Chapter 6: The Weight of the Blood.

POV: Roman

I was no man of virtues, but one; and I knew how much strength it required to fracture an object.

A hockey stick. A ribcage. A woman's resolve.

I was on the fire escape in front of the Sloane apartment and the iron was cutting through the soles of my boots. The night air was terribly cold and stinging, though it normally cleared the fog out of my head, but it seemed to me like warm water that night. My skin was still buzzing. I still could taste her in my mouth--costly lip-paint and a hopeless, desperate insolence that left my blood with the quality of molten lead.

Are you a good girl? Or are you mine?

I had a feeling of the answer before I had even asked the question. Sloane Mercer wasn't "good." She was a gorgeous, reckoning fiasco, and as soon as she had not picked up that phone to call her agents, and I was still within the room, I knew I had her. Or she had me. There was not much of a difference in my world.

I stepped down that rusted ladder, fluently and noiselessly. I smashed through the alley floor and disappeared into the shadows when a black car with government plates drove slowly through the entrance. It would have been missed by my father men. Local cops would have dismissed it. But I was familiar with the picture of an FBI tail than with that of my own mother.

I didn't head back to my car. I took three strides down the other way with my hood on and my hands deep in my pockets of my sweat. I needed to move. I had to have the physical exercise in order to forget how she had been pinned against that door--how her tiny body had been trembling in terror and in a kind of hunger that was duplicated in my own body.

She was even to be used as a target. A weakness to be counteracted. Rather, she was turning into a religion that I was not looking to pray to.

I felt my phone vibrating on my pocket. A heavy, rhythmic pulse. I did not have to look on the screen to recognize who it was. Only one person made such persistence at that time (3:00 AM).

Yes, yes, I choked, and I got to the fourth ring.

"Where the fuck are you, Roman?"

It was a menacing, gravelly voice of my father. Silas Thorne never talked, he made orders. He was like he was in his study, and filled with the odor of costly bourbon and burdened with a thousand secrets.

"Clearing my head," I said. I entered into a shady doorway, eyed the street to see anything that was not in place. "The drills ran late."

It was six hours ago that the drills were terminated. Volkov tells him that you went off the grid. He also tells you that you are safeguarding the consultant.

I squeezed the phone to the point of plastic groaning. Volkov was a dead man. He just didn't know it yet. The consultant is all we have to protect us against the university board. When she is threatened she speaks. In case she speaks, the FBI will enter the parking lot into our locker room. I'm managing the asset, Silas. Like you told me to."

Manage her, my father said, the word whip-crack. "Don't covet her. A shipment is going tomorrow out of the south docks. I want you there. And I do not wish to have the girl near it. I will not request you to manage the affairs of the family again in case she inserts her nose into the business. I will have somebody who has no issue with ending her.

The line went dead.

I stared at the black screen with the reflection being my own face. I looked like a monster. I felt like one. The wound on my forehead ached, an insistent beating of violence in which I was born.

I wasn't just a hockey captain. I was the heir of a throne of bone and betrayal. And first, under twenty-two years, I had been thinking of setting the entire structure ablaze just to see whether the girl would smile at the fire.

I got back to my SUV, which was parked four blocks away. I got into it, and I did not start the motor. I was sitting in the dark, and the smell of the city, tired and wet pavement, was oozing through the vents.

I considered that Sloane had a video. Instead, I wondered how she had leaned back to expose her pale, vulnerable, throat to my mouth. She wanted to erase me. She'd said it herself.

Try, sweetheart, try it, I said to the empty car.

I drew out my burner phone--which the Family did not know about. I only sent one text to a number that I had memorized in her desk files.

The south docks. Noon. Don't be late.

I was not merely handing her evidence to her liking. I had been inviting her into the lion-den. I would like to see whether she would take the bait. I was interested in whether she would come with a wire and a group of feds or come with me.

Since she appeared on my behalf, then the "Secret Love" was not just a theory. It was a death sentence.

I threw the switch to start the engine and the V8 banged against the brick walls of the alley. I had a game tomorrow night. I had a shipment to move. And I had a Queen to break.

The black sedan appeared as I approached the estate in my drive, two blocks away, in front of the gates of my father. They were watching. The net was closing.

I only wondered whether Sloane was aware she was the one that was holding the rope.

Roman is playing two games, betraying his father to challenge a woman who is interested in him to chains. With the Mafia, the first to be trusted is the first to be bled. Is it his obsession that saves Roman, or kills him?