Fatal Alliances [✓]

34

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

MALIA

I HAD EXPERIENCED A LOT OF THINGS in my twenty five years of living. But I had never stepped foot into a sex club of all places. Though I knew of its existence, I just always assumed it wasn't accessible to the ordinary person —especially not to me.

The Luigi's led the way inside the venue, which at first appeared to be a high-society nightclub, exploding with music and energy, lights bouncing off each corner of the stone walls, and hips gyrating in the core.

To those with entrance slips only, this was merely Viko's Dirty Martini's entryway, accessible to the general population. A gateway to what was concealed further.

I was on edge, on the brink of fleeing and if it hadn't been for Mateo Izaac's iron grip around my hand, his single thumb delicately drawing swirls on my inner wrist, as if to console and divert me at the same time —I would have been long gone.

"I don't like this." I shakily said, inhaling the forbidden scent that surrounded us.

"Neither do I." Mateo finally said, drinking the remainder of the blue concoction he'd been handed upon his arrival.

"Then let's go." I goaded him. "Can't you speak to your mother's friend over the phone? I'm sure we can take a number down. What sort of friends must she have had?"

"My mother was working as a stripper when she met Dominique." Mateo said quietly. "All her friends were questionable for most of her life anyways, he never liked any of the people she was with. She let her old life go, the second she entered his home, in a way he saved her."

"I wasn't expecting that." I admitted, with a bitter taste enveloping the roof of my mouth. "Why didn't you tell me earlier on?"

"When did it ever come up?" Mateo scoffed. "Was I supposed to share this with you when you were on my lap?"

My cheeks scorched at the memory of watching the Opera performance from the royal box, straddling him, as he refused to let me go, though he repositioned me so that I was resting on his knee. Yet, he kept his hand right where I ached and longed to be touched, teasing me with soft strokes of his fingers, along my inner thighs.

"You could have told me." I said through gritted teeth, snapping out of my reverie. "It would have made it easier to understand you."

"Why on earth would you want to understand me? Did you think by telling you these things you could humanise me and relate to me?" He replied coldly.

"Give it a rest." I said, "I have no ill intention, I am not your enemy."

"You're right." Mateo sighed. "You're not my enemy."

"Almost there." Fernando Luigi interrupted our bickering, his arm snaked around his wife's waist, whose eyes kept flickering back at me and making me scowl.