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Jesus Christ.

I haven’t exactly been using them lately, but still...There's no need to threaten Austin and the Chipmunks. They’re an essential part of me. What would I do without my cock and balls? Well...pretty much everything I’ve been doing for the last year or two, but still. You don’t just threaten a man's junk, for fuck’s sake.

“We could maybe go for dinner first. You know, beforewe get into the kinky stuff.” I waggle my eyebrows at her.

Her eyes lock with mine, and she waits. The back door swings open, its signature thump hitting the red brick wall as Jenny’s laugh sings through the air. She’s not looking over at us, instead concentrating on swinging a large black trash bag over her shoulder before stomping to the industrial trash bin. Any minute, she’ll turn back around and see us here.

Olivia’s eyebrows knit together, and her hand slips for a second. For a moment, I’m worried she’s going to drop her arm and drive away, and our interaction will be over. I make a mental note to bring this up with Dr. Alfie because even I can recognize that wanting to chloroform yourself at the back of a juice bar isn’tnormal.Even if we don’t use that word in therapy, Dr. Alfie is gonna have to do some real work to convince me this is something anyone else would do.

But then again, have they seen this girl? She’s perfect. I know men who would have seriously done some reputational damage for a woman. Crawl on broken glass, cut their wrists, wear matching outfits on vacation. You know, real heinous stuff.

And I realize I’d wear his-and-her fucking everything. I’ll get the embroidered robes and fluffy slippers. I’ll wear the t-shirt that says “If lost, return to Olivia” as her t-shirt reads “I’m Olivia.” We’ll be that old couple in Europe roaming the streets, making everyone gag.

For now, I have a choice. Accept that the girl has put in top effort, chloroform myself, and see where this goes. Or, do the sensible option, twist her hand back, taser that beautiful tanned sliver of stomach she’s taunting me with, and make a run for it.

Curiosity gets the better of me. Who the fuck is this girl I’ve been watching for two years? And how has she so successfully Ted Bundy’d me?

I might have been known as a cold, calculating bastard in my former life, but I have been looking for a punishment that goes beyond her usual scowls for a while now. In theledger of life, I’m in massive fucking debt. If I ever want to balance the scales, I need to do something drastic. Or something drastic has to happento me.And while I try to convince myself that this is just for punishment, being under the control of Olivia Daniels is too delicious to refuse.

Dr. Alfie is going to have a fucking field day once I tell him about this.

I take the cloth and hold it to my mouth, letting the blackness take me under, and the dank gray walls of the alleyway slip away.

Chapter Two

Olivia

Well. There’s no going back now. I have a brawling six-foot-something man in my back seat taking a self-imposed nap—kind of.

And not just any man. Austin Black. King of The Unseen, despicable human being, torturer, murderer, and my brother's boss. He’s in over his head, my brother that is. He signed up to some organization offering advanced career progression and opportunities to earn fat checks. He’s nineteen, and while I’m only twenty-four, he’s been my responsibility since he was fourteen and our parents died in a car crash.

Money was tight and I know that’s why he’s taken this gig. He was tired of scraping by. There wasn’t just an emotional hole left when our parents died; there was a financial one, too. I can’t say for sure, but he’s not exactly working nine-to-five while he purchases obscenely expensive things and comes home all hours of the day and night, if he comes home at all.

I was honored to raise him into adulthood. There was no way I was going to let him go into care when I was an adult and capable of looking after both of us. We were both grieving, and life was lived on a tight budget and not a lot of fun. He had this part-time job during his final year of high school, but I hadn’t thought much of it. I’d been busy studying and working. It wasn’t until just under two years ago that a seed of doubt started to build inside me.

Since then, his curly shoulder-length hair has been styled short on the sides with blond wavy hair on top. He’s still as short as me, but he’s built up muscle over the last few years, like he’s working out. He regularly comes home with scraped knuckles and mud all over his clothes. I’ve asked him to explain what it is that he’s doing, but he just laughs it off and says I worry too much.

