Page 127 of The Beast Who Begged Me

“Last one,” I promise him.

He shakes his head. “You wanna get yourself a warehouse of your very own.” But he hands me the keys. “You know the rules. Clean up and lock up.”

I wait until the door closes before going back to Caligula. He’s been staring at a silent Daniel King the whole time.

“I can give you more,” King says. “I can give you⁠—”

“This one is mine,” I say to Caligula. “If you’ll allow it, Don Clemenza.”

Caligula doesn’t look away from King. “Your claim is honored, Dami.”

King’s eyes widen. His feet scrape against the concrete as he tries and fails to put some distance between us.

I step in front of King and look down at him. His sweat has a sour edge of panic to it now. When he speaks again, the careful English accent is gone.

“When Moscow hears what you’ve done, they’ll put a price on both your heads. Every man who works for you will know how much he could make by putting a blade in your back.”

I keep looking at him. His voice gets louder.

“Your house. Your people. You think you can guard them all? They’ll take everything from you, Orsini.” He jerks his chin toward Caligula. “And him first. They’ll make you watch.”

“They can try,” I say.

He gives a harsh laugh. “You won’t be able to buy him back next time.”

King has already shown me what it costs when someone gets past me. And I can’t promise Caligula that nobody will try again.

But I can make sure this fucker never does.

King opens his mouth, already building toward another threat. I shove his chair over with my boot. He hits the concrete still tied to it, and whatever he was going to say becomes a cry.

I step onto his neck and let my weight settle.

There’s no cheering. No shouting. Just the chair scraping against the concrete as he struggles beneath me. I keep looking down at him until he stops, and when I finally step back, Daniel King is dead.

Caligula is watching me from a few feet away. The ouroboros catches the fluorescent light on his finger, and seeing it there fires something deeply inappropriate inside me.

“You’re mine,” I tell him. It’s all I can manage.

“Yes.” He steps around King’s chair to get to me. His hand closes carefully around my wrist, and I lean down when he lifts his face. There’s nothing hesitant about the way he kisses me, or the way he holds on when I start to pull back. “And you’re mine,” he says against my mouth.

“Every fucking bit.”

He kisses me again, his ring pressing into the back of my neck. Then he lets me go and backs away a few feet. “Then show me. Right here. Right now. No holding back.”

It’s an order.

And I’ve learned to do as I’m fucking told.

CHAPTER 39

CALIGULA

Dami stalks toward me, and I don’t back up. I stand my ground as his mouth crashes onto mine, and only then do I submit. I open for him, let him invade, let him take.

But he’s pulling me back, away from King’s cooling corpse, and I brace my feet to stop him. His head lifts, a question in his eyes. I recognize the instinct to take me somewhere private. To shield me.

I won’t have it.