You Don't Own Me: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance (The Russian Don Book 1) (19 page)

To my darling husband,

I couldn’t do without you.

SHANE

‘My milkshake brings all the girls to the yard.’

I
stand at the bar, my hand loosely curled around a bottle of ice-cold beer, and try to imagine a hundred years passing inside these glittering walls. And in a flash I am connected to every sad, twisted fucker inside that cavernous former theater. In a century we’re all going to be nothing but a fistful of dust. But today … Hot blood throbs in my cock and I am still king of my empire of dirt.

I cast my eyes around—and everything is exactly as it should be.

Cool air filters out of vents in the ceiling, loud music beats on my skin like morning rain in the tropics, and roving spotlights pick up waitresses in fluffy white tutus. With their tight little butts on show, they glide around as perky as fucking swans.

Sometimes the spotlights stop to lick one of the scantily clad, insanely glamorous dancers sprinkled around the place like magic dust. They are the candy in my sweet shop. Because … Hidden in the cool shadows of the booths where the spotlights never go, soulless men in dark suits and bulging wallets wait with buckets of champagne and an insatiable taste for pussy. Not that they can actually have any while they’re in here, obviously, but hey, they can jerk off to the memory until their dicks drop off.

Yup, all is well in Eden.

I pick up my beer, bring it to my lips, and notice something that
isn’t
exactly as it should be.

Martin, my manager, is escorting one of the dancers out of one of the VIP rooms. His lips are compressed into a thin line of fury, and she looks shit-scared as she struggles to keep up in her seven-inch-high transparent, plastic shoes. They have red lights inside the wedges that flash every time she takes a tottering step. Fuck, my four-year-old niece wears trainers that flash. I have never seen her before, so she must be new.

A row of beautiful girls preening by the bar exchanges knowing looks. One or two giggle heartlessly when a discreet, black exit door draped with thick, red velvet curtains swallows the pair. Beyond is Martin’s office where the hiring and firing is done.

I take a sip of cold beer, my eyes swinging back in the direction of the VIP room they have just vacated. In an impressive show of clockwork precision, the housemother, Brianna, is already slipping into it. You can tell by her purposeful air and the veiled expression on her carefully made-up face that she is on a clean-up mission.

She emerges a few minutes later, smiling serenely, and nods to one of the girls loitering by the bar. The girl immediately starts walking toward her. They meet by the mirrored pillars, exchange a few words before the girl makes for the VIP room, and Brianna continues, unruffled, on her journey.

Problem solved.

The music changes and AronChupa’s quirky track ‘I’m an Albatraoz’ fills the charmed air. One of the club’s favorite dancers, Melanie, a sleek black girl in a skin-tight catsuit with geometric patterns, struts energetically onto the stage. The effect of her appearance is instantaneous: the atmosphere in the club becomes electric. The stage lights are switched off, and Melanie disappears. All that remains is the collection of fluorescent patterns on her costume working their way strongly up a pole. It is a marvelous sight and the audience erupts in a collective roar of approval.

I place my drink down and turn back to watch the curtained door. I don’t tend to interfere in the day-to-day running of my club. Why would I? Any fool can see that between Martin and Brianna they run a very tight ship. And yet something about flashing shoes has my interest piqued.

Perhaps it is because I can always tell an innocent with one look, and she is as green as they come. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is her first attempt at strip dancing. But mostly because I can never let an injustice pass. It used to get me into all kinds of trouble when I was a kid, but it’s in my DNA; I just can’t look the other way.

Less than five minutes later she tumbles back into the club. Her ridiculous wedges are still flashing, but tears are streaming down her face. Martin has cracked the whip. She has been fired. She lurches toward a side door that leads to the changing rooms. I walk quickly to the door nearest to me and enter my pass code. The door opens into the passage she has entered.

‘Oh!’ she exclaims when she sees me. In the bright lights of the corridor, her face, under its thick make-up, has a washed out hue, and her eyes are glassy and distraught.

‘Come with me,’ I say, and she silently follows me upstairs to my office. I hold the door open and let her precede me. Closing the door, I then walk toward my liquor cabinet.

