Chapter 11: Scar Tissue
The throbbing bass of the club was a physical thing, a pulse that vibrated up through the soles of Marissa’s shoes and into her bones. ‘Velvet & Vipers’ lived up to its name: plush, blood-red banquettes contrasted with cold, metallic surfaces and gliding staff whose eyes held a calculating sharpness. Adrian moved through the crowd like a shark through murky water, a path clearing for him not out of recognition, but from some primal, social radar. He was in his element here, a king in a court of shadows and colored lights.
He’d brought her here, she knew, as a test. After the shattered coffee mug and the raw, confessional sex on the kitchen counter, the atmosphere between them had been charged, fragile. This was a return to his world, a world of performative power. He’d handed her a dress of liquid silver that clung to every curve, and his eyes had darkened appreciatively when she’d put it on. “You’ll shine,” he’d said, his thumb brushing her lower lip. “And everyone will know you’re with me.”
Now, standing near a bank of private booths veiled by sheer curtains, she felt the weight of that statement. Eyes lingered. Whispers followed Adrian, and by extension, her. He was deep in conversation with a sleek-haired man by the bar, discussing a shipping contract or a hostile takeover—the specifics lost in the music. He’d squeezed her hand.“Two minutes. Don’t wander far.”
She’d needed air, or a semblance of it. The hallway leading to the restrooms was darker, the music a muffled throb. She leaned against the cool wall, closing her eyes for a second, trying to settle the mix of exhilaration and dread that had become her constant state.
The scent hit her first: clove cigarettes, expensive whiskey, and something else, something chemically sweet. Then a voice, close to her ear, smooth and laced with mockery. “You must be the new project.”
She jerked away, heart lurching. He stood inches from her, a beautiful ruin of a man. He had Adrian’s bone structure, but where Adrian’s was honed to a lethal edge, this man’s was blurred, softened by dissipation. Long, dark hair fell across eyes of a similar piercing blue, but these were bloodshot, their focus wavering. A brutal scar tore a path from his temple down to his cheekbone, pulling his smile into a permanent, grimacing sneer. Tattoos coiled up his neck, disappearing into the collar of a black silk shirt. Rings glinted on his fingers.
“Luca,” he said, by way of introduction, his gaze crawling over her like something sticky. “The other DeLuca. The fun one.”
“I’m with Adrian,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt.
Luca’s laugh was short, ugly. “Yeah. I can smell him on you.” He took a step closer, pinning her against the wall. The sweet, chemical smell was stronger now—ether, maybe, or ketamine. “Let me give you some free advice, sweetheart. From one ruined thing to another.” He leaned in, his lips almost touching her ear. His whisper was a venomous slide. “He’ll ruin you like he ruins everything. He doesn’t know how to love. He only knows how to consume. And when he’s sucked you dry, he’ll leave you emptier than you were before.”
Her blood ran cold. “Get away from me.”
“He told you about the fire, right?” Luca breathed, his finger tracing a cold line down her bare arm. “His great act of penance. Did he tell you he was the one who hired that foreman? Pushed him so hard to cut corners that the man was drowning? My brother creates the pressure cooker, then acts shocked when it blows.” He smirked, the scar twisting. “He’ll do the same to you. He’s already started.”
Rage, white-hot and protective, burned through her fear. “You don’t know anything about us.”
Before Luca could retort, a shadow detached itself from the gloom at the end of the hall. Adrian moved with a terrifying, silent speed. There was no shout, no warning. One second Luca was leering over her, the next a fist cracked into the side of his jaw with a sickening, wet sound of flesh and bone.
Luca staggered back, hitting the opposite wall, a string of blood and saliva flying from his split lip. He blinked, dazed, then started to laugh, a wet, choking sound. “See?” he spat, wiping his mouth. “No discussion.Just force. His only language.”
Adrian didn’t even look at him. His eyes were locked on Marissa, blazing with a primal fury. He grabbed her wrist, his grip iron-tight, and pulled her away from the wall, back down the hall, dragging her behind him like a prize of war. He flung aside the curtain of a vacant, circular booth deep in the club’s recesses, shoving her inside onto the plush velvet.
The curtain fell closed, muting the world to a deep, red-hazed twilight. The bass was a distant heartbeat. He loomed over her, his chest heaving, his knuckles already swelling and smeared with his brother’s blood. The civilized mask was utterly obliterated.
