novelxo Toxic Love: Chapter 17
Two nights after the wedding, Tempest moves in. I know she was stalling on that, and I’d have been fine with delaying too, except for the image problem of my new wife living ninety miles away.
The dons, the capos…they’re not stupid. They understand what this is. But the whole point of me getting married was to showcase an image, so I intend to uphold that image.
But there’s another reason I’ve put my foot down about Tempest moving in with me: the fact that I know her dark secret now.
I’m not even really prepared to ask myself what it is about that makes me possessive of her in a way I haven’t been up till now. Makes me want to keep her safe—to lock her in a box, like some sort of overprotective psycho. Outside of Bianca, that’s never something I’ve ever been before.
So what the fuck changed?
Tempest isn’t wrong: sad as it is, her…passing would slap a neat little bow on this whole situation. I’d no longer be fake married, and, come on. What’s better than a nice married man running Club Venom?
A widower, that’s what. It’s neat, it’s efficient, and it’s bulletproof.
…It also makes me feel like a sociopath, because that “neat little bow” entails this woman dying.
So I suppose that’s a major contributing factor to me overriding her excuses and demanding that she move in: I want to protect her, in some weird way.
However, Tempest, as anyone who’s known her for longer than forty seconds would understand, has a certain…bullheaded willfulness to her. In other words, she’s a headstrong fucking terror when she wants to be. And she is clearly not down with moving all the way from Manhattan out to the Hamptons.
I mean, I get it. It’s ninety miles from her brothers, and she’s not exactly a Hamptons gal. So in the end, a compromise is reached: we’ll both move, to my penthouse in the West Village.
I mean, it is closer to Venom. And, as Tempest was all too eager—and smug—to point out, the ability to compromise is a “cornerstone of any strong marriage.”
I’m also pretty sure that strong marriages involve sleeping in the same bed, but in our case, we’ll be skipping that. Which I’m more than okay with. I’ve never once spent the entire night with a woman, and I see no reason to start now.
…Even if I was her first.
At least, I think I was. I’m still not quite sure what the fuck she meant by “it is now”, when I asked her if that time in my office at the wedding was her first time.
There’s a part of me that’s more than a little pissed about not being told that the girl I fucked so roughly in my office, still wearing her wedding dress, was possibly a virgin. Again, I’m not a monster, and taking a virginity in that manner wasn’t really ever on my bucket list.
But that said…the idea that I was her first is more than slightly intoxicating. Even if we haven’t so much as looked at each other since.
Tempest has been moved into my penthouse for all of three hours when I find myself standing outside her bedroom door. I knock, and when there’s no answer, I simply open the door and walk in.
“Um, hello?!”
Her voice comes from the ensuite bathroom. The door isn’t shut all the way, so I march over and rap my knuckles on the doorframe.
“You decent?”
“No?”
I walk in anyway.
“Are you fucking serious!?” Tempest is quickly buttoning up her pants as she stands from the toilet. She glares daggers at me. “What the hell, Dante!”
“Did I interrupt something fun?”
She rolls her eyes and glances back at the toilet. “Only if you’re into pee,” she mutters.
Spoiler: I’m not.
“And if I was?”
She wrinkles her nose. “Ew?”
“We don’t kink shame in this house.”
She rolls her eyes. “Well, it’s still in the toilet if you want to like, I don’t know…whatever you do with people’s pee?” She makes a grossed out face.
“This is what I do with it.”
She shivers as I walk past her and flush the toilet. Tempest’s face burns as she moves over to the sink to wash her hands.
“What do you want, Dante?”
This is how it’s been since the wedding. And I don’t need to be a psychologist to understand that what she’s doing is overcompensating.
She thinks she shared too much. She opened up too much, made herself too vulnerable. And now, she’s yanking things back in the other direction by being her usual smart-mouth, smug little brat of a persona.
As if that’s going to make me forget what she told me, or the way her cunt felt when she came all over my cock.
“I need you to dress up.”
She’s not the bait, but I am going hunting in a week or so.
Ostensibly, the dinner I’m holding is to meet and greet some potential new investors in Venom. Some mafia types will be attending, as well as mafia-adjacent finance guys. But it’s all a cover. What I’m really doing is hunting.
When my older sister Claudia was first taken from us, we all thought it was just random violence. That she’d been out on the wrong night, and crossed the wrong guy, who drugged her drink, raped her, and then killed her to cover his crimes.
At least, that’s what the police report says.
