Submission Specialist(Still a Bad Boy #2)(54)

“This morning you were all by yourself, but you’re not anymore. You don’t know Jace yet, but you will. He can do anything.”

She reached out and touched my shoulder and then followed her husband. Kendall had a lot of faith in him. I wished I had as much.





Chapter 26

Skylar

The door opened and the one they called Gavino Bertolini waddled in. Enrico, who I thought I heard someone say was a relative of Gavino’s, had been busy running cables from somewhere outside the room to the back of the large screen TV. He’d also set up a video camera behind me, to record me watching NHBFC-89, and Austin’s fight in particular.

“Turn on the TV, the main event is next up. She still keepin’ her mouth shut?”

“Yeah,” said Renato.

It was almost impossible to understand him when he tried to say full sentences, due to the fact that his face was a mess and his jaw had been wired shut, but that affirmation came through loud and clear. Enrico pressed a button on the TV and it sprang to life, showing some commercials.

“What’s the matter, sweetness? Still sulking because of the little knife thing?” Gavino asked.

He oozed over to me and stroked my cheek with his hand. My skin wanted to crawl completely off my body at his touch. I flinched away but, cuffed to the chair that was bolted to the ground in the middle of a large plastic sheet, there was only so far I could go before his hand found me again.

“He didn’t cut you deep, it won’t even scar. Oh fuck no, you’ve got the kind of face we can make some money off.”

His hand went down my neck and slipped inside my shirt to cup my breast. I shrieked in disgust and tried to squirm away, tears beginning to spill from my eyes.

“See boys? Listen to that. She’s an underground porn star waiting to happen. If we had more time, you’d be starring in a whole bunch of videos for sale to a very particular crowd of people, and one for me personally too. How many guys you think we could get in the train, Enrico?”

“For her? With a couple weeks’ notice? Couple hundred in a night, I guess.” Enrico shrugged, not looking up from the video camera instruction manual.

Gavino pulled his hand back. “Yeah, a couple of those full-length features, sign up anybody who wanted seconds. I bet we could get fifty movies out of her before her snuff film.”

“Probably.”

Renato garbled something in response, and I was sure I wasn’t the only one who had no idea what he said. Gavino continued as if Renato hadn’t made a sound.

“So you’ve got a big career change happening if loverboy wins his fight, and every time a new guy blows his load inside you, I want you to remember it’s happening because Austin Aquila didn’t know his fuckin’ place.”

My heart threatened to break itself in two at the mention of Austin. The entire time I’d been trapped here, they’d been driving that point home. A few times, wallowing in self-pity or in terror, like when Renato cut my head at the hairline with that huge knife, I almost lost control and let myself believe it.

Then I remembered all those times we shared that nobody else knew about, those precious little moments that belonged to us and us alone. I never had anybody to share those with before Austin.

Sometimes we’d lie in bed until birds started singing outside, just talking, joking, sharing little pieces of ourselves. Austin never told me about this, but he did let me in to some other private corners of his past. Maybe he thought I couldn’t handle this truth.

Then there was the fact that I was carrying his baby. Our lives were irrevocably intertwined now. If we had any lives left to intertwine.

I barely contained a sob when I remembered yesterday morning at home after I read that pregnancy test. It was heart-wrenching to think that the first thing I ever told my child was shaping up to be a lie.

I promise I wanted to do better, little one, I thought.

There was another promise I’d made too. I held it deep inside myself, so far down that nothing these mobsters said had come close to touching it.

I promised Austin that, in me, he had a love he could rely on. That was one promise I wasn’t going to let them turn into a lie. I loved him. I loved him no matter what. He didn’t do this to me. They did.

“Hey Enrico, something’s been bothering me,” said Gavino.

“What’s that, boss?”

“This bitch’s name. Skylar Cross. Hey, bitch, did you know a guy… what was his fuckin’ name… Malcolm Cross? That was the guy at NHBFC wasn’t it, Enrico?”

“Oh yeah,” said Enrico, dragging out the last word thoughtfully.

A long-held hope was suddenly wrenched out of my clutches when Enrico started laughing at some sick memory. How could my uncle have been mixed up with these people too?