Page 6 of Bought (BOUGHT TRILOGY #1)

CHAPTER SIX

Lucian

I kissed her. Not out of hunger. Not out of dominance. Not to prove a point.

I kissed her because I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to know what it felt like.

What she tasted like.

Now, I sit on the edge of the bed, drink untouched on the table, my hands clenched between my knees. My chest aches.

I broke my own rules.

Christ, that kiss.

It lingers like smoke in my mouth, thick and impossible to swallow. Her lips were soft, but she didn’t give me softness. Instead, she offered resistance, heat, and defiance, pressing back against my control.

She kissed me as if she wanted to prove she couldn’t be owned, even while she let me in.

And touching her was pure heaven.

Her body was so responsive as if I knew exactly what she needed.

Unclenching my hands, I run my hand over my shoulder, like I can still feel the scrape of her nails digging into me there. I loved the way her body arched against mine, the heat of her skin against mine, bare breasts pressed to my ragged scars.

I hear the quiet catch of her breath when my tongue slides against hers on repeat.

I wanted more.

I sent her away.

She walked out my door, a slight tremble in her defiant chin that I know she didn’t want me to see.

Enemies circle like sharks. Ghosts haunt me.

Love is the most dangerous weakness a man in my line of work can have.

I should have felt relief when she left. All I felt was need.

A buzz from my phone pulls me out of my torment. A message. From the agency.

You have a new secure message from:

ERIN CROFT

Below her name, the agency offers me a choice to accept or decline.

I don’t even get to read the message first.

A coin sits on the ground by my shoe. A shiny copper penny. I pick it up, pinching it between my thumb and forefinger.

Safety, reject, tails. Gamble, accept, heads.

I flip a coin. Heads. Accept.

Erin: Meet me again. No payment. Just you.

Looks like that kiss ruined us both.

I put the phone face down. She’s already too far under my skin. And if I let her in any deeper, she’ll have me scratching off my own skin to heal the itch. To scrape away the guilt I feel for surviving.

Years ago, before I became a Bachman, an operation went wrong. My decisions led to loyal men dying, along with someone who wasn’t even supposed to be there that night.

My first love.

I promised myself that no one else would die because of me.

There’s only one thing I can do now. I climb into my discreet car, the American-made one with the rattling muffler.

The Porsche would stand out where I’m going. I peel away from the building.

It’s time to shift my focus back where it belongs. No matter how much I want her, work needs to come first. Head before heart.

Always.

I drive past the low-lying buildings that border Brooklyn and Queens. The area is rundown and often floods. It’s nicknamed the Lost Neighborhood. Our boys call it the Wild West of the West Side. It’s temporary. The Morettis will find out we’re here soon enough, but for now, it’s home.

After the Morettis orchestrated the firebombing of Bachman Enterprises, hidden in our once-beloved Village, our entire operation was forced to move.

The original headquarters still stands there as a burned-out shell.

Part of the facade remains, but the inside is gutted.

Every desk, server, and shred of paper has turned to ash.

There is no way to link the crime to the Morettis.

We’re stuck in a hopeless stalemate.

We can't rebuild on our land until the insurance company handling our claim proves that we did not intentionally destroy our home. We evacuated the city after the Village was bombed, but we needed a team to stay behind.

Blaze and I, along with a ragtag group of bachelors, were the first to volunteer.

Along with a star-studded team of Bachman lawyers living on the West End, except for Blaze, it’s Peter Pan types, who would never settle down and have no ties outside the brotherhood.

Our job is to hold what’s left of the fort.

At the time I offered to stay, I didn’t have any ties. Didn’t want them.

Then she showed up at my door.

Now I’m thinking we put a memorable plaque where the Village used to stand, and I take her somewhere safe, where she could never be a target.

But my blood runs Bachman, and we’ve led this city for a century; my pride, my ego, our legacy holds me back.

We currently operate from a single warehouse, known as The Hole.

It’s a bleak, functional space with corrugated metal walls and drafty, uninsulated rafters that creak in the wind.

The air smells of diesel, with pools of old stains visible on the cold concrete floors.

Every time a truck drives by outside, the walls shake.

These buildings were intended for the temporary storage of shipping pallets.

Our main ‘conference room’ is no longer the elegant space with a bay of windows we were used to, but a converted loading dock filled with mismatched folding chairs, a battered desk, and a whiteboard still displaying the faded outline of a long-forgotten inventory list.

My mind drifts back to Erin. She haunts me like a song I can’t get out of my head.

Ever since the Village was destroyed and the majority of the Bachmans evacuated New York, I’ve been on edge.

I travel through the city like someone who’s been told there’s a sniper on every roof, and for all I know, there might be.

They’re no longer only after our turf. They’re set on bankrupting our American businesses. They want us off New York soil, and with their tech, they’re doing their best.

They’ve also begun sending packages first to our businesses, before they bombed them.

When the family evacuated, the enemy expanded their targets to the private homes of Bachman-friendlies. With the Morettis’ direct threats, they’re becoming fewer and farther between.

Handwritten notes, bottles filled with gasoline, graphic photos of what will happen to anyone who doesn’t disassociate from us. Sometimes the packages contain pieces of animal carcasses. Occasionally, they’re human.

Sometimes I can’t tell the difference.

Every day involves negotiating territory. Every hour is a struggle for leverage.

There's no such thing as a safe moment, not even inside this makeshift office that we don’t think they’ve discovered yet. I’m sitting at the only proper desk in the place, a gun taped to the underside. Blaze claimed his spot in the corner, a milk crate for his chair.

He’s the only one who doesn’t seem bothered by the change. Having grown up in government housing in the Bronx, I suspect he feels more comfortable here than he did in Manhattan.

