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  ALEX DRAKOS

  HIS FORBIDDEN LOVE

  BY

  MALLORY MONROE

  Copyright©2018 Mallory Monroe

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  AUSTIN BROOK PUBLISHING

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  THE AUTHOR AND AUSTIN BROOK PUBLISHING.

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters are fictitious. Any similarities to anyone living or dead are completely accidental. The specific mention of known places or venues are not meant to be exact replicas of those places, but are purposely embellished or imagined for the story’s sake.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  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

  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

  EPILOGUE

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  CHAPTER ONE

  The black limousine came to a screeching stop at the entrance to the mammoth Drakos Capital headquarters building in downtown Manhattan, and the security chief waiting at the edge of the sidewalk quickly opened the back-passenger door.

  Alex Drakos, in golf shoes, golf pants, and a cardigan sweater, got out and hurried inside. His right hand was closed, as if he still held his beloved golf club in his hand, as Security ushered him onto the waiting elevator and hustled him up to the office of the CFO on the thirty-eighth floor. Only two men were present: the chief financial officer himself, Matt Scribner, and Jimmy Hines, the corporation’s chief investigator.

  Both men, normally rocks of confidence, were nervous and uncertain as they sat in front of the desk. This could go either way, and they knew it. Not because their boss was an unfair or unreasonable man. He was neither. But this kind of news could overstretch the bounds.

  Both men rose to their feet when Alex walked in.

  “You called me off of the links for this, gentlemen,” Alex said as he walked to the edge of the desk and leaned against it. “You’re cutting into my relaxation time.” He folded his arms and crossed his legs at the ankles. “This had better be good.”

  Jim Hines took the lead. “We have news, sir, and we were certain you wouldn’t want us to share this over the phone.”

  Alex smiled what his employees called that billion-dollar smile. “That goes without saying or I wouldn’t be here, Jim. Now would I? What is it?”

  “The trap worked, sir,” Jim said as he buttoned his suit coat over his big belly. “We’ve uncovered the embezzlers.”

  Alex was surprised. The auditors had only just noticed the breach a week ago. “You’ve uncovered them? Already?”

  “Yes, sir. Although it was a complex level of stealing, once we got into it we realized it wasn’t that complex.”

  “Was it inhouse?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I know them then?”

  “You do, sir, yes, sir.”

  “Then tell me,” Alex said with a smile, rubbing his hands in anticipation. “Spill the beans! I’m dying to know just who these bastards are that think they can steal a dime from me without consequences.”

  Jim wasn’t ready to take that leap alone. He looked to Matt for help. Matt was the head of the company’s finances, after all. He should have taken the lead in the first place.

  But even Matt had to clear his throat first. “There’s no way to say this, Alex,” he said, “except to just say it. The embezzlers are in-house alright, as you suspected, but they aren’t employees. It’s your son and daughter, sir.”

  Alex, at first, was certain he didn’t hear him right. His son and daughter? What about his son and daughter? But when he realized he heard it exactly right, he frowned and stood up quickly. “My what?”

  “The embezzlers are Cate and Jonathan, sir,” Jim said, making it clearer. “Your son and your daughter. Together and separately, they managed to steal from Drakos Capital, through the Drakos Charitable Foundation subsidiary, in excess of twenty-eight million dollars.” He reached out a thick folder to Alex. “I had my men check it. I had them double-check it. We triple-checked, sir. There is no doubt about it.”

  Alex was astonished. He had expected bad news. Nobody pulled him off of the golf course unless it was bad news. But he never expected anything like this! His son? His daughter? He knew they were capable of pulling some crazy shit, especially that daughter of his. His ex-wife made certain to raise both of them with nothing but contempt for him. But to pull this?

  “I know it’s heartbreaking, Alex,” his CFO said.

  But when he said that, Alex looked at him. His big, blue eyes were blazing, but he managed to put on that smile. “Heartbreaking?” he asked. “What’s fucking heartbreaking? When I get finished with both of their asses, it’s their hearts that’s going to be breaking!”

  Alex snatched the folder from his chief investigator, and in so doing revealed, but for a second, the horror behind that smile, and then he left the office.

  The CFO, stunned by the boss’s response, shook his head. “That’s one fucked-up family,” he said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Jim Hines replied. “If one of my kids pull the shit his kids just pulled, I’d be feeling the exact same way. Besides, people handle pain differently. Our boss? Real differently. He gets mad at first. Then he doesn’t get mad at all. He gets even.”

  The CFO chuckled, because he knew it was true. But he also knew, in reality, it was more of a tragedy than a laughing matter.

