Page 139 of Brutal Collateral

We lost control on our wedding night, stupidly thinking one taste would get it all out of our systems.

Neither of us guessed we’d give in each night for more. I don’t know about Griffin, but I feel helplessly addicted to what he does to me when the sun goes down.

“What happened to your wrist?” Lucia asks me when I hold up the lunch menu at my favorite trattoria in Little Italy.

Griffin tying me up with his belt last night flashes at me, blocking out the sweet basil aroma in the air and the hum of silverware dinging against thick hand-painted ceramic plates.

There’s no G-rated version of what the hell we’re doing. I can’t tell my nineteen-year-old cousin, who I think is a virgin, that I love when my husband ties me up and fucks me like a savage.

“The self-defense classes I’m teaching at the O’Rourke Woman Center.” I rub my wrist for effect. “The man they hired to beat the crap out of me got a good hold on me.”

“Ouch,” Lola jumps into the conversation. “What a brute!”

“That’s the point. I listened to these women’s stories. They’re being housed at the center for protection while their piece-of-shit husbands and boyfriends roam free. Some of these men are animals.” I suffered one brief attack, and I still see Rand Miller’s face in my nightmares sometimes.

The women who opened up to me say they’ve been attacked nearly every day. None of them had a man with a gun to stop it.

We order lunch, then Lola and Lucia ramble on about their upcoming vacation. They’re spending the rest of the summer at the Zervas family estate in Santorini, Greece on the Aegean Sea. I try not to be jealous that they’ve been allowed to live a life Alexander denied me. But my father made horrible choices and Alexander protected me.

“Please consider visiting us,” Lucia says, squeezing my hand. “Lola has a secret lover there. I can use the company.”

I spin my gaze to her. “Do you? In Greece?”

“I met him when we were there in... Ouch,” Lola snaps at her sister. “Did you kick me?”

“I know you went to Greece after Christmas.” I sip my wine.

Aunt Helena brings them every year. There was little she could do about my abduction at that point.

“It was better you weren’t around anyway. For all we knew, they could have come back and taken you both as well,” I lie to make them feel better.

Salads come and I listen to them talk about their classes in Paris while I stab my Caesar. We eat our entrees and drink more wine until the guards Wrath and Pride come to take Lola and Lucia home. After kisses all around, my cousins plead with me to think about the invitation to Greece.

I assure them I will. Maybe Griffin can escape for a few days since we didn’t have a honeymoon.

Bourne gets my attention from the restaurant entrance but holds his palm facedown, signaling for me to take my time. He meticulously watches guests come and go, and the restaurant was swept for explosives this morning.

As with other outings, I’m free to move about, so I head to the ladies’ room to wash my hands. Walking back to the table, I feel a chill snake up my spine, like I passed through an evil spirit.

I look up, and a set of cold gray eyes at the bar stop me dead in my tracks.

Rand Miller sits on a barstool, holding a cut glass tumbler watching me like I summoned him from the grave with my earlier vision of him assaulting me. I blink a few times, thinking I’m seeing a ghost, but it’s him. I expect a nasty sneer. There’s only a blank expression on his face. His lips are flat, and his eyes look dull and empty.

Feeling a warm body behind me, I spin around. Before I even get a hand on the wedding knife strapped to my thigh, Bourne is there.

“You okay, Ma’am?”

I hide how shaken I am. All I have to do is point to Miller and tell Bourne to attack him like a dog, pump him with lead, and yank me out of there. Then with two phone calls, Shane will have the security cameras wiped, and the enforcer’s clean-up team will handle the rest.

“Let’s go,” I say to Bourne. “I thought I saw someone I knew.”

Someone I thought was dead.

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