Heartless (Starcrossed Lovers Trilogy 1)

I didn’t want Violent Delights and the club house full of games and filth. I didn’t want to summon any innocent little bitches and tear them apart for my whims.

I wanted Elaine Constantine. Even though my palm was still sliced ragged, begging me to hold true to my oath, I wanted Elaine Constantine.

It was the most insane move I’d ever made when I took the pair of glasses from my inside jacket pocket and took off my tie to loosen the top few of my shirt buttons. It was the most risky thing I’d ever contemplated to walk straight through Elaine’s tower foyer and up to the security reception with a cold hard smile on my face.

“Terence Kingsley,” I said at the counter. “I’m here to see Elaine Constantine.”

“Terence Kingsley,” the woman on reception repeated as the two security guards cast a glance in my direction. “She’s expecting you?”

“Yes,” I told her. “Please alert her to my visit, and I’ll make my way up to her suite.”

My actions could have killed me on the spot. Security could’ve killed me on the spot.

They didn’t.

The woman put on a smile and dialed up to Elaine’s suite, and I waited, deadly cool as the woman spoke.

“Terence Kingsley is here for you. He says you are expecting him.”

I waited.

Every second stilled to nothing as I waited.

There it was again, simmering down deep, that forbidden fucking thrill that set my heart on fire.

The woman ended the call and gave me another smile. “Elaine says to go on up. She’s on level twenty-nine.”

Interesting.

Interesting and thrilling, right to the seedy fucking depths of me.

“Thank you,” I said, and flashed the security desk one final look before I made my way through the foyer.

The elevator ride was long and slow. My mouth was dry as I stepped out onto the top level suite and walked right on up to Elaine Constantine’s front door. I rapped my knuckles three times, my fist still held up in the air as my pretty little bitch Elaine answered.

She’d been crying.

The tracks of her tears were fresh down her cheeks.

“You’re insane,” she hissed as she swung the door open. “What the hell are you doing here? Have you lost your fucking mind?”

I pushed past her without a word, taking a look at the opulence of the apartment around me. It was huge, cream, and sparse. Hardly a trace of personality in the place.

“I’m here because I’m Terence fucking Kingsley,” I sneered at her. “I’m here to visit the troubled little bitch who nearly got herself fucked up in the back alley of loser town last night.”

Just as expected, those pretty blue saucer eyes of hers widened.

“You really are insane,” she said again. “You nearly got us both killed then, and that was stupid enough, but if anyone thought for one single second you were here . . . now . . .”

She seemed different.

Elaine seemed different.

Scared to a whole new tune. One I hadn’t seen in her before.

It was then that I looked beyond her to the coffee table next to her designer leather couch. It was then that I saw the concoction of sleeping pills and other bottles of meds waiting in a row next to a half-empty bottle of champagne.

And more . . .

A scrawled letter, complete with the fountain pen cast down at the side . . .

I headed close enough to investigate and picked up one of the bottles. Diazepam. A whole jar full of them that I shook in my hand.

Fatalistic little bitch.

“Going to bail out, are you?” I asked her. “This is how you’re planning on ditching your life, to save the Power brothers the effort?”

“It’s got fuck all to do with the Power brothers,” she said in a stupid little fucked-up voice, folding her arms across her chest. “I’m doing what I want, because I want to.”

But she was lying. Just like always.

If she’d really, truly wanted to kill herself tonight she’d have told the security team that the Morelli heir was in the foyer in pursuit of her, and cast Terence Kingsley aside as nothing.

She didn’t want to kill herself. She wanted me.

She’d wanted me since she’d very first set eyes on me at Tinsley Constantine’s ball.

We stared at each other, both of us sizzling with generations of family hate and vitriol. Both of us despising everything the other one stood for. Both of us knowing that anything other than malice between us was at odds with everything we stood for as human beings.

I should’ve laughed in her face and watched her kill herself, choking her down with her medicinal stocks to help her along her way.

I did nothing. Just stared. Seething. Seething and wanting. Seething and needing.

“Leave me,” she told me, and this time her eyes flared with a new round of shame. “You can sleep happily tonight, knowing I’m saying my goodnight for good. See you later, asshole.”