Until Retribution Burns: A Dark Mafia Romance (Beauty in Lies Book 3)

  Until Retribution Burns

  Beauty in Lies Book Three

  Adelaide Forrest

  Copyright © 2021 by Adelaide Forrest

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design by Adelaide Forrest

  Proofreading by Light Hand Editing

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  About the Author

  Content & Trigger Warnings

  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

  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

  Chapter 37

  Also by Adelaide Forrest

  About the Author

  Adelaide lives in her tiny house with her husband and two rambunctious kids. When she's not chasing all three of them and her dog around the house, she spends all her free time writing and adding to the hoard of plots stored on her bookshelf and hard-drive.

  She always wanted to write, and did from the time she was ten and wrote her first full-length fantasy novel. The subject matter has changed over the years, but that passion for writing never went away.

  She has a background in Psychology and working with horses, but Adelaide began her publishing journey in February 2020 and never looked back.

  For more information, please visit Adelaide's website or subscribe to her newsletter.

  Content & Trigger Warnings

  Beauty in Lies is a DARK mafia romance series dealing with topics that some readers may find offensive or triggering. Readers of Adelaide Forrest’s Bellandi Crime Syndicate series should note that this series is much darker.

  Please keep in mind the following list WILL contain specifics about the ENTIRE series and may spoil certain plot elements. Please avoid the next page if you don’t wish to know specifics.

  The following scenarios are all present in the Beauty in Lies series. This list may be added to over time.

  • Situations involving dubious, questionable, or nonconsent

  • 13 Year Age gap, with both characters being of legal age at the time a physical relationship forms.

  • Forced Pregnancy

  • Branding

  • Forced Marriage under threat of death & violence

  • VERY graphic violence, torture, and murder

  • Drug use, attempted date rape, and dubious situations while under the influence

  • Kidnapping/Captive Scenarios

  • Knife Play/Violence

  • Somnophilia

  1

  Isa

  A firm hand clenched the back of my shirt, gripping me tightly by the material and lifting so suddenly that the sound of fabric tearing filled the air.

  Dark and impossibly cruel eyes met mine as he lifted me off my feet.

  As if I was the kitten he'd tempted me with, he kept me at arm's length. Like I was a dirty and diseased thing he couldn’t bear to taint himself with.

  I screamed as my body was tossed backwards. Cold water filled my lungs suddenly when I broke through the surface, sinking fast and rapidly caught in the current. I kicked my legs, lost in the darkness of the river as it roared around me. Phantom shadows came from the depths, surrounding me as my body was swept away.

  A sharp bite of pain caught my leg, ripping through skin —

  "Isa!" Rafael snapped, drawing me back to the present as he grasped my shoulders and shook me roughly. I stumbled backward, slapping away his touch and desperate to get free from him. My back hit the opposite wall in the hallway, the impact making me feel solid compared to the liquid feeling that had taken over my body when I remembered what it was like to drown.

  How it felt to be filled with the same water that surrounded me, as if I could dissolve into nothingness and cease to exist.

  The man who had ruined me, who’d had changed everything in my life and taken my sister away...was my father-in-law. Dead or not, we'd somehow become bound by the bonds of marriage.

  I wished I'd been there to watch him burn for what he’d done to me and my family, but fate, and my husband, had stripped me of that right.

  "Mi reina," Rafael said, stepping toward me cautiously. My feet moved faster than my body could keep up, sliding further along the wall to keep that distance between us. "Stop and think about this. I need you to be very, very certain it was him.”

  "Stay away from me," I gasped, backing down the hall toward the kitchen where I'd left Martina. He reached out for me again, his face a complex mix of concern and rage as I threw myself back to avoid his touch. "Why?" I asked. Tears streamed down my face steadily as I tried to understand and tried to wrap my head around all the moving pieces in the game I hadn’t even known we were playing.

  Hadn't his father done enough?

  I turned, running down the rest of the hallway and bursting into the open-concept living room. Rafael followed at my heels, the sound of him vaulting into motion behind me erupting in the more enclosed space.

  I turned to look back, watching his face harden for a brief moment before I collided with a wall of muscle. I screamed as Sebastian wrapped his arms around me, holding me still despite my struggles and the foot I stomped on top of his.

  "What's going on?" Andrés asked, stepping up beside me as Sebastian spun me in his arms. Facing Rafael, I watched his gaze settle on his cousin's hands wrapped around my stomach and my chest to hold me still.

  "Unhand. My. Wife," Rafael growled, his voice dropping to a tone that bordered on animalistic.

