CHAPTER 16

Aleara’s POV.

Embarrassment, shame, rage, confusion.

What the fuck had just happened.

My mind was clouded with a million thoughts, trying to process each one was practically impossible right now. My mind was filled with worry and insecure thoughts.

All in all, what the fucking hell had just happened.

I had just been locked in a kiss with Jay, Atlas’ secondhand man.

This man had willingly approached and kissed me, and then this motherfucker had the balls to tell me that it was a fucking mistake?

My face was an unbelievable shade of bright red.

I could not tell if I was ashamed with the fact that I had kissed the man who kidnapped me and practically destroyed me life or because I read the situation wrong and now this ‘mistake’ had caused such an awkward tension in the room between us.

I tapped my foot impatiently on the ground, creating noise in this uncomfortably loud silence.

Jay paced around the room in circles, cursing loudly under his breath.

He glared at me with his predator eyes, dark, hungry, and angry.

I glanced up at him through my eyelashes, keeping my head held down, fuck I couldn’t even look at the guy right now. My face was like a huge fucking tomato.

He raked his hands through his silky-smooth hair and walked over to me.

“This,” he motioned between the two of us, “never happened,”

My face went even more impossibly red as I gave a brief nod.

“You need to be marked now, come,” He demolished any reason to continue the thread of conversation.

Great. The last thing I wanted to fucking do was to be marked like I was, and object being claimed as part of this mafia.

He marched past me, making a great attempt to hit me with his shoulder on the way past.

Sooo extra.

“Move. We don’t have all fricking day,” he ordered gruffly.

Shut up.

We moved quickly through the halls, walking through sets of doors and down more long stretches of building. I recognized these hallways from my first day here. So many wonderful memories.

I faltered my steps. I hesitated.

Apparently, my hesitation irked Mr. Bipolar over here because he suddenly grabbed my arm with such force that I thought it would pop out of its socket.

“Fuck!” I yelled as his nails pierced my skin, like needles drawing blood.

“Walk like a normal person you bitch!” he screamed back at me. Dickhead.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I sneered through gritted teeth, pissed off as hell.

He pulled harder on my arm, “just shut the hell up,”

I was about to give him another smart remark back but held my tongue. There was no need to say anything else.

I just held up my middle finger, it said it all.

Victory.

He shook his head but made no effort to retaliate. He pulled me down the hallway and unlocked a door, pulling me into a dimly lit room.

It was gloomy and eerily silent, the only sounds being the murmured and hushed voices of men from unseen spaces and corners.

In the center of the room was a single chair and an old school like table.

I made a poor attempt to pull myself from Jay’s grip, only earning a harder and tighter pull on my arm in return.

“She’s ready,” He addressed a man at the table. He was buff and scarred all over, looking to be in about his mid-twenties. This guy looked like he could kill me in an instant.

No, I’m not fucking ready.

I glanced into the man’s swirling dark brown eyes, his caramel hair looked soft to touch, I could see the danger. He was dangerous and I could tell just from his face.

“I see why Atlas chose this one,” his eyes scanned me up and down, hungrily glancing at me. I felt Jay shift uncomfortably beside me, he liked this as much as I did.

“Where did you get her?” the man prompted curiously, earning another uncomfortable shift from Jay. His grip tightened again, warning me not to pull any kind of shit.

“Prostitute auction,” he told the man gruffly.

Huge. Fucking. Liar.

I did understand why Jay felt the need to lie though. It was a far less question evoking answer then telling the truth:

‘I kidnapped her off the side of the street on her fucking birthday because I thought that she was a prostitute, but it turns out she’s not and I fucked up bad, and now my trigger-happy bipolar bestie wants her as his image of settlement, but I have just kissed her and shunned her mercilessly’.

I felt useless in this conversation. It was entirely about me, but I took no part in it, I just had to watch and listen as lies were made up.

The man finally turned to me, offering a tattoo filled arm.

“I’m Luca, it’s a pleasure,” The man, Luca, introduced himself.

