Chapter 8: Corrupted Heart: Chapter 8

The beast inside of me is a fickle one. He’s unpredictable at times, and his tastes are…ambiguous. Despite knowing him intimately all my life, there are still times where I’m not quite sure if the desires roaring inside me are clamoring for violence or sex.

Sometimes I worry that it’s both. Others, it’s precisely the promise of both that gives me a rushing high no drug on Earth can mimic.

It makes my reaction to Bianca Sartorre the other night even more curious.

My jaw sets as the gilded elevator slowly rises forty floors above Central Park South.

I’m still trying to figure out my monster’s motive for tracking her to that bar, snatching her, and bringing her to my secret sanctuary. Was it to find out why Vito Barone’s adopted daughter was running around with bricks of cocaine in back alleys?

Was it a need for violence? A desire to snip off any loose threads, considering what she saw me do in that alley? Maybe it was fueled by a far baser instinct.

Maybe I was curious why the good little princess has been looking for primal play on the website of a fetish club she shouldn’t even be a member of. The one she goes on using a fake name.

Like me.

Honestly, that would be the easiest explanation. It’s difficult for me to find someone with whom to explore my very specific tastes. Women who say they’re into “rough sex” or primal play typically have no fucking clue what I mean when I say it.

I don’t mean fucking pink fuzzy handcuffs, or a safe word that gets used the second my fingers curl around a throat.

I’m looking to be savage. To fuck like it’s an extreme sport, or a battle. What I want with sex is a hunt.

A blood-soaked war.

Most women—most people in general, actually—would never guess this side of me. I keep it locked up tight in a safe buried under the fucking floorboards. Very few women get past the facade to see the real me.

And all of them, without exception, run screaming once they do.

Bianca didn’t.

I fully expected her to, which is why I came at her with both barrels blazing: barging in on her, masked, in that club bathroom. Binding and blindfolding her before kidnapping her.

The knife.

The chase.

Showing her the true nature of my beast.

I kept waiting for her to break down and scream the safe word, to show me the terrified little mob princess way out of her depth that I knew she was. To prove to both of us that she does not belong in the shadows.

Except it never happened, until I forced the issue. Until I pushed her a mile past her comfort zone, pinned her to the ground, and savaged that climax from her shuddering body.

That’s when she finally broke.

Like I knew she would. Like maybe I hoped she would, so I could go on reminding myself why the mask I wear to face the rest of the world is so necessary.

But deep down, I know the reason I walked away the other night wasn’t that I’d proved anything to myself. Nor did it have anything to do with who she or her family is.

When I had Bianca on the very bleeding edge between sanity and my own brand of deviant insanity, I saw something curious in her.

Something good.

Something breakable.

Something I used to be, in a previous lifetime.

I blink as the elevator dings. The black thoughts I’ve been mulling over in the ride up here vanish, and I can’t help but grin when the doors slowly glide open, allowing me to step out into the lavish, gilded entryway to the Drakos estate.

Home.

Or at least, home until recently.

“Engonós.”

My grin widens as I step out of the elevator into the stunning home on Central Park South—a staggeringly huge neoclassical mansion perched atop a forty-story building across from Central Park. Twelve bedrooms, twice as many bathrooms, grounds complete with two pools and a tennis court, and a wine cellar and collection that most aficionados would kill for.

This place was home when I was a kid. Then again after first our father and then our oldest brother Atlas died, when Ares moved the rest of us back to New York from London. But it’s not the house, its luxurious views, gilded walls, or even the warm memories that have me smiling.

It’s Ya-ya: my grandmother, Dimitra Drakos, who’s standing in the lavish entryway beaming at me.

“Geia sou, Ya-ya,” I grin, striding across the marble floor and scooping her into my arms. The woman is all of five-foot-nothing and feels like she weighs as much as a bird. But I, and the rest of my siblings, know that to underestimate her due to her diminutive stature would be a mistake.

Ya-ya might be the size of a seagull, but she’s as lethal and as cunning as a lioness.

She sighs, clucking her tongue against her teeth as I pull away. “The house misses you, grandson.”

I grin. “Miss you, too, Ya-ya.”

