Hate like honey, p.1
Hate Like Honey, page 1
Hate Like Honey
Corsican Crime Lord, Book Two
Charmaine Pauls
Published by Charmaine Pauls
Montpellier, 34090, France
www.charmainepauls.com
Published in France
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Copyright © 2023 by Charmaine Pauls
All rights reserved.
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Photography by Wander Aguiar Photography LLC
Cover design by Book Cover By Design Ltd
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ISBN: 9782491833213 (eBook)
ISBN: 9798853599703 (Paperback)
Created with Vellum
Contents
Foreword
Previously in Love Like Poison
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
Afterword
Sneak Peek of Tears Like Acid
What to read while you wait
Also by Charmaine Pauls
About the Author
Foreword
Hate Like Honey is the second book in the Corsican Crime Lord series. You must read Love Like Poison (Book One) first. Sabella and Angelo's story continues in Tears Like Acid (Book Three) and concludes in Kisses Like Rain (Book Four). The story includes violence, a hate relationship, an unredeemable alpha-hole, and scenes not recommended for sensitive readers. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
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Trigger Warnings
Triggers include but are not limited to abuse, torture, asssault, blood (gore), death, guns, graphic violence, graphic sexual scenes, punishment, spanking, branding, forced marriage, forced pregnancy, kidnapping, substance abuse, non-con/dubcon.
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Read Love Like Poison now.
Previously in Love Like Poison
Corsican Crime Lord, Book One
On Sabella Edwards’s sixteenth birthday, she meets the enigmatic twenty-year-old Angelo Russo who shows up uninvited at her party. He’s dark and breathless like the ocean, the one thing she loves most in the world. Their attraction is instantaneous, but her father, Ben, orders her to stay away from Angelo. Ben claims that Angelo is from a bad family. Little does she know that her father promised to marry her to the powerful crime lord and that Angelo traveled across half of the world to meet his future bride.
Angelo manipulates Sabella’s mother into letting her keep a rescued cat. This gift means more to Sabella than the priceless gold and diamond bracelet the Russos offered her. During an intense farewell the following morning, Angelo tells Sabella that all her firsts are his. He orders her to wait for him, asking her to be patient, but refrains from telling her about the marriage contract.
When Ben refuses to acknowledge the oath he made, Angelo sets out to claim what’s owed to him, including not only a portion of the shares and voting rights in Ben’s company, but also the woman destined to be his. In order to bend Ben to his will, Angelo schemes to steal a book that contains evidence of bribes Ben made to high-ranking criminals and government officials.
Angelo gifts Sabella a phone that she keeps secret. During the next year, they have regular contact. A solid relationship develops over the distance. One year later, Angelo is back on the day of Sabella’s birthday. She lets him into the house when her family is asleep. In exchange for her first kiss, Angelo gives her his signet ring and instructs her to never remove it. When Sabella dozes off, Angelo uses the opportunity to steal the book.
Sabella is devastated when she learns the truth. She confronts Angelo at his hotel, only to discover that Angelo is having her watched. She throws his ring back at him, telling him she never wants to see him again, but he threatens to brand the insignia on her skin if she doesn’t wear the ring. No matter how hard she tries to escape the dangerous Corsican, her efforts are futile. Even though Angelo returns to his home thousands of kilometers across the sea, he effectively controls her life.
Deciding that Angelo was bluffing, Sabella flirts with an older boy at her friend’s birthday party, only for Roch, the man Angelo employed to keep an eye on Sabella, to throw the young man into the pool. The web spins tighter around her until she’s consumed with anxiety and fear.
On her eighteenth birthday, she suggests losing her virginity with her best friend and neighbor, Colin Taylor, but Colin and Sabella have grown apart since Colin hooked up with his girlfriend. Colin rejects the offer, informing Sabella he’s no longer a virgin. Her isolation from her friends and her slow withdrawal from the world is complete. A little intoxicated during her party, Sabella finally reaches a breaking point and flushes Angelo’s ring down the toilet.
The same night, Angelo shows up to claim another first. In a spiteful effort to even the score, Sabella lies about having given her virginity to someone else. The sex that follows is angry and vengeful but no less explosive. To punish her for removing his ring, Angelo renders her unconscious and brands her with his family emblem.
Sabella is woken to incredible sex and a permanent brand on her skin. Despite Angelo’s insistence to go public with their relationship, Sabella doesn’t want her family to know that she betrayed them not once but twice, first by allowing Angelo to steal her father’s book in order to blackmail him into signing over his shares, and then by sleeping with their enemy. She returns the Ferrari Angelo gives her for her birthday, inviting his irk.