  Outside, when Alex got back into his limousine, opened the folder, and began reading all of the sordid details of how his own flesh-and-blood was scamming the shit out of him, his heart did break. His face was frowned and tormented, as he read through page after page after agonizing page. It created so much agony that he had to stop reading, and close the folder.

  He looked out of the window as his limo drove through the streets of a preoccupied Manhattan. Beyond the bundles of crowds that packed the side
walks, he saw pockets of individuals too: a couple holding hands and shopping together. A family of tourists taking pictures together. A group of girlfriends laughing at some joke.

  Alex wondered about his own life. There were primarily three levels to it: his work life, his golf life, his sex life. In that order. The sum and substance of his daily existence. It had always felt like it was enough. It had always felt like it was fulfilling. Now it didn’t even feel like it was right.

  And where was love?

  Alex used to think about love often, and what it truly meant. He used to wonder if anybody ever really loved him with that deep, no-strings-attached, abiding kind of love. His ex-wife, a gold-digger if ever there was one, certainly never did. His friends and lovers only loved what he could do for them. His parents? Forget it. And now his children didn’t give a shit about him either. They were willing to steal huge sums of money from his ass, and to do so right under his nose, as if they were rubbing it in. It was a terribly painful, stinging rebuke.

  A rebuke he had no choice but to face head on, and deal with.

  He opened the folder again, and continued reading. The sting was still there, but nobody was ever going to know he felt it. He was a man who publicly smiled his problems away, while privately suffering, and always suffering alone, because of them.

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to get even. He could be a hard, vengeful man when he had to be. The fact that it was his children; the fact that it was his own flesh-and-blood that had turned on him, made it all the more vital that he showed them his other side. That he showed them just who they were fucking with.

  And just as his investigator insisted there was no doubt about the findings, there was no doubt about Alex’s resolve to take care of those findings, either: he was going to make those bastards pay for what they took from him. He was royally pissed, and they were going to pay.

  But even still, given who they were, and as he read more and more of the unrelenting details, he was far more hurt than angry.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Vito “Money” Visconni slapped the boy so violently across his narrow brown face that the eight-year-old fell backwards onto his butt. Kari Grant didn’t see the slap, but she heard it, and she heard her child scream for her.

  “Mommy! Mommy! He’s hurting me, Mommy!”

  When she hurried to the basement door, and saw her son on the floor, with Vito over him, kicking him like he wasn’t a child, but some mangy dog on the street, she ran down those stairs so fast she nearly lost her balance and slid to the bottom rung. “Leave my child alone!” she cried as she ran. “Get your hands off of him, Vito!”

  But Vito kept kicking him. “I’m gonna teach his punk-ass a lesson,” he was saying, with a beer can in his hand. “He’s too soft. His ass too soft! I’m gonna show him what it means to be a man!”

  But Jordan was small for his age, and Kari knew Vito’s drunkenness and stupidity could kill her son. And although she was small herself, she ran into that basement, grabbed the first thing she could get her hands on, which happened to be a hammer on a work bench, and ran to Vito. Without giving him any warning whatsoever, or giving him a chance to stop harming Jordan, she knocked him upside his head from his blindside, with a knock that walloped him.

  Vito was already drunk, and when she hit him he stumbled sideways like a drunk, as if he was going to fall. But he held onto one of those work benches he kept in the basement, and stayed upright. He was bleeding from her blow, and had scattered many of his tools, but he stayed on his feet.

  Kari picked up Jordan and began running up the stairs with him in her arms. This was the last straw. That man had been intimidating her for years, and threatening to kick her ass time and time again, but he never had the nerve to touch her. Or even think about touching her child. Mainly because he knew they didn’t call her Krazy Kari for nothing, and he knew she would fight him back. But also, because he professed to love her.

  But he had crossed the line and touched her son. For the first time ever, he had taken out his anger issues on her child. It was the first time, but Kari was going to make certain it would be the last time.

  She ran. She should have run years ago, but she was running now. Her son was eight. She was only twenty-three. But she was getting away from Chicago, and Vito Visconni, a made man for the mob, for good.

  “You’d better run!” Vito was yelling behind her as he staggered toward those stairs, throwing whatever he could up those stairs. “You’d better run!”

  He tried to run, too, up the stairs after her, to beat her ass, but he was too drunk, and in too much pain. He stumbled backwards, instead, holding onto the railing to avoid falling. “Better run,” he said again with less fire. “And don’t your ass ever come back!” His fire returned. “You hear me, Kare? Take that punk-ass, sissy-ass kid of yours and never step foot in my house again. You hear me, bitch? I don’t ever want to see him or your crazy black ass ever again!”