We all lived here together after we moved back to the States. But slowly and surely, the rest of my siblings have all gone their own ways, with their own “persons”: Ares with Neve, Hades with Elsa, Deimos with Dahlia, and Callie with Castle.

A few months ago, it sort of clicked with me that I was A, the last one here, and B, officially a thirty-year-old man living alone with his grandmother.

Not that I’m ashamed of that, at all. And, for the record, it was Dimitra who not-so-subtly pushed me out. I believe her words were something along the lines of me “never finding a good Greek girl to settle down with and have lots of babies with if I insisted on living with my grandmother”.

So a few months ago, I moved into an old brownstone I bought deep in the East Village that I’ve been slowly refurbishing.

“I thought you’d be hungry.”

My smile widens and my stomach rumbles as she lifts the plate in her hand and pulls off the napkin covering it with a small flourish: homemade souvlaki wrapped in pita, along with Ya-ya’s famous homemade tzatziki sauce. There’s even some fries wrapped up in there.

Fuck. Yes.

I groan happily as I take the plate and dig in with an enormous bite.

“How did you guess?” I chuckle around a mouthful of juicy souvlaki.

Ya-ya grins, having to stand up on her tiptoes to pat my cheek even though I’m leaning down. “You’re my giant, engonós,” she beams at me. “And all that Spartan blood needs its nourishment.”

I bite back a smile. Ya-ya is convinced that our family is directly descended from the three hundred Spartans who defended Greece from the Persian hordes at the Battle of Thermopylae. That we’re literally related to the dudes with the CGI abs in that 300 movie. Do not ever try to tell her otherwise.

“This is delicious,” I growl, devouring the pita.

“Well, maybe it’ll entice you to come visit more often. You know, my suggestion that you find your own place didn’t mean forget you have a grandmother,” she chides with a grin.

I chuckle. “Miss me already, Ya-ya?”

She rolls her eyes. “My kitchen certainly does. I don’t know what to do with all the food in there anymore.”

“I could aways move back in, you know.”

“And pigs might fly, Kratos,” she smirks with a sternly arched brow. “Which is to say—no, you can’t.”

I laugh. “That’s cold, Ya-ya. What, you got a boyfriend coming around these days you don’t want me to see?”

“Just one?”

I snort around another bite of souvlaki and gesture past her with my chin. “Am I the last to arrive?”

She nods. “The king is holding court in the library.”

“Well, best not keep him waiting.”

Ares is a stickler for punctuality at these family meetings of his.

The mask has been back on since I stepped off the elevator. And it’ll stay there when I greet the rest of them. I’ve moved mountains to ensure that my family never sees the darker side of me. They know first-hand how cruel our father was. And they all experienced the sadism of our oldest brother, Atlas, before his death a few years ago.

But none of them knows what happened to me. What was done to me. None of them knows what I really am.

“Well, well, look who showed up.”

“I had to do a quick thing for Ya-ya,” I rumble as I step into the library, rolling my eyes at Ares. “Relax.”

Ares, our oldest surviving brother and the official head of the Drakos family, frowns a little, but then he lets it go as he clears his throat. Ares plays the role of protector. The strong shield. The one wearing the heavy crown and making the tough calls. Ironically, he does all this as if he had been born to be king, even though technically he wasn’t.

But that’s who he is now. And recently becoming a parent with his wife Neve to my nephew, Elias, has only strengthened that.

My gaze pulls around the beautiful old library full of leather-bound books where Ares likes to hold court if we’re meeting here at Ya-ya’s house. Sprawled on the couch next to Ares’ chair is my second-oldest brother, Hades: chaotic, untamed, and impulsive, a physical manifestation of “id”.

Or at least, he was.

He’s still the same maniac brother with whom I share a love of engines and fighting. But now that he’s married to Elsa, a stepfather of sorts to her younger sister Nora, and expecting a child of his own, his sharper edges have been smoothed a bit.

Deimos, my younger brother, stands by the window. Of any of them, I suppose he’s the one I should connect the best with, as he’s arguably the most like me. Except, while I hide all my dark emotions, urges, and nature deep inside, Deimos wears them on his sleeve. We all expect him to be “the scary psycho” of the family, because it’s a role he’s played ever since we were kids.

