Page 23 of Dance of Madness

If something feels good, but everyone says it’s bad, is it still bad?

I’m not talking about murder or whatever. I mean the other stuff. Wanting things you’re not supposed to. Doing shit that makes your blood pump even if it makes someone else flinch.

Who decides what’s “good” anyway?

I think most people just pretend to be good because they’re too scared to really look in the mirror.

But me? I’d rather know who I really am.

Even if it means admitting I’m not the hero of this story.

Be heard,

-Me

5

NERO

She looksbeautiful in her sleep.

Not everyone does: some people sprawl out, limbs all over the place, mouth wide open, looking like a cross between a goddamn starfish and a zombie.

Not her.

I slip from behind the window drapery, moving silently across the floor until I’m at the foot of her bed. The bedroom is a mix of elegant chic and girlish princess, complete with a vanity lined with crystal perfume bottles, a walk-in closet overflowing with designer wear, and a four-poster canopy bed that Dracula would love.

I suppose that makesmethe Count in the current scenario.

I vant to suck your blood…

Hmm. Haven’t ruled that out yet.

For now, though, I stand there and watch the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest, her long blonde hair pulled back in its usual high, tight ponytail.

My jaw tightens.

That fucking ponytail makes mewant things. The same things I wanted the other night, when I watched it bounce and swish in front of me, taunting me as I ran after her. I want to wrap it in my fucking fist and use it to guide that soft, pretty,poutymouth of hers up and down every thick inch of my dick until it’s dripping and messy with her spit.

As if on cue, His Majesty rises to immediate attention in my jeans, swelling painfully tight against the denim.

The Kalishnik estate isn’t just set on some of the most sought-after real estate in New York, if not the world. It’s alsoimpenetrable. Armed guards on every floor. Motion sensors. Cameras. A laser-assisted pressure alarm system on the roof. Even goddamn drones sweeping the perimeter in alternating patterns. Taken together, it makes the buildingimpossiblefor most people to get into.

But I’m not most people.

And obsession makes a man…inventive.

Still, it wasn’t exactly easy, getting in here tonight. And being caught would mean—aside from me almost certainly losing my head, or at least several other appendages—all-out war between the Kalishnik Bratva and the De Luca family. Which would probably spiral into a war between the Italians and the Russians, which would in turn pull in the Greeks, the Irish, the Yakuza—fuck, by that point, probably everybody else too.

In short, mutually assured annihilation and a large-scale bloodbath, all because a blonde ponytail gets my dick hard.

The rational next thought, then…the obvious goal…isnotto get caught.

Theirrationalnext thought, which is the oneIhave, is tomake the most of it.

I slowly move around the bed until I’m standing next to her pillow, still looking down at her sleeping form, watching her lips twitch in her sleep.

I’ve always thought of her as just another spoiled, untouchable Bratva princess. It would appear I misjudged Ms. Kalishnik.

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