10. No Alternative

Leonie

Inside, Jared pushed me up against the wall and ravaged my mouth with his. Palms to his muscular and bare chest, I pushed him away with force into the opposite wall. “Jared!”

It took him a second to gather himself. Physically, he’d never hurt me. I wouldn’t allow it.

But I’d never hurt him, either.

“I’m so sorry about those texts,” he said, stepping forward as he rubbed the elbow he’d hit. “I got drunk and then when you cancelled on me, I got angry.” He exhaled and gave a schoolboy smile. “But you’re here now.”

“Not for that,” I cried and pushed at his wide chest again with more force, having to stop myself from taking this asshole to the ground. “I’m here to get my things.”

That smile died. “With Dominic Belov as your bodyguard?”

I didn’t need a fucking bodyguard.

I just shook my head, already exasperated by the minute I’d spent with him.

“Or as your boyfriend?”

Shoving past him to his bedroom, I found his bed sheetless and a condom wrapper on the floor.

Amazing.

I wished I was surprised.

“When I cancelled on you, you were so overcome with anger you ended up fucking someone else between calling me,” I said with a laugh. “Unbelievable.”

He was a wall before me, face red in anger. “What, like you’re not fucking Belov out there?”

No matter what I said, he wouldn’t listen. Once he got something stuck in his head it would eat away at him. For the last two years, I had to remind myself he served a bigger purpose.

“I’m getting my shit and I’m going,” I said, pulling out the clothes from my drawer. Damn, I should have brought bags.

“No,” he barked, slamming the drawer shut.

I didn’t manage to pull away in time, scraping the back of my hand and hissing, clutching it to my chest.

He didn’t care, continuing, “You’re not taking your things. You don’t need to do this.”

“Why?” I said, whipping around to face him. “Why don’t I need to do this? Because you love me? Or because you plan on spending my inheritance on a nice family house? Or because you see me as a trophy wife but see yourself as a player who will still fuck anyone and everyone else?”

“Leo—”

“They don’t add up!” I shouted, the throbbing pain of my hand pushing me to finally have this conversation. “I am not expendable. I am not entertainment, nor am I a backup. I am the priority; there is no alternative. I am no longer one of your options.”

His face was red with anger and he grabbed my injured hand to pull me close to him. I winced at the sharp sting, tears pricking my eyes. There was blood on his skin from where he gripped me.

His voice dropped low as he brushed my hair back. One hand gentle, one hand violent. “But you were an option last night. So what changed?”

At the same time, I stamped on his bare foot and jabbed an elbow up into his chin as three raps sounded at his bedroom door. He swore and keeled over, cupping his jaw. “Fuck!”

Dom leaned against the door frame, a roll of bin bags in his hand, a huge grin across his face.

“What’s happening over here?” he asked and I could almost hear the pride in his voice. His eyes flickered between Jared’s foot, my hand and the clothes now on the floor.

Jared watched him approach cautiously, still comforting himself. “Nothing, mate, we’re just talking—”

“I wasn’t speaking to you.” He put his arm over my shoulders and pulled me close. When he spoke into my hair, his voice was soft, “What’s happening? Are you okay?”

I nodded and looked down at the blood smeared across my hand. “I want to go home.”

Jared wasn’t worth it.

Dom’s voice was comforting, “Let’s get your stuff and then you’ll never have to come back here.”

“Leo, let’s—”

“Nah,” interrupted Dom, lifting a finger to silence him as he pulled me into his chest. “It’s best you don’t speak to her, you’ll only piss me off more. Make yourself useful and grab any of her other things.” He ripped off one of the bin bags and shoved it into Jared’s chest before gesturing to the door. I felt Jared’s gaze on me before he finally huffed and left.

Dom took my hand and examined the damage. He was so peaceful. His voice, his movements. “I’ll pick up the stuff here and you go and get in the car. I have antiseptic wipes in the glove box.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“Yes.”

I squeezed his hand with the one he inspected so he looked up at me. “Don’t. I still need him.”

“Need him?” His voice was thick with repulsion.

My eyes rolled though I enjoyed that little spike of jealousy. “His dad works in Firdman’s prison. Why do you think I got with him in the first place?”

He blinked and slipped his hand from mine. “That’s clever, Leonie Lion.”

I cringed at the childhood nickname.

“There’s a gun under the bed.”

“Yours?”

I nodded. I hardly ever carried one anymore, but I still practised at the shooting range with Roc every week.

