A Thousand Cuts (Underworld Kings) by Anne Malcom

Author:Anne Malcom [Malcom, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

Sienna

As with the first morning here, Cristian was gone when I woke up. I wasn’t sure whether he knew I wasn’t ready to see him and face my feelings for him in the cold light of day, or if he needed to get up at five in order to do ... whatever it was that mafia bosses did.

It hit me that I didn’t know anything about what being in the mafia really entailed. Laws didn’t mean anything. Loyalty meant everything. If you crossed them then you’d be in a shallow grave. That’s what the media had told me. If I was going to get evidence to get me out of here and put Cristian in prison then I needed to actually go looking for it instead of stomping around the house in silk dresses, getting fucked on the dining room table. I needed to find something that would end all of this.

The thought turned my stomach, and my mind was on Cristian the entire time I went through the motions of my morning routine. I gathered what I knew about him thus far. Not as a mafia kingpin but as a man.

He was serious. Extremely so. It hit me that I hadn’t seen him laugh since I met him. Granted, the situations we’d been in hadn’t exactly been laughing matters, but still. Every time he smirked or smiled, the expression was filled with wickedness. Malice, not joy.

Everything about him was severe, grim almost. Dangerous, deadly, certainly. Like he didn’t have any happiness inside of him. And I liked that.

I was always shocked to hear women I knew talk about what they wanted in a man. Sure, there were qualities that differed depending on the woman and their preference in regard to age, financial status, height, religion, but there was always one common quality.

“I want someone who can make me laugh.”

Everyone wanted to laugh. Everyone wanted a man with a sense of humor. I wasn’t sure if it was because women saw others looking for that and were too scared of being outliers, or if they generally wanted some jokester as a partner.

Whatever it was, I couldn’t make sense of it. I was, for the most part, a serious person. Sure, I liked to play with Eli, laugh with Jessica over a beer or three, but my main pursuit in life was not to have a happy one.

I wanted safety. Security. Great, sordid, filthy sex.

I did not need my partner to be a comedian. In fact, I actively avoided them. Because in my experience, a man who ‘made women laugh’ was someone who was always ‘on.’ Usually someone with mother issues, desperate for approval.

Which was why, along with a lot of other more depressing reasons, I went for older, richer and more serious men.

But when my relationship before Pete ended the way it did, because of my pursuit of seriousness and dirty sex, I was disgusted with myself, shamed and hurt. So I’d decided to search for a man who was the opposite of everything I used to search for.

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