Baby for the Beast Read online

  I close my eyes and force my breathing to slow.

  The guy in the passenger seat turns, the leather groaning against his weight. “She okay?” he asks.

  I crack my eyes to look at him. He’s older than the driver, maybe thirty-five, with jet black hair that’s shaved close at the sides and long on top. Tattoos reach up his neck, below a face that is rugged and lined with a distinctive scar that cuts a straight, vertical line across his lips.

  I’m gradually bringing my breathing back to something approaching normal, trying to focus on the rhythm of my breaths instead of my situation, because I know distantly that I can’t handle the truth. Not yet. Not completely. I’m still deluding myself a little into believing this will turn out to be something else, something other than what it seems.

  The man in the middle seat throws a tattooed arm over the seat and swivels to eye me with an unimpressed look on his face. He's a dark kind of handsome, with a shaved head and a pattern of stars tattooed beside his eye and down his cheek. His eyes are a shocking gray, with thick eyelashes and a cruel curve to his lips that fixes them in a permanent sneer. "She looks okay to me," he says. There's a kind of slow laziness in his voice that might have been arresting, under different circumstances. Given my position, though, the way his eyes scan me from head to toe only makes me prickle with unease.

  “What’s happening?” I ask. My own voice sounds too quiet, almost muffled, like I’m hearing it through clogged ears.

  “This,” says the man in the middle seat with the star tattoos beside his eye, “is called kidnapping. It’s where we take you and don’t let you go until we get something we want.”

  “Luke,” says the driver with a tone of reprimand. “You don’t have to be an ass about it,” he adds a little more softly, as if he’s aware that the guy in the middle looks like he might stab or shoot someone on impulse.

  Luke only throws his hand up in a carefree manner and shrugs. “You’re wasting your time, Chase.” He leans his head back against the window, tilting his eyes to the ceiling and grinning in that faint, sneering way of his. “Enzo’s never going to let you fuck her.”

  “I don’t want—” starts Chase from the driver’s seat.

  “Oh come on,” says Luke. “Look at her. Niko would fuck her. Wouldn’t you, Niko?”

  The guy in the passenger seat—Niko, apparently—nods, as if he’s acknowledging a sad truth. “Would, if Enzo wouldn’t have my balls for it,” he says with a faint accent—Russian, maybe.

  Chase shakes his head, looking at me with those apologetic brown eyes. "Just trust me," he says. "No one here is going to hurt you. Enzo's a good guy, too. He comes off rough at first, but he's just under a lot of pressure from his father."

  “The fuck is this?” asks Luke. “She’s a hostage, man. Just shut the fuck up and get ready to drive. Enzo’s coming, anyway. Might not want to let him catch you chatting up his hostage,” he says, pointing toward the restaurant.

  A few moments later, the door opens. Enzo glares at me. “It wasn’t there. Where else would it be?”

  Luke covers his mouth, almost laughing at loud. Enzo immediately shifts his glare to Luke. “Something fucking funny?” he snaps.

  Luke shakes his head, but is barely keeping it together.

  “Spit it out,” barks Enzo.

  "It's her purse, isn't it?" Luke asks with choked laughter. "You were in there looking for the hostage's purse?" He clears his throat and smooths the amusement from his features when he looks at Enzo, who doesn't look close to laughing.

  Enzo turns his attention back to me. “Where else would it be?” he asks again.

  “Well, it could… It could maybe be in the bushes?” I say in a very quiet, very scared voice. “Just a few feet from where we were when I said it was maybe inside?”

  Enzo stares at me for what feels like an eternity before he slams the door and walks to the bushes, digs around for a second, and then plucks my purse out like it’s a snake.

  He gets in the car beside me, plucks my phone out of my purse, and then hands the purse to me without a word.

