Page 18 of Beautiful Villain
My heart had done that stupid thing again.
I should’ve known better.
It had happened before.Twice.The same rush.The same certainty.The same mistake.
Both women had disappointed me in the end.They had pushed until they needed to be corrected.Both were now…gone.
This time was worse, because this one had embarrassed me.
I closed my eyes and breathed slowly, counting out the way I’d been taught.Control was important.Rage was useful, but only when aimed properly.
“She thinks she’s free,” I said.“She won’t be for long.”
The city felt smaller by the minute.Streets tightening.Doors closing.Everyone suddenly cautious, like they could feel something circling.
“She’ll get tired,” one of my men said.“She’ll need help.”
“Yes,” I said.“And when she does, she’ll choose the wrong person to go to.”
The world was a cruel, ugly place.Freedom wasn’t the gift people pretended it was.It exposed you.It left you unprotected.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Mikayla out there alone—vulnerable to the wrong people, the wrong kind of attention.She was stubborn, defiant, convinced she could survive anything.But defiance didn’t stop predators.It only made them curious.
That was what scared me most.
Not that she’d run—but that she’d be found.Used.Passed from hand to hand by men who wouldn’t care who she was or what she was worth.Men who would take everything from her and leave nothing behind.
I clenched my jaw.
Because if anyone was going to break Mikayla Gregory—strip her down, reshape her life, leave their mark—it wasn’t going to be some stranger.
It was going to be me.
I opened my eyes.
“When we find her,” I said, “I won’t accept anything less than an apology…on her hands and knees.”
“And her father?”Enzo asked quietly.
I smiled without humor.
“He already paid.Give the poor sod a proper burial.”
7
Gianni
Iwatched her from the doorway longer than I should have.
She sat at the table with my men like she’d always belonged there—leaning in, laughing when Dunn exaggerated a story for effect, rolling her eyes when Larry tried to pass off a terrible hand, trying to make it look strategic.She didn’t flirt or perform.She laughedwiththem, not at them, like this was a room she’d walked into a hundred times before instead of a den full of men who’d made a life of burying bodies together.
It was… odd.
There were no women in this house.There never had been.Women existed on the periphery of our lives—temporary, transactional, carefully kept out of the machinery.Mikayla didn’t hover at the edges.She stepped straight into the middle of it and somehow seemed like she was right at home.
She adapted.That was what caught my attention.She listened more than she spoke.Asked questions that weren’t intrusive.Let them talk.Let them be clever.Dangerous men liked feeling clever.It made them careless—but with her, it made them protective instead.
I didn’t like how quickly that happened.