‘Would you like a drink?’ I throw over my shoulder.

‘No thank you, Mr. Eden,’ she replies meekly.

I turn my head and meet her eyes. She is actually a stunner. ‘Call me Shane,’ I tell her softly.

She frowns with confusion.

‘Have a seat,’ I invite and pour two stiff measures of brandy.

Walking over to her, I hold out a glass. She accepts it with a murmur of thanks and I notice the sudden change in her body language. She thinks I am coming on to her. Unsure about my intentions, she has reverted to her usual routine. Sweet, really.

I have occasionally dated girls from the club if they’re totally irresistible and they get my ‘have cock will travel’ rules, but generally I prefer not to. It’s bad business all round. I move to my desk and, leaning my butt against the edge, cross my arms over my chest and smile at her.

She smiles back tremulously, her eyes moist with invitation. In a practiced gesture of seduction, she looks down and bats her waterlogged eyelashes coquettishly.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask her.

‘Bubbles.’

I hide a smile. ‘Right, Bubbles. Want to tell me what happened?’

She turns bright red. ‘Martin fired me,’ she confesses painfully.

‘Why?’

‘I … I … let a customer … uh … touch me,’ she reveals.

‘You must have known you’re not allowed to. Why did you do it?’

She looks up at me, her eyes large and begging. ‘I swear I didn’t want to. I told him no, but he said if I didn’t allow him to he would call for another girl. I’ve only been here for a week and I’ve hardly made enough to cover my house fees. He was the first man who asked me for a private dance. I didn’t want to break the rules, honestly I didn’t, but at the same time I didn’t want to lose my best chance to make some money, especially after he told me that everyone did it.’

She opens her left palm in an appealing gesture. ‘So I told him I needed to go to the toilet and I went out into the club and asked Nikki for advice, since she’s the best earner in the club.’

Her face becomes bitter. ‘She told me I’d be stupid to let such a high flyer escape. And that any of the other girls would have touched him without a second thought. “It’s totally harmless. Just touch him from the outside of his clothes and no one will be the wiser,” she said.’

I frown. ‘Were you not told there are cameras inside every booth?’

‘Yes,’ she admits sadly. ‘And Martin has just taken me to his office and made me watch myself act like a fool. But Nikki convinced me that the cameras are just there for show. That there is no film in them and no one actually monitors them. I know I did wrong, but I truly believed her. She is the star of this club. Nobody makes more money than her. I’m a nobody; I’ve just started working in this club and I’m no competition to anybody, so I never thought that she would play such a dirty trick on me. How wrong I was.’ Her voice is filled with regret.

She leans forward suddenly, her face intense. ‘I felt I had no choice. She told me that if I don’t start earning money soon I will be thrown out because I was taking the place of a girl who could be earning big money for the club. I really didn’t know what else to do.’ Her face fills with sadness. ‘I have commitments. My mother, my babies. I have twins in Brazil. My mother is taking care of them. I need to send money back. They need me to survive.’

She is so young, it never occurred to me that she is a mother. ‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen.’

I nod and gaze at her. She lacks confidence, but Brianna did not make a mistake taking her on, and Nikki had good reason to try to eliminate her. She has something very special, and one day she will be a valuable asset to this club and great competition to Nikki.

I put my brandy down. ‘I’ll give you another chance, but if you ever break any of my club’s rules again, you’re out and, as per industry practice, your name will be circulated to all the other clubs.’

She clasps her hands together, her eyes shining with gratitude. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much, Shane. I promise on my two children’s lives I’ll never let you down.’

‘Good.’

As if unable to contain her excitement she bounces out of her chair like a puppy.

‘Go home, Bubbles. I’ll have a word with Martin later.’

She comes close enough for me to feel the heat coming off her body and, tipping forward in her flashing wedges, plants a feather-light kiss on my cheek. I cock an eyebrow and she lets her heels drop back to the ground and, slowly, licks her thickly glossed lips. Yes, Bubbles definitely has something.