  I sit in sullen silence, running through the litany of things I want to say to him—shout to him. I want to ask him how he can live with himself for doing what he did with me when he must’ve known he was planning this all along. I want to say so much, but I only sit with the weight of all the strange men in the strange car pressing in around me, with the growing panic that’s settling in my chest and curling up to rest, and with the increasing belief that it’s all real.

  I’m his hostage.

  We ride in silence for what feels like an hour before Enzo finally turns to me, eyes hard and lips pressed tight. “Goddammit,” he mutters under his breath. “Change of plans, Chase,” he says to the driver. “We’re going to The Spot.”

  Chase looks in the rear-view mirror, eyebrows raised. “But your father’s expecting…”

  “You think I don’t know what he’s expecting?” Enzo snaps. “We’re going to The Spot. If any of you aren’t man enough to stick with me once we get there, you’re welcome to go crawling back to my father for scraps.”

  The men in the car are silent, but the discomfort is so thick I can feel it. “What’s going on?” I ask.

  Enzo turns to me. “I’m changing the plan. I’m a fucking idiot for it, but I’m changing the plan.”

  “To?” I ask when he falls silent.

  “To something that is probably going to end up getting me killed sooner rather than later.”

  7

  Enzo

  We pull up outside my club. It’s downtown near the main strip. It’s not the most expensive building I own, but it’s my pride and joy. The architecture is modern with huge blacked out windows, four stories, and the single red circle with a cursive “L” inside to signify it’s part of the Luciani empire. Everyone just calls it “The Spot,” because if you’re anybody in this city, it’s the fucking spot to be. Simple as that.

  “Where are we?” asks Neela.

  It pains me to see the way she’s glaring at me, the glint of real hatred behind her eyes. “This is my club. The Spot,” I say simply.

  She frowns in confusion. “You’re kidnapping me to a club?”

  “I don’t think you can use kidnapping like that,” Niko notes, not looking up from his phone. “Sounds wrong.”

  “You fucking serious?” Luke asks. “You’re the same one who tried to tell me snuck was a goddamn word.”

  “I snuck a handful of your mom’s ass last time I saw her,” Niko says.

  “You fucking-”

  “If you’re done,” I growl at the two of them.

  Luke throws up a hand as if to say it doesn’t matter anyway, and Niko just keeps swiping through pictures on his phone with a faint grin. Idiots.

  “The original plan was to blackmail your father. He drops his case against us and he gets you back. If he didn’t play ball, then my father was going to…” I clench my teeth when I think about him cutting off her fingers one by one and sending them to her dad until he caved. “He was going to make things messy.”

  “And the new plan?” she asks, a hint of hope in her voice.

  “The new plan is I’m going to get you out of this.”

  “Couldn’t you just drop me off at home?” she asks quickly. “I won’t even press charges. I’ll just pretend none of this ever happened. You could—”

  “No,” I say. “If my father were to find out I cut you loose, he’d just send someone else to get you. I’m going to keep you safe until I can find a way to get you out of this. Okay?”

  Her expression falls. “It still sounds like I’ll be your hostage.”

  “In some ways you will be,” I say. “I can’t let you contact your family, because word might trickle back to my father. I can’t let you out in public or people might start asking the wrong questions. But I’ll treat you like a queen. I promise. You’ll have everything you could want. Every comfort. And when I find out how, I’ll set you free.”
<
br />   She still looks sullen.

  I touch her chin with my finger, lifting her face to mine. “Neela,” I say. “Trust me. This is the only way. You can hate me if you want, but it’ll only make this harder.”

  “For you?” she asks, eyes hard. “Or for me?”

  I clench my teeth. “For both of us.”

  She wrings her fingers in her lap, eyes downcast.

  “Never thought I’d see the day,” Niko muses from the passenger seat. He’s half-turned toward us with a condescending grin on his face. “The Beast has been tamed, I suppose. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You don’t even carry your gun half the time anymore. Traded it for a pen and a briefcase a few years back, didn’t you?”