I’m fine with him having that role. It took the eyes off me after the horror-show that was my childhood and early teen years. But even Deimos has calmed down a bit in the last year, since marrying Dahlia.

He and I nod to each other before I stride over and slump onto the second couch next to my little sister, Callie. She lived here at Ya-ya’s house with me the longest, until she married Castle, the head of the Kildare Irish Mafia family.

Yes, we were all named for Greek gods, muses, and titans. In addition to being a monstrously cruel piece of shit, our father had a bit of a thing for Greek mythology.

And yes, I’m aware that there’s another common theme here: all my siblings, even wild-man Hades and crazy Deimos, have moved on. They’re creating lives and new directions for themselves with people they love.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what I am or what the fuck I’m supposed to be.

Callie turns to smirk at me, her eyes dropping to the remains of the souvlaki in my hands.

“Had to do a quick thing for Ya-ya, huh?” She smirks. “Like what, help her empty the fridge?”

I chuckle, offering her the plate. “Wanna bite?”

Callie shakes her head. “What, and take food out of the mouth of the favorite grandchild? Not a chance.”

I roll my eyes. “I’m not the favorite.”

“Dude, I didn’t get a pita pocket and fucking French fries when I walked in.”

“I got French fries,” Deimos shrugs, grinning. “But I had to steal them from the kitchen when Ya-ya wasn’t looking. You know, because I’m not the favorite either.”

My eyes roll as I glance back to Callie and wave the plate in front of her.

“You suuuure?”

She sighs heavily and snatches a huge handful of fries, stuffing like four at once in her mouth.

“Ass.”

I grin as I watch her scarf them down. “Do I need to have a talk with Castle? Is he not feeding you enough?”

“Oh, don’t you worry. He’s feeding me plenty. You know, eating for two and all that.”

My brows shoot up. “Holy shit,” I blurt. “Cals, are you⁠—”

“Kidding,” she giggles. “I mean, I’m not yet.” She smirks at me. “But we’re putting in lots of practice.”

I make a puke face and wrinkle my nose. “Annnd there’s that daily dose of way T. M. fucking I. that’s been lacking since you moved out.”

“Aww,” she grins. “You miss it. Admit it.”

Ares loudly clears his throat. “So, yeah, if you’re done with lunch, Kratos,” he grumbles at me. “Could we get this show on the road?”

I grin, offering him my plate of fries, which he takes, because of course he does. No one in their right mind says no to Ya-ya’s food.

“How’s my nephew?”

“Loud,” my oldest brother sighs, looking about as exhausted as I’d imagine the father of a two-month-old would.

Hades chuckles. “Ares is just fucking pissed that Elias is stealing Neve’s tits away from him.”

“No, Ares is fucking tired,” our brother grunts. “Because he hasn’t slept more than three fucking hours at a stretch in two months. And he’d like to get this goddamn meeting started so that he can maybe sneak in a ten-minute nap before he goes home to diapers and cleaning pump parts. Also, if you could maybe never talk about my wife’s breasts again, that’d be swell.”

Hades chuckles. Callie wags a finger at him.

“Hey, laugh it up while you can, bro. That’s gonna be you in three months.”

Hades makes a face as Ares clears his throat again.

“Anyway. This can be brief, but…” He rolls his shoulders, turning to glance at each of us. “We need to talk about the Italian elephant in the room.”

Deimos’ brow furrows. “Nero?”

“Nero,” Ares grunts, nodding. “We all knew there’d be some upheaval and drama when the Carveli family went down in flames…”

Beside me, Callie shivers a little, hugging herself. I drop a heavy, comforting hand on her shoulder, which she seems to appreciate, turning and smiling at me a little.

I doubt many people ever had a good experience with the Carvelis. But Callie especially doesn’t look back on them with any fondness. There was a while there when an old blood marker our father made with the Carveli family betrothed our sister to the sleazy, cruel, sixty-year-old father of the late and unlamented Don Massimo Carveli.