“What did he say to you?” Adrian’s voice was a low, dangerous rasp.
“Nothing that mattered,” she breathed, her own pulse hammering in her throat.
“It matters!” he snarled, sliding into the booth beside her, crowding her against the wall. His hand came up, his bloody knuckles brushing her cheek, leaving a faint, warm streak. “His words are poison. You don’t listen. You don’t ever listen.” His anger was molten, directed at her, at Luca, at the world.
His mouth crashed down on hers. It wasn’t a kiss; it was a claiming, a punishment. He bit her lower lip, hard enough to make her gasp, and licked the sting, tasting her. His tongue plunged inside, a fierce, dominating invasion. She kissed him back with a fury of her own, her fingers tangling in his hair, pulling him closer. The taste of copper—his brother’s blood—mingled with the flavor of him, dark and addictive.
His hand slid up her thigh, pushing the silver fabric of her dress up to her waist. The air was cool on her exposed skin. His fingers, rough and demanding, found the lace edge of her panties and tore them aside with a sharp rip. She cried out into his mouth.
“He saw you,” Adrian growled against her lips, his fingers stroking through her wetness with a brutal, clinical efficiency. “He looked at you. And now I can smell him on this air.” He pushed two fingers inside her, deep, curling them. She gasped, arching off the seat. “You’re soaked. Is this because of him? Because of that fucking chaos he brings?”
“No,” she moaned, her hips rocking against his hand. “It’s because of you. It’s always because of you.”
With a guttural sound, he freed himself from his trousers, his cock springing out, thick and fiercely erect. He didn’t bother with finesse. He hooked his hands under her knees, spreading her wide, and drove into her in one relentless, punishing thrust.
The breath left her lungs in a harsh gasp. He filled her completely, a stretch that bordered on pain, chased immediately by a flood of electric pleasure. He set a brutal, driving pace from the start, each slam of his hips grinding her into the velvet cushions, the frame of the booth digging into her back. The curtain around them swayed with the force of his movements.
“You’re mine,” he chanted, his breath hot and ragged in her ear. His teeth grazed her earlobe. “Every fucking part of you. This cunt is mine. That mouth is mine. What’s in here,” he pressed his forehead hard against her temple, “is mine. He doesn’t get to touch you. He doesn’t get to fucking breathe near you.”
His words were filthy, raw, stripped of all pretense. They fueled her own desperate arousal. She wrapped her legs around his waist, meeting each of his thrusts with a force of her own, her nails scoring down the back of his jacket. The obscene, wet sounds of their joining were loud in the intimate space.
“Tell me,” he demanded, his pace becoming erratic, harder. “Tell me who you belong to.”
“You,” she gasped, the world narrowing to the point where their bodies joined, to the frantic pounding of her heart. “Only you, Adrian.”
He growled, a sound of pure possession, and shifted his angle, hitting a spot deep inside her that made her vision whiten. Her climax ripped through her without warning, a violent, shuddering wave that clenched around him, milking his length. He swore, his own control shattering. With three more deep, grinding thrusts, he came, spilling into her with a hoarse cry, his body rigid and trembling above hers.
He collapsed against her, his weight a solid, anchoring warmth. His face was buried in the crook of her neck, his breath slowly evening out. The distant bass of the club pulsed around them, a reminder of the world just beyond the curtain.
After a long moment, he pulled out of her gently, a wince crossing his face. He adjusted her dress with a surprising tenderness, his fingers smoothing the ruined silk over her thighs. He tucked himself away, then carefully used a clean handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the smear of blood from her cheek.
He looked at her then, his eyes haunted, the fury gone, replaced by a bleak exhaustion. In the dim red light, he looked younger, stripped bare. “He’s right about one thing,” Adrian said, his voice raw. “I ruin things.” He traced the line of her jaw. “But I am trying… not to ruin you.”
Outside the booth, in the swirling chaos of the club, Luca DeLuca watched the curtain from the shadows, dabbing his bleeding lip with a cocktail napkin. A slow, pained smile spread across his face. It was a smile devoid of joy, full of shattered glass and old, festering wounds. He turned and melted back into the crowd, a ghost waiting for his next opening. The game was far from over.