While Angelo returns home and finalizes the planning of his marriage to Sabella in the European summer, Sabella enrolls into university to study marine biology, still unaware of Angelo’s intentions.
The Edwards family goes through an eventful period with the birth of Sabella’s nephew as well as her sister’s wedding. Sabella’s sister falls pregnant shortly after. Her family is far from perfect, but, despite the growing tension between her parents and her father’s preoccupied behavior, Sabella feels a sense of belonging when they gather for her brother’s birthday celebration. For once, everyone seems happy.
In the meantime, in the Russo household, the preparations for the summer wedding are in full swing. The garden has been transformed and the wedding dress delivered. On their way to sample the wedding cake, Angelo’s mother and his twin sister are killed in an accident when his mother loses control of the car and drives off a cliff. Angelo knows his enemies are behind the accident, their real target having been his father.
As a part of him dies, a new part is born, a part that is more monster than man. Angelo swears vengeance, and promises that the guilty party will suffer the wrath of hell.
Hate Like Honey
Chapter
One
Sabella
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The library is quiet. Most students are gone for the holiday. I revel in having the space to myself. The gray winter light that sifts through the windows catches the dust particles in wedges. The smell of leather, paper, and ink reminds me of my dad’s study, a place where I felt secure and loved.
Yet something is off. The long lines of shelves crammed with books form an ominous labyrinth. The aisles between them are hiding places where danger can lurk. I don’t like that I can’t see between them. The lamp throws a ring of light around my books and laptop that doesn’t reach farther than the edge of the desk. The corners of the hall are cloaked in darkness.
A creak sounds overhead. I jerk my head toward the upstairs landing. There’s no one. It’s probably just the wooden floorboards expanding or shrinking due to the changes in temperature. A shiver slides down my spine. I pull my cardigan tighter around myself as I prick up my ears, focusing on every sigh and groan of the old building.
The medical section with its priceless oil paintings and precious antique books displayed in glass cabinets is my favorite room. For some reason, the faces of Hippocrates and Pasteur stare menacingly at me from the wall today. I should go back downstairs to where the librarian has her desk. I can do with the comforting presence of another human being.
My mind made up, I gather my books and notes. Just as I slide my laptop into my bag, the door squeaks open, cutting a triangle of chalky light into the space. I jump. Footsteps fall hard on the floor. Like in a bad dream, I’m frozen in place, watching with growing dread as the form of a man takes shape in the darkness.
The hair in my nape stands on end, and my palms turn clammy. My mind screams at me to flee, but my body is paralyzed with fear. I inhale deeply, fighting for reason. I’m being silly. Students come here all the time. It’s not unusual for a man to walk into the room.
Like a ghost manifesting from thick, black fog, he advances toward me. Life finally returns to my limbs. I push back my chair, ready to bolt, but then he passes in front of the window, and the grainy daylight illuminates his shaved head and meaty hands.
Roch.
I’m simultaneously relieved and scared. He walks to me with determined steps, each falling like a warning on the floor, and stops next to me with his hands balled into fists. From close up, I can make out the angry light in his pale eyes and the furious strain in the hard angles of his face.
It’s unreal to see him standing there. The man my tormentor pays to keep an eye on me hasn’t showed himself in months.
I look up at him, swallowing away the tightness of my throat. “What’s wrong?”
His nostrils flare. He inhales. Exhales. “They’re dead.”
My voice comes out breathless. “What?” I scoot my chair to the side, putting space between us. My first, incoherent thought is, Not Angelo. Please, no. “Who’s dead?”
He flexes and clenches his fingers. “Teresa and Adeline.”
I blink. “Who?”
“Angelo’s mother and sister,” he says through clenched teeth.
Shock slams like a fist into my stomach. The punch steals my air. “W-What?”
Pain glitters cold and hard in his gaze. Anger makes it sharp. “Car accident.”
“Oh my God.” The metal of the armrests is cold under my palms. “When?”
“An hour ago.”
An hour ago.
The statement is like a blade slicing through my heart. It’s too fresh, too terrifying. Too raw. I can’t imagine how Angelo must feel. Enemy or not, this isn’t what I want for him. Or for anyone.
“I didn’t know he had a sister,” I say, thinking out loud.
“His twin,” Roch says, the words strangled.
