Page 8 of The Contract

I’m sorry, did he just say his property?

Creepy Guy’s still wheezing beside me like a deflated tire, and his sidekick’s vulture talon is still death-gripped around my leg.

But it’s the Russian who worries me the most. He rolls in like the beautiful calm before the storm you can spot on the horizon.

I can’t see him, not with the fucking sack still on my head, but I feel him everywhere.

An electric charge sparking through the air, curling across my skin.

The way he’s handling these thugs? He’s confident. Controlled. And very, very dangerous.

He’s also straight up delusional and under the wildly mistaken impression that women are property.

That I’m his property.

Before my what the fuck meter makes it to my mouth, the hand shackled around my ankle tosses my foot like trash. “Fuck off! She’s property of the D’Angelos.”

Wait…

What?

My brain hiccups.

Are you telling me these morons who attacked me work for my new in-laws? The D’Angelos? What kind of sick fucking family is this?

And who the hell did my sister marry?

“Which D’Angelo?” the Russian asks, voice low and clipped.

No fear. No awe. Just casual curiosity.

And my question exactly.

While they snarl at each other like two dogs in a cage, I start moving. Slow and awkward, I scoot away, flying blind one gravel-scraping ass-cheek at a time.

Graceful? Not in the slightest.

Just trying to stay low and small, and out of the line of fire while I tug-of-war with this knot.

In the meantime, Numbnuts doesn’t back down.

“Mr. Andre D’Angelo,” he announces, slow-motion sounding out the name like it carries divine weight.

The way this knot’s fighting me, I kind of wish he’d sound all his words out like a second grader. Really shove some extra syllables in there and buy me a few precious seconds of not dying.

And maybe give me a clue to who Andre is?

Enzo, King of the Damned, introduced me to his brothers, and I remember them. An Andre, I do not.

Aside from their sister Trinity, there was Smoke, Mateo, Dillon and Dante.

My pulse kicks up a storm as a set of steel-blue eyes floods my mind.

Dante.

Dante looks exactly how I imagine dark, obsessive, tortured Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights would—only with a bad-boy edge that screams stalk her first, woo her later.

We’d only spoken once—briefly, over the phone—but one thing was crystal clear: the man, with his dark, touchable waves and full, frowny lips, had an agenda.

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