Chapter 8

EIGHT

DOMHNALL

“Help me!” she screams at the top of her lungs.

She runs towards the elevator as far as her chain will allow and continues wailing, “Help! Help! I’m kidnapped! Help! Fire! Fire!!! ”

I turn to head for the door. She can scream as loud as she wants. I hope it gives her hope. The sadist in me curls in pleasure at all the ways I’ll crush her. Mind. Body. Soul .

“When I get back, our training can begin.” I feel giddy and alive with anticipation as I reach for my white, pressed shirt and the suit-coat I hung on a hook near the door.

Her screaming abates for a moment at my words, only to pick right back up again as I head for the elevator. They get especially piercing when the elevator doors open, as if she thinks the sound will carry better that way.

It’s adorable.

I give her a little finger wave and a wink as the doors close, then breathe in deeply as the elevator starts to ascend. A glance at my phone showed me who’s at the door, and it’s nothing but a small nuisance.

All that matters is that I finally have her in my grasp.

Madison Harper.

I never stopped looking for her. But she and her father were good at covering their tracks, always on the move. Her father taught me so much of the foundations of what I know about hacking and security systems, after all. He was so good at searching out weaknesses and then exploiting them. Both with people and technology.

I smooth down my coat jacket as I head towards the door, pausing to check my face and hair in a mirror. I pull a little travel wipe from my inner coat pocket and unpackage it, swiping back and forth across the stubble of my mouth and beard.

There. It’s ungentlemanly to answer the door with the gleam of the woman you’ve just eaten out all over your face.

I have a facade to maintain, after all.

When I open the door, it’s to an angry-looking, cross-armed Quinn.

She looks down the hallway behind me. “Where is she? ”

“She’s fine.” I block her path with a hand when she tries to storm past me.

“That’s not what I asked.”

My jaw locks. “Is this going to be a problem?”

“Only if you don’t produce the girl. Moira and I gave her assurances. I don’t go back on my word.”

“You haven’t. The contract specified the money was in exchange for her virginity. There was no time condition. Now if you would please get the fuck off my property, Quinnlynn.”

Quinn adopts her domme stance that tells me to back the fuck up and rethink my last statement. But I’m the one man in this city who’s not intimidated by her little act.

I step into her face, forcing her to take a step back, which I can tell pisses her the fuck off. But I won’t be intimidated in my own house, even by someone I respect as much as Quinn.

“Well, Domhnall Bryce Callaghan,” she spits, getting right in my face. Toe to toe with me. “I promised her she’d be safe, so you better be able to produce her within the next ten minutes or I’ll make a scene. And not the spanky kind you’d enjoy. I won’t be made a liar, even for you.”

“Oh?” I lift an eyebrow dangerously. “Even when I hold the future of your career in my hands?”

Her eyes widen and her mouth drops open, but I don’t back down.

“You’re not even supposed to have access to a calculator for another decade. Remember that little deal I worked out with the Texas district attorney for you? I took you on as an intern because of your talents, but there are limits if you question my authority again.”

Her abilities with a keyboard are undisputable, but it got her into trouble when she’d barely turned eighteen. She was trying to hack into the Federal Marshals, and almost got in before she was caught. I recognize young talent and have a soft spot for the rebels.

But my conscience doesn’t even twinge at making the threat. Sometimes when you finally jump off that last cliff to the full-on dark side, there’s no looking back.

“Money can’t buy everything,” Quinn snaps, glaring up at me.

“You’ll know better when you aren’t young and poor.”

“I thought you were one of the good ones,” Quinn hisses. “Glad to know sooner rather than later I was fucking wrong. I quit . Now show me the girl.”

“I’ll escort you off the premises instead.”

Quinn glares and plants her feet. “Touch me, and I’ll break your hand,” she warns, deadpan. “I’m not leaving without Brooke.”

I smile down at her. “I would never dare hurt a woman. Unless she begs.”

Quinn rolls her eyes. “Then hand her over.”

“No. But if you won’t leave without her, feel free to enjoy sleeping on my lawn,” I gesture. “I’m generous. You can even make your way around the property to sleep on a pool chair. ”

“I’ll call the cops,” Quinn threatens.

“And tell them what? That I’ve kidnapped someone from Caleb’s virginity auction?”

Her mouth drops open. “You’d do that to Caleb?”

I just shrug. She doesn’t need to know if I would or wouldn’t. Then I lean in, whispering so just she can hear, “No offense, but who do you think they’ll believe? You spent two years in maximum security lock-up and only got out on early release because I sponsored you.”

“So now you think you own me?” Quinn furiously bumps me with her corseted chest. “You think you can just get away with anything? Fuck you, Domhnall. You aren’t a god, and unless you give me a good goddamned reason, I will raise hell in every way I can until you free that woman, I don’t care if it ends me back up in prison.”

“You don’t want to go to war with me, Quinnlynn,” I warn. “You will lose, and it will be painful for you.”

She pulls out her phone from her boot and pushes a few buttons. “You’re a smug bastard. You forget. I know your weaknesses.”

Is she really calling the police? I’m not bluffing. Nothing will make me give Madison up.

