Page 5 of Rise of Temptation

“Do you want to live?”

Blink.

“Are you willing to sacrifice everything you believe in to stay alive?”

A longer pause. A cautious blink.

“Do you want to come?”

Blink.

He lets go of my neck and moves his hand to my clit, rubbing circles around it in time with his thrusts until I’m screaming and coming apart all over his cock. He groans and follows me over the edge, once again filling me with his seed.

“Good girl. Now I’m going to offer you a deal. You accept, or you die. Doesn’t really matter to me. I also want to know who is using my club for trafficking, and you’re going to help me figure it out. Frankie overheard a conversation tonight that makes us think it’s the Russian Bratva. He’s checking it out.”

“So the deal is that we’re working together now?”

“No. The deal is that you work for me. You keep your job, but I’m your real boss. Everything you learn, you bring to me first. But no one else in my organization will know who you are. To them, you’ll be my own personal whore. When you’re around me, you will do everything I say. Dress how I tell you to dress. Act how I tell you to act. Be who I tell you to be.”

“So I fuck you, I feed you information, and what do I get?”

“If you’re lucky? Orgasms.”

“And if I’m not?”

“Death.”

Chapter 4

Frankie

Ican’t believe Enzo is prioritizing his nightly fuck over the biggest threat to his empire. It’s not like she won’t be there when he gets back. He had her handcuffed to the bed, for fuck’s sake. He can spare fifteen minutes to see if this tip pans out.

As I push through the door to the back room of the club, my annoyance at Enzo is redirected to Sal and Joey, who are lounging on the couch with a bottle of the good tequila and a couple of shot glasses.

“Seriously?”

They look up in surprise, then have the decency to look slightly ashamed of themselves.

“Are you two just getting paid to drink and fuck around now?”

“We’ve always kind of been paid for that,” Joey points out, and he’s not wrong. On paper, Sal owns the club and Joey manages it. In reality, it’s a Family business, which means all four of us—Enzo, Sal, Joey, and I—run it together. “But this time we’re also spying. We saw those Russian buffoons come back here and go into the exhibition room, so we figured it was the perfect opportunity to gather some intel.”

“Oh yeah?” I ask. “And how’s that going from way over there on the couch?” The couch is in the perfect place to see into the next room, but you can’t hear for shit unless you’re close to the shared wall between the two rooms.

“Well, since you asked so nicely,” Sal replies, “they already left.”

“What? Already?” I turn to look through the two-way mirror and, sure enough, there’s no one on the other side. “Did you hear what they said?”

“Yeah, it was just normal business stuff. Nothing about trafficking or girls or anything that made us think they were doing something here that we haven’t sanctioned,” says Joey before he pours two more shots and tips his back. “Want one, boss?”

I glare at him, then at Sal. “Did it occur to either of you that they might’ve been speaking in code, knowing there was a chance someone was in this room and could hear them?”

“Sure it did, but that’s not going to do us much good without knowing what the code is. Right?”

These two are usually very good at their jobs, and I’d trust them with my life. But sometimes, they let the fun of running one of the premiere clubs in Chicago get in the way of our real work. “Next time, either record them, write it down, or don’t get drunk while you’re listening. If you could remember what they actually said, we might be able to figure it out.”

“They also could’ve been playing us, planting bad info to get us to chase our tails.”

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