  It doesn’t matter that I’m the son of Michael Luciani. It doesn’t matter that I’m the biggest and the strongest in the fucking car, or that I’ve proven my worth a dozen times over. Just like a wild pack of animals, the kind of men in my line of work are always watching for weakness. Show them a single sign that you’ve faltered, and they’ll rise up to challenge you.

  Niko is doing exactly that, and the fact isn’t lost on Chase or Luke, who watch with frowns.

  “Call me tame again if you want a fucking demonstration,” I growl. “Otherwise, you can keep playing with your goddamn phone.”

  Niko locks eyes with me a few moments before sniffing dismissively and turning back around. Small victory. He’s watching now. Eager. I’ll have to remember to keep a very close eye on him until I can find a way to get him off my crew.

  We park the car at the back of the club. Chase and the guys go in ahead of us, leaving me to escort Neela inside.

  “The Beast?” she asks as we approach the building.

  My body tenses at the mention of the nickname. “They started calling me that a long time ago,” I say, hoping she’ll drop it.

  “Why?” she asks.

  “It’s not important.”

  She takes the hint and averts her eyes to the club. I’m relieved to see she’s relaxing at least a little bit. I take her hand and stop her before we walk inside, leading her instead to a bench by the water. “Listen,” I say once we’ve sat down. “I may not be a good man, and I’ve sure as hell done bad things, but I’m trying to do the right thing now. Okay? I meant what I said back there. You can trust me.”

  “I want to believe that,” she says. “I just don’t understand any of this. I mean, who are you guys? Are you hitmen? Professional kidnappers? Just criminals?”

  “Mafia,” I say. “But it’s not like what you see in the movies. Not in my family, at least.”

  “But you still break the law,” she says, eyebrows drawn in confusion. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t need to blackmail my dad.”

  “You’re right,” I admit. “But I’ve been moving us toward being a legitimate business over the past ten years. A lot of our money is in businesses, like this club, and real estate now.”

  “But where’d the money come from?” she asks. “I mean, if you rob a bank and then invest the money in real estate, it doesn’t exactly make you a law-abiding citizen.”

  I work my lips to the side and laugh a little. “Fair point. I’m not claiming to be a saint, Neela. I’m just saying I’m not a cold and ruthless killer.”

  “You’re not?” she asks, surprising me with a little half-smile. “That’s really convincing coming from The Beast.”

  I know she’s just fucking with me, which is a step in the right direction in itself, but I can’t hear the name without images of bullet holes in a crumbling, yellowed wall playing across my mind. I see his body slumped over, like he was just sitting down for a break and dozed off. I can even remember the smell of the gunpowder, acrid and hot in my nose.

  “Sorry,” she says suddenly.

  Her voice startles me, and I realize I must’ve been zoning out as the memories came back.

  She looks over at me and I’m struck by how beautiful she looks. There’s a special edge to her that I can’t quite pinpoint. At times, it seems like innocence, but that doesn’t quite capture it. She doesn’t belong in my world, like a flower squeezing free between two slabs of concrete, she seems too delicate and good to exist here, but I have to drag her deeper all the same.

  “I don’t really know what to think,” she says after a while. Her hands are nervous in her lap, fingers squirming together. “I want to be pissed at you, I think. That feels like the right way to feel. My family is going to freak out when they realize I’m missing, and it’s because of you. But then if I believe what you’re saying, then it almost sounds like I should be thanking you.”

  “You shouldn’t thank me,” I say. “I don’t expect it, at least. It’s a shitty situation and you don’t deserve to be wrapped up in it. I’m going to do what I can to make sure it’s not too hard on you. Okay?”

  She nods, favoring me with a quick smile.

  I motion for her to follow me and lead her into the club, which, for all intents and purposes, is going to be her prison for the foreseeable future. Ask my father, and it’s his club, but ask anybody around here and they’ll tell you the real truth. It’s mine. Half of the Luciani family assets are mine. Without my work, we’d still be squabbling over street corners and laundromats. If I was feeling generous, I could probably give my little brothers some of the credit, too.

