Katie chose her outfit carefully. She needed something sexy in case she wanted to distract Roman, but she also didn’t want to find herself on her back any time soon, so she needed to balance the skin to cloth ratio. She settled on a bikini (it was unlikely she was close enough to land to swim, but hey, a girl could hope), layered with a sky blue wraparound skirt and a white sleeveless top.
Katie always chose her clothes carefully. She had ‘heist’ clothes and ‘playing with the ex-douche-bag’ clothes. She had ‘visiting the fam’ clothes and ‘entertaining clients’ clothes. Katie had become such a clothing chameleon that she wasn’t actually certain what her natural style was. When she hung out by herself in her apartment she tended to wear leggings and T-shirts with funny cat memes. She’d always wanted to get a cat, but her jet-setting lifestyle wouldn’t allow for it.
Katie decided to use the gorgeously furnished ensuite while she had free run of the master suite. She washed her face and brushed her teeth with a brand-new toothbrush that she suspected was there for her. She ran her fingers over the glass surrounding a huge shower and looked around in appreciation. There were even fresh lilies in a small crystal vase on top of the vanity.
She emerged out onto the main deck, bare feet brushing against the warmth cast by the morning sun. From the look in his eyes as she approached, it probably wouldn’t have mattered what she wore. She was always going to capture and hold Roman’s attention. She had from the first moment she’d spoken to the dead-eyed gangbanger seventeen years earlier. She blushed and looked away from the heated stare he was giving her and awkwardly tucked a lock of blond hair behind her ear.
He stood and took her arm, maneuvering her into the cushioned seat next to him. It was a long, padded bench overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Katie was dismayed to realize that she saw no land in any direction. She was well and truly trapped.
“Where are we?” she asked, shading her eyes and looking all around.
Roman watched the flickering emotions for a moment before saying, “You’re here with me.”
She shook her head and frowned at him pleadingly. “I can’t stay with you, Roman. I have a job. Please, you can’t keep me here, I have to be at work in a few days!”
He didn’t respond for a moment, just continued to watch her face as though she weren't begging him to let her go. When he did speak, it was on another topic entirely. “Why were you naked, Katie?”
“Wh-what?” she asked, confused at the switch in topics. Then her brain caught up and she realized what he meant. She dropped her eyes, shame suffusing her features in colour.
“You there to fuck him?” Roman snapped, his fingers biting into the edge of the cushion next to his thigh so he wouldn’t reach out and grab her. She shivered, eyes locked on his long, blunt fingers, tracing over the old gang tattoos, knowing what those hands could do to her.
She’d never been on the receiving end of Roman’s violence before, but she’d witnessed enough and heard things. She’d been fourteen when Dexter died at the hands of the Red Brotherhood. The entire family had been a wreck. Much later, she had finally been cognizant enough to catch the rumours of a brutal gang war that lasted less than a week. Of an entire gang faction taken out by a single man in bloody retribution for death of his best friend. She knew it was Roman, because he had come to her in the night, months after the killings, and promised her that she and her family were safe. He had held her tight against his body while she cried for her brother, then he’d walked away and let her grow up.
“Asked you a fucking question, Katie,” he snarled, turning dark, aggressive eyes toward her. “Answer.”
She shivered and cringed back against her seat. What could she tell him? He would know a lie if it fell from her lips. So, she nodded and flinched back when he swung his fist as though he would hit her. Instead, he brought it crashing into the seat behind her while she cowered away from him. She tried to remind herself that Roman had never hurt her before. That he had done everything to protect her.
He leaned forward, his entire body seething with rage, and said one word. “Explain.”
Katie understood that he was giving her an opportunity. She also knew that Roman was unpredictable at the best of times. A dark beast lurked within her lone wolf. The man that dedicated his life to working with a lethal mobster, hunting and killing. Stalking the shadows. Stalking Katie. He was good at the things he did. She needed to be very careful what she said to him. He brought her here, out into the ocean, for a reason. He wanted her isolated and alone so he could keep her to himself. So, she would have nowhere to run.
She leaned back against the cushions, putting precious inches between herself and the man whose entire focus was on her. She swept her long lashes down, over her eyes, concealing the expression. Licking her lips, she spoke softly, “You know about the money?”
He grunted in affirmative, but didn't speak.
