Mafia Princess by Kennedy Slope

Chapter Ten

Icould still smell Sasha’s perfume on my suit as I sat in my office. The delicate floral scent of it was distracting. Normally, when I screwed a woman, I quickly went home and washed the event off of me. Sex was about pleasure and once I had mine, I wasn’t interested in thinking about the experience further.

“What’s wrong with you?” Marco asked. I had called him after dropping Sasha off at the house.

“I just left the Petrov’s,” I told him.

“How are the in-laws?” Marco asked. There was a smug smile on his face as he sat across from me. Marco enjoyed digging the knife in when he talked about my wedding.

“Isaac agreed to hand over some of the more lucrative ports,” I told him. I reached into my jacket pocket, pulling out the deed that Isaac had placed in my hands before I left. I had been so high on my victory that I’d been unable to control myself when I got into the car. I wrinkled my nose as I considered what I had done.

Marco took the papers, his eyes scanned the information, and widened as he read the documents.

“How the fuck did you get these?”

I leaned back in my chair doing the best that I could to seem completely nonchalant. “I threatened to send Sasha to him in pieces if he didn’t give me what I wanted,” I told Marco.

Marco’ eyes went wider. He was against my marriage from the start, especially because he knew that he was the reason I was willing to marry Sasha in the first place. As the only family that I had left, I would do everything in my power to make sure that he was safe, and at the time, I thought making a deal with the devil would do it.

“Do you think that was wise?” he asked.

“Are you questioning if I would do it?” Marco played the role of enforcer. He was my right hand, and that position often got messy. He wasn’t one to shy away from such things, so I wondered why he questioned the threats that I had made to Isaac. Threats that I was more than ready to act upon if Sasha became expandable.

“She’s a Blanchi now,” Marco said. “People would view it as a sign of weakness if you allow your wife to come to some harm.”

“I’d be the one doing the harming,” I reminded him. I could see the distaste cross his face at my words. Generally, we lived by a code. One that had been instilled in us at a young age by our father, which was that women and children were off limits.

“You declared open season on your own wife,” Marco said.

“Isaac isn’t going to say anything to anyone. He gave me the deeds to protect Sasha. He’s not going to want anyone to know that I haven’t extended my protection.”

“Everyone is talking about it,” Marco said.

“What? Why?”

Marco ran a hand through his dark hair. It was clear that my brother didn’t want to talk to me about this. “You haven't been seen with her.”

“So?” Plenty of mob wives and daughters were kept out of the public eye. Sasha had barely been allowed to go out under her father’s roof.

“So, she’s the wife of the Don. She’s not like other women. Ma was always with pa.”

“I thought that it would be best to keep her away from everyone,” I told Marco. “After all, she’s a Petrov.”

It was the one thing that I couldn’t get over. I barely knew Sasha, and I didn’t want to know her. Whenever I looked at Sasha, I saw her family, and the many things that they had taken from me. I couldn’t deny the effect that Sasha had on my body. The smell of her perfume on me reminded me of her tight pussy gripping me as I thrust into her soft, pliable body.

“It doesn’t matter,” Marco said. “She’s your wife, and if you aren’t going to claim her as such, she’s going to find herself in the crosshairs of our enemies as well as her father’s.”

I hated that Marco was right. I had thought that I could marry Sasha, put her in my house, fuck her, and ignore her. When she finally gave me a child, I’d send them off to the burbs and be done with it. But Sasha wasn’t the daughter of some random made man. She was the princess of an empire, and now, it was my responsibility to make sure that she didn’t end up in the hands of any of our enemies.

“Lorenzo’s daughter is getting married this weekend, right?” I asked. I normally didn’t keep track of such things. I had an assistant who tracked my calendar, but I recalled seeing it on my phone when I was pretending to ignore Sasha.

Marco nodded. “Francesca is getting married at the Plaza,” he said. There was a note of irritation in his voice. “Apparently, this is 1980.”

I chuckled. Marco was happy to be part of the family, but unlike me, he didn’t appreciate ostentatious shows of wealth.

“I suppose I have Sasha to thank for not being so cliche,” I muttered. I knew that she hadn’t chosen one single part of our wedding, that had all been her mother, but it seemed like an appropriate thing to say.

“Make sure that you bring her,” Marco said. He got up from his place across from me taking the deeds to the new ports with him. “I’ll check these out.”

“Be careful,” I told Marco. “Petrov didn’t hand them over willingly, and if I know that old man, he’s going to try and retaliate in some way.”

Marco sighed. For a moment, my brother looked so much older than his age. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Make sure you handle your shit. That’ll take a load off of my mind.”

I rolled my eyes at Marco but said nothing.

Once more I was in an impossible situation. I needed to make sure that I kept Sasha at bay. I wasn’t sure if I could trust her. She was young and naive, and she knew nothing outside of the confines of her home. Her innocence made her a perfect weapon for her family to use against him. I wasn’t stupid enough to be caught off guard.

Sighing, I put my feet up on my desk and contemplated what I was going to do next. Marco was right, but so was I. I needed a way to use Sasha for my purposes while keeping her too far to make any sort of trouble for me.

