Vicious Hearts: A Dark Enemies To Lovers Mafia Romance

There’s a monster in each of us.

At least, that’s what my father used to tell us. Or should I say, what he used to preach to us. This went hand in hand with uplifting remarks like “we are all already in purgatory, and the job of the righteous is to send the wicked to Hell so the rest may go to Heaven.”

Seamus fancied himself a man of God. A redeemer. A prophet. And for a long time—so, so much longer than I should have—I believed that. For years, I chose to overlook the reality that was staring me, and usually screaming at me, right in the face.

My father wasn’t a man of God. He wasn’t a prophet, or great savior.

He was, however, the monster he claimed was inside each of us.

And tonight, you took one giant step closer to becoming him.

I wince as I climb the last flight of stairs to the top-floor landing of the crumbling Hell’s Kitchen apartment building I’ve called home for the last year.

I hurt.

A lot.

All over.

Gritting my teeth, I open the three locks on my door and slink into the apartment. When it’s safely locked and dead-bolted behind me, I groan as I sink against it, my heart racing.

My mind whirling.

My entire body still—oh God—throbbing and tingling.

And aching.

With an effort, I push myself away from the door and drag myself through the tiny studio apartment. I shed my coat and my flimsy porno-dress, letting both drape across my bed against the wall as I gratefully kick off my heels. I slip my underwear partway down, and grimace as I examine the black lace, spotted darker in places.

That part wasn’t supposed to happen. That wasn’t in the plan.

Turning, I let my eyes drift over the collage of pictures, newspaper clippings, and notes tacked up on the wall. Photos of people, all labeled with their names—Ares Drakos, Castle James, Neve Kildare…

My pulse skips when my eyes land on the pictures in the middle of the group. The photos of the lethally attractive man with the sharp jaw and the venomous green eyes.

The beast who took my virginity…

…about ninety seconds before I put a knife in his heart.

I shudder, hugging myself and wincing again at the pain I feel everywhere. My neck, from his hands and teeth. My breasts, which are spotted with the early dark spots of bruises and more teeth marks. My hips and ass, sporting welts from the riding crop.

Between my legs.

It all hurts. And yet…it’s not necessarily a bad hurt.

Thank you, fucked up kinks.

I chew on my lip, my hands tracing down my bruised body. Yeah, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Yes, the plan tonight involved seducing Cillian and getting him alone. It’s why I spent the last month watching the patrons of Club Venom come and go, narrowing it down to a handful of potentials, then shadowing each of them in turn to find an opening.

I got lucky with Jenny.

Blonde, but the wig fixed that, roughly my size and complexion, and a relative newcomer to Club Venom—thanks to the older guy she was seeing from a sugar daddy website who bought her a membership. Jenny was a little careless with her wallet one night while stumbling into a cab outside the club. Jenny also recently took a new job in San Francisco, and won’t really be using her Club Venom membership much.

That was the plan. Get through security using Jenny Miller’s membership ID, find and seduce Cillian Kildare, get him alone, and kill him.

Not as payback for his involvement in my father’s incarceration and then death.

But to free the one person on earth I care about, or who cares about me.

My twin brother, Finn.

Finn’s the reason I came to New York City a year ago. He’s the reason I’ve spent any free moment I have between my odd jobs combing the seedier parts of the city, asking around shelters, halfway houses, and methadone clinics.

A dull but firm knock at my apartment door sends a ripple of something cold and fierce down my spine. I tense, grabbing my robe off the hook on the bathroom door and pulling it on hastily before I glance at the door.

I know there won’t be anyone there when I open it.

There never is.

Swallowing, I walk quietly across the floor. I glance through the peephole anyway. But of course, there’s nobody. I slowly creak the door open a crack, and my gaze drops to the floor of the landing.

At the little black box.

With a shiver I feel in my very soul, I pick it up, slip back inside, and triple lock the door again. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I open the box and stare at the black throwaway flip-phone inside. I wait for it to ring. Keep waiting. Seconds and then minutes tick by before I finally set it down.

My eyes slide back to the wall of photos and notes.

All targets, all picked by him.

He goes by the name Apostle. We’ve never met in person. Only via heavily encrypted emails and burner phones, where he sounds as if he’s talking through a voice scrambler.

He claims he worked for my father. He says he’s still “carrying out his holy mission”. Two months ago, when he first reached out, he told me he had my brother.

Then he threatened to kill Finn unless I used the training and brutality that our father beat into us when we were children to hunt down and eliminate a list of targets—all associated with my father’s capture and incarceration fifteen years ago, and his death a few months ago.

