Page 47 of Where the Wicked Reign

I walked to him and slapped him up the back of the head. “Keep your dick in check,Whore-of-the-Century.”

He grinned. “That just means she likes me. Or, more likely, that she wants a piece of this.” I rolled my eyes as he ran his hands the length of himself.

“How could she not?” I uttered with dripping sarcasm.

“Sounds like you could do with some. I can feel the stress radiating off you and fucking with my chilling tub time.”

“Oh, I’m fucking sorry that this extremely serious and volatile situation is cutting into your relaxation time,” I bit back.

“See? Stressed out. You need a piece of me, all right.”

“Aren’t you saving that piece for her now?”

“I’ve got a lot ofpiecesto go around, big boy,” he said, smirking out at me. “Youknow that.”

I glared back at him.

His smirk slipped. “Your jealously is showing.Again.”

He was challenging me.

He didn’t like me expressing jealously or getting possessive of him. Especially when I did have my girls every now and then, fair-weather girlfriends, really. It was all I could handle when my whole life was the Family. Or it was supposed to be. Until things had started going south in the worst ways. Until Nico had started becoming so disillusioned.

Julianneededsex and a lot of it. He was a thrill-seeker, a trauma response to what he’d gone through with his brutal shit of a father. It was sex, us riding our motorcycles and stunting down the back roads at the edge of the city; him signing up for a whole lot of skydiving, rock climbing, even getting into tight-rope walking wherein he’d gone to higher and higher heights, even once walking across two office buildings a couple of years back with thousands of onlookers cheering him on.

And I couldn’t give him that much fucking. I didn’t have time and more than that, I only got the urge once in a while. I had trouble shutting my mind off and Julian was one of the only people who could help me do that, who could get me to that headspace with the whole Dom thing he brought to the table. So, I guess, whenever he was with anybody else, it worried me that he’d replace me and find somebody like me who could be more of apermanent fixturefor him. And, yeah, maybe it bothered me too that I couldn’t actually be a constant for him.

Now, in Caterina, there was yet another potential person to fuck who’d caught his eye.

And the thing with her was that with the marriage directive and Nico’s obsession, she was going to be around all the time, not just a flash-in-the-pan fuck for him.

“Did you hear me?”

I blinked out of my thoughts to see him holding up his phone screen to me. His phone that was covered in a cobalt-blue—his favorite color—glittering case.

I peered closer and saw his IG page was up. He’d just posted a photo of himself in the hot tub, showing his pierced nipples with the gold hoops through them and running his hand through his currently wild hair.

The caption read:Who wouldn’t want a piece of this, right? Tell my asshole friend, Carver Babes.

His phone started pinging wildly within the next few seconds and I watched tons of comments come in, telling him how hot he was, how much they wanted him, all that.

That was his other thing—being constantly on social media, documenting so much about his life and teasing his hundreds of thousands of followers. He liked the attention and needed the affirmations.

And more than that, it kept him constantly busy. Between this and his work and his fuck sessions atNocturne,along with his other thrill-seeking activities, he barely ever stopped. Just the way he needed it. He didn’t like it when things stood still, when there was quiet.

It was another result of what his father had put him through.

“You’re a real shit sometimes, you know that?”

“Only when I need to be,” he said, far too pointedly.

And then he suddenly stood up in the hot tub, water cascading all over his very naked body.

“You’re not wearing trunks,” I choked at the sight of his hard dick, the piercings glinting against the fairy lights set up everywhere. He’d put a whole scene together, along with a champagne bucket, some teddy bears holding flowers, no doubt for his IG followers and the tons of pictures he’d posted before I’d unexpectedly shown up here.

“I don’t like the restriction in the hot tub. Remember?”

I spotted his white cotton robe nearby and snatched it up, then tossed it at him as he stepped on out.

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