His Virgin Stripper

28- The Devil Was Waiting

Sienna

My legs weighed me down like chains as I dragged my feet along the endless hallway. Every single step felt like a massive physical effort.

My knees were still trembling slightly from the weakness of the past two days. The air in the passage was cool, but my skin felt hot. A nervous sweat prickled at the back of my neck, making my collar itch.

I kept my eyes locked on the broad back of the giant leading the way. I carefully maintained a strict five-foot distance between us.

I didn't want to get anywhere near him. I didn't want to accidentally brush against his dark jacket. I didn't want to remind him that I was walking behind him.

He walked with a heavy, rhythmic thud that seemed to vibrate straight through the floorboards and into the soles of my boots. The sound echoed off the wood paneling, a constant reminder of how trapped I really was.

As we turned another corner, the scale of the house began to press in on me. The ceilings were too high. The hallways were too long. It felt like a maze designed to keep people lost.

But my surroundings quickly blurred as my thoughts spiraled out of control.

When did he come back? Enzo had made it sound like he was miles away. He made it seem like Marcello was handling a crisis that had no end date.

How was he? Was he injured badly?

Questions swarmed my head like a hornets' nest. They were buzzing so aggressively that I couldn't hear the sound of my own breathing. They repeated in a vicious, torturous loop, knocking down every ounce of logic I had left.

I was so consumed by the mental wreckage, desperately trying to calculate the state of a man I barely knew, that my eyes stopped registering the corridor.

I was just moving on instinct, putting one foot in front of the other while my mind was miles away, until I absent-mindedly slammed into a wall.

Except, it wasn't a wall. It was a massive, solid barrier of muscle.

The guard had stopped abruptly in front of a heavy, dark wood door at the end of the passage. I had walked straight into his shoulder blade like a distracted child.

The impact rattled my jaw and sent a sharp ache radiating across my brow. I stumbled a step backward, my balance faltering on the thick carpet.

My boots caught on each other, and for a second, I thought I was going to hit the floor again. I managed to plant my heels and stay upright, my heart jumping into my throat from the sudden jolt.

I rubbed my forehead, my face flushing with a mix of embarrassment and sudden panic. "I'm sorry, I wasn't looking, I—"

The words died instantly in my throat. I froze, my hand hovering over my bruised forehead.

A muffled voice drifted through the thick wood of the door. It was low, gravelly, and stripped of any human warmth.

"What should we do?" the voice asked. The words were clear enough to cut through the quiet of the hallway. "We could kill him as a warning."

My eyes widened in horror. My heart stopped dead in my chest. A cold, heavy weight dropped straight into my stomach, turning my insides to ice.

Kill him? Kill who?

The casual efficiency in the man's tone made it sound like they were discussing throwing away a piece of old furniture.

They weren't talking about a person's life.

They were talking about an errand.

A chore.

The violence of the sentence hung in the air, suffocating me. My breath hitched, and I pressed my back against the opposite wall of the hallway, wishing I could disappear into the wallpaper.

Who were these people? What kind of place had Marcello brought me to?

Before the other person inside the room could even form an answer, the guard in front of me raised his massive fist.

He knocked heavily on the dark wood. Three sharp, echoing cracks that sounded like gunshots in the narrow space.

Instantly, the sound from the other side of the door died. The voices vanished. The silence that followed was heavy and suffocating.

A second later, the brass handle turned, and the door opened inward. A man stepped out into the hallway. The moment my eyes landed on him, the air left my lungs.

He was, without a doubt, the scariest man I had met since waking up in this house. He made the other guards look like amateurs.

He wasn't just big; he carried a dark, oppressive aura that seemed to suck all the light out of the corridor. His face was a mask of cold, scarred leather, a thick line cutting across his cheek.

His eyes were empty. It was like looking into a pair of bottomless pits, devoid of any emotion or mercy.

He didn't spare me a single look. He didn't care that I was trembling against the wall, trying to occupy as little space as possible. He simply adjusted the cuffs of his grey suit jacket and walked away.

His heavy footsteps faded down the passage, leaving a chilling silence behind him.

The door remained propped open, but my feet were glued to the floor. I couldn't move. I couldn't even slide my hands into my pockets to hide the shaking.

My thoughts went wild all over again, fracturing into a thousand terrified directions.

Who were they thinking of killing? Who was the person they were talking about? Was it one of the men who attacked us at the rental house? Or was it someone innocent who just got in the way?

Why would they kill someone so casually? Why would Marcello kill someone?

The questions hit me like physical blows. The man who had handed me his card, the man who had looked at me with such urgency during the chaos—was he a murderer?

Did he order executions from behind closed doors while I sat upstairs eating off silver trays? Was the kindness he showed me just a mask?

The realization that I was standing on the threshold of a world that traded in human blood made my stomach violently churn. I felt sick.

The room started to spin slightly, the edges of the doorway blurring. I wanted to turn around and run down the stairs. I wanted to drag Roxy out of this house, break through the front gates, and never look back.

I didn't belong here. This was a nightmare, and I was stepping right into the center of it.

"Will you keep staring at me like a ghost?"

His voice broke into my thoughts like a lightning strike. It shattered my panic and pulled me violently back to reality.

The fog in my head cleared in an instant.

I looked up, my eyes finally focusing on the interior of the room.

Marcello was sitting behind a massive desk. The low light of the office caught the sharp, aristocratic lines of his jaw. He looked tired.

There were dark shadows under his eyes, and a dangerous, unyielding edge clung to his broad shoulders.

But his eyes were wide open, locked onto mine with that same intensity I remembered from my bedroom in the rental. He was alive. He wasn't bleeding out in an alley. And he was waiting for me to step inside.