I didn’t kill Cillian Kildare tonight because I harbor any grudge against him. I don’t even know what his involvement with my father’s death was, nor do I care.

I killed him because I will do anything for Finn.

Anything.

Even stalking the members and peripheral members of an Irish crime family. Even murdering its leader in cold blood.

Even fucking him.

A knot forms in my stomach as I feel my face grow hot. Again, that wasn’t ever supposed to be part of what happened earlier tonight.

I didn’t go to a kink club with the intention of losing my virginity to the man I was about to kill.

A man with lethally hypnotic green eyes. A man with a positively palpable darkness swirling around him—a darkness that latched onto and hooked itself into that secret, hidden part of me, and refused to let go.

A darkness that sparked something wicked in me.

I didn’t have to let any of that happen. I could have killed him in the elevator. Or when we first walked into the room. Or when he was telling me to strip, or first touching me.

Pushing me to the edge.

Shattering my inhibitions and allowing the darkest parts of me I’ve never once explored with another person to come flooding out.

I know I could have done it before his cock rammed between my legs.

Before he drove into me, claiming me like no one ever has before.

Before I felt every enormous inch of his thickness filling me, stretching me, even tearing me—a pain that immediately triggered a pleasure response, because that’s how fucked up I am.

That sudden and vicious first penetration, after being wound up by him so tightly, was like pulling a trigger, making me come instantly, harder than I’ve ever come before.

No. I didn’t have to let all of that happen. At least, I don’t think I did. Though, now that I’m thinking about it, maybe it’s better to say I was powerless to stop any of it.

Because the version where I let a vicious monster brutally take my virginity against the bedroom wall of a sex club seconds before I put a knife in his heart doesn’t exactly paint me in a very positive light.

I close my eyes, shuddering as I remember the savagery of his touch. The viciousness of his kiss. The sheer brutality of his pleasure.

When I shift on the bed, I wince at the pain that cramps between my thighs. I put my hand down there, and my fingers come away smudged with red.

And my face burns with shame.

I wish I could say blood is the only wetness I felt there in this moment. But that would be a lie.

With a groan, I stand and pad into the bathroom, shedding my robe. In the mirror, my eyes drag over the many bruises and marks scattered across my skin—my tenderized nipples, my bitten neck.

The puffiness between my thighs.

From there, as always, my gaze shifts to the other marks that dot my body. Older scars. Older wounds, that run far deeper than my skin. Some are from the brutal monster who was my father—the faded scar on my wrist, the lines across my back.

Others are from my own hand.

Little secret white lines across my thighs.

Places where I could let the pain bleed out. Places where the horrors from my childhood and adolescence could escape. Places I cut to feel anything other than the shadows of the past.

But not all of them come from a place of misery and darkness. Others come from a place of…

Depravity.

They’re the reminders of times I’ve pushed the deviant and fucked-up kinks inside of me to places I shouldn’t go—to cliff edges I shouldn’t look over.

To places where pain and pleasure blend in heady, intoxicating ways.

Shuddering, I turn my gaze from the mirror and the marks across my body. I drag open the shower curtain to turn on the water, only to be greeted by my roommate and committed life partner, Bones.

Bones cocks his head to the side, his eyes flitting over me as if he’s drinking in each bruise, each bite mark. Each pink, red, or rapidly-turning-purple mark on my flesh, and judging me for every single one.

“Don’t look at me like that, dude. You lick your own asshole.”

Bones meows, licking his lips.

“Oh, let me guess. Wonder of wonders, you’re hungry. There’s a shock.”

Bones hops up onto the edge of the tub. He’s probably been drinking from the leaky faucet. He jumps down onto the floor and rubs his head against my shin.

“My my, amazing how that judgey attitude drops when you need your tummy filled, isn’t it?” I smirk, wincing when I bend down to pick him up. “Okay, c’mon.”

The tiny refrigerator with the plug-in electric stove sitting on top of it is shoved into the corner of my cramped, crummy apartment, right near the door. I make a face when I open the fridge, smelling something rotten coming from God-only-knows-where, considering it’s empty. The cupboard above isn’t much better. I’m down to two slices of bread, one can of tomato soup, and a tin of tuna fish.

When I first arrived in the city, I worked multiple odd jobs—waitressing, mainly—to try and rustle up the enormous sum of money even a shithole like this costs to rent in this city. Because I had to be here. New York was the last clue I had about my addict twin brother’s whereabouts.

As of two months ago, though, when Apostle entered the picture, I haven’t had time to work. Not with trying to track the targets he gave me, and plan how the hell I was supposed to do what he wanted me to do. And I don’t exactly get to bill him for my time.

