Page 1 of Fallen Prince

CHAPTER 1

Allie

Ahard, muscular chest collided with my back, pushing me forward so I was pinned against the wall. Panic slashed my thoughts to ribbons, tangling my rational mind into a snarl of disjointed, primal fears. Someone was in my house; a man had been waiting for me in the shadows as soon as I closed the door behind me.

Animal instinct overtook my body as adrenaline surged through my system. My hands slapped at the wall, my palms stinging as I struggled to free myself from my attacker’s hold.

He was too strong. His hand tightened over my lips to smother my scream, but he didn’t have to hold me with bruising force to trap me in place. His bulky frame surrounded me, suffocated me. Mychest seized; I couldn’t seem to get any air into my lungs. The shadow-draped foyer spun around me, and terror was a copper tang on my tongue.

“Breathe.” The growled command was punctuated by a sharp prick at the side of my neck. Insidious warmth oozed into my bloodstream, pumping through my body with each pounding beat of my heart. My muscles relaxed, and fresh oxygen flooded my lungs, enhancing the strange, alarming high that muddled my mind. The shadows around me deepened, and I floated away into darkness.

“Wake up, Freckles. We need to talk.”

My eyelids were far too heavy, and sleep fogged my brain. I groaned and tried to ignore the voice, but a harsh curse roused me. That deep, masculine tone set off alarm bells in my fuzzy mind, blaring at me to wake up.

A burst of instinctive fear pulsed through me, and I peeled my eyes open. I squinted into the darkness, struggling to make sense of where I was. A single, dim lightbulb hung above my head, cocooning me in a small puddle of illumination that threw the rest of the room deeper into shadow. Thesemicircle of floor that I could see beneath my feet was gray concrete.

My head spun, and my stomach churned. My surroundings were so foreign that they didn’t seem real. This was something out of a disjointed nightmare, not real life. My flesh began to crawl, and the primal impulse to run caused my muscles to bunch beneath my skin.

The world flickered around me with each rapid pulse of my heart. The sickening effect was disorienting, but I tried to bolt anyway. My arms jerked against soft bindings, and my panic spiked. I twisted and pulled, my mind refusing to accept that my wrists were tied behind the cold metal chair that provided a rigid frame beneath my trembling body.

In my increasingly frantic struggles, a pinpoint of red light drew my attention. I barely made out the shape of a camera set up on a tripod to my right. I was being recorded.

Something stirred in the shadows, a darker shade of black. I stilled, freezing like a spooked doe.

Dread coiled in my gut as the memory of a man’s hand on my mouth flooded my spinning brain. The prick at the side of my neck had been a needle, and I was lucid enough now to comprehend that my mind was still sluggish from the drugs.

The darker shadow took on the form of a towering man. He loomed over me, just at the edge of the pool of light, a nightmare shrouded in darkness. My skin pebbled with a shock of icy fear, and my belly quivered. His massive body dwarfed mine, his corded arms flexing against his tight black shirt as he crossed them over his chest. The light gleamed dimly over a mass of tousled black curls as he tipped his head back, but only the sharpest lines of his face captured any of the illumination. It rendered his face a macabre, skull-like mask.

Terror hit me like a sledgehammer to my brain, obliterating all rational thought in a burst of primal panic.

“Help!” I cried out for anyone to save me. I twisted against my restraints, but the silky binding simply slid around my wrists, securing me firmly in place. My scream tore up my throat, and the spike of abject horror magnified the dizziness from the drugs that lingered in my system. The room swirled around me, making my stomach churn. Nausea coated my shrieks in acid, and my next scream stuttered as I swallowed against the burn.

Through the unruly hair that tumbled over his brow, a flash of white indicated that my captor rolled his eyes at me. “Don’t bother. Do you think Idrugged you just to bring you to a place where someone could hear you scream for help?” His voice was gravelly, rough with exasperation. “We’re going to have a little conversation. Screaming will only waste my time. I don’t like having my time wasted.” The last was a low warning, softer but somehow more terrifying than his growl.

“Who are you?” The question left my lips on a whisper. The room wouldn’t stop spinning, and my stomach writhed like a nest of venomous snakes. “What do you want from me?”

“I’m Max Ferrara. And I want you to tell me all about your father’s ties to the Russian Bratva.”

Ferrara.My brain stuck on the name, unable to process his second statement. Through the haze of drugs and terror, it tugged at my thoughts, dragging knowledge from the back of my mind. Ice frosted over my skin, and a bone-shaking shudder wracked my body. “Please let me go,” I begged on a tremulous whisper.

I didn’t know this man, Max, at all, but it wasn’t hard to guess why he’d kidnapped me. While my dad had served as lead prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, he’d built the case that decimated the Italian Mafia. The Ferraras were one of five major families that he’dtaken down. That’d been when I was eleven years old. Max seemed too young to have been sent to prison back then, but there was an obvious reason why he had me tied to a chair in a dark room where no one would hear me scream: revenge.

Max’s teeth flashed in a savage grin. “So, you do know who I am. Good. What else did your daddy tell you about his dirty dealings? Tell me everything you know about his relationship with the Russians.”

That grin sliced through any rational thought I’d managed to gather in the midst of my drugged haze. Most of his face was still hidden in shadow, but that feral flash of white teeth set off my most basic prey response. I pulled harder against the restraints that bound me, frantically trying to flee from the threat. Blood pounded in my ears, but it didn’t drown out the sound of my ragged breaths. They sawed through the air around me, shredding any hope that this truly was a nightmare to ribbons.

Desperation punched my chest when I didn’t manage to shift so much as an inch off the chair; the bindings weren’t painful, but they held me fast.

“You don’t have to hurt me,” I begged in a rush. “Just let me go, and I swear I won’t tell anyone about this. Please, I—”

“I’m not hurting you,” he snapped, cuttingoff my plea. “The sooner you stop babbling, the sooner this will end. Tell me what I want to know.”

His corded muscles flexed where his arms were crossed over his thick chest, a chilling reinforcement of his brute strength and my powerlessness. A shadow ticked along the harsh line of his stubble-shaded jaw, and his eerily illuminated cheekbones seemed to sharpen—like some primal, fearsome beast that dwelled in darkness.

I squeezed my eyes shut, willing my head to stop spinning. Everything was surreal and sickening. If my world could just go back to normal, if only this were a nightmare and I could wake up…

“Focus, Freckles.” A sharp snap directly in front of my face jolted through my entire body like a thunderclap. “The Russians,” the beast prompted. “Tell me about your father and the Russians.”

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