A ripe, tight, eager pussy. Very predictably, my cock is interested, but my cock is always full of bad fucking ideas. Girls like Bubbles, they look like they’re figuring on a cheap thrill with a hot, hard dick for the night, but that’s like watching a snake slither up to you and thinking, Awww … look, it wants a little cuddle. Take it from me, they don’t even give you a chance to take the condom off before they’re making wedding plans in their heads. Me, I like a little bit of Angela, Pamela, Sandra and Rita.

I pull a fifty from my shirt pocket and hold it between my index and forefinger. ‘Take a taxi home tonight,’ I tell her.

Disappointment flashes in her chocolate eyes, but she takes the hint and deftly plucks the note from my fingers. The same action has been performed ever since man first invented currency, and its primal nature tugs at something in me. Have I really done Bubbles a favor today? She’s naïve and innocent now, but one day she will learn all the things that strippers learn about men, and their greed, and their lust, and their ugliness. She will learn to exploit those qualities and she will make lots of money, but will that really be a good thing?

‘Don’t do anything the little voice inside you tells you not to,’ I tell her.

She nods slowly. ‘You are a very beautiful man. Not just your face and body, but your heart too,’ she whispers. She pauses for a moment. ‘I promise you will never regret this decision.’ 

Then she walks out of my office and closes the door quietly behind her.

SHANE

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

                                                                                                        —Steven Wright

I
hear her shoes clatter down the wooden stairs as I light a cigarette and take a deep drag. Walking over to the large one-way mirror, I look down at my club. My eyes look for and immediately find Nikki. She is sparkling like a diamond. Sitting next to a man, her pose provocative, she raises perfectly manicured fingers and over the thin material of her gown, sensuously rubs her nipple. Her mark—I can tell straight away he’s got a cock full of bad fucking ideas too—stares, transfixed.

You have to hand it to her, she’s good, she’s real good.

She even had me fooled once.

With girls like Bubbles you see them coming. But when Nikki approaches you, you don’t even see the snake, you just see the grass moving. Nikki is poisonous even when her legs are splayed wide open and she is moaning, in that crazy Russian accent of hers, ‘It’s so deep, baby. Oh yes, fuck me, baby. Fuck me hard. Show this nasty pussy who its owner is.’

She crashed a vase into a mirror when I ended it. Good thing I’m an old hand at ducking. Sometimes, I still catch her watching me with a strange mixture of frustrated lust and venom, but she refuses to leave. Why, I don’t know. Any club would welcome her with open arms. I could have fired her, but why spoil a good thing? She’s the club’s highest earner.

I am suddenly distracted by a flash of white that appears in my peripheral vision. My eyes shift to follow it. A girl in a shimmery white dress is moving across the floor in the direction of the toilets. Her walk is slow and sexy, effortless, and her bone structure is very fine and delicate. In the dog world she would be a Saluki bred by the Bedouin to race across the desert sand during a hunt. A dog considered too fine to be called simply a dog.

Her skin is very pale and her hair is raven black. It pours thickly down her back like an oil slick. Normally, I would have been put off by the combination of pale skin and long black hair. It reminds me too much of the chalk-white, black-wig-wearing female demons in the Japanese horror flicks that my sister and I used to secretly watch until the early morning hours when we were really young, but something about this woman …

I exhale smoke.

A strobe light catches her face and my eyes widen.

Whoa! She is far more stunning than I had imagined. In the blue light she looks almost unreal, like a creature from a fairy tale. So pure she cannot be tainted by vulgarity or coarseness even when she is surrounded by it. The quality is so rare I don’t feel her call in my cock where most women make their presence felt, but deep in my gut. A tendril of excitement twists up my spine.

I want that woman.

Badly.

I kill my cigarette in an ashtray on my desk and leave my office. I take the stairs two at a time, stride down the corridor, and enter the club. Cool air from the vents above hits my face. Dillon Francis and DJ Snake’s track ‘Get Low’ is playing. I position myself by the Chinese bar with its blue and white porcelain tiles.

An acquaintance grasps my hand and pumps it. ‘Hey, Shane, how you doing? Let me buy you a drink?’

‘Thanks,’ I say with a smile, ‘but I’ve got one coming.’