His twin? I can’t imagine losing Mattie or Ryan. Coldness settles in my body. I feel sick. How did I not know he had a twin?
Oh, Angelo.
How does anyone cope with such a tragedy?
“I thought you should know,” Roch says, trying to force an impersonal tone, but his brutal emotions come through in his voice.
Turning on his heel, he stalks away.
Long after his footsteps have faded, I’m still sitting there. I haven’t lost anyone close to me. I hope I never do, because I feel awful. Haunted and tormented. For a man I don’t even like.
My hand shakes as I reach for the phone in my bag—the one Angelo gave me—and wake up the screen. There are no messages. There haven’t been any since June last year.
Why didn’t he let me know?
Then again, why would he?
Pain is private.
Why would he share something so intimately hurtful with a person who hates him? Not that he doesn’t hate me too. The only thing he loves where I’m concerned is tormenting me. Letting me know about his grief doesn’t serve that purpose.
I remain there until the day has gone dark, searching for the right words, but I can’t come up with anything appropriate. No language can communicate what I want to say, how sorry I am that this happened to his family. To him.
Finally, I settle for simply, I’m sorry for your loss.
Chapter
Two
Angelo
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The house is brimming with people wearing black. Everyone is here—my uncles and cousins, people who served with my mother on charity boards, friends of my sister from university, our business associates, and a shitload of others I don’t know.
They sip the drinks my mother imported for the wedding and nibble on the refreshments Heidi prepared while talking in hushed tones. Every now and again, a name drops. My mother’s. My sister’s.
I should say my late mother and sister. It takes getting used to.
The dining room is shrouded in darkness. The shutters are closed, dispelling the harsh summer sun. The AC does the job of keeping the room cool, but the gloom seems fitting.
Breaths and perfume mingle around me where I stand next to my father’s chair at the head of the table. He sits quietly, staring straight ahead. We each have a glass in our hands. His is empty. Mine still contains the four fingers of Scotch he poured.
The end of his cigarillo burns red as he drags on the tobacco, puffing the smoke into the already stuffy room. The air is thick with the heady scent of the white lily wreaths on the mantlepiece, sideboard, and table. Thick with mourning. Every mouthful of oxygen I drag into my lungs chokes me with grief.
In between loading their plates with Corsican pates and tapenades, people file past to pat my father’s shoulder.
Their voices are demure. “We’re sorry for your loss.”
They nod at me, avoiding looking into my eyes, perhaps because of what they see there.
Someone opens the window and grabs the latch of the shutter.
“Leave it,” I say.
A woman. “It’s so dark in here. Letting in some light will help—”
“Leave it,” I say again, harsher this time.
The woman jumps. She closes the window and scurries away.
My cousin, Toma, enters. He catches my gaze from across the room and gives a slight nod.
My father stands.
People step aside. They clear a path as we make our way to the study and continue their conversations when the shuffle is over.
Toma enters first. My uncles are already inside.
I close the door.
My father goes to his desk, his face a mask of loathing and wrath.
Every muscle in my body draws tight as I stop in front of my family.
“Is it done?” my father asks.
I clench my hands in anticipation of the answer.
“Yes,” Uncle Nico says, his manner resigned. “He talked.”
My father narrows his eyes to slits. “Is he alive?”
“Yes,” Uncle Enzo says. “Like you instructed.”
I look down. My hands are empty. I should’ve brought that drink. But I don’t want to blur my reason. I want to be lucid. I want to—need to—remember every detail of this day.
My father curls his fingers into a fist on the desk. My uncles wait. When my father dips his head to indicate that he’s ready, Uncle Enzo speaks.
“Cossu cut the brake cables.” Uncle Enzo hesitates as if he’s too afraid to continue.
Uncle Nico speaks. “As for you, Angelo, he was supposed to paint thallium on your steering wheel. When absorbed through the skin, death is slow and painful. The only reason he hadn’t done it that morning was because the delivery of the parcel was delayed.
“The guy who brought it in via boat from Marseille had engine trouble on the way. We intercepted him at Cossu’s house. He didn’t know what was in the parcel or who paid him. He said the arrangements were made over the phone and no names were mentioned. Fifty percent of the payment was deposited in his bank account upfront. The parcel arrived by mail. All he knew was that he had to drive the boat to Bastia, rent a car, and make a drop-off at Cossu’s house. Nevertheless, we didn’t want to take any risks. Both him and his boat are now on the bottom of the sea.”
