Her Dark Protector

~All Mine~

The glass lenses of the binoculars pressed hard against my face.Through the crosshairs, the world lost its color. Everything was reduced to a clear high definition frame of stone, iron, and a heartbreaking silhouette.

I was parked a quarter-mile out, ensuring there was a killscreen distance, nestled in the shadows of an abandoned warehouse that overlooked the northern ridge of the Volkov estate.

From here, the sprawling fortress looked less like an empire and more like a tomb. And right at the top of it, standing on a precipice of cold white marble, was the Volkov's princess, Isabella. She looked lost.

Her dark hair was tangled across her face, obscuring the delicate features that had kept me awake for the last four hours. She was leaning out over the iron railing, staring down at the jagged rocks and the churning gray sea far below.

My fingers tightened around the casing of the binoculars until the metal creaked. Don’t do it. A voice growled deep in my chest. A violent surge of panic jammed its way into my throat.

It was a sickening and unfamiliar sensation. For twenty years, my heart had been a flatline. I had watched men beg for their lives, watched buildings burn to ash, and felt absolutely nothing!

But looking at her stand on the edge of that drop, looking at the fragile geometry of her body leaning into the void, my chest felt like it was being cracked open with a crowbar. I felt physically ill. I couldn't explain what i was feeling.

The thought of her falling, her delicate skin shattering against the rocks before I could have my turn with her, made a possessive rage ignite in my veins. She didn't get to die, not now when I wanted her close. She didn't get to escape the reckoning I had spent two decades bleeding for.

Through the lens, I saw the heavy curtains behind her burst open. A towering figure lunged onto the balcony. It was Malcolm, her father’s shadow. I watched him approach her like a man handling an unpinned grenade, his hands raised, as his mouth moved in desperate pleas. When he finally reached out and pulled her back from the edge, a ragged exhale escaped my lips, fogging the glass.

The moment her feet hit solid stone, Isabella collapsed inward, burying her face directly into Malcolm’s chest.

My relief was instantly swallowed by a toxic wave of jealousy.

Her fingers clawed into his jacket, clutching at him with the same desperation i'd seen that night. And he held her. He wrapped his heavy arms around her, burying his face in her hair.

A snarl vibrated in my throat. I lowered the binoculars, slamming them down onto the dashboard of the darkened SUV. The leather of my gloves groaned as my fists clenched. I wanted to tear that mansion apart. I wanted to rip Malcolm’s arms from his torso for putting his hands her.

I didn't care that he was her guardian. In my mind, the only man allowed to hold her, the only man allowed to see her break, was me. She'd become mine that night.

"You're going to burn a hole through that windshield if you keep staring like that, boss." The voice came from the passenger seat. Marcus didn't look up from his ruggedized laptop. His fingers tapped lazily against the keys as the blue light illuminated the sharp angles of his face.

Marcus had been with me since the beginning. He was than a partner. He was my friend and the only man alive who knew the real name of the orphan who had survived the Volkov massacre."She was going to jump." My voice was a hollow rasp that didn't sound like my own.

Marcus finally paused his typing, focusing his dark eyes toward me. He looked out the window toward the distant estate, then back at me. I heard a heavy sigh escaping him. "And that bothers you because it ruins the timeline, or because you’ve spent the last twelve hours acting like a man possessed?"

"Shut up, Marcus."

"I’m just stating what i've observed, Elijah," he said, turning the laptop toward me. "Before last night, you were yourself.

Then you saved a drunk girl in a bar, found out she’s the Don's daughter, and suddenly you’re sitting in a stakeout van at nine in the morning, sweating through your suit because she took a breath too close to a railing."

"She is the key," I growled, reaching into my inner pocket to pull out a silver cigarette case. I snapped it open. My mind flashed back to the scent i'd been engulfed in. Her heavenly scent. The memory of her soft, desperate lips pressing against mine in the dark of that hotel room had tormented me for hours. She had tasted like a sweet temptation.

"Viktor keeps all his vaults locked. He keeps everything hidden. But he left his weakness wandering around a lounge. I'm going to use her to take his crown, and watch him cramble in front of me."

"Well, you better move fast," Marcus said, his tone shifting from teasing to dead serious. He tapped the laptop screen, bringing up an encrypted text log intercepted from the Volkov internal servers.

