Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 56011 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56011 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
The streets turned into stretches of open road surprisingly quickly. The silence only grew heavier as we grew closer to our destination. The cab driver said nothing, just kept his eyes ahead. I only hoped we were doing a decent enough job at feigning a regular life in a regular world.
“Up here on the left,” I told him, and directed him up the drive to my place.
My Kington Peak pad was nothing like my central apartment or NYC in general. The place wasn’t even that big, just a cut off little lodge of a house at the end of the Kington Peak gulley.
“Here,” I said, and the cab pulled up at the top of the driveway. The place was pitch dark.
It gave me a little shiver of lust to see Elaine trying so hard to see our destination in the shadows. Here we were, at the cage of her torment. I was the big bad wolf waiting to tear open his prey.
“Keep the change,” I told the driver and handed over just a sliver more than the right amount. Nothing too obvious or notable.
Elaine didn’t have a last-minute freak-out as I opened her door for her. She didn’t have a burst of save me! for the driver. She didn’t try to run off into the night.
No. She was a good girl. She stepped out of the cab and resigned herself to her fate like a sweet little lamb to the slaughter.
I watched the cab rumble away down the drive before I dug the keys out of my pocket. I’d barely used them over the past year, too caught up in Morelli Holdings and business life to scrape even a scrap of time away from the city. I left Elaine standing on the spot as I headed up to the front door.
I knew she was staring intently over at me with her heart in her throat as I pushed the key into the lock and opened the door, ready and waiting.
“Come on in and meet your fate, little girl,” I said and led the way inside.
3
Elaine
It wasn’t what I was expecting from him. Not in the slightest.
The house was small and remote, hardly the grandeur I’d have pictured for the Morelli heir. He must’ve seen the surprise in my eyes as I crossed the threshold and stepped into the hall. My gaze was flitting around the place, checking out the mediocrity of the decor. It was cheap. Cheap for us anyway. Cheap for our billionaire existence.
“This is nothing but a pathetic little shack to me. I’m barely here,” he told me.
I didn’t believe him. Not for a second. It wouldn’t even be on his radar if he didn’t come here.
It was a tiny chink in his Lucian Morelli armor and the very first glimpse at the man behind the beast. If such a man existed, that is.
“Sure,” I said. “Just a pathetic little shack. Right, yeah, sure. Whatever, Lucian.”
That raised his hackles. “I mean it. It’s nothing but a sad little listing on my empire. I thought pathetic surroundings would be fitting for you.”
His elaborate justification only gave me more assurance I was right. Yeah, it was a glimpse of him. He was lying to himself. These pathetic surroundings meant more to him than anything I’d ever seen. I could read it in his shift in posture and the way he cast his keys so easily onto the side table. He loved this place.
Wow. Lucian Morelli loved something. That was quite a revelation.
He stepped through to the kitchen, and again it had a quaint little nothingness about it that I could relate to. My friend Jemma’s cheap apartment was my bolthole. My sanctuary so removed from my life that it was a welcome relief. This place had the same feel.
The coffee machine looked like the most expensive item in the building. He’d definitely paid out decent cash for that thing.
Weirdly, I liked it here – just like I did Jemma’s place. I could buy into his easiness in this space, even in the grip of the beast who’d be my demise.
“Are you going to finish me off tonight, then?” I asked him, pasting on my bravest face.
“I’ll finish you off whenever it suits me,” he told me, and he meant it.
I looked at him fresh in these new surroundings, as though I was seeing him for the very first time. His darkness was radiating. His strength was brilliant –– muscular and sculpted with biological precision. It was a strange thing, just how opposite our family lines were, in every sense of the word. Who knows, maybe in some alternate dimension the bloodlines would breed and produce something vaguely normal.
His hands were magicians whenever they moved, his fingers beautiful in their dances. His hair was perfect in his styling, even though he was still suited up as Terence Kingsley.