She looked at him through her lashes. His broad shoulders blocked out the rising sun behind him. Was it morning already? He’d given her enough drugs to knock her out overnight. She looked him over in the light of the early morning sun, trying to calm herself enough to figure out what to tell him. He wore a black button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up his tanned forearms and a pair of light blue jeans that moulded to his muscular thighs. Though they were good quality, there was a hole in the knee from wear. He had old, faded tattoos from his gang days littering his arms and neck where she could see his skin. His dark brown hair was short, but not too short, as though he buzzed it with an electronic razor and it was overdue for a cut. His square jaw and sharp cheeks were covered in at least a week’s growth of beard. Somehow, she didn’t think it was on purpose. It was just Roman. He would find grooming to be an annoyance that he indulged in only when he had to.
“He started blackmailing me after the divorce,” she whispered, dropping her eyes to where his hand was clenched in the cushion next to her thigh.
“I guessed as much,” Roman gritted out. “Not what I asked.”
Katie took a breath and tried not to roll her eyes. He wasn’t going to make this easy on her. “Okay,” she said as calmly as she could, “well, he decided he also wanted sex with the monthly payments.”
“Fuck, Katie,” he snapped. “I already guessed that shit. Start telling me something I don't know. Like why you agreed to spread your legs? Thought you hated the guy. Or is that what turns you on? You into twisted shit like that?”
The breath caught in her throat and Katie clenched her fists so she wouldn’t slap him. She had to remind herself that she wasn’t violent. And that to react violently with someone like Roman would absolutely set the big guy off. That likely he was trying to bait her so he would have an excuse to put his hands on her. To treat her the way he wanted to treat her in that moment. He was at war with himself. He’d spent years putting her on a pedestal only to discover she wasn’t worthy. Well, he could join the club. She was a disappointment to everyone else, including herself.
“He found something out about me,” she said in a rush, knowing she didn't have a choice. “If I didn't give him what he wanted he would go to the FBI and get me arrested. I… I couldn't risk it. So I gave him what he wanted.”
Surprise flickered across Roman’s features before he masked them with his usual indifferent expression. “Why didn't you come to me?” he demanded.
It was a valid question. When Colin had first approached her with his ludicrous demands, Roman’s face was the first to enter her thoughts. Even then, she knew her dark protector would swoop in and save her from her own mess, she also knew she didn’t deserve saving. She deserved every second of the year’s penance she’d been made to suffer at Colin’s hands. It hadn’t been so bad. The money was nothing, a drop in the bucket. The sex had been disgusting only in that she’d had to endure his hands on her body, his breath in her face and his tiny dick working away at her for as long as he could keep it up while she fantasized about something else. Anything else. Thankfully, though a disgusting little worm of a man, her ex-husband had not been sadistic. He didn’t have the imagination.
“I couldn’t tell you, I knew you would kill him,” she whispered.
Now, looking up into the eyes of a man that truly wanted her, every part of her, a man that truly understood the meaning of the word hell, she knew she was in the power of someone that had the imagination to make her suffer if he wanted to. A shiver of both fear and anticipation slithered down her spine. She deserved whatever Roman decided to dish out to her. She wanted whatever he decided to hand out to her. She would have no choice but to take it until she found a way off this boat and back into her bleak existence.
He moved over her until she was forced to lean back against the cushions. His powerful arms flexed around her slender body, showing her how breakable she was. When he spoke, his voice was soft, like deep velvet, though his words were terrifying. “Should’ve told me, Katerina. Would have taken care of the problem a year ago. Could’ve been fucking me in payment, instead of him.”
She gasped and tried to roll away from him off the side of the bench. He caged her against the seat and dropped the weight of his lower body against her, pinning her in place. She shoved against his chest, but his arms tightened in response until she was only bruising herself against his muscular body. Finally, she subsided, relaxing in his hold, breathing heavily. She balled her hands into fists in her lap and refused to look at him.
“Is he dead?” she whispered, not looking at him.
Roman hauled her up against his body, refusing to allow her the room that she craved. He took her jaw in his big hand, caressing her chin with his long fingers and held her face up to his. He pierced her with his dark, almost black eyes and forced her to read the truth within. He tilted her face just a little and touched the edge of her mouth with his hard lips before tracing a line up her cheek toward her ear. She shivered as his tongue darted into the delicate shell of her ear before tracing the lobe.
