CHAPTER ONE

CAGED 

SOFIA’S POV

The bedroom door locks at exactly 10PM, every night. It was the same sound and unfortunately the same cage.

I pressed my ear against the wood and counted Luca's footsteps down the hallway, fourteen steps to his door, if I'm not mistaken. The door closes and finally, the whole mansion can breathe. Twenty three years I have been so calculative, learning the different tones of his door from the time he's entering the room to when he's leaving the room to meet me.

Ever since that night, I stopped believing he was just my brother. Not after the stunt he pulled a few years back. Hell no.

I stood at the window and looked out at the garden below, the manicured hedges and the stone fountain with two guards who changed their positions by 11pm. I thought about the black dress folded inside my winter coat at the back of my closet. I thought about the guard who owed Gonna a favour.

“Hmm, maybe he could be useful tonight.” I thought to myself as I remembered how he told her about the tunnel behind the wine cellar in exchange for her silence about the bottle of whiskey he lifted from the cellar last month. 

She'd always tell me to let her know whenever I was ready, but I've been so scared but now, I don't give a fuck. “Not tonight, at least.”

I stripped off the white silk nightgown Luca bought for me, it was exactly the way he liked it. As long as it's reaching my knees, we wouldn't have any issues. I wasn't feeling the dress either way so I might as well take the black one staring at me. 

I strip off the white silk nightgown Luca bought for me, the one that falls exactly to my knees the way he likes, and I put on the black dress and feel the difference immediately. It was tight across the hips, low at the back, the kind that would immediately go nuts for me the moment he lays his eyes on me. I found the red lipstick at the bottom of the makeup drawer, the one I bought online and hid behind my perfume bottles, and I put it on and looked in the mirror and tried to remember what it felt like to win instead of a possession.

The tunnel looks like what the guard described earlier on. I crawled through it on my hands and knees with my heart beating so fast against my ribs and emerged three blocks from the mansion into the cool night air alongside the distant traffic…

I got up with dirt on my knees and red lipstick on my mouth. Then I hail a cab and go find it.

~ ~ ~ ~

Sinners and Saints is darker than I expected and louder, everyone wears masks and the anonymity is the most intoxicating thing I have ever felt in my life. “Basically I'm no one here, great.!!” 

I was halfway through my second drink when I saw him. I've never felt anything like this before, the guards clocking my movements, Luca's eyes finding me across a room. This feels different and a bit heavy. I turned before my body could profess anything and for some reason I found him in the VAIP section, tall and calm in a dark suit, watching me through the crowd with the unhurried patience of a man who has literally nowhere else to be.

He walks up to me and the crowd moves for me. 

He steps close enough that I could smell him.. cedar. He looked up at me for a while before he spoke. “You don't belong here,” he says. His voice is low and unhurried. I liked that.

“Neither do you,” I say. “Your suit costs more than most people's cars.” 

His mouth carves a little. “Maybe I like the view.”

I felt a rush of heat move through me so fast, it almost embarrassed me and I kept hold of his gaze anyways because I did not crawl through a tunnel in the dark to look away from the first interesting thing I've found.

He leans close and his breath is warm against my ear and he says, "You came here looking for trouble, Mamacita. The question is whether you're brave enough to find it," and something in me that has been locked up for twenty-three years decides, simply and completely, that yes. Yes I am.

"I have rules," I hear myself say.

"I'd be disappointed if you didn't."

"No names. No faces. One night only." His thumb traces slow circles on my hip bone and I feel it everywhere. I want to be someone else's, just for tonight, just once, and so I look at this dangerous stranger and I say the thing that has been sitting at the back of my throat since the moment I saw him. "If you're so confident, why don't you get on your knees and prove it, Daddy."

His eyes go dark behind the mask. His hand tightens on my hip, hard enough to bruise, and he says very quietly, "You have no idea what you just started," and pulls me toward a hallway marked PRIVATE.

~ ~ ~ ~

He drops to his knees without being asked twice and I stop thinking about everything.

His hands spread my thighs against the wall and the cool air hits me as I shiver and then his mouth finds me and I forget about Luca, forgot the mansion, forgot every locked door and footstep and careful performance of obedience. He takes his time with my body.

My dress rides up at my waist. Black lace panties hang in shreds from one ankle.

He tore them off like they insulted him.

His hands clamp my thighs, spreading me wide against the wall. Cool air hits my wet pu**y and I shiver. “Say it again,” he growls. “Call me what you called me at the bar.”

“Daddy,” I whisper. “Daddy… please.”

“Good girl.”

Then his mouth is on me.

No teasing. He dives in like he’s starving. Tongue flat and wide, dragging up my slit in one long stroke that makes my knees buckle. I grab his hair and hold on.

He sucks my clit between his lips. Hard, flicking so fast I can’t breathe. My hips jerk forward while he pins me harder against the wall.

“Stay still,” he orders. “Let Daddy taste what he owns tonight.” He slides two fingers inside me, slow at first, then deeper. Pressing that spot that makes white sparks shoot behind my eyes.

I cry out.

He doesn’t stop. Tongue circling my clit while his fingers pump steady, ruthless. The wet sounds are obscene. “Cum on my tongue,” he commands. “Cum like the dirty little girl you’ve been hiding.”

I shatter.

Thighs shake around his head. Back arches off the wall. I couldn't help but moan out loud. He keeps licking through it until I’m whimpering, oversensitive, trying to push his head away.

He doesn’t let me. “One more,” he says, standing. “You’re not done.”

He lifts me up, carries me to the couch just so he could drop me on my back. My legs fall open automatically. The belt was unbuckled, zipper down. His cock springs free. Heavy, thick, already leaking. He strokes himself once, twice, eyes locked on me.

“Eyes on me.”

I obey like a dog taking orders from her master.nHe notches the head at my entrance while pressing enough to part me.

“Beg,” he orders.

“Please screw me, Daddy. I need it.” He slams home in one brutal thrust, my mouth opens on a silent scream. He’s so deep it hurts and feels perfect. 

He doesn’t give me time to adjust. Pulls almost all the way out then drives back in. The couch creaks. My tits bounce with every snap of his hips.

“Look at you,” he rasps. “Pussy gripping me like it never wants to let go.”

I claw his back, he hooks my legs over his shoulders. Folds me in half. Hits even deeper.

“Cum again,” he growls. “spill on Daddy’s cock.” His thumb finds my clit in rough circles.

This orgasm is intense. Legs shaking while my vision became blurry. I scream over and over while my walls pulse around him.

He follows right after while groaning low. I feel him swell, throb, then hot spirits deep inside me.

We collapse together. His forehead drops to mine, his breathing is ragged and unsteady and for a moment he seems almost human.

"You're dangerous," he murmurs.

"So are you," I say against his neck. 

He shifts, pulling back, standing, straightening his clothes with ease, and that's when I see it … the tattoo at the base of his spine as his shirt rides up, a symbol I've seen before, stamped on documents in files in Luca's office in the drawer marked in my brother's handwriting with a single word: ‘enemy.’ My brain catches up and then he turns. The mask has slipped and I see the jaw, the thin white scar running along the bone that I have looked at in surveillance photographs so many times I could draw it from memory.

Alessio Volkov.

The Viper.

My family's most wanted. The man my brother has been trying to kill for three years. The man who just had me screaming his name in the dark, who I begged on his terms, who I gave everything to willingly and joyfully and with my whole chest.

He looks at me and something in his expression tells me he has known exactly who I am this entire time.

My one night of freedom just became the most expensive thing I've ever taken.