I led Lucy up to my apartment without saying a word. She didn’t even look at me, just let me take her hand. I held on tight and waited until we were inside before I remembered the cut on her arm, which was staining her outfit and dripping blood to the floor.

“We have to get that taken care of,” I muttered.

Again, she didn’t respond. I led her into the kitchen and smacked her ass, and she jumped up on the counter. I dug around in the medicine cabinet for some gauze and disinfectant, and she parted her legs so I could stand between them. Lucy’s eyes were wide, but she didn’t make a peep as I disinfected her cut, even though I knew it must’ve stung. I cleaned out the wound and wrapped it in gauze, making sure to keep it covered well.

“I’ll have to check it daily to make sure it’s healing well,” I told her.

Finally, Lucy looked at me. Those big beautiful eyes followed me around as I took care of the supplies and put them away. She wanted answers, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to explain just yet. The tension in the room was palpable, and I found myself desperate to tell her the truth. I wanted her to know. I wanted her to find out the whole story. But where the fuck was I supposed to begin?

“Start at the beginning,” Lucy whispered, and my eyes snapped to her. She was looking at me, her palms between her legs on the marble counter, her eyes dancing over my scarred features. For the past few days, my girl had managed to make me forget about them. But now I was more painfully aware of the scars than ever.

“Just tell me,” she said. “I just want to know. I won’t judge, whatever happened.”

Judge. What a fucking funny way to put things.

“Her name was Alessia,” I said gently, and saw Lucy’s whole body tighten when she realized I really would tell her the story. “I fell in love with her when I saw her in handcuffs.”

* * *

I was a newbie. I was a criminal defense attorney, just fresh out of law school. I’d gotten good grades and I had a job lined up the second I got out. But I wasn’t a genius, and I wasn’t top of my class. The job I got offered was mediocre in terms of payment, and in terms of the cases I was supposed to work. But I was happy with it. I was perfectly ready to climb my way up the ladder.

I made a promise to myself the day I decided to become a criminal defense attorney.

I promised myself I would only defend people I honestly believed were innocent.

So, I got assigned this case. A woman, in her twenties, barely as old as I was. We were both so fucking young. Too young to understand everything that was going to happen between us.

Her name was Alessia Rossi. She was fucking beautiful. The first time I saw her, I knew I was in trouble.

They led her towards me in handcuffs. I’d been worrying the whole day about being assigned her case, because I knew I couldn’t defend her if I didn’t truly believe she was innocent. I’d made up an image of this woman in my head. I pictured her small, curvy. Fashionable haircut and red lips, a cigarette dangling from them. She was accused of killing her lover. I was told she was a prostitute. I imagined her as a lewd stereotype, and I didn’t even realize the woman being led towards me was her until her eyes snapped up.

Dark brown eyes, just like mine used to be. Hair that fell down her shoulders in thick black curls. She didn’t wear any makeup, of course. She was small indeed, and curvy too. A beautiful figure that made me tighten my grip on the suitcase between my legs. She looked so fucking young. She looked like a child in that room, and I wondered how anyone could possibly think she was guilty of taking down a 200-pound man and stabbing him repeatedly. I didn’t buy it for a single second.

I knew she was innocent before she sat down in the chair in front of me and started to cry. She raised her handcuffed hands to her pretty face and tried to wipe away the tears.

“Miss Rossi,” I said uncomfortably. “I am your attorney. You have to be perfectly honest with me and always tell me the truth, and I will do whatever is in my power to ensure your safety.”

“I didn’t do it,” she whispered. Her voice was heavily accented in Italian. She looked very small and vulnerable sitting there, and I felt my cock twitch guiltily as I stared at her. “Do you believe me?”

She stared at me with those beautiful eyes, and reached across the table. I stared at her outstretched hands. Her skin was tanned, the lines of her palms prominent. Her hands looked like she knew what it was like to use them for work. I looked right into her eyes and answered her honestly.

“Yes.”

Her eyes brightened and she smiled at me. A smile that lit up my fucking world.

And then she started to explain what had happened.

As she spoke, I stopped calling her miss, and started calling her Alessia. She still addressed me as Mr. Wolfe, but I could see there was something going on there. Something neither of us could really influence, an attraction growing out of nothing, or maybe out of the desperate situation at hand. I wanted to help her. I wanted to make sure she got the fuck out, because the more I found out, the stronger my belief in her innocence became.