I’d even gone as far as to follow him one day, and that’s where I spotted Austin. I didn’t know who he was at that point, of course. But he ruffled my brother’s hair affectionately when no one was looking, and that was when I realized Danny had an entirely separate life I didn’t know about.

After a little online sleuthing, I found a Reddit thread on The Unseen. The stories they told were horrific. Acts of violence littered the anecdotes, with commenters adding their own version of the legends they’d heard. Reading between the lines of the hopefully exaggerated stories, it seems that The Unseen is a subset of a larger enterprise named The Organization. This at least had some genuine articles from reputable newspapers. The leader? John Black, sixty-five years old, white hair, muscular build, with an imposing height. If he wasn’t running it with his brains, the blurred photo of him onTheSeattle Timesnews website would suggest he could certainly do it with his brawn. Even for a sixty-five-year-old, the guy was jacked.

According to the exposé article, his two sons, Augustus and Austin, worked with him to run The Organization, and for all intents and purposes, Austin cleaned up messes—or rather, made messes and then cleaned them up. There were no photos of Austin, but he didn’t match the one the website showed of Augustus so I had assumed it was him up until Danny let his name slip in conversation one night.

When I followed Danny, he went back to the same warehouse repeatedly, and all sorts of trucks were coming in and out at all times of night, too. I was never brave enough to leave my car to check it out. The Reddit thread had given menightmares, but I continued to watch from afar nonetheless.

Once Austin had started coming into Squeeze the Day just a few weeks later, I’d panicked. At first, I thought he knew I’d been watching him, and panic traveled up my throat that I was in danger. When I made eye contact, he observed me with a curiosity that made my skin crawl, but there was nothing familiar in the way he looked at me—more of an appreciation, as sick as it made me feel. I knew I couldn’t risk spying on Danny anymore. It would be risking his life if Austin found out I was observing his operation, whatever it was. It was obvious The Unseen didn’t want people to know what was going on behind the dull gray roller doors of their warehouse.

What I had managed to find out really was just rumors. The Unseen stupidly have matching tattoos, which Danny described to me asan initiationwhen I asked him about it. But he wouldn’t tell me what the initiation was for. I only know it’s a tattoo for The Unseen because a girl I went to high school with dated someone who works for Austin, and that guy also has the same tattoo: a blindfolded brunette staring up to the sky as a tear rolls down her cheek. Also, my brother is nineteen. He’s about as subtle as lighting a bag of shit on someone’s doorstep and ringing the bell. So when I said he came home with scrapes and bruises, it was true, and it was all the time. And unless he’d got a side gig digging graves at the cemetery, there was no reason for him to come back late at night covered in mud. The third concern came with the amount of cash he started to throw around. He handed me a bundle of one hundred dollar bills one night accompanied by a Post-it note with a smiley face on it. No explanation. Just money. Covered in dirt. All he’d said when I pressed him was that it was a bonus for a job well done.

So drastic times call for drastic measures. Danny won’t listen to me. He’s made up his mind. And besides, as he jokingly said one night when I caught him coming home at 4 a.m., “there’s no way out now.”

But it’s not funny, and my parents didn’t leave him inmy care so that he would get killed by some gangster that has shitty taste in coffee. I mean, who goes to a juice bar to order coffee, anyway?

The plan is to: one, temporarily house him in my basement; two, keep things chill; three, flip the switch and make him believe I’m a psycho and that his life might possibly be in danger. And finally, when he agrees to let my brother go, I’ll let him go, too. But not before Danny and I have enough time to get out of town. See? A four-part plan. Easy.

I pull into my driveway. It’s our parents’ house and is looking a little run down. My mom used to garden and keep everything full of flowers. Now, the path is overgrown, the weeds creeping in through the cracks, and the grass needs mowing—well, hacking might be a better word.

I pull out the trolley I’d prepared and place the blanket on top. Bending my knees and engaging my core, I drag him out by hooking my arms under his armpits. Linking my fingers across his chest, I drag him out of my old Land Rover Defender—another item left over from my parents’ passing.