  "He will, as soon as you tell me why you're chasing her through my home, and she looks like she's seen a ghost. I know what your father taught you was acceptable behavior, Boy. I will not tolerate that in my house," Andrés argued, forcing Rafael's eyes to turn to him. Whatever he saw in Andrés’ expression calmed the beast in him somewhat, and he stepped forward slowly to touch gentle fingers to my face as I flinched back.

  "I promise you, I didn't know," he murmured, touching his forehead to mine as if he could make me feel the truth to the words.

  "You expect me to believe that?" I said through gritted teeth. My throat clenched around the words, a sob that I wouldn’t give into threatening to break free. Of all the people in the world, there couldn't be any way that Rafael obsessed over the same girl his father had tried to kill, and it was all just a coincidence.

  It wasn’t possible.

  "I've been searching for answers. I have men looking into the accident in Chicago to find out what happened to you and who did it. I wouldn't have done that if I already knew the answer, mi reina," he reassured me.

  I eyed him warily. Though his words felt like the truth, I’d come to learn that coincidences didn’t exist when it came to Rafael. In the place of happenstance there was only cool calculation and manipulation — a master hand on the chess pieces of life, guiding those around him to do exactly as he pleased.

  My bottom lip trembled as I remembered how desperate he’d been for the answers to what happened in the river that he’d thought to coerce me into revealing them under the threat of branding. He’d stood nothing to gain in that moment aside from the information he lacked that had plagued him.

  He must have thought he saw acceptance in my eyes, because he tore Sebastian’s hands from my body, moving to draw me into his embrace. Dropping to the floor, I scurried out beneath his arms and rounded his cousin’s legs, letting him unknowingly serve as a temporary obstacle as I scrambled to my feet and raced for the back doors.

  My arms pumped with the desperation consuming me. A glance over my shoulder as I threw open the French door showed Rafael brutally shoving his cousin to the side to get past him. The breath froze in my lungs as I moved, my chest unnaturally tight as I ran.

  The view of the shed up ahead in the distance served as a cruel reminder of all the ways Rafe had ruined me.

  He’d taken an innocent girl who’d survived his father’s wrath and done what he’d failed to do. He killed her—turned her into a phantom of his own making.

  A murderer.

  Even wanting nothing to do with that shed and the recent memory that threatened to slow me down, I turned my back on the docks and sprinted in its direction up the driveway. Closer to civilization and escape, even knowing in my heart that the flight was pointless.

  I stumbled, my heel tilting to the side as I traversed the slight incline with r
agged breaths. The roll of my ankle shot pain up my leg, a whimper escaping my throat as I looked behind me. Rafael was quickly closing the distance between us, his face twisted into a murderous expression as he ate up the head start his cousin’s interference had provided me.

  “Isa, stop,” he ordered, his low and impossible quiet voice traveling through the air. The sound shouldn’t have reached me, but something in that command felt like I would hear it anywhere. No matter where in the world I was, no matter where he was, the instinctive desire to submit to his will overwhelmed me.

  Only the panic coursing through my veins drove me to keep moving, to stumble along the path with the limp from my sprained ankle. Even knowing it was futile and that Rafael would always catch me and drag me back to the pits of Hell with him, I kept going.

  That feeling settled down my spine, the slow caress of a nightmare whispering along my skin when he came close enough to almost grab me.

  One more step, and I could already feel the heat of his arms reaching to wrap around me in the next moment. The harshness of his grip as it would lift me off my feet.

  I ducked, dropping to the ground and crab walking backwards on my hands as the devil himself loomed over me. Even in the moment with his expression calm and placating, cautious, as if I were a wounded animal he only wanted to help, that darkness lurked in his stunning gaze. The animalistic tilt of his head as he studied the prey he’d well and truly caught once again left little doubt as to just what kind of punishment he would deliver as soon as he pulled me into his evil embrace.

  A shadow emerged from the other side of the driveway, a figure moving between us as if he didn’t fear death itself. Joaquin stepped over my body, positioning himself so that one foot was to either side of my thighs. “Get up, mi reina,” he said softly, glancing over his shoulder at where I panted on the ground beneath him.

  I drew my legs out from between his, leaving him standing in front of me as I pushed to my feet and winced at the pain in my ankle when I righted myself.

  “Move,” Rafael ordered, and the bass of his voice coated my skin. That panic and terror settled over me once again, a distinct reminder of the time when I’d genuinely feared for my life while he tormented me.

  I knew Rafael wouldn’t kill me, but I also knew there were things far worse than death. The pain of knowing that I’d fallen for him twice, and that everything had been a lie both times, that threatened to crush something that went deeper than flesh and bones.

