22. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Rome

“Earth to Rome.” Damien waves a hand in my face. “Are you listening?”

No. I haven’t been listening to him for the last five minutes, at the very least.

It’s rude. Dame and I on one of the sofas in the living room late at night. We should be talking, yet all I can think about is her. Quinlan.

She hasn’t eaten all day.

Spacing out is beyond rude. It’s irresponsible. We’re hashing out the last details in my revenge plot against Joseph and Elaine, my so-called parents. He walks me through the part Jagger and Laurel play in this. This is important.

We’re this close to the end.

And I can only seem to care about one woman and the fact that she hasn’t eaten.

“Sorry.” On days like these, I wish I’d have grown my hair. At least I’d have something to pull on. Instead, I rub my jaw, my fingers harsh on my skin. “Repeat that for me.”

“It’ll wait. You’re worried about Quinlan. Don’t.” He dips his chin, his expression serious for all of a second. Then, a ghost of a smile spreads on his lips. “She’ll eat. It’s a promise.”

Holding Quinlan captive shouldn’t be like this. My chest shouldn’t squeeze because she refuses to put food in her mouth.

Liam’s usually the one to help me when I’m like this. When the trauma from my past threatens to choke me. But he’s in his room, digging into a company that’s been on our radar.

Damien tries. I appreciate it, especially since I know he struggles with these conversations.

“Or…” he starts. “You’ll finally give me the green light to force food into her pretty mouth.”

Tries, and succeeds. I know—I know —he’s using it as a shield. I’ve seen what lies beneath. How he’s both this person and the other.

What the world has turned him into.

No matter what, he’ll always be my friend. I love him like a brother. Always.

“No, no force-feeding needed.” I huff out a laugh.

His grin widens by a fraction.

“No one’s died from missing a couple of meals. I’m aware.” The words unburden me. They’re a reassurance. A reminder that I survived worse, and she’ll be fine. “There’s always tomorrow. Or she’ll raid the fridge once we’re done for the night.”

Damien’s eyes cut to my fists. I’m clutching them at my sides. The blood on my knuckles is fresh after my workout earlier this evening.

The physical pain was a lifeline. I would’ve punched through Quinlan’s door otherwise.

She has no idea what it does to you.

The punching bag suffered the consequences. It took everything I gave it—my anxiety, my desperation for her to eat. I released my aggressions, left them there in a pool of sweat. Blood stained the leather of the bag when I left the gym.

I’m not that person. I. Am. Not. Him.

I flex my fingers, smoothing over my gray sweats. There. I’m better. Back to missing her instead of freaking the fuck out.

“Who knows.” Damien waggles his eyebrows. “Maybe she’ll be in the mood for meat. She’ll eat so much protein that she’ll grow to be like you one day.”

Before I can tell him I’ll take her in any shape or size, I hear it.

A piece of furniture drags on the floor of one of the rooms upstairs. My head snaps in that direction. I’m on my feet, and so is Damien.

We don’t go to her, though, as defenseless as she is. We listen in, stalking her in our own home. We’re vipers in the grass. Wolves hiding in the shadows, anticipating the right moment to strike.

My anxiety is a distant memory. My chest stopped aching. The feral need to hunt her trumps everything else. And fuck, do I need to punish her for refusing to eat.

“Want me to call Liam?” Damien asks in a hushed voice. “Tell him to catch her?”

I shake my head once. Liam would rather stalk her too.

“Come.” Never losing sight of the stairs, I motion for Damien over to the corner of the dark living room. Where we’ll be engulfed by the shadows.

Her footsteps are soft. She basically floats along the second floor. My muscles strain as I listen to what she’s doing up there.

Doors open and close. She’s checking our bedrooms. Must be trying to log into our password-protected laptops.

She’s free to snoop around our rooms. First off, we’ll have no secrets from her soon enough. Sometime after she realizes she’s ours and stops fighting this.

Second, we have no secrets anywhere around the house. We haven’t gotten to where we are by being reckless. No paper trail. No emails. No credit card receipts linking us to the men and women we hired to do some of our dirty work.

Nothing.

The police, FBI, CIA—goddamn Interpol—are free to visit us as well. They could raid our laptops, our rooms, our closets. No one would find any evidence of what we’ve been planning.

Other than the notebook. It’s locked in a drawer in our office, papers filled with scribbling and code words. The pages are old. Some of our notes are two decades old.

A stranger wouldn’t understand a thing we have there.

Would Quinlan?

Damien grins. “Sneaky,” he mouths. “I like that.”

She is.

A hushed gasp reaches from above us. She’s found Liam.

My friend’s blue eyes meet mine. “Let’s join them.”

All the blood in my body rushes south. My cock thickens. The need to conquer crashes into me.

We’re doing this.

Click. Another hushed sound. A door closes.

Liam’s beat her at her own spying game. He must’ve heard Quinlan and pretended to be asleep.

Tap, tap, tap and she’s at the landing. Quinlan’s slender hands curl around the railing as she leans forward, scoping the first floor.

My eyes narrow, taking in our prey.

Her long blonde locks dangle in front of her. She wears one of the black tank tops we stored in her closet and a pair of black sleep shorts.

Left, then right, her head twists. Searching for us.

