19. Rhaim

19

RHAIM

" W hy were you late?" I mocked myself, quietly, after sitting behind my desk and turning the chair so that I could look out the floor to ceiling tinted window that viewed the city's skyline.

Why the fuck was I pretending to give a shit what had happened to her?

Maybe because I actually did.

I closed my eyes and growled at myself. I had actual business to conduct, now that I was certain the FBI wasn't closing in, and I'd done myself no favors taking off all last week—but something had happened to her, and I didn't think it was just that she'd stayed up too late reading.

I still wasn't a hundred percent sure why Lia sicced a PI on me. I believed the man that he didn't truly know, and he was too potentially useful to me currently for me to rat myself out by asking her.

But if she wasn't going to try to blackmail me, and she wasn't working for a letter agency, I found all of the other options worrisome.

In an attempt to understand her last night, I'd pored over every single fucking thing she'd put online, and between that and Sable's information today, I'd pieced together the life of a girl woefully out of sync: with her age, with her peers, with her location. I'd met sixteen-year-olds—on the street, not in the bedroom—with more venom and capabilities in them than it seemed she possessed.

I would say she was sheltered, but her entire life attested otherwise. Her father's reputation and money had thrown her into the deep end, but instead of it making her wicked or cunning...she'd simply just drowned.

Which would explain why she was always looking at me with those amber save me eyes. They were somehow an even worse temptation than her small high breasts and the curve of her full lower lip.

But save her from what? From a life of luxury and attention? From all the comfort that money and the Ferreo name could buy?

I didn't understand—and I wasn't sure I wanted to.

Because when I'd come back to the office and seen her looking fragile, it did bad things to me.

Primarily, it made me jealous that someone else had beaten me to hurting her, although hurting was perhaps not the best verb.

After all, did clay hurt when it was molded?

Did carbon hurt, when pressure and heat made it shine?

No.

What I wanted—and what was a particularly bad idea, seeing as it was Nero's daughter we were talking about here—was the opportunity to control her.

Especially as I ought to know better—because I'd done that once before, and it was why Isabelle had died.

I'd timed Isabelle's cycles, then took her on a trip to a remote island in Mauritius and threw her birth control away. I wanted kids, and I knew we could afford the best of everything, nannies, schools, help—so I'd decided it was time. She was so pissed she couldn't stand looking at me for two days, but after that, when she knew I wouldn't budge, and how I'd kidnap her for longer if I had to, her anger faded and we spent three weeks having the intense, madly personal fucking that came from knowing you were doing it for a reason—that each time you thrust, you were binding yourself to someone else for life. We made love every day, beneath the mosquito netting on our bed, against the walls of our cabin, even out in the ocean, but if we did, I'd take her roughly again once we were on the shore, where the water couldn't wash me away from her.

It was idyllic, beautiful, peaceful—and what was more, it worked. She knew she was pregnant by the time we got back on the plane, and that calm, serene feeling of "this was what we were meant to do" perfection lasted for three months, up until the day she crashed her car on the way home from the farm. She'd been going to a check-up appointment in the city, and the actual God that I spited, and who I would never fucking believe in, took them both away from me. Now all I could do was visit them at the cemetery every Sunday.

It'd been five years, and some nights it felt like it had only happened yesterday.

So yes.

I was an adult, and I knew nothing good could come of letting Lia into my life. She was too tempting, and I was too toxic.

Even if every time I saw her it made my palms itch for action, and lit up parts of my brain I wanted to deny.

I just hoped that whoever had hurt her was closer to her own age—and that I never figured out who they were, for their sake.

I was surprised hours later by a soft knock on the door. "Mr. Selvaggio?" she asked from the far side.

"Come in," I said, glancing at the time. Just six—I would probably be here till at least eight or nine. Without looking over, I went on. "You can go home now."

"I was actually going to ask if you wanted something to eat—and if you cared about any of these people that've called you?" She looked timid in the doorway, still damaged by whatever'd hurt her earlier this morning—my poor little moth, with a slightly nocked wing.

I rocked back in my chair, stretching out my neck. "If they don't have my personal line, probably not."

"One of them was trying to sell you aluminum siding," she said, giving me a tentative smile.

"For a whole building?" I teased, then shook my head. "You can still go home. I'm perfectly capable of ordering my own dinner."

She shrugged a little. "That's what I'd be doing too—only the city's changed a lot since I was here last. What's good?" she asked, then added a very belated, "Sir."

I snorted. "I'll tell you, only if you promise not to tell your father," I said, then realized how many different ways I could take that statement before finishing. "My favorite restaurant is Burmese."

Her smile became more genuine. "Your secret is safe with me."

I wrote down a short order and the name of a restaurant on a notepad on my desk as she walked over. "Let me know when it gets here," I said, handing it over with a black credit card. "Get yourself whatever you want to take home, of course."

She twirled the credit card around, and pretended to be impressed. "Could I order other things with this?"

"Only if you want to get audited," I said dourly. She was in tight leggings and a large cardigan that flowed down to her mid-thigh, with tight sleeves down to her fingers, very different from the rest of the professional women in the building. "Although that begs the question—what's your father paying you for your servitude to me?"

Her full lips pouted. "Nothing."

"But when you were janitorial—" I was certain Ruiz would've put her on the books. In fact, I'd wanted him to; I wanted her to know what other people in the building were making.

"Yeah, they cut me a check for that week and hand delivered it. But this is just for free. Which I guess makes me your intern," she said, her nose lightly wrinkling with disdain.

I groaned and rolled my eyes—and she outright laughed.

I looked at her strangely as she put a hand over her mouth to apologize.

"Sorry—my dad said that if you laughed when I told you that, to tell him, because he'd make you sing at his birthday party as punishment."

That level of pettiness sounded like Nero. In fact I was certain he'd come up with more than one way to fuck with me—but only me, not Corvo—for having abandoned ship last week. "A fate worse than death, truly, for anyone who has to hear—but for the record, I didn't."

"I know," she said with a grin, slowly growing in her bravery. "And besides, he pays for everything else, so it's not like I really need money."

I cut her off. "You look like you're going to art school. Buy yourself some clothes for work. Keep it under ten grand."

She blinked, clearly unsure as to whether or not she should be pleased or affronted. "You're not trying to buy me off, are you?" she wound up asking with a slight huff.

"If I am, is it working?" I deadpanned before I could stop myself. Her eyes widened in a way that incited me, right before my sanity reared its depressing head. I shooed her out of the room with one hand before she could answer. "Go order—I'm hungry."

I was not shitting where I ate.

And I was not ever going to fuck Nero's little girl.

At least not inside the building.