“Aleara,” I nodded back, shaking his hand awkwardly. His cool and calculated eyes studied me before he nodded in the direction of the chair in front of him, telling me to sit.

Jay practically carried me to the chair as I struggled against his grasp.

Luca positioned himself on the other side of the table, pulling out a case from behind him. That was when it dawned on me.

This marking… was a tattoo.

I was about to be inked. Bad ass.

He reached for my arm and Jay forced it up onto the table.

“Brace yourself whore,” He hissed as I shot him a deathly glare. The man still had the balls to call me a whore after I decked his sorry ass for it in our training session earlier.

The tattoo gun met my skin, I had to bite down on my bottom lip to stop myself from screaming slurs and curses at this man. He worked quickly and silently, the needle pinching my skin. I watched as the midnight black ink marked my wrist.

Tacere per Sempre

I looked up at Jay, having no clue in the world what these words meant. I guessed they were Italian though; I knew that much. He lifted his sleeve to show me his wrist. On it was engraved a tattoo that mirrored mine exactly.

“Tacere per Sempre is the mafia’s code. It means forever silent. You take the secret of the mafia with you to the grave, you do not sell out your family, you don’t tell anyone at all about the mafia. If you do, you’ll be killed,”

Well, that’s just friendly.

Speaking of friendly, I wasn’t feeling that way at all towards Jay right now.

The guy had made me feel so foolish and embarrassed, my cheeks are still tainted red from the amount of shame crushing me.

Atlas’ POV.

“Alright on my command, one two three, GO!”

We approached a warehouse, twenty of my men cautiously stalked up towards the front gates of a building in front of me.

The Russian scum had been notified and were well and truly aware of the drug shipment I had coming into port from Bolivia.

2.5 tons of cocaine were loaded inside of this warehouse, approximately $2 billion dollars’ worth to be exact. Even though this port is the property of the Italian Mafia, someone had tipped off the Russians and they were onto our top-secret operation.

This shipment was my top priority, the money I could get and the things my mafia could buy. Our suppliers had to be extremely cautious in their shipment, this amount of contraband is like gold to us in the mafia, priceless.

“Antonio,” I addressed my third in command, he turned to me.

“I want this shipment properly dispersed, make sure that no scum gets their hands on it, I have matters to attend to back at the compound,”

Jay had been teaching Aleara some self-defense, I wondered how that shit was going and whether she had broken any fragile bones yet.

I slid into the back seat of one of the blacked-out cars parked out the front, it rolled into gear and sped down the road.

Jay was much like me in the fact that we both preferred solitude, we didn’t trust anyone. Both of us had been used and abused, our trust broken and so we understand that sometimes its better off to be alone. I am curious as to how he would have coped being locked in a room with a fiery bitch all day long.

I didn’t know how to handle Aleara, and I don’t know how to supposably get her to stand by my side and be a symbol of settlement, she isn’t actually good at cooperating.

I know I would spend every day for the rest of my life regretting not choosing one of my close woman acquaintances to be my representation of settlement, that would have made a lot more sense then picking off a random girl from the side of the street. It would have saved me a lot of trouble and money, but no, I was drawn to Aleara, the strange, mysterious, and slightly irritating stranger.

My advisors suggested that I get to know her better, to understand her, to ‘click’ with her if she is to show balance and stability in my demeanor… to get to know her.

To be isolated together.

I shook my head as the car rolled into the compound and passed the guard gates into the garage.

I walked down the halls and into the tattoo room, just in time to watch Aleara flip Jay off and let out a string of colourful words into his face.

Jay stood there, his hands bunched up in closed fists, probably trying to restrain himself from pulling the gun from his pocket and killing her.

“You low life asshat, fucking selfish, son of a-” she stopped mid-sentence, noticing me in the room. Her mouth hung wide open; all she did was blink.

Rage boiled inside of me; how dare she talk to my men like this. Especially my second in command.

She awkwardly saluted me, taking a few steps back, her tiny legs backing shaking as she backed against the wall. My eyes were drawn to the tattoo on her arm and internally nodded approvingly.

“You,” I grunted, “We’re going on a little trip,”