  But like always, Vito’s words didn’t match his actions. He tried to see her again. He was on the hunt for Kari and Jordan later that very same day. But that was mostly because he was in denial. Kari couldn’t leave him, he was telling his men. They’d had problems in the past, and although she might have left for a day, to give him a chance to cool down, she never left him for good! He was certain this time was just like all those other times.

  Only it wasn’t like all those other times. Any fool, including his men, could see it wasn’t. He had touched Jordan. They knew how Kari was about that child. There would be no coming back.

  In the end, it didn’t matter, because everything went sideways for Vito less than twenty-four hours after Kari left him. The Feds, after months of surveillance, closed in and arrested Vito Visconni on three counts of conspiracy to commit murder. He and most of the leadership in the Pataki crime family were picked up. And suddenly he was too preoccupied to give a shit about Kari or Jordan or anybody else. He was too busy worrying about himself. And fighting like hell for his freedom.

  His fight failed. He and two of his cohorts were tried, convicted, and Vito got ten years.

  He said he didn’t ever want to see her again, and the feeling was mutual, Kari thought, as she sat in traffic in Apple Valley, Florida, and thought about that day. It happened six years ago. Six long years ago. Kari left Vito and Chicago and never looked back. But as she tried to make her way to work; as her old but reliable Toyota Tercel inched its way through the heavy traffic, she wasn’t at all sure why she suddenly started thinking about that day again in the first place.

  Apple Valley wasn’t a big city. It was, in fact, a small, bedroom community on Florida’s Panhandle. But because of its one long, main road in and out of town, and because it was the gateway to most businesses in town, it was crazy-hectic during morning rush hour, and Kari was stuck in the thick of that rush.

  As the traffic grind to yet another complete stop, she looked through the rearview mirror, and spruced up her bang. She was already getting bags under her eyes and she wasn’t even thirty yet. Her best friend Faye said she looked tired all the time. And why wouldn’t she? All she did was work, work, and more work. Work and Jordan and church on Sundays were the sum and substance of her existence. But as she sipped more coffee from the Styrofoam cup she held in her hand, and continued to inch through traffic, she wondered if she was going to be late for work for the first time in she-couldn’t-remember how long, and if that could be a sign.

  She also wondered why Vito and that day she left him had suddenly popped into her mind. She hadn’t thought about that fool in years. He was like a bad movie she swore to never see again.

  She was only nineteen when she first hooked up with him. Nineteen going on thirty-five, and already with a four-year-old kid her mother had to help raise. He was a bad boy in Chicago, in his mid-twenties at the time, who liked his ladies saucy. He took an immediate liking to Kari, that smart-mouth black kid who hung around the way all the time, and quickly made her his number one.

 
; Her first mistake was moving in with a player like him, which she did right away. Then she ended up staying with his crazy-ass for four long years. Her second mistake.

  After he beat on her son, and she left him, and even after he went away to prison for a crime that had nothing to do with them, he continued to try and harass her from behind bars. He didn’t know where she moved to- she saw to that herself. But he would send letters to her friends to give to her, and they would read the letters to her whenever she would phone them.

  In one of those letters he had the nerve to tell her that she was still his property, and if she ever let another man touch her, he’d kill her and the man. Her friend, on Kari’s urgings, turned that letter over to the authorities: it sounded like a threat to Kari. But the authorities didn’t do a damn thing about it. He was just blowing off steam, they said. It was hyperbole. I’ll kill you. People say it all the time, they said.

  But if the person saying it at that time was in prison for conspiracy to commit murder, it seemed to Kari, they should have taken his saying it a little more seriously.

  But they didn’t.

  But she stayed out of the dating game all the same.

  It helped that she lived in Apple Valley. Beautiful women were a dime a dozen in Apple Valley, and women outnumbered men four-to-one. She was considered only mildly attractive, anyway, compared to most in town. In other words, to men in Apple Valley, Kari looked okay.

  Not that men didn’t ask her out occasionally. They did. But when she turned them down, Kari was convinced it wasn’t a big deal to them. What man wanted okay, she figured, when they could have bombshell?

  Not that she was interested in any of them, either. She had a son to raise and a career to get off the ground. Vito’s threat wasn’t the reason she remained single. Vito’s threat didn’t even cross her mind.

  The only reason she was thinking about it now, and him now, she decided, was because she had real hope in her life for the first time in a long time. Things were finally looking up! There were rumors that the promotion she should have received at work long ago was going to be bestowed upon her today. But like most things in her life, even the announcement wasn’t going to be a piece of cake for her. She was stuck in traffic, and could very well miss it!