  Dig beneath the surface, and everything in the city is owned by the Toretti or us. Thanks to my influence, the Luciani family is on the cutting edge of organized crime. No more shaking down small businesses for protection money and the old-timer shit. Now, we are investors without the burdens of legal conscience, as I liked to put it.

  Just like inventors need investment capital to get their products off the ground, enterprising criminals need weapons, vehicles, and crews. We provide that, for a cut of the profit. Left to his own devices, my father would’ve kept the family in the dark ages, right along with the Toretti, and it was only when he started handing me some of the control that I used our money to branch out. I poured money into clubs, restaurants, and even some of the local wholesale stores. My father and his crews started handling most of the new-age work backing criminals with money, and I started looking for ways to get us to a place where we’d have something legit to pass on to my kids, if I ever slowed down long enough to have some. My father didn’t understand my angle at first. He kept trying to see what the scam was in real estate.

  The beauty of it was that it isn’t a scam. It’s almost legit, once you get past the minor issue Neela pointed out. I’m just making good investments with our dirty money and putting it into businesses and properties that’d help us bring in cash. It isn’t perfectly legal, but I’m taking the cronies and fuckups who owed us favors and turning them into businessmen and managers. Over the last ten years, I’ve dwarfed our prior earnings and put us on a short path to becoming legit. We just need a little more time. A few loose ends cut, a few old habits curbed, and we’d be a bunch of criminals who found their way to the straight and narrow path, so long as our past never caught up with us.

  My work has earned me a reputation. My father is the boss, the ultimate authority and the one no one dares to cross. In principle, at least. He stays mostly secluded to his tower downtown, where he still clings to the threads of the old ways with his old crews. Even working as backers for aspiring criminals isn’t worth the risk anymore, not with the strides I’ve made recently.

  The younger generation gets that. Most of the old-timers, though? They still keep their loyalty to my father, which means the Luciani crime family is split between something resembling a booming corporation and an old school mafia family.

  I take Neela inside the club, which is already pulsing with activity, even though midnight hasn’t rolled around yet. The decor sets the place up to look like the interior of a lavish bachelor pad. White marble floors, plush, circular chairs and sofas dotting the space, and several staircases lit by bright blue neon light. The ceiling is spotted with patchworks of decorative wood beams, an
d the bar spans nearly an entire wall. Most of the second and third floor are visible from where we stand at the entrance, thanks to the partially open ceiling, but the fourth floor—where the real intense shit goes down, is completely concealed from here. The fourth floor is a club in and of itself, entirely catering to guests with a taste for BDSM.

  Music thrums through the air, which is laced with a thin layer of smoke that catches the neon and bathes everything in an electric blue glow.

  I fucking love this place.

  It’s my kingdom. My sanctuary. My retreat.

  I lead Neela through the main floor as people look up and nod me their respect before carrying on with their business. No one stops to harass me or ask me for favors. They know better. I spot my younger brothers lounging in the far corner with a group of women and a few bottles of liquor. Angelo notices me and gives me a subtle tip of his glass, dark eyes intense. As always, the scar across the bridge of his nose makes my skin crawl with the memory of that dark night. Gino, my youngest brother, sits on the opposite side of the table and gives me a slightly sarcastic salute. Gino has always managed to maintain a hint of sarcasm and amusement, despite the horrors we've lived through.

  I give my brothers a quick nod and take Neela deeper with my crew following a few steps behind.

  We eventually reach the third floor, where I have my private rooms. The door is unassuming; it’s tucked near the back and could be mistaken for a fire exit if it weren’t for the burly guard who leans against the wall beside the door.

  “Mr. Luciani,” he says formally, giving a more shallow nod to the rest of the guys as he lets us in.

  The door shuts behind us, muffling the music from the club to a comforting and dull pulse, like a distant heartbeat. “This is where you’ll be staying,” I say to Neela.

  “You mean my cage?” she asks.