Cracking my knuckles, I realized that I was actually going to have to get to know my wife, which was the last thing that I wanted to do.

* * *

The next morning I sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast and waiting for Sasha to wake up for class. She was cutting it close according to the time on my watch, and I was surprised that the straight A student who never looked to have a hair out of place was willing to be late to school.

About five minutes before she absolutely needed to leave, I heard the sound of her heels clicking on the hardwood floor.

“Finally,” I muttered, putting down the newspaper.

Sasha stops as she sees me at the table. We hadn’t eaten breakfast together even once, but the surprise on her face was still comical. It looked as though she had sucked on a lemon. Considering how I’d fucked her in the car yesterday before throwing her out, I was sure that I was the last person she wanted to see.

Too bad for her, I thought. Marco' words had played in my head the entire night, and I knew that if I planned to use Sasha to keep her father in line, I needed to make sure that no one questioned what I would do if they harmed her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

I noticed that she was wearing a pleated skirt that fell past her knees and a white linen top. It was incredibly prim, especially with her buckled heels. It wasn’t the normal attire for a college student, but I didn’t say anything.

For some reason, I didn’t want to ruin this day for her. I didn’t know a great deal about Sasha, but I did know that going to college was a big deal to her. I suspected that she had been on such good behavior, yesterday notwithstanding, because she didn’t want me to yank that opportunity away from her.

Something about that felt incredibly sad to me.

“Dominic?” she asked. The shock of her using my name brought my attention back to her.

“It’s Dom,” I said.

Sasha raised an eyebrow.

“No one calls me Dominic. I don’t think I’ve heard my full name since my mother was alive.”

Sasha bit her lip, a habit of hers I noticed for when she was nervous, but she didn’t say anything. “I thought I would drive you to school,” I said. It sounded odd, but I ignored it. I wasn’t so careless that I wasn’t going to make sure that she had protection even if she didn’t want it.

“Thanks,” she said.

I was surprised that she wasn’t going to argue with me as she had yesterday. I was a little disappointed. I liked the fire that she showed.

“You should eat something,” I told her, gesturing to the spread that was on the table.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

I had to bite my lip to keep from ordering her to eat, but I knew that I needed to try a different approach with Sasha. I wasn’t going to change who I was, but I needed a slightly gentler touch if I was going to build some inroads with her. I needed her to trust me.

“Fine,” I said. “We should get going.”

“You’re really going to drive me?” she asked. There was a note of incredulousness in her voice.

“I already told you that you can’t take the subway,” I snapped. “If you want to go, this is how you are getting there.”

Her eyes flamed, and I waited for her to tell me to go screw myself, but instead, she gripped her bag tighter and nodded.

I got up from my seat and walked towards the door with Sasha following behind me. I said nothing as the elevator descended to my garage. I had pulled some strings to get Sasha into Columbia at the last minute. It hadn’t been incredibly hard. After all, she had already been accepted. A small fortune made the admissions office relax their deadlines.

“Were you able to register for classes?” I asked as I pulled out of the garage and into the busy street.

There was a long pause, likely from Sasha’s shock that I was asking her a question. “I was,” she said.

“And?” I asked.

“I’m just taking general requirements,” she said with a shrug, but I could see the sparkle of excitement in her eyes.

“Do you know what you are going to major in?” I asked. It felt odd to have such a normal conversation with Sasha. We hadn’t talked much since that first day in the house, and even then, I had been focused on laying out the rules for her.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I hadn’t actually thought that I would be able to go to school. My father thinks too much education in a woman makes her useless as a wife.”

I snorted. “Sounds like something that he would say.”

This earned a smile from Sasha, and I filed that away for another time. Sasha might not be the daddy’s princess that her father thought her to be.

“I majored in political science,” I said. “For a while, I thought I would go to law school.”

“You went to college?” she asked.

I laughed. “Hard to believe, but yes. Harvard. I would have gone to law school too but…” I trailed off as I thought about what had kept me from attending law school. My father and eldest brother had been murdered, which had changed the trajectory of my life.

Sasha was quiet, no doubt thinking the same thing I was. Her family had killed my own, and in turn, turned me into the man who was sitting next to her. I had grown up in the life, but in college, I’d considered going legit. The never ending war with the Petrov’s reminded me that that would never be possible. The family I had been born into made it so that I was always going to be where I ended up.

As I pulled in front of the school, as best I could considering Manhattan traffic, I recalled why I had decided to drive Sasha to the school to begin with. “There’s a wedding on Saturday night,” I said.

“Oh?”

“We are going to need to attend.” I wanted to make it clear to Sasha that this was work. We would be going as husband and wife, but not as a normal couple.

“Okay,” Sasha said.

I reached into my wallet pulling out a black credit card. “Here,” I said, handing her the car.

“What’s this?” Sasha said, turning the card over in her hands.

“You’ll need a dress.”

“Okay,” she said, placing the card in her bag. She waited for a moment, and I wondered if I should say something else, perhaps, apologize for the shit I did the day before. But I wasn’t the type of man I could expect an apology from, so instead, I reminded her that a guard would be waiting for her promptly after her last class and watched as she headed towards the school.

Getting to know my wife was going to be much more challenging than I thought.