Blaze pulls up his crate to my desk, ready to argue some sense into me. We’ve been disagreeing for days.

“You ready to talk?” I ask.

“Do we ever talk?” He flashes that roguish grin at me, fully aware of his youthful good looks. “Lately, we end up yelling.”

“Only because you won’t agree with me,” I argue. “I think you like the sound of your voice echoing in this shithole.”

“If you’d just do what I say, we’d have no reason to argue,” he counters. “And we wouldn’t have to disturb the rats living here.”

We start civil enough, but soon enough, we end up loudly disagreeing over a high-value, high-risk shipment the Morettis are expecting. Blaze wants us to ‘intercept it.’

We need the cash, but I’m not sure it’s worth facing the blowback if they find out we’re the ones who stole it. I prefer to play it safe, at least until we figure out how the Morettis have been able to predict our every move.

Blaze aims to make a bold statement and leave a lasting impression. He storms off to his corner cave, muttering about “old men who won’t take risks.”

“Since we’re the only two here, I’m pretty sure you’re talking about me,” I holler back. I sit in the empty loading bay, gazing out at the cracked concrete and the puddles from the last rain.

I can’t seem to focus on anything but glimpses of her from last night.

I almost miss the sound—a hiss of tires just beyond the chain-link fence, a low, eager engine idling. Heart in my throat, I move to the cracked metal door, looking out.

“Blaze. We have company.”

I hear the scrape of his carton against the floor as he stands.

There’s a car I don’t recognize pulling up about a building’s width away from our door. It’s a black Caddy, late-model, shining like an oil spill, even in the dull light. I take a closer look. The windows are tinted darker than the law permits.

“Blaze! Take cover!” I slam the door shut, locking it.

The sound of the first round firing temporarily petrifies me. I am transported back to another day, another time, a different shot. The world erupts with a crashing sound of glass and noise, as the high windows shatter and shards of glass shower down.

Bullets rip through the thin steel walls of the warehouse, sending metal shrapnel whistling past my head. For a split second, I see muzzle flashes like camera bulbs.

Blaze is already crouched behind my desk, gun in hand, eyes wide but steady.

“They’re early,” he says, mostly to himself. “I thought we’d have another few weeks in this dump before the dogs sniffed us out.”

“Stay down,” I bark, but he’s ahead of me, crawling across the floor to the far corner where hidden explosives are layered behind a stack of forgotten legal boxes.

I dig for my gun, ripping the tape from the underside of the desk, feeling the satisfying weight of the weapon in my arms. The gunfire doesn’t stop—it's getting louder and closer.

“Fuck.”

They’re firing full-auto; something with serious stopping power.The bullets chew through the desk, splintering wood and ricocheting off steel supports.

I pop up and fire three shots through what’s left of a window, hearing the satisfying crack of glass and the heavy thunk of a body hitting car metal.

I duck as a fresh volley of bullets shreds the chair where I sat only minutes ago.

Blaze is a shadow, darting between covers, ripping the top off a grenade. He tosses it out to the street. I cover my ears, but they ring all the same as I feel the explosion in my chest.

As suddenly as it started, the shooting stops. Silence crashes down, heavy and complete. For a moment, neither of us moves. I exhale, the rush of adrenaline making my hands shake.

“You good?” I ask, voice raw.

He nods, checking the angle of his arm where a sliver of glass has sliced a neat line above his wrist. “Only a scratch.”

“Same.” I look down at my own pant leg, soaked in blood, but the wound is superficial.

“We need to get out of here. Now,” Blaze says.

“We agree on that, at least.”

But I’m not ready to move.

I pull my phone from my pocket without thinking. It’s smeared with blood, and the screen is spider-webbed with cracks from where it hit the floor.

There’s the message.

Not from the Morettis, not from the family, but from Erin. The one she sent hours ago.

The one I never replied to.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” I wipe my hands on my shirt and shove my phone back into my pocket.

Never fail. Never fall.

Especially in love.

I stand, stretching out my aching joints. I follow Blaze to the door.

He unlocks the door, pulling it open enough to confirm there’s nothing left of the Caddy but black rubber streaks on the pavement.

“Still glad you moved back?” I joke.

“Hell yes.” He flashes a grin over his shoulder. “You can take the boy outta the city, but he’ll always be back. Besides,” he says, closing the door. “I live for this stuff.”

“I did, too,” I say, remembering the adrenaline, the power I felt protecting my family. My voice drops. “Before that mission.”

Each of the brothers is aware of the others' past. It’s part of our initiation. Coming clean by laying out our past dirt for our brothers' inspection.

“You were young. You got fucked. You have to let it go.” He puts a hand on my shoulder.

I run my hand over the back of my neck, muttering, “I should have been better at reading my men.”

“Now you don’t have to. You can trust each of us with your life.”

“Still, it’s hard to move on, to forget.”

“I hear you. But you have to. It’s time.” He squeezes my shoulder. “And I’m here for you.”

“Thanks, Blaze.”

“Brother.” He grips my arm, pulling me into some form of embrace, the closest the two of us will come to hugging. “Glad we were together tonight.”

“Same.”

After making plans to meet tomorrow, we drive off in our separate cars; he, most likely, scoping out our next office space.

As the adrenaline fades, a thought pushes in, unbidden and unwelcome.

If that bullet had been an inch to the left, she’d never have known how much I didn’t want to send her home.

I pull out my phone. Her message waits, glowing on the cracked screen.

My thumb hovers, hesitation a heavy weight in my chest. Then I type.

Lucian: Tomorrow. Same place. Nine. I’ll send a car.

I hit ‘send’ before I can change my mind.

I knew I couldn’t walk away.

I’ve finally accepted it.