Scarred Queen (The Queens Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Part Two

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Bonus: Excerpt from The Assassin’s Wife – Book 1 of Angels & Assassins

  Scarred Queen

  Nikita Slater

  Copyright © 2018 Nikita Slater

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Contents

  Fucking Obsessed with You

  Part I

  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

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part II

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Acknowledgments

  Sneak Peek: Excerpt from Capturing Victory

  Bonus: Excerpt from The Assassin’s Wife – Book 1 of Angels & Assassins

  Bonus: Excerpt from Thieving Hearts

  Also by Nikita Slater

  Stay connected with Nikita!

  Nikita’s Underworld!

  Fucking Obsessed with You

  Don’t see no colours like you, but you ask me to,

  Ask me to see the things you do,

  Think the way you do.

  Fuck the way I feel, the way I feel for you

  Loyal is everything to you, but you want me too,

  You take me too, I ain’t gonna be for you,

  Not loyal no more, not if I go.

  Fuck the way you do, obsessed with you too.

  Why you gotta take, take everything for you,

  Push the way you do, take the things for you,

  Make me love you too,

  Make me do the things you do, feel for you.

  Why you gotta make, make me feel things for you,

  Can’t hold on to you, make me go,

  Make me hate you too,

  Push me to go, make me hate you too.

  Not strong enough to go, but you gotta push me to,

  Make me fuck off, fuck away from you,

  Loyal is everything to you, fuck the way I feel,

  Make me go, fucking obsessed with you.

  Part One

  Broken Head, Broken Heart, Broken Parts

  Chapter One

  Ignacio Hernandez had never before brought a woman to a meet. Then, they’d never met at a club before. The entire scene was unprecedented. Reyes didn’t do unprecedented, but he was willing to make an exception because he was curious. He could sever the Miami connection if he had to. It would cause some shockwaves, but it wasn’t out of the question. Ignacio was beginning to annoy him anyway. His poor decisions were beginning to affect the Bolivian. Such as bringing a woman like her to a meet with a man like him. Something that was meant to show off Ignacio’s power and wealth would become a big mistake.

  His gaze flickered over the woman, calmly drinking her champagne and orange juice as though she weren’t sitting at a table with four of the most dangerous men on the continental East coast. Two kingpins and their right hands. Only Reyes didn’t think she was as calm as she appeared. Her wrist trembled slightly, giving her away. She had enough presence to make sure that tiny shake ceased by the time it got to her slim fingers where they clenched the crystal of her glass. It wasn’t the fingers or her ability to remain coolly poised while the men around her talked business that captured his curiosity. It was the mark on the back of her delicate hand, permanent slash lines, viciously marring her porcelain skin.

  Anger burned deep in his gut, surprising him. Reyes rarely felt anything. Ever. Certainly not for a woman. This was how he made effective decisions. How he moved trade across borders with ease and cool logic. Emotion had been removed from him. First by a ruthless father, then by a vicious military stint in his home country and finally by an unrelenting, merciless prison sentence that had systematically broken him before he had, in turn, broken down the prison itself and owned it from the inside out. By the time he was released it was into a world of his own making; a world shaped by him on the inside and ruled by him on the outside.

  Yet the sight of this cool, blond beauty, so broken yet utterly resilient was doing something to him, forcing him to feel. He shifted in his seat, sliding his arm across the back of the leather, his eyes never leaving her while he listened to the other men speak. Negotiate terms. He didn’t need to add his voice. Alejandro, his right hand, knew the terms. Knew not to fuck up while in pursuit of new deals for the boss.

  Reyes wanted her. The electrifying anger he felt when his eyes caressed that mark assured him he would take the woman and make her his. Not because it infuriated him that she had been abused. No, he was not a good enough man to care about that. He was under no illusions he would treat her any better than Ignacio. Hell, he’d probably treat her much worse. Because Ignacio undoubtedly set her up like a trophy in his great mausoleum of a house and then ignored the unapproachable beauty.

  Reyes had no intention of ignoring her. He was going to take her and fuck every inch of her, just the way he wanted. Hard, brutal, mean. Exactly how he was. Exactly how this world had shaped him. Because he could. She was about to become spoils of war.