When I walked past him, he cleared his throat.

“Yeah?”

He ripped off another bin bag and loudly, forcibly waved it around to open it. The muscles in his forearms bulged, his protruding veins even more obvious.

Now I was finding domestic duties alluring. He could empty my bin any day.

He chucked me his keys with a smile.

In his car, I locked the doors and put on the radio, turning it down to a human level because, clearly, Dom liked to be deafened.

My hand was still bleeding, the scrape whitening my skin around where the drawer had cut me. In his glove box, I found the wipes and a gun.

Minutes passed. I stared each one down on the dashboard, waiting for one of the men to appear.

Seven minutes. Seven whole minutes until Dom returned with two full bin bags and a blender. How he carried it all so gracefully was beyond me. I was scrambling out of the car to help him when he shook his head, dismissing me and throwing open one of the back doors to carefully place everything down.

I glanced at the house door. There was no sign of Jared.

“Do you want to carry the blender or should I put it in the footwell?”

“I’ll take it,” I said, already reaching. Holding it with both hands, he walked me to my side of the car and opened the door. Sitting there, he pulled my seatbelt across me and buckled me in, his scent of pine strong as he leaned over.

“You don’t have to put on my seatbelt. I can do it.”

He ignored me and moved to sit in his own seat before reversing out of the drive. Over my shoulder, the house stayed eerily quiet.

Dom’s jaw was tight, his eyes furious on the road.

“What did you say to him?” I asked into the blender as we rounded a corner.

“Nothing you’d want to hear,” he grunted.

“Is he hurt?”

He swerved the car onto the curb before halting. “I should have hurt him. Look!” he raged, lifting my pulsing hand, careful not to touch the tiny scratch. “He hurt you, Leo. We could find another way to fuck up Firdman.”

The anger radiated from him, tension twisted his face. If I didn’t defuse this, he may turn the car around and go back for round two.

“Dom, I’m okay,” I said softly, threading my fingers through his. I had no idea what came over me or why he didn’t push me away. He needed to know I was there and that I was fine.

“That prick,” he growled, pulling our hands to rest on my lap. “He will never touch you again. Not as long as I live.”

There was the drama queen I’d loved tormenting. But with how deep his frown was, how his hand trembled in mine, nothing could make me upset him further.

“You’re angry,” I whispered. “You’re really angry.”

“No shit,” he seethed. “If I’d known— if I knew… you would have never been with him.”

I pulled my hand back. “What, you would have threatened him like you did to the boys in school?”

“No,” he said, as if my words repulsed him. “I would have killed him like I want to now.”

“You can’t run my life, Dominic.”

His eyes snapped up to mine. “But I should be able to protect you.”

“I don’t need your protection.”

He slammed his fist into the steering wheel. He lifted it to his mouth as he looked out the window, breathing heavily.

I put the blender between my feet, undid my seatbelt, and stroked his arm. “Dom,” I said quietly, “I need you to do something.”

He glanced at me, curious.

“Let me distract you. Take your anger out on me. Make it something else.”

The air between us thickened. His eyes roved over me, considering, as his hand fell to his lap. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I do,” I said, sitting up straight and untangling our hands. Fuck, I really did know what I was saying. Consequences be damned. “Take your anger out on me. Please.”

Because no matter what had happened between us — how I had never understood his sudden hatred towards me — I knew he would never physically hurt me. When I had been taken that time by a low-level gang, he had been a mess.

He held his fists so tight, his knuckles paled. I took them and pulled them under my top where they immediately gripped my rib cage. His hands were warm against my skin.

“Dom, please—”

There had been more I intended to say, but he scooped me up and landed me on his lap, one of his hands on the back of my neck, slamming my mouth to his. His kiss was laced with need, with release to be free of the frustration under his skin. I wanted to cut him open, liberate him of the feeling. I wanted to be covered in all that was him.

I kissed him back with a vengeance as his other hand travelled up my back and unclasped my bra before he ravaged my breast, pulling, twisting my nipple. The pain only had me grinding on his lap, lost in his touch.

His tongue slipped into my mouth, melding with mine and I knew if I had made the wiser decision of wearing a skirt, I would have pushed my knickers aside and made a mess on his shorts, just to get closer to the hard length of him I rocked on.

When we finally came up for air, my head was spinning. We stayed there, breathing on each other’s faces as he guided me to keep grinding on him. His lips dipped to my throat and I arched into him.