“Hey, what’s up?” comes my sister’s perky voice over the phone that Quinn put on speaker. She’s breathing hard like she just went for a jog. In the background, I hear a familiar rhythmic thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.

“Jesus, Moira,” I cover my face with my hand even though I can only hear her, not see her. “Are you fucking somebody right now? How many times do I have to tell you not to answer the phone while you’re fucking somebody!”

“Domhnall, hi!” she says, completely unphased as the thwacking continues. “So Quinn found you. Good! We were worried about Brooke when you disappeared with her all the sudden. We just wanted to check in with her after the devirginizing. How’d it go?”

Quinn tilts her head at me, glare still in full force as she holds out the phone in my direction. Power move, using my sister against me.

“Everything’s fine here. Isn’t it , Quinn?”

She stabs the mute button. “You’ll let me see her?”

“I’ll let you in and we’ll have a chat,” I amend, teeth gritted as I sift through various plans in my head.

She hits unmute. “Everything’s great. Chat later, babe. Bye.”

“Oh good,” Moira says, her voice a little higher pitched, “because I’m about to co?—”

I hit the red end call button on my sister who’s got no boundaries.

Then I step back and gesture for Quinn to step inside.

“Start explaining,” she demands.

We sit in my den and jaw clenched, I do. I talk. I pace. Then I talk some more.

I explain who Madison was to me. And her father. It’s difficult for some of it to make it past my lips. I’ve kept all of it under lock and key inside me for so long.

Quinn sits stone-faced through my whole story. She only lets out an explosive breath at the end. “Well fuck. And you’re sure she’s the same woman?”

“Positive.”

“But she’s lost her memory.”

I tilt my head at Quinn, as if to say, seriously?

“A woman who fucked me over half a world away just coincidentally ends up at a hospital that sends her to the shelter where my sister works? Come on. I don’t think so. You don’t know this family. But I do. They’re sociopaths. Convincing sociopaths. They draw you in. Weren’t you listening? She’s the bait, and she’s so, so good at what she does. She was a genius at it all those years ago and I can only imagine how she’s perfected her skills over the last decade. She’s here because she wants something.”

“What if it’s just her dad? Did you consider that? Maybe he brought her here.”

“He’s dead,” I spit. “The devil took him back to hell two years ago. I stood on his grave and took a good piss.”

I never stopped looking for them. Two years ago I thought I’d finally found them when he popped on one of my personally designed internet-crawl systems. I knew his dark web signatures intimately—it was one of the reasons my anti-spyware software became so successful so quickly. I had intimate, cutting-edge knowledge of exactly how criminals exploited loopholes in systems.

Hunting him was one of the reasons I began building it in the first place. But I’d find him only for them to have recently skipped town. It was how I found his other victims. Always victims in his wake, usually with my M.O.

He finally changed things up and went off the map, until two years ago when he popped up again.

I thought I finally had him.

Turned out I only had his headless corpse. It washed up on a Bulgarian bank of the Danube. I felt some satisfaction imagining that all his evil shite finally caught up with him in the end and someone took an ax to the evil bastard. He was a John Doe, but I knew it was him by the tattoo of the angel Gabriel on his chest. I’d never mistake that fucking tattoo.

He was buried in a pauper’s grave outside of Budapest. Too nice an end for such a vicious motherfucker, but still, one chapter closed.

The other stayed elusively open until she strutted onto that stage tonight.

“She’s playing games again. I’m just better equipped this time. And I’m not letting her out of my sight.”

I’ve been leaning against the wall, but I push my shoulders back and stand up tall, deciding on a plan to buy me some time.

Quinn’s an unusual mind and one of my best project leads. I’d hate to lose her. Time to pretend to be affable- guy.

“How about this? One week from now, I’ll present Brooke at the club. Then you can see her again, all nice and whole. But till then, she’s mine .”

Satisfaction growls like a yawning monster inside me. That’ll give me seven days. Seven whole days to bend Mads to my will, get my answers…

Seven days to break her.

The monster grins, sharpening its teeth with a file. It’s what I’ve always wanted. To break her the way they broke me. I didn’t get my justice with her father, but I can take it out all I want on her.

“Shit.” Quinn shakes her head, then stands up from the chair she sank into halfway through my tale. “This is fucked up, Domhn.”

“Yeah? So what’s new?”

She’s quiet a long moment, staring hard at the floor like she’s trying to make her mind up about something.

“At least I get you better now,” she finally says, looking back up at me. “Everybody knows why I am the way I am, but you were always a mystery. Some vague story about a murky past back in the home country.”

My jaw hardens. “I told you this in confidence. It better not become the latest gossip around the club.”

“Your secrets are safe with me, boss. See you at work on Monday.”

She walks towards the door before pausing to look back at me. “But I’m holding you to your promise. One week. Brooke better look healthy, well-fed, and happy at the end of those seven days, or I’ll punish you. I have a dungeon, too. I can make you hurt, pretty Domhn.”

I don’t doubt she could. I’ve seen the ways she makes men three times her size weep like babies.

“She’ll be fine.”

Quinn just narrows her eyes at me before sweeping out of the room.

Seven days to break my little pet so that when I present her at the club in public, she’ll bow at my feet, beg me to let her obey, and follow me back home again like a faithful little dog.

Because I’m never letting Madison go.