Free Sold: A Billionaire Bad Boy Mafia Romance by Natasha Tanner, Molly Thorne

one. I stopped beside it and greeted Harlan, who was waiting for us. I opened the door for her.
    “Harlan will drive you to the airport. You’ll both fly back to New York,” I explained.
    She froze in place and stared at me, all joy wiped out from her face in an instant.
    “What?”
    I knew my expression was cold and self-assured. I’ve been wearing it for years. At first it was a mask; in time, it became my face.
    “It was nice to meet you,” I said. “But I don’t need you anymore.”
    “Wh-what?” she repeated, and I think I saw a tear forming in her eye.
    Oh, I could hear her thoughts just as if she were speaking out loud.
He fucked and now he’s throwing me away, just like all these assholes do. I’m just like any of his other bitches. I wish I wouldn’t have answered his email. I wish I would’ve never stepped inside that pub. I hate him so much.
    How could I explain to her that I wasn’t planning on fucking her and leaving her, but that it was precisely that moment (that magical intimate moment when it became certain to me that I love her) when I knew that I had to protect her at all costs? I couldn’t. She wouldn’t understand. She would try to convince me. But there was no other way.
    If I could make sure she was completely out of harm’s way, I could contact her again. But I couldn’t count on it. It was highly dubious. Men like me are poison for girls. They end up with a bullet in their face.
    The last words I said to her. Impeccably pronounced, without an ounce of emotion, as she broke down and tears welled in her eyes:
    “It’s best if I don’t know where you are. I suggest you move to a different city or go back to Russia. Thanks for everything.”
    I kissed her softly on the cheek and walked back to my car. As I drove away, I saw her still standing there on the sidewalk, while Harlan waited patiently for her to get into the other one so that he could drive to the airport.

14. TWO DREAMS
    VAN
    I dreamt of falling.
    I was suspended in the middle of the sky when it all started. Looking right ahead I could see the sun, spreading pink and orange light all across the landscape. Below me there was the desert, and only the desert. The sand was not uniform but striped in all the colors I can think of. Red sand, yellow sand, blue sand, pink sand, white sand, brown sand, green sand, black sand, one strip after the other, from horizon to horizon. I was trying to guess at what height I was floating in the air when suddenly I wasn’t floating anymore. I fell down at such a speed that I think I woke up but kept dreaming anyway.
    I hit the ground with full force, causing a cataclysm of sorts. As soon as my feet touched the sand, a multicolored explosion covered my whole field of vision. I had created a sand tornado that kept growing and growing as I entered the ground. Soon I was completely covered in sand and descending to the core of the earth. I could somehow see the sand as I went down, but I also felt it scratching my eyeballs, my lips, getting into my nose and mouth and ears, grazing my clothes and tearing them by sheer pressure, then scratching my nipples and my belly and the slit between my legs too. It was painful, but not too much, since the sand was amazingly fine and almost ethereal.
    After a while I realized there were voices whispering in the constant hissing of the sand flowing upwards.
Women’s
voices. They were all fresh and melodious, the voices of women one would picture as young and beautiful. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but there was a threatening tone lying beneath the sweetness of their words. As I kept drilling into the desert, I became aware that all those voices also rotated around me like a tornado, and there was a deep, masculine voice underlying them all, a voice that was not hard for me to recognize.
    Right before I woke up, I realized the sand had a subtle smell too. A smell of gunpowder. And now it was all black.
    The air in my room was chilly, and the