  No, he wasn’t angry about the mark on her hand at all. He was pissed that the mark was twisted into the shape of an “H” and not an “R.” He wanted her to belong to him, to the King. When he got his hands on the woman, that would be the first thing he changed.

  Finally, after nearly
an hour of sitting in the booth together, his eyes rarely leaving her face, she lifted hers to meet his uncompromising gaze. And for the first time in his life, he felt his heart stop in his chest. He was unprepared for the impact. Her eyes – one startling green and the other amber brown – were vivid, stunning and unrelenting. Though her expression didn’t flicker once from the blank mask of icy beauty, he saw the burning disdain, the heated fury buried deep within those fiery orbs for the men that surrounded her. She despised all of them.

  His lip lifted in an answering sneer. She refused to drop her eyes from his challenge, despite her husband sitting at the same table. He wanted nothing more, in that moment, than to take this scarred Queen from her throne and tame her. He vowed, then and there, that he would eventually have her.

  Chapter Two

  Casey Hernandez, the beautiful and untouchable wife of Ignacio Hernandez, did not leave his mind for the next several months as Reyes negotiated trade with her stupid fuck of a husband. He’d left most of the footwork with Alejandro, while he retreated to his compound, deep in the mountainous Altiplano region of Bolivia. Alejandro and several of his most trusted men had been back and forth between the two countries, discussing terms and moving product. Building business in the safest, smartest way possible.

  Reyes continued to do what he did best. Manage his kingdom with an iron fist. Though it burned him to leave the woman alone, he’d learned patience over the years through the most brutal of methods. Learned to understand his prey before making a move. Reyes moved to his desk and sat. He reached for a Cohiba, lit it, took a long draw and leaned back in his sturdy leather chair. He rarely smoked or imbibed alcohol, preferring clarity, but indulged once in a while, particularly when agitated. When his rigid control was tested or felt somehow… overly restrictive. His glance flicked to the newest set of prints scattered across his desk. They’d been taken three days ago.

  After a moment, he picked one up and allowed his forefinger to brush across her delicate features. In the picture, she was shopping, her long, perfectly manicured fingers skimming carelessly over an exquisite cashmere dress while her empty gaze remained unfocused. Somewhere else entirely, somewhere not in the room she was standing in. Except for her eyes, she looked perfect. Not a hair out of place, her long, tall form packed into a cream-coloured pencil skirt and a pink flowery blouse. Her pale blond hair flowed down her back like a silk waterfall. Reyes grunted and crushed the picture in his fist, tossing it over the top of his immaculate desk.

  He was ready to admit that, despite his best efforts, he knew very little about the woman he’d been obsessing over since the moment he set eyes on her six months earlier. He’d had her investigated by no less than three private investigators. He’d had her photographed every time she stepped foot from Hernandez’s garish mansion, which frustratingly, was not often. She appeared to have the markings of exactly what she was; a kept woman. Yet, she was more, an enigma.

  She shopped, but she didn’t take enjoyment in her purchases. She picked things out, colours that didn’t even match, handed them to her bodyguard without trying them on, then moved on to the next shop without a backwards glance. She moved like a robot, shopping, not because she wanted to, but because it was expected. She went out for lunch with “friends” once a week on Tuesdays, but she rarely said a word and she never smiled. Her so-called friends were the wives and daughters of local politicians and businessmen. She showed up because she had to, not because she liked the people that she ate with. Anyone could tell from the pictures that she hated those lunches. Other than to shop and eat lunch on Tuesdays, Casey never left the mansion. Reyes wasn’t able to dig anything else up about her, she had no past that he could discover. It was like she’d been buried when she’d taken the Hernandez name.

  Reyes didn’t like mysteries and he didn’t like women that eluded him. He was straightforward in business and straightforward when it came to fucking. He wanted both to be quick and efficient with as little mess to his personal life as possible. He knew, without a doubt, if he continued to pursue the growing obsession he felt with the Hernandez woman, that he was in danger of doing something he’d vowed never to do. Creating a mess. A weakness for exploitation.

