Sinful Hearts: Chapter 4

I startle as consciousness rips me from the haze I was just swimming in. Groaning, I stretch under the sheet, feeling the sort of ache in my muscles that can only come from a marathon fuck. My lips curl hungrily as I feel my cock thickening heavily against my thigh.

Why stop now?

With a savage grind of my jaw, I roll over to spread her legs and sink myself back into the outrageously pretty, eager, dripping, tight little pussy that’s been draining my balls all evening. But I stop short with a start when I realize the bed next to me is empty.

My eyes open blearily as I fully wake up. Scowling, I scan the room. But it’s empty. And the door to the ensuite bathroom is open, with the lights off.

.

I sit up, glaring at her side of the bed. My hand lands on the sheets, and I frown.

Still warm. She hasn’t been gone long.

For a second, I almost jump from the bed and chase after her. But then I stop myself, rolling my eyes.

I don’t chase women. Even a woman who arguably just reset the bar about a mile higher in terms of my own definition of good sex.

I allow a smile to creep over my jaw as I drop back to the pillows, shoving my fingers through my hair.

, that was good. Really good. Like, “four marathon rounds and I still want more” good.

And I want more from a woman, even if the sex is fantastic. I just don’t. I don’t chase. I don’t call later, or make plans for the next time.

I fuck, I leave.

.

Once we’re done…we’re . I don’t emotionally connect with many people at all outside my immediate family. And I don’t emotionally connect with women. So it’s just sex. And even if it’s a good time?

There’s always another woman, in another club, with another hopeful smile and twinkle in her eye, like she’s going to be the one who fixes me. That be the one to keep me wanting more.

But there’s no fixing me. I’ll never want more. Not from the same woman. A repeat means attachment, and I don’t do that either.

I used to think there was something wrong with me because of this inability to be intimate in any real capacity outside the physical mechanics of sex. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that it’s not that the ability to feel or experience emotional intimacy is broken inside of me.

It’s that it’s completely walled off, behind barriers a mile thick and three miles high. Maybe part of it—or probably a lot of it—is what happened to me when I was young. But that’s only a piece of it. Somewhere deep down, I know I’ve always been like this.

For a while, when I first became friendly with Cillian Kildare after my brother married Cillian’s niece, I thought maybe I’d found someone else who’s the same kind of different as me. Cillian, after all, is a legit, certifiable psychopath. Or at least, he’s firmly on the scale somewhere. But it turns out he’s not entirely devoid of emotions or unable to have personal relationships. Not just because we’re friends—at least as much “friends” as you can be with a man like Cillian. But because he’s married to Una now.

They may the darkest, gothiest prom king and queen couple I’ve ever met. And I’m sure their intimate life involves drinking each other’s blood, or pulling the wings off bats or butterflies or some weird shit like that.

But they’re in love. Even That’s never happened to me. And I don’t see that changing.

I doubt I’m actually psychotic. I think I’m just…tempestuous. Probably a little fucked up in some fairly profound ways that I have zero interest in examining. Or maybe I’m just a force of chaos, fucking, racing, and raging his way through the world.

Whatever the reason, here I am: approaching thirty without ever having had a meaningful or intimate relationship with a woman that’s lasted longer than eight hours.

I glance back to the spot my little kitten recently vacated and replay flashbacks of the evening in my mind, starting with the way she grabbed me and just fucking kissed me.

I’ve had woman throw themselves at me more times than I could ever count. But never like that. The other times, it’s felt almost pathetic—a desperate attempt for me to “pick them”. As if they’re “special”, or in any way different than any of the faceless, disposable women who came before them, or the ones who’ll come after.

But the little kitten who kissed me tonight wasn’t throwing herself at me. She wasn’t begging me to pick her.

was picking .

And I’m fairly sure that that’s never happened to me before.

With a groan, I stretch my sore muscles again and sit up in bed.

.

I grin.

.

