Make Me Scream, Daddy

Chapter 5

“What the f**k do you think I’m doing?” The picture of Olivia flutters to the ground between us and it’s like being caught with my d**k in my hand. I squash it beneath my boot before he can see.

But Taras is a dog with a bone. He sees it and instantly understands. “I think we have other options for legitimizing the business. Cleaner ones. Dr. Aster’s clinic is⁠—”

“Keep the surveillance on her facility.” I clear my throat. “It’s the only way to move forward.”

“Oh, c’mon, man,” he spits. “You want legitimacy? Buy a f*****g casino, Stefan. Hell, go old school and get yourself a fleet of laundromats. We’ll wash all our dirty money right up. But this clinic scheme reeks of you chasing a⁠—”

I slam my fist down on the table. Gun parts go flying. A cut opens on the side of my hand, blood trickling down to dot my cuff. “You question my judgment again and I’ll ship your tongue to your mother in a jewelry box.”

Taras chuckles, completely unfazed. “Ah. So it’s like that?”

I breathe through my nose. In. Out. My control is slipping, and I hate it.

“Yes. It’s like that.” I turn away so he can’t see my face. “So if you have anything actually useful to say, say it now.” I start to organize the parts again. “Because if you’re still here by the time this gun is ready to fire, I’m using it on you.”

I catch his eye roll in my peripherals. He’s been my best friend long enough to be familiar with my temper.

“I have other stuff, but nothing worth my life.” He snorts. “Just a mid-level employee missing from the office. Not picking up his phone, no one has seen him in a while.”

“A snitch?”

He shrugs. “Could be. Smells like it. Doubt he knows anything important, though.”

“Keep looking for him,” I order. “And when you catch him, feed him to Koshka.” The cat in our Dorchester warehouse has a taste for traitors. “Now, leave, and take the stressed-out cigarette smoke with you.”

“Fuckin’ pot calling the fuckin’ kettle black, talking to me about stress…” he mumbles under his breath as if I can’t hear him. But he rises and crushes the cigarette beneath his heel. “For a man who claims this is all business, you’re awfully touchy today. Could it be because of who you’re meeting with in just a few⁠—?”

I click the final piece into place and turn, my gun pointed at Taras.

My best friend holds up his hands even as he smirks, slowly retreating towards the entrance. “Got it. I’ll just see myself out then.”

When the door mercifully clicks shut, I grip the edge of the shooting stall.

Inhale. Exhale.

I look down at the items arranged before me—vodka, a Bersa .380, and the stolen photo of Olivia with her orchids, crumpled on the floor.

Her smile is soft in the grainy image. Unguarded. Dangerous.

Her laugh from the gala echoes in my head. It wasn’t crystalline bullshit, fake and fancy, filtered through money and manners like the rest of them. It was raw. It was real.

My fingers twitch, the way they always do before a kill. The urge to grab, to keep, to own her radiates through me.

I should probably worry about that impulse. But I don’t have time for that.

I glance at my watch. Oliva has sixty seconds before she’s late, but I’m not worried. She’ll be prompt. I know her. Control recognizes control.

As the seconds tick down—five, four, three, two…—there’s a knock at the door. A member of my household staff, too scared to barge in the way each of my seconds just did, pokes his nose through the door.

“Mr. Safonov? Dr. Aster is here.”

I nod and rack the gun slide. “Send her in.”

You could spike a head on those turrets.

That’s my first thought as I drive through the gates of Stefan Safonov’s estate.

Estate. That’s how it’s labeled on Google Maps. It’s like I’m in a Jane Austen novel, except my Mr. Darcy is a sociopathic billionaire with my fragile future clenched in his bloody, tattooed hands.

I slow down, practically hanging out my window to see all the way to the peaked roofline. This place is a gothic villain’s wet dream: ivy-choked limestone, gables refined to a razor’s edge, and a driveway lined with imported birch trees that Architecture Digest called “otherworldly.”

The birch branches reach like skeletal fingers toward the gray Boston sky. Each luxurious detail is a reminder of what I’m here for: money.