She’s so sweet. So na?ve to believe that being careful will save her from what’s coming to her.

We’re coming to her.

“Rome.” A soft elbow to my ribs. “Are you watching this?”

Fuck yes, I’m watching this. “What else could I be doing?”

What any sane person could be, when she’s there, the curve of her ass peeking beneath her sleep shorts. We get a better view of it as she descends the stairs, when she tiptoes her way around the first floor.

She’s looking for us in all the wrong places. The obvious ones, like the sofas. A peek into the kitchen. She doesn’t go farther into the living room, though. Doesn’t check out the corner where we’re hiding.

I’m harder than I thought possible.

Another step in our direction, and she’ll see us.

Except she doesn’t. She disappears down the hall.

Clever. She’s after our office where the information she’s desperate for is supposed to be. She’ll find the office, but the answers she wants won’t be there. Not all of them.

We’ll be there.

As if we needed an excuse to have our hands on her, she just delivered it to us on a silver platter.

She’ll be punished for snooping around. For refusing to eat. For being so tempting.

Damien and I exchange a glance. We have just the right punishment for all these transgressions.

“How long are we giving her?” His sapphire eyes are dark.

As dark as I feel. “Two minutes tops.”

He needs her more than Liam does. More than I do.

He’s had Quinlan—while she’s awake—twice without coming. Pleasuring her took precedence. He loves playing with her. Hunting her.

He loves her, period, even though he won’t admit it.

He’ll have her soon. Every second that Damien and I stand here builds anticipation. The painful need curls around my chest. The pressure inside my head grows. My hands hurt with the need to inflict pain.

She’s been there long enough. The wait is over.

“I’m going,” Damien says the same moment my patience snaps.

We stalk forward, our bare feet silencing our steps.

She doesn’t hear us coming. We hear her, though, once we enter the hall. Sifting through our things. Pens, contracts, folders.

Then…silence. Is she looking at the photo? I don’t think she does. Quinlan won’t care for that this early in her captivity. She broke her television. She slammed the door in Damien’s face after he licked her, after he bathed her.

She must be too mad at us to slow down and care about what we looked like as kids. With good reason.

We move closer. Low light sips through the crack in the door. The sound of drawers opening and closing floats into the hallway. One of them jangles—the locked one. A groan follows. More silence.

Damien and I are a foot away from the door. We don’t stay here long.

I push through the door, and both of us stroll into the room, standing side by side. I’m supposed to tell her something like bend over , then spank her. I do no such thing.

The sight before me stops my heart.

Last time it stopped, it was when I realized I’d neglected Anne for too long. She lied about eating for my sake. She wanted me to focus on building BLF from the ground up with my friends. I’d spent long nights there, and I missed the signs. Didn’t hear Joseph waking her up in the middle of the night and forcing her to throw up the dinner I dropped off for her.

I thought I was stealthy. That he didn’t see. I was wrong. Realizing Anne’s gone this long without food hurt like a motherfucker. I couldn’t breathe.

Tonight, my heart stops for another reason entirely.

This… This is sweet.

Quinlan has her back to us, a photo in her hands. The only one we have here. The one I thought she wouldn’t care for. Her fingers slide along the silver frame, her head bowed over it.

Looking at us. At Liam, Damien and me, sitting on the grass in Liam’s backyard. I’m hugging a three-year-old Anne to my chest. Pulling her to me as hard as I can.

Liam and I don’t smile. Our serious expressions had been a part of us as much as the color of our hair. Damien smiled, though. He laughed. As did my little sister. She giggled that day, flashing her teeth to the camera.

Maybe it was Damien that poked his tongue at her a second before. Maybe it was the big lunch and attention Mrs. Frost, Liam’s mom, had showered her with that afternoon.

Maybe both.

Liam’s mom captured the moment around the time Quinlan was born. We weren’t sure where social services would move Damien, what foster home he’d land in, so we needed to have this memory together. Just until we’d have him with us again.

Fortunately, Damien didn’t move very far. He stayed at the same school as us like he promised he would. His next foster family was a great one, a caring one, as were the ones that took in Jagger and Laurel.

That gave him even more reasons to love Quinlan.

And Quinlan’s staring at it, mesmerized by it. She could’ve smashed it like she did with the television, and she didn’t.

She cares. I want to hug her. I want to kiss every inch of her body. Breathe her in.

Fuck her until she cries.

Liam slips in, moving to my side.

My cue to speak up. “Curious, sweetheart?”

She shrieks at the sound of my voice. The photo crashes on the floor. The glass splinters.

We’ll have a new one developed by tomorrow. Her fear was worth it.

Quinlan’s shoulders rise. Fall. She’s gathering courage.

“You.” She whips back to meet our gaze, hands on her hips. “Of course I’m curious. I have a right to know why I’m here.”

“You do.” I prowl forward. Stop behind the desk, where she stands. My hand clasps around her slender neck. I grip it, pulling her toward me. “You could’ve asked, though. Since you haven’t, since you’ve been a nosy little thing on top of missing dinner, you won’t be getting your information.”

Her eyelashes flutter, pulse racing.

“You’re getting us .” She gasps when I bury my fingers into her hips, my hand bruising her. Thrusting her to my cock. “And, sweetheart?”

“What?”

“You’re going to wish you never left your room.”