So mostly, for the last couple of months, I’ve kept Bones and I fed by shoplifting. I’ve only managed to keep the apartment itself because my elderly landlady on the first floor can’t remember that I haven’t paid her in two months, which, needless to say, makes me feel like complete shit.

But you do what you have to do to survive. And I will always do what I have to do for Finn.

He gave everything for me.

My stomach groans as I look over our meager provisions.

“You know what?” I shrug, putting Bones down and then grabbing the last precious can of tuna from the cupboard. “We’re celebrating—”

I stop.

What the fuck am I celebrating? Killing someone for the first time? Someone I didn’t even have any personal problem with? Or, what, losing my virginity…like that?

“You know what, forget celebrating. Let’s just eat.”

I open the can and use a plastic fork to shovel a quarter of the tin into Bones’ bowl. He happily digs in as I sit on the edge of the bed, chewing slowly and thoroughly to make each bite last.

I jolt as the burner phone rings on the bed next to me. Here we go. A coldness settles over me, as it always does when I have to interact with him.

“Hello, Una.”

The voice—this vaguely metallic, slightly filtered, almost inhuman sound—always makes me feel like a ghost is dragging its nails down my spine.

“Hi,” I mumble in a choked whisper.

“Can I assume it’s done?”

I nod, clearing my throat. “Ah… Yes.”

The phone is quiet.

“Hello?”

“Good. It is the job of the righteous to send the wicked to Hell.”

My heart clenches as a shiver tears right through me.

My father was a religious zealot. A monster, a psychopath, a killer, and a horrible father, too. But it was his religious fanaticism more than anything that attracted people to him. People just as insane, who saw him as this almost cult-like figure. They were women, mostly. That much I remember from before he went to prison—the legions of adoring, fawning women who always seemed to be hanging out around our house day and night.

But then there were others. Other zealots like Apostle. They were the true weirdos. Sometimes, I wonder if I met Apostle in that life I vaguely remember before my father was arrested.

But it doesn’t really matter. Given that he has Finn, I’ll do whatever he says now.

I clear my throat. “How’s—”

“He’ll be fine,” Apostle barks. “So long as you do what must be done.”

I shudder, hugging myself as my eyes slide to the wall of photos.

“Find the rest. Do what must be done.”

The line goes dead.

I sleep later than usual the next morning. I’m still sore, too. But after a couple of Extra Strength Tylenols and a long soak in a hot bath, the pain slowly begins to ebb away.

The tingles and illicit ache that come with that pain, however, remain.

I’m sitting on my bed, butted right up against the wall to try and snag a single bar of my neighbor’s WiFi. On my crappy, cracked, ten-year-old laptop, I’m reading about Ares Drakos, head of the Drakos Greek mafia family. As of a few months ago, he’s also husband to Neve Kildare.

That would be, for those keeping score, the niece of the man I killed last night.

I shudder, my stomach knotting as my eyes drop to my hands. As if I’m still expecting to find blood on them, even though I’ve showered twice and taken an hour-long bath since then.

Killing a person isn’t what I thought it would be.

It’s also lingering in my soul way more heavily than I thought it would.

I shake my head, trying to clear those thoughts away. I have to. I simply cannot dwell on my sins, or think too much about how this makes me just a little bit more like the father I wish I could forget.

How I’ve ended up running headlong down the very path he wanted us to follow, even though I never wanted to.

Focus on what’s next. Focus on Finn.

A knock at the door jolts me, yanking my eyes up from the laptop.

It’s him again.

Of course it’s him again.

I wait a good thirty seconds before slowly sliding from the bed and walking quietly to the door. I don’t want him to accidentally see me, and I’m sure he doesn’t want me accidentally to see him. As expected, out on the landing, there’s another black box.

Apostle never calls me on the same phone twice. The one from last night’s brief conversation is already snapped in two with the battery removed, sitting in my bathroom trash can, as instructed.

On the edge of my bed, I take out the new burner. This time, it buzzes instantly.

“Yes—”

“Cillian Kildare is still alive.”

It hits me like a slap to the face.

Like a punch to the stomach.

Like a knife to the heart.

But there also a little glimmer of…something…inside of me that throws me for even more or a loop.

Happiness? Gratitude? Relief?

Excitement.

“Una.”

I shiver, dragging myself back to reality and the robotic voice on the other end of the phone.

“No, that’s impossible—”

“Don’t you ever lie to me again, Una, or there will be consequences.”

I stammer. “B-but I didn’t! I swear to God, I stabbed him in the—”

“For Finn. There will be consequences for Finn.”

I go cold, shaking my head.

“Please…”

“Finish what you started.” Apostle’s voice is tinny through the scrambler. “You have work to do, little bird.”