But I have a way of digging, and prodding, and ripping at the edges of things until I’ve peeked behind the curtain and I’m satisfied that I know the truth. And nothing about that report made me think we had reached the truth, so I dug deeper.
That’s when I uncovered them.
They call themselves the Apex Club. They’re mostly very connected, very rich, and from very prominent, untouchable families. They’re the type of men who think the world belongs to them.
There’s plenty of private “old boys” clubs out there where rich, entitled douchebags can drink together and congratulate each other on being rich, entitled douchebags.
Apex Club is next level.
To those “men” who wear the golden lion signet ring, being rich, powerful, and untouchable isn’t enough. They need dominion over others—namely young women and girls.
That’s who killed my sister. That’s who I hunt, and whose rings I keep as trophies in the box in my office. The crown jewel in that collection is the one with blue and red eyes, that belonged to the man who murdered my sister: a waste of skin named Alan Codrey, heir to the Codrey family oil fortune.
It will be my eternal regret that after I tracked Alan down, in his attempt to escape me, he shattered his jaw falling off a fire escape. He lived—at least for another three days of what I hope was truly agonizing pain and misery while I tortured him. But he wasn’t able to tell me anything more about the Apex Club.
I’ve killed five of them so far. Later this week, I’m going to see if there’s a sixth on the horizon.
Tempest arches a brow as she turns to lean against the white marble bathroom vanity. Her arms fold over her chest.
“Excuse me?”
“I need you to dress up.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening.”
“It’s not a request.”
Our eyes lock, and I relish the pink flush that heats her face. We may not have even touched each other since the other day, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t get all flustered around me now. Especially when she’s cornered like this.
“I’m your wife, right?” she mutters.
“It would appear so.”
“Not your servant? Or your slave?”
I smile thinly. “I think that could be up for interpretation.”
“Think again, asshole.”
“Hmm. I’ll get right on that. In the meantime,” I level a stern glare at her. “Dress up.”
Tempest follows me out of the bathroom and into her walk-in closet, where I start rifling through her clothes.
“I’m sorry, can I help you with something?” she snaps. “What exactly am I dressing up for, anyway?”
“Ah, I knew you’d come around.”
She glares at me. “I meant what would I, potentially, be dressing up for?”
“Dinner, with guests.”
“What sort of guests?”
I exhale heavily, turning back to her. “How about you just do as you’re told for once?”
Her face heats.
“Tempest, I just need you to put something nice on. Something sexy.”
Okay, I lied. She’s kind of the bait.
“Wow,” she says flatly. “What are you, my pimp? Who are these guests?”
“Nuns, schoolteachers, the PTA board.” I smirk at her. “Who do you think?”
“Mafiosos? Investors in your little club?”
“Potential investors.”
“Ahhh, I see,” she mutters. “So I’m dressing sexy to make a bunch of pricks more willing to give you money.”
“Something like that.”
I turn back to her wall of black clothes, scowling as I paw through the hangers.
“Is this seriously all you have?”
“I didn’t realize being your fake wife had a fucking dress code,” Tempest snaps.
“Well, it does And none of this will do.”
Tempest glares at me as I pull out my phone and call Ginevra.
Ginevra was always the one tailor that my father considered his better. And even though she’s pushing eighty by now, Ginevra is still the best tailor and seamstress in all of New York, probably one of the best in the world.
She’s also a good friend.
She greets me warmly, and pretty soon we’re playing a quick game of catch up in Italian. I glance over, smirking to myself as I see the confused look on Tempest’s face.
Then I tell Ginevra what I need, thank her profusely, and hang up.
She glares at me. “Who was that?”
“A friend who’s going to help you look fantastic.”
Tempest gives me a suspicious look. “For the dinner for a bunch of sleazy potential investors in your club, where you, what, fuck around in orgies all day?”
“I don’t participate at the club.”
“So it’s more of a you sitting in a dark room watching security cameras and jerking off kind of situation?”
“I’m sorry, remind me what you do for work?”
Tempest gives me a frosty look. I give her a hard stare right back and try and pretend that I can’t see the hard points of her nipples through her Black Sabbath t-shirt.
“This is what you signed up for, little hurricane,” I growl.
“I didn’t sign up for—”
“You literally did,” I mutter. “In blood, I might add.”
Her lips purse. I smile.
“This is your new reality, Tempest.” She shivers as I lean down to let my lips brush her ear, and she sucks in her breath sharply. “I’d get used to it.”