“I’m going to fuck you,” he promised before nipping my skin. “I’m going to ruin you.”

“Please,” I begged and he caught my mouth again, biting at my bottom lip until I felt the coppery twang of blood in my mouth. “Leave me sobbing.”

“I’ll leave you dripping,” he groaned, those hazel eyes intense on mine. “I’m going to cover you in my handprints, brand you as mine.”

“Yes,” I groaned, feeling his dirty words building heat in my core.

His teeth trapped my earlobe, his breathing so loud. “You want to be owned, controlled. You don’t want to think.”

I nodded and pushed him into his chair at the same time he pulled the lever and it scooted back, giving us more room.

“Dom, I need more,” I cried, pulling at his top.

“I’ll give you more, but not right now.”

I froze and then struggled to fall back onto my seat, catching my leg on the gearstick, desperate to escape him.

I tried to hide my face from him in my hair, pulling my leg again and again as frustration built in my chest. This is what he would do to me. I was a rebound, someone to toy with because that’s all he did. He didn’t care for anyone other than the Belovs. Though they were my family, I wasn’t truly one of them.

“Leonie,” he said, his voice gruff as he tried to pull my chin in his direction. “We’re on a public road. Anyone could walk past.”

That didn’t change anything though. It didn’t stop the fact that despite his anger at Jared for hurting me, he could hurt me far more.

I’d been willing to get naked on the side of the road and ride him like my bloody life depended on it. All because he was a little bit angry.

“Leo,” he said, his voice more forceful this time. “I’ve wanted to fuck you for so long that it’s not going to happen in my car a road away from your ex’s house.”

“How long?” I asked, glancing at him. It couldn’t be as long as me. His interest had only started last night.

“Too long,” he sighed, resting his head back and drawing circles in my skin, his hold keeping me on top of him.

“You said everyone wanted to fuck me,” I said slowly. “Did that include you?”

He closed his eyes and breathed out deeply through his nose. “You were too young. We were too young.” He readjusted himself even now. “I couldn’t imagine the woman you would become. How I’d want to have her even more. I didn’t realise that was possible.”

My throat was so dry I couldn’t swallow. In the last year of our friendship, I tried to show him how much I loved him. I’d thought it had fallen on deaf ears.

But it hadn’t. He just didn’t love me back, only lusted.

“When Sam fucked me at your house, I’d planned for you to be in,” I admitted, hoping I wasn’t going red. “All the porn I’d seen, the step-brother would watch and come and get involved.”

He chuckled, running his fingers up my sides in the lightest of strokes. “I wasn’t ever your step-brother.”

“No, but I wanted you to see me as a woman. All the times I’ve been with Sam, I’ve wished it was you. Especially that first time.”

His brows came down a centimetre and he braced his hand around my throat, as light as his touch on my waist. “All the times? What do you mean, ‘all the times’?”

Fuck.

“Leonie, when was the last time you slept with him?”

In his grip, I swallowed.

His fingers tightened. “Answer.”

“The week before you saw me crying in the pub,” I confessed, watching the people walk past his car. No one noticed us. “That’s partly why I was crying, because I felt I deserved him going back to his ex. Because two days before he asked me to be his girlfriend, I was getting ploughed by Sam.”

“You’ve been sleeping with him for ten years?” he shouted. “Ten years?”

“Well, no,” I said, panic tightening my chest as my thighs started to ache sat upon him. “I haven’t seen him for two years. Not since Jared.”

“If he’d reached out since you broke up, would you have?” he asked through his teeth.

I tried to shrug as if my heart wasn’t racing. “Probably.”

His face twisted into the classic disgusted expression I was used to, top lip curled in anger. “He’s revolting.”

“In fairness, I didn’t know he had taken a picture of me until you just said,” I offered.

Dom sat back in his chair with a hmph as I finally fell into mine. “At least you don’t fall in love with everyone you fuck. That’s good to know.”

I breathed a laugh and taunted, “You think I’m going to fall in love with you? That’s cute.”

“Oh, definitely,” he said with an unabashed smirk.

“Maybe you’ll fall in love with me,” I countered. Shit, I was really agreeing to this.

But his smile faded as he said, “As soon as you even like me, as soon as this is complicated, it has to end.”

But I already liked him, while pretending I disliked him more than anything. We had once told each other everything. Whatever had changed between us at sixteen and eighteen followed us into adulthood.

I offered my hand and he examined my gesture before taking it.

“Deal.”