Page 57 of Corrupted Heart

It’s from the Venom site.

My hands shake as I unlock my phone and scroll to the page. Sure enough, my chat box is blinking with a new message from him.

RaisedByWolves

You shouldn’t have done that

Instantly, another message comes through: a picture. It takes a second to load, but when it does, my heart drops through the floor.

Someone torched Kratos Drakos’ car in the Bronx.

I only know the giant, stoic Drakos brother by reputation. Or at least, I thought so.

But as the image of the flaming wreckage of a Land Rover appears in my chat window, I realize I know Kratos much more than by reputation.

…Because the other day, he fingered me to oblivion on the dirty floor of an abandoned church, after chasing me down with a fucking knife, wearing a psycho mask.

That’s who my masked stranger is. That’s who I’ve been chatting with, who I begged to fuck me. Who I chose to act out disturbing, fucked-up fantasies with.

Not just some Club Venom rando.

I goaded a lethally dangerous mafia prince. I told him my darkest fantasies. He knows who I am.

…And tonight, I burned his car to the ground.

Holy shit…

My phone dings again.

RaisedByWolves

You crossed a line, babygirl.

RaisedByWolves

So now I’m going to eradicate yours.

Then the icon next to his name goes dark.

I think I’m going to be sick.

What the fuck have I done?

11

BIANCA

It’s the waiting that’s the worst.

Not the web of lies I have to create to explain to Dante why I torched a car in the middle of nowhere in the Bronx. I can’t, I simply won’t, tell him about the drug deal I was drawn into, even if it was completely inadvertent on my part.

Drugs are a hard line for my brother, mainly I think because of what happened to our older sister, Claudia. I was really young when it happened, but I can still remember the anguish of learning she’d been drugged and killed by those monsters when she was out one night.

The only comfort I have there is knowing the men responsible have been completely destroyed. Dante’s gone to great lengths to hide all that from me, but I know that he hunted those men down and meted out his own brand of justice.

But it’s not just Claudia. Tempest has her own family tragedy involving drugs. Her older sister, Layla, ended up dying in college from a heroin overdose.

So, no. I can’t, in any way, tell Dante that all of this stemmed from me being dragged into a drug deal that went wrong. I also can’t…or won’t…tell him about my mystery masked man.

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