The game was far from over.
In the days that followed, the specter of Luca lingered in the penthouse’s silence, a sour note beneath the intense, almost desperate rhythm Adrian and Marissa established. He was leaving for Zurich, a sudden trip concerning a bloc of shareholders grown skittish. “Three days,” he said, zipping his luggage with a sharp finality on the bed they’d barely left. He pulled her to him, his kiss hard, possessive. “The car will take you to work and back. Do not go anywhere else. Do not answer the door.”
“I’m not a prisoner,” she said, her voice muffled against his chest.
“You’re my everything,” he corrected, his tone leaving no room for argument. “And everything needs to be protected.” His gaze dropped to the diamond necklace, which she now wore without prompting, a cool weight against her skin. “Even from my own blood.”
The first two days at The Velvet Hour passed in a blur of routine exhaustion. The club was quieter midweek, a ghost of its saturday-night self. She polished glasses, sorted invoices, and felt the absence of Adrian like a physical chill, despite the memory of his heat imprinted on her skin. The other bartenders gave her a wide berth, their conversations dying when she approached. The message was clear: she was marked as his.
On the third evening, the air felt charged. She was in the back office, counting the previous night’s take, the static buzz of the fluorescent light the only sound. The door creaked open. She didn’t need to look up. The clove and chemical scent announced him.
“Burning the midnight oil?” Luca’s voice was a lazy drawl. He leaned against the doorframe, his silhouette sharp in the harsh light. The bruise on his jaw had faded to a yellowish-green shadow, accentuating the ruin of his scar.
Her heart kicked against her ribs, but she didn’t startle. She finished counting a stack of bills, methodically sliding a band around them. “The club is closed to the public. How did you get in?”
“I have a key.” He grinned, dangling a master keycard from his finger. “Perks of being family. Adrian forgets the details when he’s playing house.”
She set the money down and finally looked at him. “What do you want, Luca?”
He pushed off the doorframe, moving into the small room with a prowler’s grace. “Just checking in. Seeing how the kept woman is holding up. He’s got you on a short leash, huh? Work and home. Very modern.”
“I’m working. Unlike some.” Her words were calm, but her palms were damp.
He laughed, a sound with no warmth. “Ouch. You’ve got a bit of his bite now. Cute.” He picked up a paperweight from the desk, a heavy crystal orb, and turned it over in his hands. “He tell you why he’s really in Zurich? It’s not shareholders. It’s damage control. The wife of that foreman—the one who died in the fire? She’s decided to write a memoir. Wants to name names.”
A cold trickle of dread worked its way down her spine. She remembered Adrian’s confession on the kitchen counter, the raw guilt in his eyes. I visit him twice a year. To remember. “And?”
“And my brother is there to make the problem disappear. Not with a fist, this time. With a wire transfer so large it makes morality a quaint idea.” He set the paperweight down with a definitive thud. “He buys his peace, piece by piece. Everyone has a price. What’s yours, Marissa?”
This was his game. To seed doubt, to twist the knife. The confrontation Adrian had warned her about. She stood, facing him directly. “You’re jealous.”
His amused mask slipped for a fraction of a second. “Of what?”
“Of him. Of the fact that he tries. That he feels the weight of what he’s done. You just float above it all, getting high on the wreckage.” She took a step toward him, fueled by a sudden, clear anger. “You’re not warning me. You’re trying to poison what he has because you have nothing. That scar isn’t just on your face.”
Luca’s eyes flashed, a real and dangerous emotion cutting through the drugged haze. He closed the distance between them in one swift movement, his hands slamming down on the desk on either side of her, caging her in. His breath was hot and sour. “You think you know him? You’ve seen his little performance. The guilt, the grand passion. You haven’t seen the cold, calculated bastard who looks at a human being and sees a column on a balance sheet. That’s his real inheritance.”
“I’ve seen enough,” she fired back, refusing to shrink. “I’ve seen the payments. I’ve seen the visits. What do you do, Luca? Besides skulk in hallways and get punched in the face?”
A slow, ugly smile spread across his lips. He leaned in, his mouth close to her ear. “I feel, darling. That’s my curse. He numbs it with money and control. I numb it with whatever I can shove into my vein or up my nose.” He pulled back, his gaze dropping to her mouth. “But some things… some things you can’t numb. The way you looked at me in that hallway. A little scared, a little fascinated. I felt that.”
