Novels by Lawrencia Amoako

The light hit me like a fist.I flinched back, blinking, my whole body still raw, wrecked and humming. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw his face and everything stopped.Not slowed but stopped.Damien Blackwood looked down at me with dark eyes and a smile that had nothing warm in it, and I understood, in the space between one breath and the next, that the world I had woken up in that morning no longer existed."Hello, Hawthorne," he said. "Small fucking world."I heard the words and I understood them. My brain was doing several things at once: processing his face, which I knew from four years of board briefings, my father's dinner table and the front page of every financial publication that had run the story of yesterday's port deal collapse. Processing the fact that I was naked with marks on my body that I could feel without looking, the soreness that went deeper than skin, the specific evidence of the last three hours written into every muscle I owned.I scrambled back. The sheets ta

The stranger didn’t let Elias catch his breath.Elias lay there on the silk sheets, chest heaving, come cooling on his stomach, the blindfold was still tight against his eyes. His body felt wrecked already, legs shaky, ass throbbing from that first brutal round. But the stranger’s hands were back on him, rough and sure, flipping him onto his back like he weighed nothing.“Too much?” the low voice asked against his ear. Teasing and testing.Elias shook his head before he could think. “No. Don’t stop.”He hated how desperate he sounded. Hated that his cock was already twitching back to life just from the stranger’s breath on his skin. *I’m not gay. This is just stress. It is just one night.* The lie looped in his head like a warning siren, but his body wasn’t listening.Calloused fingers wrapped around his spent cock and stroked slow, too slow. Elias bucked up into the touch, a broken moan slipping out. The stranger chuckled, dark and satisfied, and kept edging him. Every time Elias got

Elias’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking.Not the small, polite tremor he could hide in board meetings. This was full body, teeth rattling shit that made the black silk blindfold feel like it was already cutting off his air. He’d paid the obscene membership fee, heart beating so hard he could taste copper at the back of his throat. The handler’s grip on his elbow was firm but impersonal, guiding him through a door he couldn’t see, down a corridor that smelled faintly of leather and something colder underneath.No turning back now. He said to himself.The second the handler’s hand left his arm, the world went completely black. Not dim or shadowy. Pitch fucking black. The kind of dark that pressed against his eyelids and made every other sense scream louder. Silk sheets whispered under his bare feet when he took a hesitant step forward. The air was cool against his skin, carrying the faint scent of clean linen and something sharper, ozone, maybe, or the ghost of sweat from whoever had been i

The Maybach cut through the downtown rain like it had a personal grudge against the city.“Tell me again,” Damien said, voice flat and low. “How close did Victor actually get?”Rafe didn’t look up from his phone, thumb flicking across the screen too fast, like the speed could change the numbers. “Close enough that if the SEC filing had landed yesterday instead of tomorrow, I’d be sitting here googling which countries still hate America enough to skip the extradition paperwork.”Damien pressed two fingers hard into the hinge of his jaw. The ache there had been building for days, a dull throb that no amount of coffee or rage could kill. Outside the tinted window, the city bled past in wet streaks of red taillights and white headlights. Eleven straight days of silent war calls at 3 a.m. to people who owed him favors they’d rather forget, buried trails, threats that never made it onto any official record. And still it had come down to fucking barely.Victor Hawthorne.The name landed in t

"To my son," Victor Hawthorne said, raising his glass, "and the future that finally makes this family complete."The applause started immediately. Three hundred people in a room that cost more per square foot than most people earned in a year, all of them clapping for a toast that wasn't a toast at all. Elias Hawthorne knew the difference. He had been learning the difference his whole life.He smiled and lifted his champagne. He looked at Sophia beside him, her hand warm and steady on his arm, her diamond catching the light. She was beautiful and brilliant. She was exactly what his father had ordered."You look perfect tonight," she said quietly, leaning close."Thank you," he said, and he meant none of it.The problem with being good at performance was that it left you alone inside it. Elias had been inside this particular performance for twenty eight years. The dutiful son, polished heir. The boy who knew how to sit straight, speak precisely and never let anything real show on his f