"Because the old man just moved the goalposts. Our inside wire just dropped the transcript from the dining room ten minutes ago."I leaned in, my eyes scanning the text. The cigarette remained unlit between my fingers. "What did he do?"

"Viktor is failing. His heart is giving out, and the northern syndicates are bleeding his cash reserves dry," Marcus explained while pointing to a financial ledger breakdown. "He needed an option to secure his borders before he kicks the bucket. So, he just sold the princess." The silver case snapped shut in my hand with a crack like a pistol shot. "To who?"

"William Alessi. The oldest son and heir to the Alessi syndicate." A cold chill settled over me. William Alessi was brutal known for being brutal. He'd shed a lot of blood across the eastern seaboard.

He wasn't a businessman; he was a butcher. William was a psychopath who treated his territory like a personal slaughterhouse and his women like cattle to be broken. I knew his whole history. I knew about the first wife who had mysteriously broken her neck after three months of marriage.

"The arrangement is entirely finalized," Marcus continued, as his fingers scrolled through the encrypted flight paths and security schedules. "Viktor is trading Isabella’s hand in marriage for the Alessi military vanguard. The wedding countdown is set. Twenty-one days from today."

"Three weeks!"

"It gets worse," Marcus added, clicking onto a live traffic manifest. "William Alessi isn't waiting around for the ceremony. He wants to inspect his new property. His private transport just cleared the state line. He lands at the private airfield downtown in less than two hours. He’s coming straight to the Volkov estate to claim her as his wife-to-be."

I looked back up through the windshield, my eyes locking onto the high balcony where the white curtains were still dancing in the wind. The balcony was empty now. Malcolm had taken her inside.

I knew she was currently weeping. She was terrified and trapped in a cage with a monster coming to claim her hand. A dark, feral possessiveness reared its head inside my chest, clawing at my throat.

William Alessi thought he could just fly into my city, walk into that fortress, and put his filthy hands on the only woman whose kiss had ever made me feel alive?

He thought he could take the weapon I had chosen for my vengeance and turn her into his plaything? "Elijah," Marcus called out to me softly. His voice carried a rare note of warning as he watched the expression on my face.

"An alliance between the Volkovs and the Alessis changes everything. If those two syndicates merge, they’ll have over two hundred soldiers on the ground. Our cell only has twelve of their men. If William takes her, the fortress becomes completely impenetrable. Our revenge plot will be dead in the water."

Slowly, I reached into my pocket, pulling out a heavy, matte-black steel lighter. I flicked the wheel, and a bright amber flame leaped to life.

I brought it to the tip of my cigarette, inhaling the acrid smoke. My gaze never left the distant stone walls of the Volkov mansion.

Let William Alessi land his plane. Let Viktor Volkov play his little matching games with his dying empire. They thought they were the ones pulling the strings. They thought they were chess players, moving pieces across a board of blood and money.

But they didn't know about me.

They didn't know about the boy who had survived the closet, the ghost who had returned from the dead with a heart made of ash and a mind built for total annihilation.

"Elijah? What's the play? Do we pull back? Do we restructure the timeline?"

I blew a thin stream of gray smoke against the glass of the windshield, watching it cloud the view of the fortress before vanishing into nothingness.

A cold, humorless smile spread across my face. "We don't pull back," I murmured, my voice dropping with certainity that made Marcus visibly straighten up in his seat. I reached out, wrapping my fingers around the steering wheel, the engine purring to life beneath us.

I gave one last glance to the high balcony, imagining Isabella’s terrified and tear-stained face. The burning need to claim her and rip her away from that house and lock her away where only I could have her nearly consumed me.

"Nobody touches what is mine, Marcus," I whispered into the dark interior of the car. I could hear the suspension creaking as I shifted the vehicle into drive. "Nobody gets to alters the path of my vengeance. Not even Viktor himself!"

I pressed my foot down onto the accelerator. The tires gripped the gravel as we pulled out of the warehouse shadow, descending toward the city streets.

"And especially not William Alessi. If he thinks he’s coming to this city to take her..." I let the sentence hang in the air for a few seconds. The weight of the unspoken promise suffocated the silence between us.

"He’s about to find out exactly how much blood it takes to buy a princess!"