Page 31 of Craving Dahlia

“Hm.” Dahlia presses her lips together. “I don’t want your pity, Alek. And I don’t want to marry someone out of charity. I’ll figure this out.”

I hear her voice waver on that last sentence. I know she doesn’t have it figured out, and she’s clearly in distress. The first look that I got at her face when she opened the door told me that much. But it took everything in me to show up here in the first place, and her dismissal sends another jolt of anger through me.

“That doesn’t instill confidence in me that you’re telling the truth.”

Her eyes flash, and I can tell I’ve pissed her off. “Get out,” she grinds out between her teeth. “You’ve said what you came here to say. I don’t need to hear any more.”

A better man would stay and try to convince her to let me help. A better man would try to find out what it is that she needs.

A better man would simply believe her. But instead, I look at her angry expression and narrowed eyes, and shrug.

“Have it your way,” I tell her flatly, and turn to leave.

I wonder if she’ll call after me, or say she was too quick to dismiss my offer. But there’s nothing but silence behind me, until I’m standing outside the apartment door, once again inthe hallway. An older woman walks past with a fluffy white dog on a leash, and she casts me a suspicious glance as she hurries towards the stairs a little more quickly. I can’t help but wonder what she would have thought if she’d seen the elevator door open that night to the sight of Dahlia pinned against the mirrored wall, my head buried between her thighs.

If just seeing me is a shock, that would have given her a damn heart attack.

Shoving my hands back into my pockets, I take the stairs at the other end of the hall. The last thing I need right now is more memories of Dahlia in that fucking elevator. My cock is still half-hard, desire pulsing through me and tangling with the steady beat of the anger in my veins, and the chilly evening air is a relief when it hits me as I step outside.

When I get on my motorcycle, I’m not even entirely sure where I’m heading. Not back to the mansion right now, that’s for sure. The last thing I want is to see Dimitri while I’m in this mood.

I’ve already started to think that coming back to the mansion to stay was a mistake. After six weeks of keeping my distance, staying in hotel rooms and prowling New York in an effort to decide what the fuck I want to do now, I decided that it was time to go home. To try and find out what happened while I was gone for five years, and why they never came for me. But from the jump, it was difficult.

Evelyn treats me like a guest, and Dimitri treats me as if no time at all has passed. As if those five hellish years were a blink of an eye, and we should go back to normal—except now he’s thepakhan, and by tradition, I should fall in line at his side. I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about the past, and it makes me wonder why.

There’s no place that feels like home to me, now. Nowhere that I can feel comfortable, or safe, where I don’t feel on edgeand out of place. So it’s not a surprise that without really meaning to, I end up at one of my old haunts in Hell’s Kitchen, a dive bar calledSalty Sal’s. It’s on a back street near the docks, flanked by a butcher and a sandwich shop, and it’s the most lively spot on the block at this hour. At least a dozen motorcycles are parked out back, and the front and back doors are both open, music and cigarette smoke spilling out into the evening air.

I get off my bike, fishing out a cigarette of my own as I walk towards the back door, the flame from my lighter flickering in the growing dark around me.

Before, I wasn’t much of a smoker. I enjoyed it casually, much like drinking, and women got a kick out of it. It went with my overall look—the leather jacket, the tattoos, the motorcycle. I fucked a woman on the seat of my bike once while we passed a cigarette back and forth, and I distinctly remember her coming, hard, when one of the embers fell onto the small of her back. I never saw her again after that, but she was wild enough to be memorable.

Strange, how that memory doesn’t feel as arousing, now. It’s immediately replaced by the memory of Dahlia on her knees in that cab, her lipstick smeared across the shaft of my cock as I wrapped my hand tighter in her hair, Russian curses spilling from my lips at the pleasure. Pleasure I’d forgotten, and that now I want to chase.

Which is the same reason I’m lighting up a cigarette as I walk to the back of Sal’s. That first draw of nicotine into the lungs is something I was denied for five years, along with good food, booze, and the freedom to do what I fucking pleased. So now I want all of those things. I want to feel pleasure again, because I sure as fuck don’t want to feel anything else.

Except for women. Women have been the exception to that—until Dahlia. And now, I can’t bring myself to want to fuck anyone else. I haven’t in the six weeks since I took her home.I told myself I was going back to my enforced celibacy, that I’d wrung it all out of my system that one night and didn’t need to spend time in another woman’s bed. But the truth is that every time someone has come up to me, all I see is her.

It’s fucking infuriating, and it’s only getting worse now, with what’s happened in the last few days.

Sucking in another deep drag of the cigarette, I blow out a cloud of smoke just as I reach the back entrance, dropping the cigarette to the ground and stubbing it out with the toe of my boot. A couple wearing all black are making out against the wall next to the door, and I shove past them, heading directly for where I see Sal passing out beers to a group of college-age kids.

The jukebox is playing some grating pop hit, and I figure it’s probably those same kids that are responsible. Ignoring it to the best of my ability, I take a seat at the opposite end of the bar, waiting for Sal to make his way over to me.

He’s been here since I was sixteen, when I used to sneak in after running errands for my father. I tried to pass off a fake ID once, but Sal wasn’t fooled. He let me drink anyway, saying if I was old enough to run jobs for the Bratva, I was old enough to have a beer. I’m glad to see that he’s still here—I’ve never really known how old he was, but he looks like he could expire at any moment. He’s wrinkled and slightly hunched, with wisps of white hair just above his ears, and piercing blue eyes that remain unclouded despite his age.

“Alek!” He calls out my name as he makes his way towards me, and I feel the corners of my mouth twitch, the closest thing I’ve felt to a smile. “Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”

“Near enough. Good to see you’re still sharp as ever, Sal.”

“I’ll be here until I’m ninety.” He flashes a broad, yellow-toothed grin. “Same thing as always?”

“You remember that, too?”

“Sure thing.” He turns, getting a cold bottle out of a fridge under the liquor shelves, and pops the cap off of the beer—a local ale that I’ve been drinking as long as I’ve come here. He pours it into a glass and pushes it over to me, then takes one look at my face and nods.

“Been gone a long time,” he says, his gaze flicking over the scar. “Glad to see you back.”

And with that, he turns to go and serve a couple that just walked in through the door.

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