Page 8

I shouldn’t have fucking touched her.

It hadn’t been my plan. I was supposed to go in there, threaten her, and make her tell me what I wanted to know.

The fact she hadn’t used the washroom since I dumped her in the tower room at my estate was something to be used against her. All it did was probably make her orgasm more intense.

Touching her was reckless. Making her come? That was the real mistake.

She’s too relaxed now. Sitting beside me in my car, not in the trunk, but next to me wearing the light-blue sundress one of the housekeepers found for her to wear, distracting me even more with those full fucking thighs on display.

The dress is too fucking short and too tight, but my last attempt at a normal life hadn’t left a lot of clothing behind when she walked out. I don’t even remember this damn dress. It’s something a milkmaid would wear with the rounded neckline pulled tight with a drawstring, and the sleeves have some poof to them.

Even if I could remember the dress, I doubt it looked this good on anyone else. My knuckles whiten as I grip the steering wheel tighter. This isn’t a hookup for me to be drooling over. She’s a danger. Possibly to my family and definitely to herself.

“You can let me out on the corner. It will be easier than trying to park,” she says, tugging at the hem of the dress.

“I’m parking.” I pull around the corner from her apartment and find a spot.

“Is my car here?” she asks after I’ve maneuvered into the spot. “I don’t see it on the street.”

“Your car had a flat tire. It’s being fixed and will be brought over tomorrow night.” I throw open my door and climb out. Her door pops open before I round the trunk.

Noticing me glaring at her, she looks down at herself, then back at me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I reach around her and shut the door, hitting my fob to lock it. Though, in this neighborhood, I doubt a car alarm would stop anyone from doing whatever the hell they wanted to it.

“You don’t need to walk me up,” she says, walking a few paces ahead of me.

I grab hold of her hand, dragging her to my side.

“You’re under the delusion that I’ve set you free, Megan.” Turning her to face me once we get to the main door of the building, I wait until she brings her eyes in line with mine. “I haven’t. We’re just here to get the note.”

“But I’ve told you what you wanted. Look, whatever you and your family do, I don’t care. I don’t want to know, and I want nothing to do with it.”

She’s cute, in an incorruptible sort of way.

I wonder how long it would take to ruin that? To rob her of her innocence and replace it with all the darkness that the world actually holds.

Pulling the door open, I jerk my head. “Let’s go.”

She rolls her eyes but doesn’t argue with me. It’s the first smart thing she’s done since I put my sights on her at Obsidian.

I follow her inside and up the set of stairs to her apartment. There’s a distinct stench of pot lingering in the hall and the music thumping from one of the doors we pass tells me where the party is.

There’s a crunch as she steps, and I pull her by the elbow away from whatever she just stepped on.

A glass pipe, or what’s left of it after she stepped on the bulbous portion of it, lays splattered on the peeling linoleum tiles.

“Careful.” I take the lead, bringing her to the next door, her apartment.

I pull out the key from my pocket.

“Where’d you get that?” She tries to take it from me, but one glance from me and she drops her hand. If she wants to have any chance of getting rid of me after I get this note from her, she needs to behave herself.

I’m not sure she knows how. Which only seems to feed my growing infatuation with her.

As I slip the key into the lock, the door pushes open.

“You didn’t have your goon lock it last night?” she accuses, reaching past me to push the door open the rest of the way.

“He locked it.” I step in front of her, blocking her from going inside before me.

The living room is trashed. The pillows and cushions are tossed from the couch, and the coffee table is upside down. Picture frames are scattered across the floor from where an end table had been.

“What the hell?” Megan shoves her way into the apartment, but I catch her by the arm before she gets ahead of me.

“Just wait here. Let me make sure there’s no one still here.” I leave her standing in the living room and quickly check the bedrooms and the bathroom. No one, but the entire place has been gone through.

Drawers are opened, their contents spilled everywhere.

She shuts the front door when I come back from the kitchen. The frame is busted where the bolt had been locked. Whoever got in wasn’t trying to be quiet.

