Vicious Hearts: A Dark Enemies To Lovers Mafia Romance

It’s taken every fucking ounce of my willpower to have gone this long with her sitting naked on my lap and not have bent her over the fucking table in front of us and fucked her hard enough and deep enough to slake my hunger for her.

Now, that patience is at an end.

The problem isn’t just her nakedness. It’s not just that I’ve tasted her before. Not just that I’ve felt her come insanely hard as she squeezed my dick, or that I’ve been craving her, even while hunting her, ever since.

It’s that I’ve seen the darkness in her.

I’ve seen how deep her own depravity goes. I’ve seen the porn she likes, and the fantasies she has. I’ve realized that the band she wore on her wrist that night at Club Venom wasn’t just an act, or her “cover”.

I’ve watched her step onto the edge, teetering over the abyss in an attempt to satiate the dark desires she keeps locked inside.

And it’s all of that taken together that has me unable to stop or deny myself any longer.

Given who and what I am, it’s not like I’m out cruising the city picking up random club bunnies every night of the week. But I’m also forty-one, and I’ve hardly spent my adult life as a monk.

Still, it’s taken less than a week of watching her to understand there’s something rare about Una.

I’ve never once seen a darkness and viciousness similar to mine reflected back at me by any woman.

Dangerous, depraved desires, buried deep inside. And yet in her they’re also mixed with a sort of intoxicatingly defiant innocence. As if there’s a war forever raging in her, between the good and the bad. Light and dark, caught for all eternity like lightning in a bottle.

I’m dying to smash it open.

She gasps, shuddering as my hand slides up her bare thigh.

“I said, be a good girl and spread your fucking legs.”

Una stares straight ahead as I breathe the words into her ear—defiance in her eyes, her jaw clenched.

But it’s all an act. It’s a shell she’s learned to hide within—to stop the world from seeing the darkness swirling inside of her.

She’s embarrassed by her own desires. So she keeps them locked deep inside like a dirty little secret, masking herself with this chip-on-her-shoulder toughness and devil-may-care sass.

Which I see right fucking through.

Because game, as they say, recognizes game.

I’ve spent my entire life wearing masks, ever since my uncle Lorcan saw—truly saw—the devil in me that had my parents unable to meet my eyes. Lorcan was the one who first taught me to channel that darkness—to find steam vents to release the pressure, so that I could at least hide within normal society.

So when Una tries to put her own mask on, it’s a lost cause when it comes to me. Her emotions and her secrets might as well be as naked as she is right now.

My hand slides up her thigh. She stiffens, and goes to shut them. But when my bare palm smacks the tender flesh of her inner thigh, she yelps and ceases the movement. She also turns bright red. I watch with amusement as she so desperately tries to hide the hunger on her face, the way the pink of her cheeks floods down her neck to her chest, the way her nipples harden when I smack her thigh again.

“The band you wore that night at the club really wasn’t just a disguise to go with the wig, was it?”

I already know the answer. But I want to hear her say it. I also wouldn’t mind if she lied and forced me to spank the truth out of her.

“I…I don’t know.”

Another smack to her thigh. “I’ve seen the videos you watch online.”

Her eyes bulge, her mouth falling open before she snaps it shut and swallows.

“Not to mention, just in case you’ve forgotten, I’ve had first-hand experience feeling how fucking wet you get when pain comes into, shall we say, play.”

Her bottom lip catches between her teeth as she stiffens, and her eyes dart to me before stabbing straight ahead again.

“I don’t… I mean, I’m not like…”

“Like what?” I growl thinly into her ear. “Like me?”

She swallows but doesn’t speak.

“What am I, Una?”

When she still doesn’t answer, I force a sound to her lips—a gasping moan as I reach around her and pinch one of her nipples again. That gets her to whip her gaze to me, eyes wild.

“Well? What am I?”

I see the flash of defiance and fight in her eyes. I know she wants to use this opportunity to call me a psychopath, or an asshole, or a tyrant, or any number of a string of names.

I’m surprised when she just says the one.

“A sadist,” she breathes quietly.

“At times, yes. And you know what that means?”

Of course, I know she knows what that means. But I want to open her up. I want to lay her bare. I want to make her say it out loud, for both of us.

“Yes,” she whispers. “It means you want to hurt people.”

I shake my head. “Not exactly. I want to hurt people who attempt to hurt me or my family, anyone would. But in the context of me and you, it’s not that I want to hurt you, Una.”

Her eyes go wide and her lips quiver as my hand slides all the way up her thigh to cup her pussy.

Warm. Wet.

I fight back the urge to pin her to the table right here and now and fuck her until she can’t walk straight. Instead, I settle for twisting her nipple with one hand while the hand between her legs drags a thick finger up her lips.

