Page 51 of Axel

I still don’t know when the jet takes off on our short flight to some private airstrip in the Georgia mountains.

“I’ve created a fake marriage license,” Grant informs me, clicking across his laptop. “Since you booked the place with your credit card—rookie mistake, by the way—he’ll know your real name. But I’m creating a fake life for you. Fake address. Fake job. You’re now the secretary for Carson Stewart and?—”

“The idiot lawyer who chases ambulances?” I’m insulted.

“He deserves it,” Axel grumbles. “He reallydoesfuck around on his wife, and it’s about time he’s caught.”

“It looks like the camera the owner used to film Nick and Zar…” Grant studies his screen, “is positioned directly across from the bed. So be aware of it as you two…”

Grant advises us while I sit stunned, admiring him.

He’s beefy and tatted like Axel and his other brothers, and he seems smart like them, too. The only difference is the proud gold band gleaming on Grant’s thick, inked wedding finger.

It’s his only jewelry, like he’s proud of his marriage, and I realize…

The other woman.

The other queen in the room during the taboo initiation must’ve been Grant’s wife.

Because Wren is Sire’s wife. Zar is Nick’s partner. That hot daddy Nash always fights with Axel about Nash loving some woman named Vale. There was another brother, the bouncer from Delta’s, who looks like Grant’s twin, who was there, too, but I don’t remember seeing a ring on him. And I’ve heard Axel say his brother Loch is marrying Alena. Their wedding is soon.

Though it still digs at the back of my mind, sensing there’s more between Axel and Alena, as well.

What in the escaped Bratva hell?

This world I spied on, that I’m now trapped in, feels like a salacious soap opera cast with dangerously hot AF, inked men and their badass queens.

Oh, and don’t forget the whole Bratva-prince part.

Oh, and don’t forget their baller mom, either. Whoever she is.

Wait! That’s one, two, three … six? Or seven brothers? Seven Bratva princes? But Axel said his mother had six sons, and there were six men in Wren’s initiation. I mean, six kings. But I’m counting seven total?

So, who was missing that night?

Jeez, I’m so confused and dying to ask Axel, but he said Grant thinks I’m just his paralegal.

“Don’t let him know our secret,” he warned.

“Oursecret?” I scoffed in his fancy Jaguar on the way to the private airport. “Okay, Victoria, we’re not a secret.”

“Do you have to argue with everything I say?”

“I’m practicing for the Supreme Court.”

“Practice supreme silence.”

“God,” I huffed, “when you’re a dickhead, you make it hard to like you.”

“No, Wildfire,youmake my dickhead hard, and…” he winked, “you don’t have to like it towantit. Not everyone has good taste.”

“Taste my ass.”

Yep, I served that up like a high set in volleyball, and Axel spiked the point with a sexy smirk. “If you want my tongue licking your ass, Wildfire, all you gotta do is moan for it.”

He made me squirm in my car seat.

I think I preferred himnotflirting with me to him attacking my senses like a frontal assault on my clitoris, so I changed the subject.

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