Vicious Revenge (Vicious City Book 4) Read online

  Vicious Revenge

  Vicious City, Book Four

  Loki Renard

  Copyright © 2019 by Loki

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  A note from Vicious

  A note from Loki

  About the Author

  1

  “Is it too late to say I’m sorry?”

  “Far too late, Kitty.”

  Those unique green eyes sear into me with a mixture of lust, pity, and desire for pure revenge. I know I deserve this. I know it’s been coming for a long time. I’ve caused him more trouble than any other woman, maybe any other person in his entire life. He still loves me. That doesn’t mean he isn’t going to hurt me.

  “These clothes are coming off.” He says it as a matter of fact. I have no choice in this. I forfeited my right to choose when I made him my enemy. A tremor of fear runs through me, but I know better than to resist. If I want to make amends, if I want to escape this prison I’ve found myself in, I have to show him three things: submission, obedience, and contrition. None of those things come naturally to me.

  He undresses me slowly, peeling the fabric from my skin. My clothes are the last vestiges of armor against him, and I feel the final shreds of my resistance going with them. He is wearing an impeccable suit. My nudity is a shame I will bear alone.

  I want to fall into his arms and beg forgiveness, but I can’t. There can’t be forgiveness yet. Not after everything I’ve done.

  “Turn around. Let me see you.”

  I turn slowly, feeling his eyes devour me. It has been so long since we were last intimate, our separation caused by mutual arrogance and my ill-fated madness. Vicious looks at me and I feel myself swallowed in his gaze. I am falling into him and he’s not even touching me.

  “I am sorry.”

  “I know,” he says softly, leaning back into the armless chair which is so ornate it looks almost like a throne. “Come here.”

  He reaches for me and I take his hand. I want to feel him against me. The brief touch of his palm is pleasure enough for all that will come once I am over his thighs.

  This all started because he told me he was going to lie to me. This time, he tells me the truth.

  “This is going to hurt.”

  Weeks earlier…

  “This is a bad idea,” Blaze declares.

  She’s right, of course. But I have my own to get back on a certain English criminal mastermind, and I have to be bold about it. When it comes to messing with Vicious, I know I’m walking a dangerous line. He doesn’t need much in the way of encouragement to commit some seriously twisted acts, but nobody makes me think I’m going to be given a back-alley lobotomy and gets away with it.

  It has been a month or so since the chaos of my Russian abduction, and I am ready to follow through on the threat I made when I discovered the more twisted aspects of the way Vicious recruited me. He has been lying to me from the beginning, and he’s not sorry about it. Not at all.

  “You can’t tell Slick.”

  “Sure, let me keep a secret from my CIA agent husband. That’s totally doable,” Blaze rolls her eyes at me. She’s sitting cross-legged on the couch, her pink socked feet sticking out under black jeans.

  “You’ve changed since you got married,” I sigh. “Where’s the girl who used to throw herself between balconies hundreds of feet in the air just to hang out with me?”

  “She got married to a man who is even more twisted than yours.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Oh yeah, it is.”

  I casually swing the vase I picked up before we started this conversation.

  “Okay, so. You’re going to tell Vicious that you came in, the window was broken, and I was gone.”

  Blaze waves her hands in a ‘stop’ motion. “Wait. This plan involves ME lying to his face?”

  “Well, yeah. To start off with.”

  “I’m out.”

  She’s out? Blaze is never out.

  “Okay what the fuck has marriage done to you?”

  “Nothing,” she says.

  “Oh, it has done something.”

  “Maybe it’s stopped me being completely stupid?”

  “This isn’t stupid. You came in through the balcony to try to tell me Vicious was lying to me. That’s like three hundred feet up in the air. Now you won’t even tell him one little white lie?”

  Blaze tosses her hair and sighs. “Things change, Kitty. People change.”

  “No, they don’t.” When did I become the cynical one?

  “They do when they marry CIA agents who use canes.”

  I take a deep breath. She is married now and Slick is hyper protective. I understand why. In all the craziness which has ensued since I met Vicious, it’s Blaze who has been the worst hurt. Slick doesn’t want to see that happen again, and neither do I.

  “Fine,” I relent. “I’ll take care of this on my own.”

  I swing my arm back, and then whip it forward and send the vase crashing through a floor to ceiling window which looks out over the balcony. There’s no real need for this part of the plan. I just want there to be some drama to the occasion. I want him to walk in and find the glass shattered, just like the trust I had in him.

  “Right. I’m out of here.”

  “Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.” Blaze follows me out the door. We run to the stairs and dash down. I feel a mischievous thrill running through me. Vicious is going to come home to a smashed window and a missing me. It’s going to freak him the fuck out, but he deserves it. He had me kidnapped and made me think I was going to be brain surgeried. At this point, anything I do is justifiable. I feel like I’ve been written a blank check for mayhem, and I’m writing in a whole bunch of zeroes.