Una shudders, swallowing a moan.

“It means I want to find the dark, black, parts of you and rip them out,” I rasp. “It means I want to expose those needs you have that you’re so ashamed of that you keep them hidden away, and inflict them upon you until you’re mine.”

“So, you do want to hurt me.”

“More to the point, I want to hurt you the way I know you fucking want me to hurt you.”

She shivers, and I swear to fucking God I can feel her pussy grow even warmer against my hand as she squirms on my lap.

Her gaze slides to mine, her cheeks flushed as she chews on her lip. “And if I say no?”

I arch a brow in amusement. “You won’t.”

She puts on a partially convincing shocked face. “But if I do, though? If I say no, or stop, will you?”

“No.”

She shivers.

“Because we both know that’s only part of your kink. Part of what makes it thrilling for you. The other part is that you might say no, and I might not give a fuck.”

My finger strokes her glistening, silken, dripping wet pussy, watching in dark amusement as she tries to bite back a breathy moan.

“But…” she bites down on her lip hard again as I roll a finger over her clit. “But if it has to stop. If no really, truly means no…”

“Then you use your safe word.”

She stares at me. “No. I mean if I don’t want you to do any of those things to me. If it’s all a no, and you keep going anyway, do you even know what that’s—”

“I know the defiance in you wants so badly to say no. But the devil in you won’t let you.”

“What devi—”

She chokes, moaning as I quickly sink two fingers deep into her messy little pussy. I curl them against her front wall, watching with amused hunger as that sass on her face melts away completely and she melts in my lap.

“That devil,” I growl. “The devil that craves the roughness and the pain and the darkness you know damn well only I can give you. You might’ve been at the club that night to hurt me, Una,” I hiss. “But you were also there to stare out over the abyss, into the darkness you like to play at with your choice of porn and your methods of making yourself come—”

Her face turns bright pink and a whimper tumbles from her lips as I slowly stroke my fingers in and out.

“You were there to see if truly looking into the darkness you crave would scare you away forever, or suck you in and never let you go.”

She squirms, trying to glare at me, which is hilariously unsuccessful given that my fingers are stroking in and out of her pussy and my thumb is rolling over her clit.

“You…you don’t know a thing about—”

“I do. I know everything about you,” I hiss. “Every dark desire. Every depraved need. And if there’s anything I’ve missed, believe me…”

She jolts, gasping as I start to drive my fingers into her harder, without mercy.

Which of course, makes her even wetter.

She shudders on my lap, her teeth biting her lip so hard I’m almost positive they’re about to bleed. Her eyes fade in and out of focus, her cheeks flushing as I curl my fingers deep against her g-spot.

Mercilessly dragging her release from her. Viciously pushing her to the very fucking edge.

I reach around her with my other hand, making her gasp and whimper as I pinch hard on a nipple. I twist the pebbled bud in my fingers, torturing her as her sopping pussy floods my fingers with her desire. As she clutches the edge of the table and shivers enticingly on my lap.

“I can feel this greedy little cunt is ready to come for me,” I rasp into her ear, punctuating my words with a sharp bite to her neck. “I know a huge part of you is trying to hold back. But I will break through that defiance, Una.”

She starts to stiffen, her knuckles and fingers turning white as they grip the edge of the table.

“I’ll break through every fucking defense you have, my little fuck toy.”

Her pussy clamps down on my fingers, hard, her inner muscles clenching as her eyes roll back and a silent scream hangs on her trembling lips, waiting to be let out.

“And just so you know,” I rasp into her ear. “The next time I do this, you won’t see it coming. You’ll be completely unaware when I grab you, tie you up, and fuck every tight hole in your fucking body, without mercy, and without a care, ignoring every no you manage to choke out around my cock while it’s down your fucking throat.”

Una explodes, coming like a bomb exploding as she screams and writhes and wriggles in my lap. I bite down hard on her neck again, driving the pleasure higher as I pinch her nipple and ram my fingers deep in her eager, clenching, orgasming pussy.

Then she goes jelly-like in my lap, her whole body trembling and shaking as her eyes fight to focus.

“Good girl.”

Heat floods her face—from shame, or desire, or probably both, given who she is.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. Fuck. Frowning, I snatch it out to shut it off, until my eyes land on Hades’ name on the screen. Double fuck.

“I need to take this.”

Slowly, I ease her off my lap, stand, and then sit her back in the chair.

“Stay. Eat,” I growl, nodding at the plate of food before I turn and march across the floor to the main living area. Standing by the massive clock-face window, I glare out over Manhattan as I call Hades back.

“Well?” I growl when he answers.

Hades exhales slowly. “We’ve hit a dead end with the brother.”

Shit.