He pulled back slightly and spoke in a hard voice, “Yes.”
Katie’s stomach plunged and she went limp in Roman’s arms as she remembered the pool of blood in Colin’s apartment. The blood that had belonged to her ex-husband. The blood that had been spilled by the hands that were now holding her. She blinked as tears pricked the corners of her eyes and blackness started to edge in on her vision. Her chest rose and fell in rapid succession as she gasped for breath.
“Don’t you fucking dare grieve for him,” Roman snarled, shaking her hard.
Katie’s head snapped like a rag doll's causing the yacht and the ocean to spin around her. Roman lifted her as though she weighed nothing, turned her so she was facing him and forced her to straddle his lap. He snaked an arm up her back and held her by the back of the neck, forcing her head up to his. He used his other arm to wrap around her waist and anchor her against his incredibly hard body. She whimpered and squirmed against him.
“You will not mourn for the man that blackmailed you. Turned you into a ghost. I did the world a fucking favour, Katie. Do you hear me?” he snarled in her face.
She knew what he was doing. In his own way, he was begging her to tell him he hadn’t fucked up and killed someone she loved. Roman couldn’t handle all the twisted emotions that came with love. Because he hadn’t ever been loved. Katie’s family had always been close.
When Dexter was still alive he'd told them about his best friend. Roman had spent the first twelve years of his life in Juarez, Mexico. The son of a sex slave and a big-time drug cartel guy. Though his upbringing was anything but loving, it had been filled with wealth and privilege, with the expectation that he’d take over the family business. A competing faction had taken out Roman’s entire family. Roman had escaped with a few low-level drug dealers to the States and joined the gang where he’d met Dexter.
She nodded her head against his, fighting the tears. “I hear you,” she whispered. She felt some of the tension leave him.
She wasn’t going to cry for Colin. He was a weasel. A disgusting bastard that deserved whatever he got. She cried for Roman. For the beautiful, fucked up, lost soul of a man that deserved so much better than her. He’d taken her penance. He’d blackened his soul just a little bit more for a woman that didn’t deserve his adoration.
She felt his body tense up once more, felt his chest expand as he prepared to ask her the question she knew she wouldn’t be able to answer. He took her by the neck and pulled her head away from his so he could see her blue eyes when he spoke.
“What did he have on you that kept you going back every month? Why would the fucking FBI get involved, Katie?”
Her knees tightened involuntarily on either side of his legs. Heat flared in his eyes. She held onto that look. Knowing it was about to turn ice cold. She clenched her fingers against his arms, preparing for his reaction.
“I can't tell you,” she whispered.
As she predicted, any warmth in his eyes turned immediately to ice. His hands dug into her soft skin until she knew there would bruises. She didn’t think he even realized what he was doing. He yanked her forward on his lap, slamming her chest against his. She brought her hands up to put some distance between them, but he pulled her arms around her back and held them in one hand. He gripped her jaw with the other.
“Won’t,” he growled.
Her breasts lifted and fell quickly with her gasping breaths. She was completely trapped against him, her legs spread across his on the bench. Though she was terrified, she knew her pussy was wetting the bikini bottom she’d pulled on earlier. She desperately hoped he couldn’t feel the wetness soaking through the denim of his jeans.
She licked her lips and forced herself to focus on the man who was threatening her well-being in a very elemental way. She needed to put sexy thoughts away for the moment. “Either way, I’m not telling you, Roman.”
She cried out in actual terror at the look that crossed his face. It was a look she’d never seen before on Roman’s face. It looked like instant death. She imagined it was similar to what Colin, and many others, had experienced right before lights out. Katie began struggling in earnest, trying to pull her arms away from Roman's grip and twisting frantically on his lap. She knew right away that she’d done the wrong thing. That she was inflaming the big man past the point of reason.
He stood abruptly, his hand circling her neck. He shook her and then pulled her into the heat of his body. She felt his cock hard against her stomach. His voice was harsh as he spoke, his accent much thicker than usual. “Refuse to give me anything, Katie, then I am forced to make assumptions. I will treat you like the puta you act. Since I took care of your problem, you can make payments to me instead. Go downstairs and spread those legs, I’ll show you what a real cock looks like.”