Alessia came to the city only a couple of months earlier. She’d been lured there with promises of working as a dancer and entertainer. On her first night in a shitty, cramped apartment, she came to realize what those promises really meant as a man who she’d met online raped her virginity away from her.

She was never paid, not once.

She was forced to sleep with men for money that never crossed her hands. Forced to be whored out by the man she’d trusted implicitly, a family friend she wanted to please. Her family back in her own country was huge, and depended on the cash the man claimed he sent them every month. She didn’t dare explain to her parents what was really going on. And she was caught in this endless fucking circle of being hurt and feeling like she owed it to her family to see it through.

The man she worked for was a fucking monster. She told me all about him.

But nothing could have prepared me for the moment he strolled into our first meeting, grinning wide and saying he’d come to visit Alessia.

She started crying at the sight of him, and I got up from my chair, instinctively knowing who he was even though he hadn’t introduced himself.

“You need to leave, now,” I barked at him. “I’m Miss Rossi’s attorney and I don’t think you should be here.”

The man approached me. He was taller than me, with grayish-white hair and a beard. He grinned at me like I was nothing but a speck of dust he could clean off with a flick of his fingers.

“We will speak soon,” he told me simply. “But first, I’d like to speak to my girl. My Alessia.”

He turned back to face her, and she melted into her seat. The guards made way for him, lenient like they’d never been with him. I watched this stranger, this sick fuck, whisper to the girl I’d already started to see as mine, and my body raged. I wanted to kill him. But instead I had to stand back like a fucking jackass and wait until he was done with whatever the hell he was whispering in her ear.

When he retreated, a brilliant smile was on his face, and Alessia was looking at him adoringly.

“I’ll speak to you now,” he told me with a wide grin. “Step outside with me, Mr….”

“Wolfe,” I barked.

The man stepped up to me, grinning so fucking wide. He reached for my lapels and pulled them up, laughing in my face.

“Don’t look like much of a wolf to me,” he smiled. I wanted to fucking kill him.

Instead, I followed him out of that interrogation room, my eyes on Alessia. She was sobbing softly, her eyes never leaving the man.

We stopped in the hallway, and now his friendly smile was nowhere to be seen.

“That girl is guilty,” he told me, and I gave him a blank stare.

At that point, Alessia hadn’t explained what had happened yet. But I knew this guy was full of shit.

“She’s not,” I said simply. “Alessia could never take down a man twice her weight, and she wouldn’t kill someone.”

“Oh, so you know her now?” The man laughed out loud. “Trust me, boy. Stay out of it. She’s guilty, and you will let her be sentenced as such if you know what’s good for you. Got it?”

“What?” I stared at him, completely shocked by the way he was acting. “I can’t let an innocent woman go to jail.”

“You can do as you’re told though, can’t you?” the man laughed, slapping my cheek like I was his kid brother. “There’s a prize in it for you, boy. Just do. As. You’re. Fucking. Told.”

“I can’t let it happen,” I said shakily. “She didn’t do anything. One look is enough to know she isn’t guilty!”

“That’s not for you to decide,” the man said. “She’s going to jail. Do you understand?”

He took a step closer to me, and suddenly I felt intimidated. He wasn’t just much bigger and stronger. The thing that scared me the most was the way he looked at me. So fucking coolly, like I was nothing but an obstacle he could get rid of any moment he wanted to. Like he didn’t give a shit what he had to ruin, what lives he had to end, to get what he fucking wanted.

“I asked you if you understood,” he said, and I stared into his cold eyes. “I could make your life a world of trouble if you don’t agree to do as you’re told.”

“I’m going to do what’s right,” I replied simply, and he laughed in my face.

“You sure you want to start a war, boy?” he asked roughly.

I didn’t reply, just kept staring at him.

“Alright,” he replied with a brilliant smile. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

With those ominous words, he walked away from me and I went back inside the interrogation room where Alessia was waiting for me. I tried to calm her down, but the second the man was gone, her story started to change. On some level, that jackass had made her believe she was at fault for what had happened to the dead man.

I finally found out what really happened that night. That Alessia had been forced to sleep with a man when he drank down a glass of champagne she’d poured for him. He fell to the ground and had a horrible attack that ended with blood spilling from his lips and mixing with his saliva. And then, just like that, he was gone.

Alessia told me in a shaky, soft voice that she didn’t do it. As if she was worried the man from earlier was listening from behind the door.