  His mother and siblings had been caught in the crossfire of such a weakness. He’d ended his own father in bloody retaliation, finally taking out a broken man before dismantling his empire and rebuilding from the ground up, better, more brutal and unbreakable. Now he had to decide if he was going to allow this woman to crawl further inside him, burrow her way deeper under his skin. Because something told him if he didn’t do what he knew was right, and put a bullet in her head now, take care of this weakness, he was going to bleed for her. And he didn’t bleed for anyone.

  He had less than a week to decide. He was going back to the United States to see the woman and to take care of the Miami connection. It was time to make the power move and set up his own organization with men he trusted at the top. He glanced down at the array of pictures scattered across his desk, his dark eyes moving to one in particular. A close up of her face as she glanced over her shoulder toward the hidden camera. Every time he looked at her, he saw that tiny scar next to her eyebrow. Something about it bothered him. How had she gotten it and why hadn’t his investigators found out a damn thing about her? Why was she such a mystery? And would she survive the coming war long enough to answer his questions?

  Chapter Three

  “Boss wants to see you.”

  Casey jumped and dropped her concealer stick. It clattered against the top of her makeup table, rolled from the smooth glass surface and onto the carpeted floor. She took a calming breath before turning slightly in her seat and bending over to pick it up. Her long, pale blond waves swished around her shoulders as she reached for the tube, snatching it up. She set it back on top of her vanity and then glanced over her shoulder at the rugged, stocky bodyguard standing in her doorway. He hadn’t knocked to announce his presence. She would have heard and been able to prepare herself for the intrusion of her private sanctuary.

  They never knocked. It was like they took deliberate pleasure in walking in on her any time they wanted, interrupting her private moments. So, she made damn sure those moments were few and far between. She locked the washroom door when she was in there and always changed in the closet. When Ignacio’s respect for her had nosedived it was like he’d given his men free reign with their disregard of his wife as well. Perhaps it had bothered her at one time, but she didn’t really remember what that felt like anymore. Now her feelings were more geared toward survival. She didn’t like the way his men watched her. Like a pack of hungry dogs, awaiting the release order from their master. So far, the command hadn’t come; they weren’t allowed to so much as touch a single hair on her head. He still seemed to value her trophy status.

  The bodyguard standing in her door wasn’t her usual full-time man. This was one of the relief guys that took over from time to time. She nodded a little and said quietly, “I’ll be out in five minutes.”

  He continued to stand, tense and looking at her as though he had no intention of leaving. She turned her head, gave the best impression of haughty she could come up with and repeated, more steel in her voice, “Five minutes. You may go now.”

  His eyes narrowed and his shoulders stiffened, but he left, closing the door with some force. Casey sighed in relief and slumped against her vanity for a moment. She now had five minutes to prepare for a meeting with the devil. And she’d pissed off another bodyguard.

  She ran a quick brush through her hair and added a little mascara to her pale lashes, then pushed away from her makeup table. She didn’t take too long in her closet choosing an outfit because she knew the bodyguard would be back right on time to collect her for the meeting with Ignacio. She was lucky she was even getting the five minutes she’d insisted on. She snatched a pair of distressed skinny jeans from the shelf and pulled them on underneath her robe. She chose a black bra with little embroidered roses on it, her favouri
te, and then pulled a soft black knit sweater off a hanger. She added a pair of three inch heeled black boots to complete the outfit. Ignacio hated it when she was taller than him. Not too hard, considering she was already the same height as him at 5’8.”

  She hurried out of the closet just as her bedroom door banged open. She lifted her chin in cool defiance and moved toward the door. The bodyguard, whose name she didn’t know, took her arm in a painful hold that told her he wasn’t pleased with her current attitude, and led her out the door.

  “A little slower, help,” she muttered as she stumbled to keep up with him, her heels sliding on the marble tiles. His hand tightened on her arm until she flinched. He was going to leave bruises. The man must have a death wish. One word to Ignacio and he’d be toast. She sighed and tried to shrug him off. Too bad she was a better person than that.

  He practically flung her down a flight of stairs toward her regular bodyguard, Alonzo, who took a quick step back before he accidentally touched her. He took one look at the hold her temporary bodyguard had on her and stepped threateningly toward the pair. Casey dropped her eyes and turned her head away, not wanting to watch the display of masculine posturing in her own foyer.