Page 26 of Tormented Heir

Not wanting to leave her unsatisfied, I reach around her and stroke her clit. “Hard or soft?” I ask.

“Soft on the clit, hard with the fucking,” she gasps.

I oblige her and grit my teeth to stop myself from coming before she does. She grips the edges of the table hard and cries out, and I let go as I fall over the edge into brief, glorious bliss.

Taking off the condom, I throw it into the trash. I look at the woman as she rights her clothing. She’s pretty. She’s only the second woman I’ve fucked in over a year too. Why can’t I find the desire to keep someone like her around for a while?

I kiss her goodbye and say I’ll call. She raises her brow and smirks.

“No, you won’t,” she says. “That’s alright. I knew what I was getting. You don’t call, ever. Women talk. You don’t do this often, and when you do? It’s one and done. I had a good time, and so did you, and all is well that ends well.”

She’s striking, and she quotes Shakespeare. “If I did have time in my life for anything other than work, you’d definitely be a second date kind of a girl.”

Her face grows serious for a moment. “I’d never second date you, darling.”

Her words surprise me. I’m a cocky enough asshole that I think most women would want to. I’m handsome, or so I’ve been told repeatedly. I’m also rich, dangerous, and I have a really big cock. “Why not?” I ask, curious.

“Because, sweet thing, men like you don’t live long, fruitful lives, and the next man I do more than this with”—she indicates the room behind us—“I want the date to have the possibility of something serious. I don’t need something serious with a man who is likely to get himself killed one of these days. Dangerous boys like you are fun. You’re not marriage material.”

“Damn.” I place my hand over my heart and stagger back a few steps, making her laugh. “Aren’t men supposed to be the ones who categorize women that way?”

“Equal opportunities, baby.” She grins at me.

I shake my head as she walks away, and then I turn back into my office above the glitzy nightclub. Down one floor is a place where the music and the dancing are a legitimate business and not merely a front for quiet meetings in back rooms where weapons are ordered and supplied.

Sitting at my desk, I stare out at the city. San Francisco. A den of iniquity and vice, love and purity, money, and intense poverty. She’s a beautiful, shabby, gleaming contradiction of a city.

And I fucking love her.

Built from the gold rush, a hotbed of immorality and impropriety that grew into a hub for tech and finance, and today, the kingdom my family rules over. This club is in the Soma District, but our home is on a hill, across town, in Pacific Heights where it borders Presidio Heights. Gated, guarded, and with high level security, in many ways it’s a million miles away from this area. In others, not so much. Greed, corruption, they run rampant everywhere. Much of human nature is grubby, some of it dangerous.

I watch as below, two police cars pull up. The cops get out, jog across the road and into the pizza place.

Pouring a whisky, I let myself relax into the beat as it filters muffled and deep through the carpets and floorboards.

In a few hours, I’ll leave to save what is ours. A young woman that stupid men took as a giant fuck you to the family.

They didn’t know who they were messing with.

I’ll be giving them a lesson in true pain and vengeance.

I smile as I drink.

Before I kill them, they’ll already be begging to be dead.

9

ADRIANA

PRESENT DAY

San Francisco

“Adriana, did you grab me the things from the store?”

Ugh. My stepmother’s voice grates on my last nerve. I sigh and head downstairs. I need my own place, but after finishing university in England, full-time work has been hard to come by.

Hence me moving back home to live with my father. A move I now greatly regret since Hana entered his life like a blonde tornado.

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