He wants to talk, but I turn away from him and watch the door that leads from the toilets. My drink arrives and I take a gulp. The door opens. A woman comes out. The door shuts again. I am holding my breath. I let it go in a rush. Why am I behaving like this? My skin prickles, as if it knows something I don’t.

The door opens once more and she walks out. Her stride is still a slow sway, but up close she is even more breathtaking. And again I have the impression that she does not belong in this place. As if she is a shimmering water queen risen from a river, able to transform boredom into a feast of the senses.

As she gets closer I have the impression of something exotic. It could be her nose or the straightness of her eyebrows. But blood from distant lands flows in her veins. Her lips are full and painted some spicy color, a mixture of turmeric and chili. Her eyes are elongated and look straight ahead.

She would have passed by without noticing me if I had not shot out an arm and grasped her delicate wrist. Her reaction is strange because it is so deliberate. She stops walking and lets her gaze swing slowly from my hand wrapped around hers up to my eyes. This close, her irises are light green and liquid, the pupils flaring. They are almost ethereal. I have the weird sensation that I am waking her up from a dream. It is disconcerting.

Inside the circle of my fingers, her bones are as fragile as a bird’s. I stare into her deeply mesmerizing eyes. They make me want to know everything about her. About what has made her so fragile and otherworldly. They make me want to possess her.

‘And who would you be?’ I ask, flashing her my most charming smile.

She stares up at me for a few seconds longer. Then she frowns. ‘I’m probably not what you think I am.’

What surprises me is that she did not mean her answer to be provocative or flirtatious. That instantly makes her the most interesting woman I have ever met. My cock is pulsing and crushing against my jeans like crazy, so, naturally, I promise myself that I am going to fuck her. I’ll be damned, I can’t remember the last time a woman had me this strong. I widen my grin. ‘What do you think I think you are?’

Her lips move and words quiver out. ‘A random pick-up.’

‘Wrong. I think you’re the most beautiful woman in this club, and I’d like to take you out.’

‘Where would you take me?’ she asks curiously.

‘The woods.’ My answer irritates me.
Bravo, Shane. You sound like a fucking serial killer.

But the first flicker of interest appears in her eyes. ‘The woods?’

‘Yes. I have an old chateau in France. It is very beautiful this time of the year. At night the fireflies come out.’

She inhales with surprise. ‘Fireflies?’

‘A sight to behold, they are. I never tire of watching them as they blink around the garden. There used to be more, but there are fewer and fewer of them now.’

‘I have never seen fireflies. They seem more like the stuff of myths. How magical to see them for real.’

‘Then you must come to Saumur.’

‘Saumur,’ she murmurs, tasting the name on her tongue.

‘I promise you’ll love it. There are crickets and bull frogs and wild boar, and occasionally a peacock looking for a mate will wander into the grounds.’

Her mouth parts with wonder. ‘Really?’

‘Scout’s honor.’

‘Will I have to sleep with you to see all this?’

I am still holding her hand. I stroke the silky skin on the inside of her wrist with my thumb. ‘Not if you don’t want to,’ I say.

She smiles slowly, sexily. When she smiles she’s as beautiful as a field of fireflies. 

‘We can just be friends?’ she asks cautiously.

My eyebrows shoot up. That’s a new one for the books. I honestly don’t think anyone has
ever
said that to me. ‘We can be whatever you want us to be.’

She leans closer, her eyes suddenly alight with mischief. ‘Are you wearing mascara?’

I laugh. ‘No.’

‘You have very fancy eyelashes,’ she says solemnly.

‘I could say the same about you.’ I swear I have never had such a weird conversation with a woman before.

‘But I’m wearing mascara,’ she says with a grin.

‘Do you have a name, mascara-wearing babe?’

‘My name is Elizabeth Dilshaw, but everyone calls me Snow,’ she says as she gently tugs her wrist out of my grasp.

I don’t want to but I let go. ‘Really? Snow?’

‘Yes. I was born in India where almost everyone is dark-skinned, so when I was born so fair and with such a full head of midnight-black hair, all the nurses started calling me Snow White. The name stuck and I became known as Snow.’