I need it like I need air, and Stefan Safonov has more than enough to go around.

The vulnerability makes my stomach clench as I ease my seven-year-old Prius into park between a Bentley and a Maserati. My car looks every bit as out of place as I feel in my too-tight blazer and the same heels I wore to the gala.

Nothing says desperate like an outfit repeater. My mother would be horrified. Then again, she already is, so what do I really have to lose?

A stone-faced guard in a dark suit approaches my car. I roll down the window with a smile he doesn’t return.

“Dr. Aster?”

It’s technically a question, but I get the idea he already knows exactly who I am. The number of cameras on me right now has to be astronomical. There’s probably an X-ray machine running over my car as we speak, scanning the contents of my purse to decide if my nearly-empty bottle of Tums is an explosive device.

I swallow back the anxiety crawling up my throat. “That’s me.”

“Turn off your car,” he orders. “Follow me.”

I scramble out of my car to follow the man, tugging my skirt down and straightening my already straight posture. I may not have lived up to all of my mother’s expectations, but I felt her knee in my back enough times to know never to slouch.

Each step into Safonov’s fortress feels like sinking deeper into quicksand. The foyer ceiling soars three stories high, a crystal chandelier that could double as a weapon hanging from the ceiling. Beautiful and lethal.

There’s a spiral staircase that wraps around the foyer, but I’m taken to a separate door and led down, not up.

Below the opulence.

Below the facade.

Down stairs that spiral into what can only be described as a billionaire’s murder basement.

My heels rap against the marble. Tick. Tick. Tick. It’s like a timer, but I don’t know what it’s counting down to and I really don’t want to find out.

A door booms open, and there he stands. Stefan Safonov is backlit against a bullet-riddled cement wall, assembling a handgun. His sleeves are rolled to expose forearms mapped with more tattoos I didn’t see at the gala. I have no business trying to decode them, but my eyes trace the black swirls anyway, helpless against curiosity.

He doesn’t turn as I enter. He doesn’t even turn when he speaks.

“You’re late.”

His deep voice is muffled this far below ground, like we’re in a tomb. A shiver snakes up my spine, but I never let it bend.

I pull my eyes from the wall of mounted firearms to my watch just as the second hand touches the twelve. “I’m right on time despite having to descend to the lowest circle of hell. What’s with the guns? Are we here to negotiate or audition for John Wick 5?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. Then Stefan turns and holds the pistol out, butt-first. “Let’s see what you can do.”

I back up like he’s handing me a venomous snake. Actually, I might respond better to the snake. “No thank you.”

“We can’t be in business together if you’re six feet under. You should know how to protect yourself. Boston is full of men who take rejection personally.” His ice-blue eyes—one with a distinctive brown segment that I should’ve clocked the night we met; Good God, how much would women pay to have a drop of this man’s genetics?—lock onto mine. “Who knows? I might even be one of them.”

I cross my arms. “I came here in good faith—for work. I’m not here to deal in weird, cryptic threats.”

“No?” His gaze drops to my outfit, lingering on the slit that exposes a sliver of thigh. “Then why wear that skirt?”

Heat blooms between my shoulder blades, and I have to fight the instinct to curl in on myself. To hide under the laser of his stare. Thirty seconds in front of Stefan and my body is already betraying me. I’m pitiful.

Of course, I knew that already. I knew it when I spent forty minutes this morning deciding what to wear, calculating the exact ratio of professional to desirable. One centimeter too much leg and I’m desperate. Too little and I’m forgettable.

But this moment confirms that I goofed it anyway.

“I have a business proposition,” I say firmly. “Not a death wish.”

“Then come here, Doctor.” He holds out the gun again. “You live in a dangerous city. Time you learned to protect yourself.”

“I have pepper spray.”

Well, now, I do. I didn’t have it on me the night of the gala. It was still in the console of my Prius, tucked away safely in the plastic wrapping.

Not sure how much good it’ll do me, though. I’m deep underground and Stefan Safonov has a gun. Frederick Carson was child’s play compared to this.