I stand, stretching again before I pad across the room to the bar cart. I pour myself a much-needed whiskey, knock it back, then pour one more and bring it back to the bed with me. I sit on the edge and glance at my watch sitting on the bedside table.

. I’m supposed to be at Leo Stavrin’s office—well, his office—twenty minutes ago. And I’ve already fucked up the first part of the plan involving him tonight.

My mind flashes back to the little kitten kissing me, but then I rewind a little bit further, to the girl I was talking to before Kitten came along.

The girl I actually came to Venom tonight to see. Not because I had the tiniest interest in fucking her, much less to her. But because Ares asked me to, and family is one thing I will always do for.

Even seducing Leo Stavrin’s utterly brain-dead girlfriend.

It’s like this: Leo is Gavan Tsarenko’s top captain. Until a few months, he was working lower down the totem pole over in the UK, where Gavan’s co-head of the Reznikov Bratva, Konstantin Reznikov, runs things. But when the Russians’ war with the Albanians got Gavan’s top captain Artyom killed, his position needed to be filled. And it would seem Leo has filled the position well.

That, obviously, puts him close to Gavan. It also probably goes without saying that it makes him intimately familiar with whatever plans Gavan is cooking up when it comes to making a play for Serj’s empire.

But there’s something else about Leo that few people know: Leo’s a cuckold.

I don’t mean that as an insult. That’s legitimately his thing. Leo’s fetish is for his girlfriend Anya—the aforementioned brain-dead brunette with the ridiculously fake tits—to go out and get fucked by random dudes, and then come home and tell him all about it.

There may or may not be a part of that kink that involves, uh, afterward with his tongue. And, hey, I’m not gonna kink shame anyone, even weaselly little shit-bags like Leo Stavrin, but fucking .

In any case, that was what Ares wanted to “run past me” after our meeting earlier. Leo’s gotten Anya a membership to Venom to help facilitate her random fucks. So the plan was for me to make an appearance myself, find her, seduce her, and get her talking about anything business-related she may have heard from Leo.

That plan went a little sideways when she fucking , of course. Anya might be dumb…and she is…but I doubt even she’d be dumb enough to start talking about her boyfriend’s Bratva business with someone who’s very obviously a member of a competing family.

And then, of course, Kitten grabbed me and kissed me, and the plan went from merely full of holes to sunk to the bottom of the sea right next to the fucking in about a nanosecond.

Not that I have any regrets. It was honestly a shit plan to begin with, and I get more than a little pissed when Ares wants to weaponize how I am with women for business purposes.

I mean, yes, I have issues. I’m not a fucking whore, though.

have plans involving Leo too. But mine involve spying on him using the state-of-the-art surveillance equipment I’ve got stashed in an apartment across the street from the restaurant he uses as an office. Not banging his girl.

And fuck, I should have been there twenty-

minutes ago now.

Quickly, I knock back the rest of my drink and get dressed. I glance once back at the bed before I roll my eyes and resist the urge to slap myself.

Then I’m outta there.

Half an hour later, I’m pulling the hood of my sweatshirt down low over my face as I slip in the back door of the apartment building. I’ve rented the studio on the fourth floor through a shell company, just to be safe. I’m not stupid. But you can’t be too careful.

As it stands, we’re just in a business standoff versus the Russians. But I’m hyper aware how it would look getting busted spying on Gavan’s top captain in his own place of business when we’re not openly in hostilities. Yet.

As much pride as I have in my own family, and as much as I’d love to tell Gavan and his crew to go fuck themselves, that would be epically unwise. We made ourselves much stronger when we partnered our family with the Kildares. But the Reznikov Bratva is a fucking powerhouse. Not to mention allies with about four other equally huge Bratva families.

So the name of the game right now is “make sure you don’t get fucking caught”.

I can do that.