  “Fuck, fucking, oh my god,” Blaze is muttering under her breath as we pile into the car I bought with cash. Vicious doesn’t know I got this. I’ve had it parked in a corner of the garage for a good week, waiting for my opportunity.

  “You have to drop me home,” she says. “Slick is gonna be back from work in less than an hour. I don’t want to have to answer any awkward questions about this.”

  I’m disappointed that I’m going to be on my own for this little plot. I’d kind of counted on Blaze being by my side, but I guess things are different now she’s married. Slick made an honest woman of her, in more senses than I care to admit. Me? I’m not married and there’s no sign of that happening any time in the immediate future. Vicious isn’t the marrying kind, he’s made that clear.

  We swing by her place and she hops out. Before she goes, she leans down and looks in through the window at me. Her dark eyes are filled with concern. “I’m worried about you, Kitty. I think you should just go home and talk to Vicious.”

  “Fuck no. I’m done talking. It’s time for action.”

  She shakes her head. “You know this is going to end badly, right? I mean, really badly. He’s going to whip your ass when he finds that broken window.”

  “No, he won’t, because he’s
not going to find out I did it.”

  “It’s Vicious, Kitty. You can’t outwit him.”

  And now I’m pissed off. My best friend in the world doesn’t think I’m capable of taking Vicious on. She’s wrong. They’re all fucking wrong. I’m going to show everyone who underestimated me that I’m more than a walking meat wagon for a black market chip.

  “I’ll see you later,” I say giving her a wave and hitting the accelerator.

  2

  Blaze

  I watch Kitty pull away and half my heart goes with her. I wish I was in that piece of shit car, heading for adventure, not standing here like a goober who ran home to her husband. Kitty’s right. Slick has fucking neutered me.

  I’m jealous of the freedom she still has, even though I know she doesn’t really want it. Kitty’s world is in chaos. The man she loves lies to her, the CIA wants to use her for the chip embedded in her guts, and she recently survived being hunted through a Russian forest by a madman. Her life is exciting as hell and I don’t understand how this happened. Used to be I was the one living on the edge. Now I’m the one who needs to go fold some socks.

  Heading up to the apartment I live in with Slick, I find myself doing household chores, wiping off the counters, folding the laundry. I never used to do this stuff. My old apartment basically had to be condemned. I left everything behind there after…

  I push my mind away from the event which changed everything. I don’t want to think about what happened there. I don’t want to ever remember it ever again. And yet I know I’m going to be living the consequences of it forever.

  I wish Kitty hadn’t gone. I wish I’d asked her to stay. I wish I’d told her what I’ve been hiding from everybody. If I had, I know she would have stayed with me. But I couldn’t find the words, because saying the words would make this unspeakable thing real.

  “Blaze?” A cheerful male voice rings out.

  My husband is home. Tall, blond and handsome, he has a strong body which is still refined, like a model. I can’t believe I ended up with someone like him. Every time I see him, a part of me wonders if he’s with me for some underhand reason. In this world, nothing is real. Vicious lied to Kitty. Slick sort of lied to me. I thought he was a criminal, but he turned out to be a CIA agent.

  Still, nothing about his job should require him to have married me, and unlike Vicious, he’s not a complete asshole about everything all the time. I get little butterflies in my stomach when he walks into a room. More so when I know I’ve done something wrong. Right now they’re erupting inside me.

  “Hey sweetheart, how are you?”

  Oh god, he’s so fucking nice. He steps behind me, wraps his arms around me and murmurs the words into my ear.

  “I’m okay,” I mumble, putting the socks down and turning around to be engulfed by his embrace. It feels so fucking good to be held by him. Nobody hugs like Slick. He draws me against his body, makes me feel so safe and so cared for. I want to enjoy it, but I can’t. Kitty’s words are rankling in my psyche. She’s out there doing god knows what, and I’m at home doing laundry. She’s right. I’ve gotten boring, and I’ve gotten…

  “What’s wrong?”

  How does he know? He always knows.

  “Nothing,” I say, pulling away and looking back down at the laundry to hide my face.

  “Yes there is,” he insists, pulling me back and squeezing me a little tighter. “Tell me what’s happened. Did you not have a good day?”

  I pull away from him and throw a sock on the pile of other socks which collectively make up my life now. “I’ve got no balls.”

  “I’m fairly certain you never had balls, sweetheart,” Slick smiles calmly. “Is it getting close to that time of the month?”

  “It is if by that time of the month, you mean the time I kick your dick off.”

  “Blaze, that’s enough,” Slick says firmly. He likes my sass, but he’s been cracking down on the threats lately. “What’s going on really? You were happy when I left this morning. What’s changed?”

