telling the goddamn truth and it was a ball ache. Under any normal circumstances I’d have put it down to my own stupid dicking about at Kington Peak and not at Holdings where I belonged. And nothing else. My fucking bad.

My gut knew a whole lot more than that when I headed downstairs to floor nine, though. My gut had more sense than my goddamn fucking brain. Father’s presence in the office wasn’t just about dicking about at Kington Peak and slacking on Holdings – this was about Elaine fucking Constantine. I knew it in my veins. The whole world was going Elaine Constantine crazy, not just me. I’d heard it all over the news on the way in.

Kidnapped. Somehow the whole damn world knew she’d been kidnapped.

I arrived on floor nine, and I almost regretted taking her from her sorry apartment in the first place. I almost wished I’d have left the stupid bitch to the Power Brothers and her own pitiful family to fuck up, that or kill herself and save everyone else the bother.

Almost. Jesus Christ, I only registered my thoughts as I stepped into the meeting room. Almost wished I’d left her? What the fuck was happening to me?

One thing was for sure, Father would be damned certain he was going to find out.13ElaineTurning on the TV in the morning and seeing your face staring out at you from every channel is a weird experience – weird enough to make you jump from your seat. There I was, staring out at me from the screen in Lucian Morelli’s countryside shack, featuring on every news broadcast.

Elaine Constantine kidnapped!

How the hell did the news stations know I’d been kidnapped? Family business rarely reached the general populous. Someone had snitched or chosen to speak about it.

Wow, I was getting good coverage. It was official to the masses, I’d been kidnapped. Hello there, media shitstorm. If only they knew I was kidnapped by Lucian Morelli, news would reach a whole new stratosphere.