In the empty rented studio, I leave the lights off as I move to the window. I crack the blinds just enough to be able to see out, looking at the front of Leo’s restaurant, The Pearl of the Black Sea: famous—or should I say infamous—for its overpriced caviar, cheap swill vodka poured into bottles with premium labels, and the fact that Leo Stavrin does most of his business out of a third floor, front-facing office.

An office I currently have two cameras with telephoto lenses and a military-grade targeted microphone aimed at.

I slip on the headphones, squinting through one of the cameras as I focus the mic on the office windows across the street.

.

All I’m hearing is garbled static. There’s a few hints of men’s voices, and even a woman’s—Anya, probably. But I can’t hear shit. And the shades are drawn, too.

Goddammit.

I pull away from the camera and peer through the blinds themselves.

. I glare venomously at the neon sign for the restaurant that hangs just outside Leo’s office windows. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember reading something about the flickering wavelengths of neon throwing off targeted microphones. That might or might not be bullshit, but either way, I can’t hear a damn thing.

Fuck.

I try to get anything for a few more minutes before I throw in the towel and admit defeat. This isn’t happening. Not tonight, at least.

I’m about to shut everything down and go home, when something catches my eye outside. It’s a girl storming out the front door of the restaurant. My brow furrows as I watch her, her back to me as she takes what looks like a shaky breath and shoves her fingers through her long blonde hair.

And then suddenly, the light from the neon sign above her glints off the bracelet on her wrist.

No, not a bracelet.

I go still. My face lowers to the viewfinder of the camera next to me, peering at her now through the telephoto lens.

A . A gold and white one.

She’s wearing black heels with ornate golden bows on the toes. A backless, sexy—but not sexy—little black cocktail dress.

And even if her face is turned away, I can see the angry red welts—

—running up the side of her delicate neck.

Three of them.

Fuck.

.

One similarity would be weird. The combination of all of them piled together is too much to ignore. And the bite marks on her skin that I can still taste, and the gold and white band that is obviously from Club Venom, move it from weird coincidence to fact:

The girl I just spent four hours tangled in bed with in one of the private rooms of Club Venom just walked out of Leo fucking Stavrin’s restaurant-slash-office.

I don’t for one second believe that’s coincidence. She picked , after all.

I’m about to march right down there—the danger of exposure be damned—and grab her to figure out exactly what she was playing at when suddenly, she turns.

And my world goes utterly still.

Her long, white-blonde hair swishes to the side. The neon sign glints in the hazel flintiness of her eyes, and glistens off the soft pink pout of her lips.

Eyes that typically roll at whatever I say. Lips that almost always sneer when they’re near me.

And that’s when it suddenly hits me like a Mack truck to the face.

The girl standing on the sidewalk outside Leo’s place, the girl from the club, .

What. The.

.

I can feel my throat tightening as my vision tunnels. My jaw grinds painfully as my pulse thuds like a war drum in my ears.

Fuck, I can still taste her on my tongue. I can still feel the velvety sweetness of her cunt squeezing my cock as she erupted beneath me.

But forget trying to wrap my head around the Ice Queen herself fucking anonymous men at Club Venom. I mean, I figure that part out, even if it means ripping it from her piece by fucking piece.

No, right now, I would very much like to know what the actual fuck Elsa Guin is doing walking out of Leo motherfucking Stavrin’s office at one in the morning, after screwing me all evening.

With a snarl rumbling on my lips, I whirl from the window and storm out of studio apartment. I take the stairs two at a time, yanking my hood up as I explode out the side door of the building.

…Just in time to watch Elsa slip into the back seat of an Uber and drive off.

My car is only a block away. If I run, I could make it. I could chase her. I could—

The door to the restaurant opens, and suddenly Leo and four of his goons come pouring out, looking angry as hell.

.

I turn away, yanking the hood down over my face before I slip into the shadows, watching the Uber carrying Elsa slip around a corner and disappear into the night.

This isn’t over. Actually, this is the farthest fucking from over.

Because I’ve had a taste of the heat that lies buried deep inside the queen of ice.

And now I want the fucking rest.