Page 35 of Sinful Embers

The first guy, still blind, roars in fury, reaching for his gun.

Sabrina doesn’t hesitate. She hurls something at me—a second canister.

“Don’t spray it the wrong way!” she warns. “It really does melt skin.”

I snatch it out of the air and blast the second bastard in the eyes.

He howls, dropping to his knees and I know him out. Before I can get to help Sabrina she delivers a brutal kick to the first man’s balls. He crumples. As he goes down she swings her purse—whack—straight into the first guy’s skull.

He goes down.

I grab her hand. “Move.”

We bolt in the opposite direction to the waiting SUV, slipping into the London crowd, ducking into alleyways, weaving through side streets.

We need to disappear. Now.

We catch a cab, keeping our heads low. When we finally get close to the townhouse, we slip into a shopping mall, taking a long, winding path back to the safe house.

Once inside, Sabrina collapses onto the couch. “That was fucking insane.”

I rub my jaw. “They know we’re there.”

“Do you think someone tipped them off?” Sabrina looks at me in disbelief. “Other than the five… six of us from back home, no one besides Syd and Clyde know we’re here.”

“Fuck.” I spit. “Dmitri must have someone in immigration or aviation that flagged the jet.”

“Yes, but you didn’t use your jet,” Sabrina reminds me. “We used the Archontis jet just to be careful.”

“It seems our little switcheroo—sending my jet to Russia as a diversion—didn’t work.”

“Or..” Sabrina holds up her index finger. “We’ve been compromised by someone in our circle.”

Fuck!I shove my hands through my hair. She’s right, we’ve probably been compromised from within. It’s probably the same bastard that helped Carlos take Leigh.

Chapter 10

LEIGH

The scent of old paper and ink fills the dimly lit dungeon as I turn another page of Vivienne’s journal, my stomach twisted in knots. It’s been hours since dinner, and I’ve barely looked up, lost in the depraved mind of the woman who birthed me.My mother.

No.

That word tastes wrong on my tongue. She was never a mother. She was a monster. She was just Vivienne.

The words scrawled in her delicate but precise script blur slightly as I struggle to absorb them. My pulse pounds in my ears. My hands tremble.

This can’t be real.

But it is.

Vivienne Vasilikis was a sick, twisted, insatiable nymphomaniac who saw people as nothing more than tools. To be used and abused. To be manipulated. To be destroyed.

She loved control. She thrived on it. And she wrote about it with the same enthusiasm most people use to describe a favorite meal or a thrilling adventure. She got off on other people’spain. The more they screamed or begged, the more pleasure she derived from it.

“Oh, my fucking God.” I shudder.

Her first journal details her “partners in sin and pleasure,” as she calls them—IN and SS. Obviously two men. She describes their bodies in graphic detail—their cocks, the way they fucked her. But the way she refers to them…

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