Warm My Bed, Brother-in-law Chapter 5: Chapter 5: The Woman on the Stone Wall.

Read chapter 5 of Warm My Bed, Brother-in-law by PayalSinghRajput on NovelPedia.

DAMIAN - POV. "Beautiful." She was laughing. It was a genuine laugh that made her eyes crinkle at the corners. She was sitting on a low stone wall under the large oak tree, her legs swinging as a paperback book lay open in her lap. She wasn't reading it. Her attention was fixed on a stray dog wandering through the garden. I was twenty-one. I was standing fifty yards away, with a glass of melting ice in my hand. I couldn't take my eyes off her. She was thirty-three, a grown woman, visiting our estate because her father had just agreed to hand her over to my older brother. She wasn't a Vitale yet. She was still untouched by the misery of our family. She looked like something soft and clean, completely out of place against the grim stone of the courtyard. I had watched her for twenty minutes that afternoon. I noticed the way the sunlight caught in her dark hair and the soft sound of her voice as she talked to the dog. She had no idea I was there. She never did. But those twenty minutes stayed with me. A rare, faint smile tugged at the corner of my lips as the memory played behind my closed eyes. "You went back to your fantasies again, didn't you?" Marco’s voice cut through the dark. "Did you forget why we are here?" The courtyard vanished. The green grass and the warm sunlight disappeared, dragged away by the heavy, thumping bass vibrating through the floorboards from downstairs. I opened my eyes to the dim, amber lighting of my private office. My smile vanished instantly, my face going completely blank as I looked up at Marco. He was leaning against my desk with his arms crossed over his chest, looking at me with way too much realization. "I didn't forget," I said, my voice rough, flat, and entirely stripped of the boy I had just been six years ago. But my body was still stuck on the memory of her. Just thinking about her… remembering how soft she looked back then and comparing it to the woman I had held on the hospital floor an hour ago made my body react. My trousers felt tight at the front, and the ache was impossible to ignore. It was a hunger born from five years of starving for her. I shifted slightly on the leather sofa, crossing one leg over the other to hide it but it was too late. Marco let out a short, dry chuckle, shaking his head. "You're pathetic, you know that? Your brother is hooked up to a breathing machine, the old men are preparing for a body count, and you're sitting here getting hard over a woman who swore she would kill you." "She can try," I muttered, leaning my head back against the leather. "I'd let her hold the knife if it meant she stayed close enough to do it." I looked past him toward the one-way glass wall that overlooked the lower levels. Five stories of wealth, power, and secrets, packed with the city's elite. This was my kingdom. Versatile wasn't just a nightclub. It was a five-story fortress disguised as luxury and entertainment. The bottom two floors belonged to the politicians, celebrities, and wealthy fools willing to pay a fortune for a table, but the real business happened upstairs. The third and fourth floors were sealed behind biometric locks, and only a selected few ever made it upstairs. Behind those doors, black-market deals were negotiated, information was bought and sold, and fortunes changed hands at private gambling tables. It was the hidden side of Versatile, the part that funded my empire Blackthorn and attracted the city's most powerful and dangerous men. Over the years, I had built a network that thrived on secrets. If someone wanted damaging information buried, a rival exposed, or money moved without questions, they came to Versatile. And most importantly, the club gave me access to things most people could never buy: influence, information, and favors owed by men who thought they were untouchable. I hadn't built this empire to compete with my father's rotting shipping docks. I built it because in the underworld, information was power, and power meant leverage. And tomo