  If I don’t check my attitude, I’m going to give Kitty away before she gets anywhere. Maybe I should blame it on my period. Men seem to think every bad feeling a woman ever experiences is to do with that monthly curse. Hell. Maybe it is. Maybe Kitty is on her period.

  Slick’s phone rings.

  “Hey asshole,” he drawls down the line.

  It must be Vicious. I try not to stiffen up and give everything away, but he’s not paying attention to me right now. Vicious has a way of drawing your complete attention when he talks to you.

  “The window’s broken? She’s gone?” Slick is repeating what Vicious is saying.

  This is not going to go well, I already know that. They’re going to find her in five seconds flat. That chip she has inside her basically acts as a lo-jack, and I know Slick has a device he can use to track her. I don’t know what her plan was to foil that. She knows as well as any of us that she can’t really run and she can’t really hide.

  “I’ve got the tracker in the office. Hold on.”

  Slick walks away, phone to his ear. I know he’s going to come back in a second because the device he uses to follow Kitty around is gone. I took it before I went over and saw her today.

  “Blaze? Have you been in my office?” He comes striding back.

  “Nope,” I lie.

  I can’t hear Vicious’ side of the conversation, but I can imagine how pissed he is. Kitty is gone, and so is the tracker they use. I am guessing she took the one Vicious owns too. Smart girl. I’m impressed. There will be other ways to find her, but not in the short term.

  Of course, they don’t know Kitty has run away. They probably think she’s been taken. It’s what she wants them to think, after all.

  There’s a pause. Then Slick says what I don’t want to hear. “I’ll ask her. Will get back to you in a minute.”

  He hangs up. I do my best to conform my features to an innocent expression. I don’t know if I have ever been innocent before, so it’s quite a trick.

  “Kitty’s missing.”

  “Oh?”

  “What do you know about this?”

  “Nothing! If she’s missing, why would I know? Maybe she has been taken. Maybe she’s in danger.”

  “You, Blaze, are a terrible liar,” he says, tapping the counter. “I’m not going to ask you twice.”

  “Don’t call me a liar.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  I glower at him. I don’t want to be forced to give Kitty up. I don’t think I am going to. Being married to him doesn’t mean he owns me. Kitty has only been gone an hour or so, I want her to get a more decent head start.

  “How do you know she wasn’t taken?”

  “The glass is on the outside, not the inside, not to mention the fact that there’s no need to break the window to get out of that place. It’s pretty obviously staged for attention.”

  Well they saw through that quickly.

  “I don’t know where she is. She wanted me to go with her, but I said no.”

  Shit. I’m telling the truth. What the fuck is wrong with me?

  He nods, resting on one leg and running his hand through his hair. “Jesus. This is not going to end well for her. I’m glad you didn’t go, Blaze. You were a good girl.”

  “Yeah, that’s me, super good,” I roll my eyes.

  “It is a good thing you didn’t go with her. If you had, you’d be punished the same way she’s going to be.”

  “If he can find her.”

  “He’ll find her. And if he doesn’t, I will. We can’t have her running around loose.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not,” he says calmly. “She’s at constant risk. That chip…”

  “Maybe she wants to be more than a walking chip. Maybe I want to be more than a laundry machine. Maybe…”

  He holds up his hand to stop me. “Blaze, is this about you, or Kitty? Because I can’t do anything about Kitty being missing, but I can sure do something abo
ut this attitude of yours.”

  I bite my lower lip. “Nothing. It’s not about anything.”

  His long fingers find my chin and he holds my face gently. I hate this. I hate how good he is, how kind he is. He deserves better than me. He deserves more than I can give him. I wish I’d gone with Kitty. Then I wouldn’t have to feel the deep shame which always overwhelms me when I’m in his presence.

  “I wish you’d talk to me, Blaze.”

  Forcing a smile, I do my best to lie to him. “I’m just tired. That’s all.”

  “You’ve been tired a lot lately. Maybe we should get you to do the doctor.”

  “Seriously, Slick. I’m fine.” I push his hand away.

  There’s a sadness in his eyes that kills me, but there are some things I just can’t bring myself to tell him. There are some things that would take that sad look and turn it to devastation.

  “I’m going to make us some dinner. You get some rest.”

  “You’re too good to me,” I say softly.

  “I’m exactly as good as you deserve me to be,” he replies. “And one of these days, you’re going to trust me enough to believe that.”

  3

  Kitty

  I can practically feel Vicious and the CIA breathing down my neck, but I’m prepared. I am wearing a fireproof foil suit I found on the Internet. I crinkle when I walk. The inside of the roof of my car likewise shines with foil. I’m actually not entirely certain how this chip inside me works, but I do know it interfaces with various electric systems. They say wrapping RFID passports in foil stops them from being scanned, so maybe the suit will work. I’ll find out soon enough one way or another.

  I’m aware that I’ve transcended the ridiculous at this point, but I have to do what works, and I suspect that this will work.