Chapter five: The Devil in the Living Room.

POV: Sloane

The smell was the first thing which struck me.

It wasn’t the scent of a home. It was the scent of an arena; cold and metallic and weirdly dark mint that oozed out of Roman Thorne through his skin. I froze on the light switch. The shadows in my living room were heavier than they should be and they were thick with a presence which did not belong in my sanctuary.

Awareness of being hunted came to me, in a sudden sharp shock, pricking my skin. Three years had passed along with the twenty-four hours a day I had loved to be a shadow, an unseen ghost in PR and legal warfare world. I made no mistakes. I left no trails. But the air in my apartment was filled with the rhythmic, lunging breathing of an indifferent, lawless, person.

You have lost time, Sloane, a raw and scratching voice said of the darkness.

It did not merely skip my heart, but it stopped. Tears were a confession, and I swore never to bow on my knees. I put my fingers to force the switch.

The room was filled with light, and blinding.

Roman sat in my grey velvet arm-chair as though it were his. He moved into the little room as a giant, with his huge body wrapped in a black hoodie, the hood cast back to signify a fresh angry cut on his forehead. He was even more dangerous to behold in my home without his skates than he was on the ice. One leg was over another and his heavy combat boot stood on my white marble coffee table.

He raised and his black eyes nailed me to the door.

Nice place, he thought, and the thumb rubbed along the frame of a silver picture upon the table. Too high an upscale salary to be a university consultant salary. But then again the feds have deep pockets when they are financing a mole, do they?

“How did you get in here, Roman?” I called, and my voice was even with the adrenaline. I avoided the photo he held. It was all of my actual life I had not hidden about--a picture of my sister before she was shattered by the friends of the Thorne family.

I am a Thorne, sweetheart, he half said. People like me do not have doors. Only suggestions.”

He moved towards me, and every pace was a monument of disapproval on the flooring. I remained stuck to the locked door, still, but the heat he generated painfully touched the flesh of my body. He had halted within a few inches of my person, and he was something of an assault to my senses.

“Put the photo down,” I hissed.

“I already did.” He did not turn back towards the table. He gazed at the throbbing part of my neck, and as he did so it seemed to me to be like a bird caught in its nest. “I saw you tonight, Sloane. Up on the catwalk. Watching the trucks. Watching the product. You were as white as one saw God. Or a ghost.”

“I was doing my job. Monitoring a liability.”

Is that one hundred kilos pure, lead lined liability like you call it? He touched me, with his hand about my throat. It wasn’t a choke—just a claim. His thumb was above my carotid artery, beating my hysterical pulse. He had hot skin, knuckles strapped in with an athlete athletic tape. “You took a video. You believe you put you have the Thorne family in a box. You believe that the scrap of plastic you are holding in your pocket is your pass to promotion.

He put his other hand into my blazer pocket. I attempted to turn, but he held me by the weight of the body against the door. He was rock, hard and hard, reeking with cold rain and blood. His giant-like, invasive hand reached up and grabbed my phone and lifted it between us.

“Is this it, Sloane? The end of my empire?”

A sadistic grin came over his face. He did not crush or rub out; he bent in on me, thrust his thigh between mine, nailing me to the tree. It was an electric contact--a shock of fright and something still more awful, a gagging drawing of the self that caught my breath.

I may kill you, right now, you see, and he looked down to my mouth. I can break your neck, snatch this phone and be in the estate before your corpse even goes cold. Nobody would even guess at all I was here. A medal would be awarded to me by clearing out the trash by my father.

Then do it, I retorted, my voice being bordered with insubordination. “Do it, or get out of my house. I am not among the girls that you make terrified speechless, Roman. I’m the one who’ll watch you rot.”

Sudden and violent heat came through the eyes of Roman. He unbound my neck but took both wrists and fixed them above my head to the door. He hastened nearer, his breath grunting and so outpaced. And the arrogance was gone and in its place was a naked, untamed obsession--imminent and uncontained.

Thou fain wouldain, play God, whinge me with thy face a million crumpler miles away hitcheth naught. “You want to judge me…”

It is right before my eyes that you are broken, just like me, Se. It was not this money or even this justice you came to work here but the blood. You desire to have the feeling of incineration to tear something down, believing that you will be whole again.

He dropped his head, his lips almost touching mine an inch. I sensed the hunger of him--hungry and suckling. My heart beat against my ribs, and I at last could not say whether it was fear, or a torturous, unengaging lust.

Pray tell me, Lord Merton told him in a growl. "Tell me you don't want this. Ask me not to want the Devil in my bed, and I want him in a cage no less.

No, I hate you, I said and my head tilted back leaving the line of my throat open before him.

"Good," he rasped. "Keep hating me. It renders the rest of this so much greater.

He pressed his lips to my mouth not in the form of a kiss but a claim. It was a savoury and jealous affair. It was a collision of hatred, the deadly and covert appeal, above our control, of the 18+ reality of the war we were engaged with now. His tongue was hot and dominant, and his hands gripped my wrists till the fit of it was as a bone-deep ache.

I struggled a moment, my hands struggling against his hold, but my deceived body had to give way to his crude domineering heat. I went in to kiss him, my fingers entangling in the material of his hoodie, to get some friction and violence out of the moment so I can forget the guilt.

He made a withdrawal, only so far as to have a peep into my blown out pupils. His breathing was broken and strangled.

I am yours now, Sloane; now you belong to me, and my thumb is swiping over your swollen bottom lip with heavy and deliberate pressure. It does not matter who you are working with or what you got in that phone. You may have the video; you may attempt to destroy me. but when you watch that film, you will not forget how you bumped your head against this door. You also know you are one of the monsters you are pursuing.

Instead, he set me free name of the wrists, but kept me to the door, my legs feeling like water. He also moved aside, threw his hoodie on, and made his way to the window through which he had clearly gained entry.

The FBI will phone you in twenty minutes, said he and with one hand on the sill of the window he hesitated. He didn't even look back. They will request the data. You have to decide, Sloane. Good girl that you do what you are told? Or are you mine?"

He had disappeared into the night, and all I had been left to, was the stench of mint and the sounding thud of my own heart.

I fell on the ground with a gasping breath. I picked my phone, with shaking fingertips going through the video of the drug shipment. Then I fastened my eyes on the silver frame on the coffee table.

My phone vibrated. Unknown caller. My contact, he who might stop the Thorne family to-night should I only press the button "send."

I was looking at the screen, and I could hear myself repeating what Roman told me: Are you a good girl? Or are you mine?"

I didn't answer the phone.

Sloane has taken a position, yet in the Mafia, keeping quiet might be equally deadly as making a confession. Is it because she is defending her mission or because the Devil has won?