Page 5 of Lord of Vice

Holy mother of God. I was forced to stop in my tracks, doing my best not to gawk at one of the men. Even sitting down, it was easy to see he was a massive expanse of muscle, the black shirt and nearly matching suit adding to his sensual yet dangerous appeal.

He was staring at me in much the same way, the darkness of the man all-consuming.

I was momentarily at a loss, realizing only seconds later I was gawking. I felt cooked in a ‘stick an apple in my mouth and plant my ass on a silver platter’ kind of way. He was that good looking.

My normally decent thoughts were interrupted by extremely lurid ones, the kind that would fit in the first pages of an erotic romance book. While I tried to pull my heated gaze away, all I could think about was that he was every woman’s wet dream. Whew. Was it some kind of hot in the place or what?

He was without a doubt the sexiest man I’d ever seen in my life and I could only make out his physique from the waist up. But with his short, cropped hair and piercing eyes, his heated gaze following me all the way to the table, I was hungrier than before.

And this time, not because of food.

CHAPTER 3

“Tell me every terrible thing you ever did and let me love you anyway.”

—Edgar Allan Poe

Kraven

What the hell?

Fuck.

It was as if I’d just been swept into some kind of crazy dream, the woman’s beauty catching me completely off guard as she was led inside the restaurant, the hostess giving her a table by the front windows.

The moment our eyes had connected, I’d felt such a heightened sense of longing, my hands had gotten clammy. Something about her mere existence on this planet boosted the darkest kind of desires a man could have.

Ones of power.

Ones of unbridled hunger.

And more important, ones of possession.

It had been over a decade since I’d felt anything this strong. I smirked at the thought, tossing back a gulp of my drink.

“Don’t look now, boss, but she might eat you for dinner,” one of my guards said as he laughed.

At least his indecency brought me back to the business at hand. “Just get on with it. I have other work to do tonight.” Not that I’d be sleeping. I was basically an insomniac. Some would say it was my conscience prodding me, only I knew I didn’t have one.

I also needed to figure out if my employee’s act of treachery had been entirely his own or if he’d been working with someone.

“The theft at the resort is one thing but the fuckers are at it again,” Konstantin Morozov said from beside me. As my most trusted soldier, a man who’d been my advisor for years, I usually listened to what he had to say. However, there were times his promotion to counselor had obviously gone to his head. He’d become more arrogant than ever.

“What are we talking about here?” Dima snarled, although he was grinning. He was my brigadier, the man in charge of my mighty army. He was also more of a playboy than I was.

In a town like Las Vegas, you couldn’t throw a penny without finding a mafia man on some street corner, the fucker acting as if he owned the world. I’d been brought here as a pre-pubescent teenager, my father claiming the Bratva position when no other Russian entity had managed to do so. At the time, there’d been one other major player in town, a couple of smaller syndicatescrowding territories. Now every single massive resort and casino had some organized crime syndicate attached to it.

One of my highest-ranking warriors burst out laughing, cursing in Russian as he threw back a shot glass of vodka. Misha drank the clear shit like water, where I could barely stand the taste. How many jokes had I endured over the years, bottles of Russian vodka sent to me as potential bribes? Enough that the entire population of Sin City could toast to people’s stupidity.

“Shitheads bringing illegal drugs into the new club.” Konstantin threw me a look.

It wasn’t unusual in a city where every sin was embraced. While not a significant part of my business any longer, I also catered to the rich and famous with party favors for a hefty price. But not inside a single resort or club.

“Track down who is responsible,” I said, still finding it very difficult to take my eyes off the lovely girl. She was quite a few years younger, but there was something worldly about her. Or maybe I sensed she was going through rough times. I could smell her fear from where I was sitting.

My men rambled on in Russian, comparing the various enemies we had. As usual, we had a situation at one of the casinos, although this time the crime was more egregious. A guy little more than a kid who’d worked for me for over two years had managed to get inside the very secure money vault, clipping two hundred thousand in cash and getting away with it. Well, almost. The poor dumb fuck hadn’t anticipated one camera in particular. It was the only one that had shown his face.

What Konstantin had brought to my attention was that some bearer bonds were missing as well from an earlier heist. Withsome other anomalies, it would appear the kid wasn’t working for himself but told to evoke my wrath. The question was simply why at this point?

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