“However,” Ares continues. “We didn’t expect the De Luca family to be the one filling that fifth slot on the Italian Commission. The problem here is⁠—”

“That Nero is a fucking violent, unpredictable lunatic,” Deimos grunts from where he’s still leaning against the bookshelves near one of the windows.

Hades scowls. “Great. So another fucking Massimo.”

Ares wags his head side to side. “Not quite, but he’s definitely a wild card. They’ve been calling him the young lion, both because of his ferocity and the fact that he’s got something to prove. To make things even more interesting, apparently Nero has bad blood with Davit.”

I wince.

Shit.

“Guess it’d make things too easy if all the criminal scumbags in this city would kiss and make up and stop trying to stab each other in the back, huh?” Callie mutters.

“I’m not sure anyone has ever accused the Albanians of setting aside grudges,” I grunt before turning to Ares. “Just how ‘bad’ is this bad blood?”

Ares looks grim. “Davit and I had a talk this morning, and he promised to turn Little Italy into Kosovo if Nero so much as mispronounces his name.”

“Super,” Callie groans.

Ares is right: this is a problem.

Davit Kirakosian is the head of Te Mallkuarit, aka “The Cursed Ones”—an Albanian crime family deeply rooted in mysticism and old-school religion, with a knack for smuggling and a penchant for cutting the heads off their enemies.

I mean that extremely literally.

They’ve also recently planted roots in New York. Normally, since they haven’t made a single move on any of our territory or interests, we’d be leaving people like Davit and his merry band of head-chopping psychos alone. But that was before they made a hard play for the same development site on the west side of Manhattan that we were.

Word that Vito Barone was going to be offloading the building overlooking the Hudson River that he got for a song years ago garnered a ton of interest from every developer and investor in the city. Vito’s not a huge fan of our family: somewhat because of old Greek-Italian rivalries from way back, but in huge part because of a Deimos.

Before Dahlia, my brother was a member of Club Venom. I don’t know, and I’m sure I don’t want to know the details. But apparently there was an incident of some kind at the club between him and Vito’s niece, which resulted in Dante revoking my brother’s membership.

Needless to say, Vito hasn’t exactly looked kindly in our direction since. But money talks, and we were able to make ours sing and fucking dance when it came to being the top bid for his property.

The Armenians did come in swinging there for a while, with money I genuinely didn’t know they had. But pending some last-minute details of the sale, we’ll be taking that property off Vito’s hands, not Davit.

“That reminds me.” Ares turns to nod in my direction. “Davit wants to give…well, lend…us a token of goodwill. Things got a little tense there during the bidding war for Vito’s property. But I think this is his way of settling it between our families. Plus, I’m pretty sure he’d actually like to do some business together sometime. Anyway, I need you to go pick it up.”

I frown. “Okayyy…but why me? And what exactly is this token of goodwill?”

“A 12th century statue of the Crucifixion, and I’m asking you because it’s huge and weighs a fucking ton.”

Great. “How heavy are we talking?”

“Davit mentioned bringing a truck.”

My brows shoot up. “What’s this fucking thing made of, gold?”

Ares smiles, slowly shaking his head.

“Human bones.”

“Yeah, no. Fuck that,” I shake my head. “I’m out.”

“Kratos, I need you to do this. It’s gotta be someone from the family, or it’ll be perceived as an insult. I’d go myself, but I’ll be real with you, brother. I’m fucking tired. Like, seriously. I’m asking you to do this as a favor for the family.”

I sigh heavily.

“Jesus, I’ll go with you, ya big pussy,” Hades snickers, grinning at me. “Okay?”

“Fine.”

Callie frowns. “The Albanians were aggressive with wanting that property. The peace offering, however creepy, is a nice gesture. But if they go to war with Nero, and Nero is allied with the Barone family, and we’re doing business with the Barone family…”

Ares nods slowly. “I’ve already spoken to Davit about this, as well as Michael Genovisi of the Scaliami family, and Cesare Marchetti. No one wants an all-out war. Even Davit is aware how bad that would be for business, and for all his obsession with honor and shit, business comes first.” My oldest brother sighs heavily. “But it’s a big, flimsy powder keg right now. All it’s going to take is one spark, and we’re going to have huge problems.”

