Page 27 of Desperate Crimes
The beast. The storm. The shadow that wraps around me like silk.
And I think—I know—that somewhere deep inside me, I’ve always been waiting for someone exactly like him.
God help me.
I’ve been kidnapped by a dark monster, and it’s my favorite trope.
Honestly, I’m not even sorry yet.
Chapter Six-Leanna
Truth is, I was born into this chaos.
Raised on whispers and blood oaths.
On backroom deals and velvet threats.
On beauty masking brutality—smiles sharp enough to draw blood and rules written in gold and enforced in red.
And okay, yes, it is deeply, deeply humiliating that every time I curl up with one of my mother’s books—paperback, hardcover, eReader, mood depending—I can’t help but cast myself as the heroine.
The stolen girl.
The adored obsession.
The one whose darkness was always there, just waiting for the right man to coax it free.
It’s worse that the man I always picture in the role of the possessive antihero—the morally gray villain with eyes that see too much and hands that know exactly how to ruin you?
He doesn’t even know I exist.
Not really.
I mean, he knows me.
Of course, he does.
Nico Fury Jr. isn’t the type of man to forget a face.
Especially not one who calls his mom Aunt Anna and whose father shares a private jet with his own.
We move in the same rarefied circles—our names always spoken with reverence, our family trees tangled in alliances and power.
We’re not blood, though. Just relatives of the same kingdom.
Princes and princesses of different castles built on the same brutal foundation.
But I doubt he’s ever looked at me—really looked at me—the way I’ve imagined a thousand times.
Like I’m his.
Like I’m not some sweet, polite little Volkov girl in the corner sipping champagne and smiling for charity photographers.
Like I’m prey and he’s starving.
My fantasies? They don’t care about real life. They’re messy. Shameless. Made of ink and moans and all the ways I wish someone—he—would see me.
Claim me.