I smile broadly. She did step out of a fairy tale, after all. ‘Skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony.’

‘And you are?’

‘Shane.’

‘Yes, I think I’d like to see the fireflies and have you as my friend,’ she says softly.

Izzy Azalea and Rita Ora’s ‘Black Widow’ is playing. There are people brushing past us; I can smell their perfume and cologne. They serve as a backdrop for her. Someone calls my name, but I don’t turn to look. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

She bends her head and shakes it, and her beautiful hair moves like a silky curtain around her face. ‘No, I’m with … friends. I have to go back to our table.’

I take my phone out of my pocket. ‘What’s your phone number?’

She lifts her head and tells it to me and I key her number into my phone. Not taking my eyes off her, I press the call button. A bird starts chirping from inside her bag.

‘Now you have my number too,’ I tell her.

‘Yes, now I have your number,’ she says slowly.

The moment is strange, surreal even. Full of undercurrents and deeper meanings, it doesn’t belong in the middle of a club relentlessly dedicated to the pursuit of the pleasures of the flesh. All the clever words and witty remarks have deserted me. I don’t want to let her go.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. I ignore it. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ I say.

She nods slowly. ‘Yeah, maybe you will.’

For some odd reason her voice is sad. As if this promise has been made before and never kept, even though I cannot even imagine a scenario where a man takes her number and does not call. She is impossibly intriguing. I resist the temptation to reassure her that I will call. 

‘Well, then. Nice to have met you,’ she says and, turning, begins to walk away.

‘Snow,’ I call.

She turns around, one charcoal eyebrow raised.

‘I will call you,’ I promise. It has never happened to me before. I have never cared to reassure anybody that I will call. If I felt like calling the next day, I called. If I didn’t, well … c’est la fucking vie.

One side of her mouth lifts, and then she turns away and carries on in her path, again an incorruptible fairy tale creature. When she disappears from my sight I can’t stop smiling. I take a triumphant sip of my drink before tilting my body slightly so I have a view of her table.

And that moment is like that video of John Newman’s track, ‘Love Me Again’. Do you know it? Where a boy and a girl meet in a dreary club. They escape from her wannabe gangster boyfriend and run out of the back doors. Hand in hand, full of hope and excitement, thinking they have outrun the bad guys, they get out of a narrow alleyway and dash straight into an oncoming vehicle. The video ends abruptly on a black screen.

I guess you are supposed to infer that they die.

Snow’s table is Lenny the Gent’s table.

The fairy tale takes an unexpected and unwelcome turn. Lenny ‘the Gent’ is not the wannabe variety but a real gangster. What they used to call a mobster. They call him the Gent because he is always so fucking polite. He would say ‘please’ or ‘do you mind’ before he hacked off your face. The Gent is surrounded by beautiful, giggling women vying for his attention, but he gazes at Snow’s approach with the kind of hunger that makes me sick to my stomach.

Fucking hell. Straight into an oncoming vehicle! 

Snow is Lenny’s woman.

When she reaches his table, he stretches out his hand. For a second she hesitates then she opens her bag and gives him her phone. He pockets it, and taking another phone out of his pocket gives that to her. She puts it into her bag and sits down beside him, and he places his hand on her thigh.

I try to make out her expression, but her face is as smooth as a statue. Like a man in a daze I start walking toward her. My mind is blank. Fortunately, I collide with a waitress.

‘Sorry. It was my fault,’ she apologizes.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I tell her, my hypnotic trance broken.

I stop where I am standing and look at Snow. She is staring vacantly into her drink, her numb face the perfect frame for her empty eyes. The emptiness is total. I recognize its significance instantly. Her frozen body and expression are an instinct to survive. She has locked herself away in a place where she cannot be corrupted by the baseness and degradation around her.

A nearly naked woman is writhing her flesh close to Lenny the Gent’s face, but, like mine, his eyes are glued on Snow.

There is only one way this thing is going to end. Badly. But I don’t care. I have always gone where angels fear to tread. The blood expands in the veins of my forearms.

Snow will be mine.

The second mouse will get the cheese.