Page 34 of Beautiful Enemy

I just never knew at that moment that it wouldn’t be Viktor seeing me naked but Dante Moretti instead.

No words come out of me.

Dante gives me a naughty look, like he’s asking me to tempt him. I stare back, almost daring him to try.

But then my shyness wins out and I avert my gaze. I can almostfeelhis disappointment.

Dante drops his hand and steps away from me and picks up my wedding dress, throwing it over his arm. “I’m taking this with me.”

“But it’s so cold down here. I’ll freeze at night.”

“You’re my enemy, remember?” Any of the warmth he just showed me is gone, replaced with nothing but cruelty. “You don’t get to be comfortable.”

He leaves the basement with my wedding dress in tow.

Dante

What the fuck am I doing?

Getting too close to Nadia is not the right course of action. I need to hate her. Despise her. And yet, I’m desperate to pull her back into my arms and kiss her.

Seeing her in nothing but her panties has made me rock hard. If I didn’t have such good control, I would have thrown her on that mattress and ravaged her right then and there.

And I think she would have went along with it.

Nadia is a confusing, confounding little creature. Pure and innocent but there’s a pain lurking underneath her. A darkness. Maybe her father put it there. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Nadia isn’t exactly who I thought she would be.

She’s a lot shyer than I thought. But there’s a bravery to her. It’s a subtle strength. She’s terrified and yet she has the courage to bargain with me. Not many people would do that.

Nadia is mystifying and because of that, I need to get away from her. I need to return to my mission and my mission is to drive Erik and Anya mad.

And I know exactly how to do it.

As night falls, I go to the nearest hospital and down to the lower basement where the morgue is. The forensic pathologist on sight nods at me to enter. His name is Sampson. When I was coming up with my plan to kidnap Nadia, I had Matteo reach out to Sampson and blackmail him into working with us.

“This is illegal,” he mutters as he leads me into the morgue. He opens the morgue cooler and pulls out a dead body of a young woman.

“I don’t care if it’s illegal. Cut off her finger.”

“I could lose my job for this.”

“You’re already going to lose your job if you don’t do as I say. Remember, Sampson, we know all about what you did to your previous assistant. You don’t want that going public, do you?”

He frowns, then sighs. “Fine.”

“You’re the one in charge here. No one will notice a missing finger. You’ve already completed the girl’s autopsy.”

“But she has parents. They’ll notice if her finger is missing.”

“Have they seen her body yet?”

“No,” he admits.

“Then just tell them she lost it somehow when she died. No one needs to know. If no one looks too hard, no one will see. Now cut off her finger.”

Grumbling under his breath, Sampson finally does as I say. The girl’s finger comes right off. One easy slice.

“I have to put it on ice if you don’t want it to decompose.’

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