  “That’s enough, Rafael,” Joaquin reprimanded, holding his position despite the way Rafael’s fury coated the air.

  I watched in horror as Rafael pulled his gun, pressing the barrel against Joaquin’s forehead. My guard didn’t flinch, staring back at El Diablo with defiance in his face. “Give me mi reina,” Rafael growled, the monster not bothering to hide beneath the surface. It didn’t matter that he’d known Joaquin far longer than he’d known me. I didn’t doubt his vindictiveness or the reality that he would shoot him if Joaquin did not obey.

  Nothing and no one would get in his way when it came to the woman he claimed as his property.

  “Then treat her like mi reina deserves. Not like an animal that you hunt down in the night,” Joaquin returned, his voice a threatening growl despite the gun pressed to his head.

  “Rafe, don’t,” I whispered, my voice pleading as I looked around Joaquin’s shoulder. Neither man spared me a glance, too lost in their mostly silent war as they studied each other.

  “She shouldn’t have run,” Rafael said finally, the gun drawing away from Joaquin slightly. He didn’t put it away, not completely, when the other man remained between us.

  “You shouldn’t have chased her,” Joaquin said, quirking a mocking eyebrow. “Even those who have done nothing wrong will run when they’re chased by the devil in the moonlight.”

  Rafael clenched his jaw, rage consuming his features as his eyes settled on mine briefly before turning back to Joaquin. “You will move, or have you forgotten all that you owe me?”

  Joaquin stilled, every muscle in his body locking tight as his eyes darted to glance at me over his shoulder. He sighed, his chest loosening with the loss of air. “If you hurt her, I will owe you nothing.”

  I watched him in a panic as he stepped to the side slowly, my body turning as if in slow motion to escape the inevitable.

  Rafael’s arms wrapped around me from behind as I screamed, turning my body until I faced him, then he tossed me over his shoulder. The ground threatened to swallow me whole as Rafael walked, moving toward the docks by the water and the boat that waited for us with the privacy he undoubtedly wanted for dealing with his wayward wife.

  My panic slowed as my eyes met Joaquin’s, watching the hard set to his jaw and the remorse in his eyes fade away.

  Something inside me hollowed, the sway of Rafael’s rapid stride lulling me into the familiar embrace of floating in that place where pain didn’t exist.

  My head buzzed as blood rushed to it, a reminder of everything I’d felt in those moments when I’d been underwater. Instead of fighting it, I sank into that familiar feeling.

  And I welcomed the void like a dark embrace.

  2

  Isa

  I was only vaguely aware of Rafael boarding the yacht, of his deep command for his men to vacate and leave us in privacy. My back collided with something soft as he shifted me off his shoulder and dropped me, the bounce threatening to jar me out of the peaceful void I’d retreated to.

  It had been so long since I’d gone there, so long since I tried to embrace the respite it offered. Rafe made me feel too much. He made me want things I had no right to desire, and the safe retreat in my mind had become nothing but a memory.

  Until the realization that nothing I believed had been true once again. Until the need for retribution burned within me, impossible and unattainable in the face of the power that was Rafael Ibarra.

  Men who claimed to care for me stepped aside when all was said and done, because no one could come between us.

  No one except me.

  I turned my head to the side, staring up at the house in the distance. The moonlight shimmered off the water in the pool, the blue and bronze of the tiles striking as the water rippled around the small waterfall at the edge. My head continued to buzz with the remnants of my blood rush, helping me drown out the sounds of whatever Rafael did while I worked to ignore him.

  He spoke, the ripples of his voice coating my skin as if from a distant memory. The distance it gave me offered clarity of my mind, a separation from the sensations Rafael would undoubtedly pull from my body whether I wanted them or not. He wouldn’t care if I fought or if I cooperated, because he would take what he thought he owned regardless.

  My body was his. He owned it, and there was no questioning that fact, even when I struggled to grasp the latest revelation in our marriage.

  The vague sensation of hands trailed over my stomach, pulling the fabric of my dress up until my skin was bared to the moonlight shining down on us. The gentle press of his mouth against my skin should have been jarring; it should have been a reminder of everything that would come in a matter of months whether I was ready or not.

  My eyes drifted closed, shutting away the image of stars twinkling in the sky. Stars that Rafael had counted as a boy with the mother his father had taken from him.

  Was I a repaid favor? A way to wrong the father he’d hated so deeply?

  I shook off the thoughts, clenching my eyes shut and burrowing myself deeper into the hollow inside me. That place where nothing hurt, where the lack of pain would welcome me hovered just out of reach.