Page 64 of Dragonfly

I was having surgery on my genitals. I chose local anesthesia because no way in hell was I letting a doc that didn’t work for me put me completely under, but I find that if those not in the life don’t find my lean form intimidating, they pay attention when Vin is standing at my back.

Just in case they decided to pull a Savannah and try to take advantage of me in a rare vulnerable state, my cousin won’t let them. I doubted that would be the case—and I vetted this outpatient surgery center outside of Springfield years ago when I decided to go with the vasectomy in the first place—but I didn’t get to where I am by not being a suspicious bastard.

They gave me all the run-down. How I should expect to be sore and swollen and achy for a few days after the hours-long outpatient procedure, that I needed to ice my junk and off for the next forty-eight hours, and how I can’t do anything strenuous for the next two weeks.

The idea that I can’t fuck Savannah again for that long after I finally did for the first time hurts me almost as much as my achy scrotum.

But I did this for her. As a gesture to show my wife that I consider this marriage both binding and lasting, I got the vasovasostomy. That way, if it’s kids she needs to stick around, I’ll breed her as soon as my pipes are in working order again.

I’ll do anything to make it so that woman can never, ever leave me.

The doc made it clear that I shouldn’t expect miracles. I’m older, it’s been years since I first got the snip, and odds of my reversal not quite taking is in the twenty percent range, give or take. But it’s better than zero—and until I can recover enough to get tested and see how the procedure fared, I decide not to say anything to Savannah.

I don’t want to get her hopes up. I also don’t want to push her away with how serious I am about her. Up until the dinner, I thought I’d been doing a good job—and then I showed her just how ruthless you need to be to lead a syndicate.

Ricky touched what was mine. He hurt her. Savannah tried to fight back, and maybe if I hadn’t confiscated her weapons, she might not have needed me to step in… but I did.

I promised her. When I first climbed into her bed after I noticed she refused to fall asleep first while I was in the room with her, I promised that—as her husband—I would protect her. Lord knows I had no idea what I was protecting her from then. How I inadvertently triggered the trauma she experiences from her time in prison, and how I didn’t know that my Family and I was the cause behind all of it.

And then I tore through the folder of gathered intel Lincoln got for me and I fucking knew.

Portia Daniels. Forty-eight. Worth two million dollars before she went into Club Fed; somehow worth three million after nine years in. Doing twelve to fifteen for an embezzlement charge, she was scheduled for a parole hearing in October.

Was.

I’ll own my part in breaking Georgia and turning her into Savannah. If my guys hadn’t poured too many fake hundreds into her small store, if my hold on the SPFD wasn’t as iron-tight back then… if the bank hadn’t pretended not to notice all the bad bills like they do now… she never would’ve been an innocent woman caught in the crosshairs on my business.

But this bitch? She’s the reason my wife flinches when I stroke her neck from behind in the dark. She’s the reason Savannah took weeks before she allowed herself to fall asleep before I did. She’s the reason an innocent twenty-five-year-old woman—the same age as Gen is now—went into a minimum security prison only to come out, feeling like murdering a mafia leader more than a decade her senior seemed like the only way to quiet the noise inside her head.

Savannah was and is murderous. And maybe I’m just as broken as she is, but I like that about her. So long as she’s not spilling Dragonfly blood—unless they’ve done enough to earn death—I can give her the outlet for this dark side of her.

Even better, I can teach her how to do it. To protect herself when I can’t, and to make sure that no one will ever, ever hurt her again.

And though I’m sure she’d have rather make Portia Daniels a victim of her own, she’s my wife—and I wanted that kill.

So I sent Oliver to Madison with enough money to buy a crooked correctional officer, plus a syringe full of so much dirty Eclipse, Daniels would die of an OD in minutes. My newest enforcer—Kieran’s replacement—was eager to earn his first leaf, and since I’ve always been the type to delegate, I let him do this for me while I had a very firm alibi of having my vas deferens put back together.

Once the surgery was done and I got the okay to be released, I grit my fucking teeth and walking out of the surgery center as if my sac wasn’t screaming. The local anesthesia had worn off enough for it to be noticeable, and the instruction told me if it got too bad to take an ibuprofen.

Fuck that. I’ll be fine.

To prove it, I not only drove myself home, I dropped Vin back off at the manor before I headed to the office. Oliver had express instructions to return there after he finished up in Madison, and I wanted to talk to my enforcer in person to hear how the job went.

It went. It was actually pretty impressive. He’d made contact with a few ‘maybe’ guards last week, testing out who’d be interested in doing a favor for a hefty sum of cash. Madison is near enough to Springfield that our distribution operation already had a foot in the door there. Even in a min sec prison like Madison, drugs are rampant, and the Dragonflies supply.

Portia Daniels’s nasty death would be unexpected, but not impossible, and when I meet with Oliver in my office, he shows me the pictures the guard sent him after the deed was done.

As I smile in satisfaction at a job well-done, I think about how Savannah will react to hearing I had her biggest nightmare murdered. Not that I’m going to tell her. Not yet, at least.

Not until I’m sure she can handle it.

It’s one thing for her to see Ricky get killed in the heat of the moment. She understood that. But for the death to be so cold-blooded, so meticulously planned… I see the darkness inside of my beautiful, deadly spider, but is she as dark as I am?

I’m used to being in charge. In control. It’s part of the reason I never really sought a partner other than for an occasional release. I didn’t arrange for Daniels’s death as a way to manipulate Savannah any further.

I did it because, after how that woman treated my wife, she didn’t deserve to live—and I’ll kill anyone who thinks they can do the same until I’ve taught Savannah how to protect herself.

Even then, I will do it.

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