The floor trembles from more music pounding from the apartment below.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say no one heard anything.”

She frowns.

“Did your men do this?” she accuses. “Did you send them here to ransack the place while you had me locked up in that house of yours?” Her hands clench at her sides.

“Why would I do that?” I pick up an envelope, a piece of yesterday’s mail, turn it over, then toss it back on the counter.

“I don’t know.” She shoves both hands into her hair, tugging it away from her face. “To get back at me for being able to sneak into your secret fortress?”

“I already punished you for that. No need to do it again.” I lift a shoulder and walk past her to the living room. The television, a newer flat-screen model, hasn’t been broken. “Nothing seems stolen.”

“I have nothing to steal.” She picks up the couch cushions and tosses them back onto the couch.

“Where did you have the letter?” I pull us back to the task at hand.

She looks up at me from where she’s sitting on the couch, surveying the mess of her apartment.

“The letter?”

“Yes. The letter you got from your secret boss.” I gesture toward the bedroom. “Did you hide it somewhere or leave it out?”

“It’s in my bedroom. I’ll get it.” She pushes back up to her feet.

While she’s in her room, I head to the kitchen and turn the table back onto its legs. The fridge has a calendar with notes scribbled on the dates when bills are due, a coupon for the pizza place I saw down the street, and a picture of her standing with I assume her parents when she was younger. She’s wearing Disney ears and grinning as though she really was standing in the happiest place on earth.

I stand there, mesmerized momentarily by the brightness of her smile. Pure organic happiness that only exists among the innocent shines in her eyes. As much as I loved the little noises she made for me in the tower room, I wonder what she sounds like when pure joy hits her.

No. Not going there. I head to her room when she’s been gone for too long.

“Did you find it yet?” I call out to her.

I find her sitting on her bed, cradling a broken picture frame in her hands. The glass is webbed across the photograph. She slides her fingertips across it, hissing when the sharp edge cuts her.

“Be careful.” I grab her wrist, bringing her hand up to my mouth. I lick off the beads of blood and gently suck her finger.

“It’s just a little cut,” she says softly when I release her finger but continue to stare at her hands.

The nail on her middle finger is broken down below the skin line, and there are scrapes all on the side of her hand. All that clawing in the tower room has damaged her hands.

“You’re dangerous to yourself.” I drop her hand with a sigh and take the frame from her. Another photo of her family when she was younger.

“The photo is scratched,” she says, getting up from the bed. “I think the note is over here.”

She moves to the dresser where there is a stack of books and journals. Pushing them aside, she looks beneath them, then opens the top book.

She retrieves the folded-up paper and brings it to me.

There’s a phone number with a cryptic message about the debt being paid upon delivery.

“What does that mean?” I ask. “What debt?”

“The usual kind.” She picks up a drawer from the floor and wiggles it back into the dresser while I read the note again.

The number goes nowhere when I try it on my cell.

“Yeah, it wasn’t working after I contacted them the first time.”

“Explain what that note means. What debt?”

“Credit cards, loans, you know, the usual. They would have paid all of it for me.”

“Why would you do that?”

She looks around the room and laughs. “I don’t know, maybe someone who doesn’t live in a five-thousand-square-foot mansion might want to improve where they live?”

“You want me to believe you put yourself in danger so you could get a nicer apartment?” No way.

She’s impulsive, I can sense that, but not for that reason. A new job, more pay, that would get her into a nicer place.

Sneaking into Obsidian for serious money was for a different reason.

“You have what you wanted, now go. I have to clean up this mess.” She tries ushering me out of the room, while my phone vibrates several times as text messages come through.

“You’re not at all concerned about who did this?” I ask, grabbing my phone.

“I’m more concerned about getting you the hell out of my life.” She kicks clothing into a pile in front of her closet door.

I swipe my screen to life and read Ivan’s text messages.

“Well, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.” I look up from my phone.

“What? Why not?” She puts her hands on her hips, staring at me with exasperation.

“Because Dexter Thompson is dead.”