“Well, obviously, the Kildare family stands with this family,” Callie says fiercely.

“And I know Castle knows how much we appreciate that,” Ares says in a measured tone. “But it’s like a bad game of dominos: if we get involved with a war, and then drag the Kildare family into it, that’ll drag the Reznikov Bratva into it through their alliances. And now we’re talking about World War Three in the streets of Manhattan.”

“So what’s the plan?” I growl.

Ares spreads his hands. “I’m working on one. But in the interim, we need to make sure no one in this family gets into any sort of bullshit or entanglements with the Italians. At all.”

My jaw ticks.

Yeah, no. Too late.

It’s not just about what happened the other night with Bianca. It’s that it was no accident that it was her I matched with on the Club Venom website.

I orchestrated the entire thing.

It all started when I found the two pieces of shit traffickers I’d been hunting trying to attack her in that alley. On the plus side, I stopped those two fucks from brutalizing her that night. But on the bad side?

Well, let’s just say she caught my attention.

All of it.

After that night, I did what I always do when something pulls my attention like that. I dug up. I sliced open. I unearthed every secret and hidden place, trying to dissect Bianca Sartorre.

What she was doing in the middle of a drug deal that night is no real mystery. I know now that the two other girls who fled that alley and left her to the wolves are Alicia Houghton and Irina Lenkova, both also dancers in the Zakharova Ballet. It took about four seconds of digging to put together that they’re not really friends with Bianca, because she doesn’t have many friends. It took another two whole seconds to figure out that Alicia’s dating Grisha Lenkov, a mid-level Chernoff Bratva wannabe thug who also happens to be Irina’s cousin.

That explains the drugs. It also explains why Bianca was there, probably seeking approval from two girls who’ve historically snubbed her, plus why they ditched her as soon as things went bad.

But it doesn’t explain the way that mix of innocence and darkness in her eyes—of fear and excitement—captivated my attention.

More importantly, captivated my beast’s attention.

After that, it was just a matter of time. Especially after I hacked her phone that very first night in the alley.

Since then, I’ve been in her pocket, next to her bed, and sitting on the bathroom vanity while she showers. I’ve read her emails and texts. I’ve enjoyed watching the dirty videos she’s viewed in incognito mode.

….And I’ve watched her log into the Club Venom web portal as “BrokenBee”.

I know for a fact Bianca’s not really a member of Venom. Dante and I aren’t close, but I know him well enough to know there’s a snowball’s chance in hell he’d ever allow his little sister to become a member of his playground for dangerous deviants.

I’m not a member either. But Xavier, a hacker I frequently work with when hunting down monsters, got me into the Club Venom system. Once inside, armed with a new profile, I could force the match between her profile and mine, as well as make sure no other profiles could even see hers.

And the rest, as they say, is history. The sort of history I’m still thinking about, constantly.

The fear and the excitement in her eyes as I chased her like a maniac. The intoxicating scent of inexperience and innocence when I caught her.

The deliciousness of her cries and the heat of her tight little virgin pussy. The willpower it took not to fuck her in every sweet, wet hole she had until she was my perfectly broken little toy.

After Ares wraps up the meeting, when I’m heading down the elevator again, I pull out my phone and bring up the tracking app Xavier helped me install on hers. The willpower I exerted the other night when it comes to Bianca does have its limits, after all.

My lips curl slightly as I watch her phone’s location ping like a little blinker, down one Manhattan street and up another, before it moves into a larger building: the Mercury Opera House, home of the Zakharova Ballet.

She’s at rehearsal, blissfully unaware that I’m watching her every move.

Hunting her every step.

Still tasting her sweetness on my tongue.

I scowl as my phone buzzes, a text popping up and ripping my attention away from Bianca’s location.

My teeth grind.

Fuck.

Ares may want to minimize our “entanglements” with the Italians to make sure things don’t get more fucked up than they already are. The problem is that it’s not just my hidden darkness and secret nocturnal activities my family doesn’t know about.

They also don’t know that shit is already more fucked up.

Extremely so. Catastrophically.

And something tells me, as I glance at the text from my lawyer, that it’s about to get way worse.