Page 10 of His Property

“Please get off him,” I beg, my voice cracking.

“Answer my question first.”

Why? What the fuck is wrong with him?

It takes me a moment TJ doesn’t have to come up with my answer. It’s neither. We’re not related, and I wish TJ hadn’t told Victor we were. Who knows what kind of depraved shit he’d want to make a brother and sister do or watch? He only knows we aren’t biologically related because I’m black, and TJ is white as a marshmallow.

“Step!”

Victor lifts his boot off TJ’s neck, and TJ rolls over, gasping before going into a coughing fit. He curls into a ball and lifts his hands to his throat while he lays on the floor wheezing.

Victor smiles before letting go of my hair. He extends his hand in front of me. “Ladies first.”

I have the intense urge to scream at him, but I think that’s exactly what he’s hoping for. He wants us to react. He likes our fear.

The tattooed woman was right. He’s a fucking psychopath.

When I don’t move fast enough for him, he shoves me forward. I put my hands out to balance myself, then lead us into my bedroom.

I drop to my knees beside my bed and pull the shoebox from underneath it. The shoebox containing eight-hundred dollars… not even close to five thousand. My purse has another forty, and I have another five hundred in my checking account. My savings constantly gets emptied by my mom needing something, so that isn’t any help. Even when I calculate every dime I have, I come up thousands of dollars short.

I open the lid and pull out all the bills with shaky hands. I’m afraid to look up at Victor and see his reaction to the meager offering, but when I finally get the courage, he isn’t even looking at me or the cash. He’s looking around my bedroom, the gun no longer in his hand.

Following his gaze, I realize I left my candle lit. My e-reader rests on my bed, among a mess of silk sheets and my comforter. Victor picks it up and clicks it on, and it instantly feels like someone lit a fire in here. His eyes linger on a passage from an erotica short-story I was reading earlier. If it was vanilla erotica, it wouldn’t be so bad, but that’s far from the case.

He looks from the e-reader to me and raises his brows. “Really?”

I look down at the empty shoebox and try to ignore his amusement. I slowly stand and hold out the cash to him, my eyes still anywhere but his face.

“I know it isn’t all of it, but give me a few days and I’ll have it. My credit is good. I can easily get a few payday loans.”

He takes the bills from my hands and flips through them. “This is it?” he asks, incredulous. “That lying little shit.”

“He’s just a kid,” I say, finally managing to look Victor in the eyes. My heart pounds in my chest, and I hang on to hope that he’ll give me extra time to get the money.

Victor shrugs. “I don’t care.”

“What could he have possibly done to owe you that much money?” I ask, and as soon as I do, I know the answer.

That fucking basketball game.

“He doesn’t owe me. He owes the familia. I’m just the one here to collect.”

“The familia?” I ask, my heartbeat picking up even faster. The reason I ask isn’t because I’m confused as to who he’s referring to. I know about the Gruco Crime Family. Everyone in this city does, or at leastshould. I ask because I can’t fucking believe it.

TJ bet against the goddamn mafia. On a basketball game.

This isnothappening.

“I don’t have enough time to explain how the Italian mafia operates, sweetheart. Watch a movie.”

I stare at Victor’s chest and can’t seem to get a breath. My hands start to shake.

Victor reaches his hand toward me, and I flinch. He caresses my cheek, the gesture weirdly gentle, kind,fake. He tucks my hair behind my ear and tilts my chin so I’ll look at him.

“I really,reallywish I had more time,” he says, his gentle words laced with a not-so-hidden meaning. “But your brother has already used up forty-five minutes of the thirty minutes my boss has allotted him to get me this money. So if you don’t have all five-thousand here, right now, you’ll need to come with me so I can take you to my boss. Maybe you can square it out with him.”

I shiver when he touches my face again but try not to panic. I feel like I’m trapped inside his mind right now, and all I want to do is get out. He’s lying when he says he’ll take us to his boss. I instinctively know this deep within me. He wants me to walk to his car without putting up a fight, and he’ll probably get off on digging my face in that fact just before he kills me.

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