For a second there, I’d harbored a brief hope that if we could find the boy, I could use him as leverage to force Una’s hand in this insane marriage idea, if I had to.

“Hang on,” he mutters. “Sending you a photo.”

My phone buzzes. I pull it away as the next message pops up on my screen. My eyes narrow at the grainy image of a grim, clearly drug-ravaged young man.

…Who looks identical to Una.

“That’s Finn Smith,” Hades is saying when I pull the phone back. “And that’s a picture the nuns at a halfway house on Staten Island showed me. I don’t know about you, but that sure as fuck looks like the kid from the photo all grown up to me.”

It doesn’t just look like it. It is. I’m looking at Finn O’Conor—Una’s twin. Slowly, my jaw clenches as my brow deepens.

“How dead of an end do you mean?” I growl quietly.

His brief silence says it all.

“I mean a literal dead end. Finn Smith was a heroin junkie who overdosed and died at that halfway house eighteen months ago.”

Fuck.

“So now it’s on you to find that psycho bitch who stabbed—”

The phone flies out of my hand as I’m yanked around and slammed against the clock-window.

With a kitchen knife shoved against my throat, a scared, angry, and unhinged-looking Una holding the handle.

“I’m sorry,” she chokes, her eyes wide and wild.

“Una—”

“I have to,” she blurts, shaking, her gaze piercing into mine. “I have—”

She shakes her head, then she gasps I step closer to her, until my throat is pressed hard against the tip of the knife. Her wild eyes lance into mine, pupils dilating as she shakes her head.

“I…” She’s blinking rapidly, her chest rising and falling with her breath. I can see her pulse thudding in the hollow of her delicate neck.

“He has someone I love,” she finally chokes. This…this isn’t personal.”

“I beg to differ.”

She shivers, her eyes pleading. “It’s not. But…I have to. I have to, or he’s going to kill—”

“Your brother?”

She stiffens.

“Please—”

“This person wants you to kill me, or he’s going to kill Finn? Is that what he said?”

An anguished cry sobs from her throat as tears well in her eyes.

“You don’t understand. I would do anything to save him.”

My mind glitches. Memories come bobbing to the surface with a snarling vengeance.

I’m sixteen. There’s still blood on my shirt from taking her to the hospital when I get home and find the kitchen door ajar.

When I find my mother limp and motionless on the ground, with him standing over her. When he turns to me, and fucking shrugs.

“What are you going to do about it, you little freak?”

Anything. Anything and everything. That’s what I’d do to save my family.

I push the memory down and stare into Una’s tear-streaked face, feeling the tip of her knife piercing my neck—feeling the drops of blood dripping down my skin as our eyes lock.

I sensed it before—our shared darkness. Our mutual appreciation for the edge, and for looking over it into the abyss to see what’s down there. To see if that would make us normal.

But now I see, we’re not just similar monsters.

We’re the same.

Time slows, my pulse beating in time with hers, as if we’re connected by the steel in her hand piercing my skin. And I see with utter clarity that she would do, and has done, anything for the family she loves.

If I had a heart, it might break a little right now from what I have to tell her.

“You don’t have to do this,” I growl quietly.

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Una. Finn is dead.”

She looks like I just punched her in the gut. Her face crumples. The light inside her switches off. The knife quivers against my throat, leaking blood down, soaking the collar of my shirt.

Then her eyes narrow.

“That’s a fucking lie—”

“Heroin.”

She chokes.

“He overdosed. Eighteen months ago.”

Una starts to cry, her shoulders shaking as she moves her head side to side.

“Stop. Fucking. LYING!”

“My phone,” I growl quietly, nodding to where it’s fallen to the floor. She swallows, shaking as she pushes the blade against my skin and uses her foot to drag it over.

I could probably—definitely, actually—make my move when she bends down to snatch it up. But I don’t.

I need her to see this.

“Look at the texts from Hades Drakos.”

Her eyes dart between me and the phone as she lifts it to illuminate her face.

“What the fuck is—”

Then she sees it: the framed picture of her brother, with two dates etched into the brass plate beneath it above the simple words from the book of John: “Let not your heart be troubled”.

“No…”

She jolts, sobbing, as I grab her wrist, wrench the knife away, and fling it across the room. Her face collapses, pure anguish on her beautiful face as she looks up into mine.

Ready. Accepting. Waiting for me to kill her right here and now.

Maybe I should. Listening to my monster, however damned it may make me, has gotten me this far in life, after all.

But this time, I silence those dark thoughts.

And this time, they actually fucking listen.

She chokes, gasping as my arms go around her, pulling her into my chest.

“I’m sorry, Una.”

Instantly, she breaks like crystal in my arms, all the clenched stiffness gone—crumpling and sobbing as whatever was left of her world gets yanked out from under her.

It’s a feeling I know all too well.