And I believed her.

I promised her I’d do anything to get her out of jail.

For the next few weeks, we worked closely together in preparation for her trial, and with each day that passed, I fell more and more in love with her. It wasn’t just her beauty and her innocence. It was the way she acted, the situation she was in. She so desperately needed somebody to protect her, and I wanted badly to be that person for her. I knew I could save her if she fucking let me. I just had to make her tell the truth on the stand.

We’d also been pressuring the DA to check for fingerprints again on the champagne bottle Alessia had used, because I knew from the records they found some besides my girl’s, and for some reason, they never ran them through the database, which seemed ludicrous to me.

One night, I was leaving the penitentiary. It was late. I’d walked up to the parking lot which was empty save for a few cars, including mine.

I was about to start it when somebody tapped my shoulder. The second I turned around, someone knocked me the fuck out and I found myself on the ground.

I woke up tied to a chair in a derelict building. There were several men there and none of them said a single word. I screamed. I shouted. I think I even fucking begged, because I was just a kid, and I was fucking terrified.

They didn’t listen. They didn’t show me a shred of mercy. Burly, strong-built men stared me down. We all knew I was going to get hurt. I was the only one who still believed I could get out of it.

One of the men approached me. I’ll always remember his face.

Dark features, dark hair. He was handsome, but he looked so fucking twisted. Like a monster out in the open.

He held a knife in his hand. He didn’t say a word as he raised it above my face and carved me.

I don’t know how long the whole thing took. I remember not passing out once, though. I screamed through the pain, not that it helped. I drank my own blood as it ran down my face, and none of it helped. I was fucking done for, and we all knew it. Three men watched as the dark monster cut into my face. And once they were done, they untied me and left me lying on the ground.

I will always remember the last thing I saw with my right eye.

It was that bastard’s fucking face. One day, I’m going to kill him for what he did to me.

Don’t really remember how I got to the hospital. I was there for so long the days all blurred together. They wouldn’t let me leave to see Alessia, but I kept working on the case from my hospital bed. They told me I’d never see with my right eye again. As if my own body wanted to remind me of it, my eye turned unseeing and blue. I hated it.

I remember the last time I saw Alessia. It wasn’t even in private, it was on the stand.

I defended her the best I could.

But the moment she took the stand, Alessia said she was guilty.

She confessed to a murder we all know she didn’t commit.

I don’t know what happened to her while I was in the hospital, but I will never forgive myself for it.

She stared at me as she made her confession, and my one seeing eye stared back. I will blame myself for the vacant expression on her face forever. Blame myself for the guilt she accepted. The way she cried when she got the death penalty. I will never fucking forgive myself.

She was in death row for twenty-three days.

I visited her every single day.

She didn’t speak to me again.

On October 10th, Alessia was killed with a lethal injection. And just like that, she was gone. My life was over. There was nothing to live for anymore.

On October 11th, there was a knock on my door.

I lived in a shitty rented apartment, the only thing I could afford at the time.

The man standing in front of me was the one who threatened me outside the interrogation room. The man I knew had given instructions to carve my fucking face like a Halloween pumpkin.

I tried to shut the door in his face, but he put his foot against the frame. He wouldn’t let me close it.

He came inside, and he made me an offer.

He told me about a new business he was starting. A rival to the gangs who offered horrible prostitution services. A rival to him-fucking-self.

He tried to convince me Alessia had taught him a lesson. But she was a fucking dead girl, gone forever. And he was trying to tell me he’d change his business. That it would all be better after that, and Alessia was the victim in all this.

I was told the man who died was the man’s business partner, the one who agreed to all the horrible tactics used on their girls. He told me it would never happen again.

And that’s how Empire Sin was born.

I was offered the job of their attorney, with all the perks that came with it.

I would defend every criminal, scum, lowlife, who was connected to the man’s business. I wouldn’t have to decide whether my clients were guilty or not. I would know from the start they did it.

I accepted the job.

As the man left my apartment, he shook my hand and grinned at my fucked-up face, which he’d given to me through barked orders and dirty money passing through blistered hands.

“You’re going to be an asset to this company, boy,” the man said with that brilliant grin I’d come to hate. “Your scars, they give you character. You should really be fucking thanking me, you know.”

I made a move to hit him, but he dodged it and laughed in my face.

That was how I made a deal with the devil.

That was how I came to work for Rhys.

That’s how I became a part of Empire Sin.