Page 13 of Scars He Gave Me (Bratva Crime Syndicate 2)

“Take it off!” he orders. He moves around her to the suitcase full of sex toys I inspected earlier and pulls out a pair of restraints, then attaches them to the headboard around a fluted column on each side.

My blood is boiling, but I can’t do a fucking thing about it because I’m stuck in a closet watching her whimper her way through taking off her dress while her cocksucker husband bites and slaps at her.

I still can’t see her face, but I don’t need to.

It’s her.

It’s my Corinne.

“You didn’tpayfor me.” I can hear the teasing. I know she’s trying to lighten the mood, but there’s an undercurrent of panic in her voice, and I hate her husband for the way he talks back to her. How the fuck could she have picked a bastard like this to spend her life with?

“Get on the bed.” He’s a domineering fuck. A bully. I don’t like the way he’s talking to her. Demanding. Commanding. This is all wrong. This bastard is going to end up hurting her. “Get on the bed.”

Oh, fuck. I don’t want to hear this.

“Don’t talk to me like that.” She’s lean, muscular, could probably hold her own, but as scrawny as he is, he’s bigger than her. Big enough to overpower her without much issue.

And when he speaks through gritted teeth, I want to kick his ass. Because I could take him. With no issue.

“I said get on the bed.”

He stalks toward her and she moves, flinching even though he doesn’t touch her. When she puts her head on the pillow and he yanks her hand toward the restraint, I see her face. The fear in her eyes. Normally the color of Scottish whiskey, right now they’re darker, rimmed in red.

She’s tied to the bed now. He yanks her panties, but they don’t rip. She cries out as he jerks twice more before he comes back with a scrap of snow-white lace in his fist. He laughs and flings them over his shoulder.

I can only see his back and part of his hairy ass crack hanging out of his black underwear. I tell myself that I shouldn’t care what’s going on on the other side of the closet door. It’s none of my fucking business.

I’m here for my father, for the Bratva, to kill one of our enemies.

I’m not here forher.

“That hurt.” Anger is the stronger of the tones in her voice, but there’s also fear. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Her voice makes it clear that this is not consensual, that she is not asking for the pain he wants to bring down on her.

I look down at the gun in my hand. It isn’t going to take ten shots to kill Giordano. I have two choices.

I can spare one or two for this fuckhead.

Or I can stay in this closet and mind my own fucking business.

He climbs off the bed and goes to the suitcase. When he turns, he’s holding a vibrator as long as his arm. Her eyes go wide and her legs squeeze shut.

“No. Alvin, no!”

She’s not pleading, she’s yelling, but when he runs it along her thigh, to her hip—his body is blocking my view of anything else—her voice turns to a shriek. Desperate. Afraid.

I might’ve stayed in the closet and let her deal with her own shit, but the struggling against the restraints and the man trying to pry her knees apart while she sobs and begs and cries out, is too much.

Way too fucking much.

I push the door and step out. Not a big production. Quiet, so that there’s no mistaking the distinct click of the metal slide on the gun when I cock it next to his ear. He pulls away from her and lifts his hands in surrender.

But Corinne’s eyes open. Her gaze locks onto mine.

And in the sweetest voice I’ve ever heard, she brings back all the memories I blocked out.

“Tommy?”

Corinne

---