His hand came up, quick as a snake, and grabbed a fistful of her hair at the nape of her neck. It wasn’t tender like Adrian’s grip; it was mean, testing. “He thinks he owns this. He doesn’t.”
Rage, clean and sharp, exploded in her chest. She brought her knee up, hard, aiming for his groin. He twisted, taking the blow on his thigh with a grunt, but his grip only tightened, yanking her head back. “Feisty.”
“Let go of me.”
“Or what? You’ll call Adrian?” He laughed, his other hand grabbing her waist, pulling her hips against his. She could feel the hard outline of his erection through his jeans. “He’s across an ocean. He can’t protect you from the monsters in his own closet.”
The office was cramped, claustrophobic. The smell of him, of chemicals and decadence, filled her lungs. A terrifying cocktail of fear and a dark, unwanted thrill shot through her. This was the chaos Adrian kept locked away. It was repellent. It was magnetic.
Luca used his hold on her hair to force her head down toward the desk. “You want to see a real monster? Not the one who broods in a penthouse. The one who lives in the gutter he made.”
He shoved her forward. The edge of the desk bit into her hips. With his free hand, he fumbled with the button of her jeans, yanking them and her underwear down to her thighs in one rough movement. The cold air hit her skin. She struggled, but he was strong, fueled by a volatile energy.
“Stop fighting it,” he hissed, his own zipper rasping down. He spit into his palm, a crude, wet sound, and slicked himself. He was thick, uncircumcised, pressing against her. “You know you’ve wondered. How the other brother feels. If the madness is better than the method.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He positioned himself and shoved inside her with a brutal, tearing thrust. She cried out, a sound of shock and unwanted sensation. It hurt, a dry, burning stretch, but her body, traitorously, was already wet from the adrenaline, from the fight.
“Fuck,” Luca groaned, burying himself to the hilt. He held there, his body trembling against her back. “Oh, fuck. You’re tight. Tighter than he deserves.”
He began to move, a ragged, punishing rhythm, his hips slamming into the backs of her thighs. There was no tenderness, no pretense of anything but taking. His grip in her hair kept her head forced down, her cheek pressed against the cold wood of the desk. Papers scattered. The crystal orb rocked.
“This is what he’s afraid of,” Luca panted, his breath hot on her neck. “That you’ll find out chaos feels fucking amazing.” He drove into her, each stroke sharp and deep. “That his careful order is just a cage. And this…” he punctuated his words with a particularly vicious thrust, “this is flying.”
Shame and a wild, depraved pleasure coiled together in her gut. She hated him. She hated the part of herself that was responding, that clenched around his invading length. She bit down on her lip to stay silent, but a moan escaped, guttural and raw.
He heard it. His hand slid around from her hip, his fingers finding her clit, rubbing rough, urgent circles. “Yeah, there it is. That’s it. Come on his brother’s cock. Show him how little his claim means.”
The dual sensation—the deep, brutal fullness and the abrasive friction on her clit—pushed her toward a climax she didn’t want. Her body tightened, betraying her mind. A sharp, convulsive orgasm ripped through her, wringing a choked scream from her throat. Her muscles clamped around him, milking him violently.
Luca cursed, a stream of filthy, triumphant words. He pistoned into her twice more, then froze, his body arching. A hot, pulsing rush flooded her as he came, his groan long and shattered against her back. He collapsed over her, his weight heavy and smothering.
For long seconds, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the hum of the light. The smell of sex and sweat and clove cigarettes was overwhelming. Slowly, he pulled out of her. The sensation made her flinch.
He stepped back, zipping his jeans with a casual, devastating finality. She pushed herself up, pulling her clothing back into place with trembling hands. She didn’t look at him.
Luca leaned against the doorframe again, as if nothing had happened. He lit a clove cigarette, the smoke curling in the fluorescent glow. “Tell him I stopped by,” he said, his voice now flat, emptied. “Tell him we… talked.”
He left then, the master keycard left behind on the desk beside the scattered money. She stood there, shaking, the ghost of him still inside her, the taste of ashes in her mouth. The game had moved, and she was no longer just a piece on the board.
She was in the game itself.