Reign of a Billionaire : A Dark Mafia Enemies-to-Lovers Romance

His cheek was bruised; his eyes blank.

At ten, I was bigger than the average kid, but this guy dwarfed me. I was weak. Unprepared.

The punch to my face came out of nowhere. I heard the crunch, then felt the searing pain in my skull as the blood gushed out of my nose.

Ignoring the blood, I cracked my jaw, keeping my attention on my opponent. Then I pulled back my fist and released it into the boy’s ribs with all my might. I didn’t stop there. Alternating fists, I punched nonstop. All the pent-up frustration and anger from the last two weeks boiled over.

The boy’s eyes widened, his breaths coming in ragged pants, but I was too far gone to consider his fear. It was kill or be killed.

Fury surged. At my opponent. At this fucked-up place. At the vermin surrounding this wannabe-gladiator arena.

A crimson haze crept along the edges of my vision, pushing everything and everyone out, and leaving me alone with a boy like me. We were both victims.

Another punch and he fell to his knees, blinking in confusion before falling over. The dust cloud around him. Gurgling sounds filled the air.

I froze, my mind finally falling silent, as I stared down at the body. The red fog of rage lifted, and I braced for the consequences of my actions.

A man appeared out of nowhere with a black bag while I stood immobile, unable to comprehend what just happened.

“Punctured lung,” a man muttered as the boy choked on his own blood, his eyes showing life for the first time in the two weeks I’d known him. He spit out blood, but something solid hit my boot.

I lowered down, wiping at the blood on my shoe, and spotted a tooth. I reached for it, along with a fistful of sand. As it moved through my fingers like an hourglass, his life slowly faded away.

That day, I became a ghost.

Chapter 9Kingston, 11 Years Old

My defenses cracked like lightning across the sky.

With each passing day, I descended deeper into hell. Every passing night, I slipped into madness. There were hours when breathing alone was intolerable.

I was desperate to escape this hell. The escape seemed impossible. My reality became a fight. Became another struggle to survive.

“You,” the guard called out, and every fiber of me knotted. His eyes focused intently on me. Bile rose in my throat, my skin crawling with revulsion. But I hid it all behind a blank expression filled with nightmares.

I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to stay.

The choice wasn’t given.

Standing up, my legs unsteady, the snickers and pity drifted off the other boys, wrapping around my throat like a noose. If only it’d suffocate me. Relief shone in their eyes at not being the ones chosen, but that was how it went in this hell. Some days just weren’t your day.

Eyes on Ivan and Sofia, I let myself imagine the day the life left theirs. I learned quickly who it was that ruled over this hell. Who was responsible for the life I was forced to endure. A life I didn’t want, but was too much of a coward to try to end. So each day, I did what was demanded of me, taking the lives of other boys to continue “earning” my place in this hell.

Every muscle in my body tightened at the picture of me running into the knee-high snow. I wouldn’t make it a hundred yards before being dragged back. I should know; I’d tried it more than once.

I closed my eyes, attempting to drown out the grunts and moans. The sounds were perverse and wrong in my ears.

“Come here, boy.” A demon with a woman’s voice. I moved on autopilot, the perfume invading my nose.

I shut my mind down, seeking refuge in a warm paradise where teeth, stained with the blood of those who’d dared touch me or had tried to kill me, hung on the wall as décor.

Chapter 10Kingston, 12 Years Old

Fear was part of my every breath and each heartbeat. It shouldn’t be, I needed to be braver, but I couldn’t shake it off.

Two years, four months, two weeks, and twelve days. Eight hundred and seventy-eight days in a windowless, empty basement cell in the middle of the Siberian landscape. The only time I caught a glimpse of the outside world was when I was taken upstairs to fight.

The training didn’t bother me as much as the killing. I tracked the number of lives I’d taken by the teeth I pulled from the corpses. They were just boys, not so unlike me.

One day, someone would probably rip my teeth out when they were done with me.

I leaned against the pillar as I watched a fight between two older kids, my racing heart hidden behind my well-worn mask. Days and months of torture did that to you.

Bright lights surrounded the arena, illuminating the strangers scattered all around it. They shouted, cheered, waved their money in the air with greed in their eyes. The walls behind me were painted red, just like the blood staining the sand in the arena. But that wasn’t what captured my interest.