Page 52

Colton

“He’s… back?” Haven asks weakly.

“We’ll deal with him,” I promise her.

“No!” Haven grabs onto Lucas. “No, please don’t leave me.”

When I entered the room, Xander looked pissed, but his features soften as he crosses the room toward Haven and Lucas.

“He can’t get to you in here,” he says as he kneels next to them. “You’re safe, doll.”

Haven shakes her head frantically. “He knows your faces now. Whoever has been feeding him information, they can tell him where we are. He has a gun. He can—”

“Angel,” I say firmly. “Calm down. We’re not letting him near you, all right?”

“Just please don’t leave me,” she whispers. “The two men who took him away. Can’t they deal with him?”

“What, you mean kill him?”

“No!” Haven cries. “No, you can’t kill him.”

Lucas sighs. “Little fawn, it’s the best way to keep you safe.”

“You can’t. Promise me you won’t.”

“We’ve already promised,” Xander points out.

“Look, we’ll deal with him tomorrow,” I say. “For tonight, we all need to sleep, especially now that we have an active threat on our hands again.”

“What if he breaks in?” Haven asks, her voice quiet.

“Then an alarm will go off on my phone, and my security company will be notified. We’ll wake up, so he’ll have to get through all three of us before he’ll even see you.”

“Oh,” she says.

“Now get in your cage, angel.”

Haven does so, and Lucas reaches in to arrange the blanket over her body. She’s hugging her stuffed dragon to her chest, and a pang of envy hits me square in the chest. When I was twelve—right after my mother died—Mark forced me to donate all my stuffed animals. I begged him not to, but he didn’t care.

That doesn’t matter, though. I’m a fucking adult. I don’t need comfort items like that anymore.

“See you in the morning,” Lucas says softly.

Something about the way Haven smiles at him catches my attention. Did something happen between the two of them? Even though she’s scared, she looks… happy.

Xander exits the room wordlessly, quickly followed by Lucas. I take a few minutes to get ready for bed before climbing under the covers. Before I turn the lamp off, I glance at Haven. She’s watching me, the dragon still in her clutches.

“Night,” I say, wishing I could extract the fear from her expression and take it on myself.

“Goodnight,” she whispers.

I turn off my lamp, and it doesn’t take long for Haven’s breathing to even out. Despite how exhausted I am, I can’t fall asleep. There’s too much that requires my attention, and it all feels so urgent.

First, there’s Isaiah. We can give him another beating and dump him in the middle of nowhere again, but he’ll obviously come back once he’s healed up. I’ll repeat that process as many times as I have to, but dammit, I wish Haven would just let us kill him.

And then there’s the Glass Rooks. The recording that Greg gave us is undeniable proof that Mark is cheating all of us. Will that be enough, though? If he asked Stephen Lane and Greg to join in on his scheme, then he probably has most of the board on his side.

Will a sufficient amount of the lower-level members be angry enough to want Mark out of power? And will they be happy with a twenty-one-year-old taking over? How am I supposed to know?

Two hours slip by in what feels like a matter of minutes. Eventually, I’m able to calm my thoughts. Just as I’m finally drifting off, Haven makes a quiet, disturbed sound. My eyes snap to her cage, barely visible in the dark. All is silent for a solid ten seconds before she makes it again, louder this time.

“Angel?” The nickname comes out softer than it has in years, which startles me, but I push the thought aside for the moment.

She doesn’t respond, but her breaths are short and harsh.

“Haven.”

She jumps, the movement rattling the bars of her cage. I switch on my lamp to find her curled up under her blanket. Her dragon peeks out from underneath it.

“Hey.” I push back my covers and swing my legs over the side of the bed. “What’s wrong? You have a bad dream?”

“It was him,” she mumbles. “He took me back. He took me back, and I was trapped. I couldn’t get out, couldn’t hide.”

“You’re safe,” I remind her gently. “He can’t get to you here. Go back to sleep.”

“I can’t,” Haven whimpers. “I—I don’t want to dream again.”

Inwardly, I groan. I was just getting to sleep. All I want to do is lie down again, close my eyes, and slip into oblivion for a few hours. But I don’t want Haven to suffer alone.

“You won’t have the same dream, angel.”

“He’s always there.” The tortured way she says it tugs at something inside me that I thought was long-dead. “Him, or Beckham, or Daddy, or—” She gasps again, like she’s having trouble getting enough air. “Colt. Colt, please, I’ll be trapped there again. I don’t wanna go back. I can’t…”

“You won’t. Now go back to sleep.” I try to keep the impatience out of my voice. It’ll only upset her more, but goddammit, I’m tired.

“I c-can’t.”

Stifling a groan, I rub my face. She’s right on the verge of a panic attack, and at this point, I’ll do whatever I can to calm her down. So I stand and move to the cage. Haven watches me with wide, terrified eyes, and she stiffens when I unlock it and swing the door open.

“Why don’t you come to bed with me?” I ask.

Silence, and then a timid, “Is it safe out there?”

“Safe out—what are you talking about?”

“He can’t get to me if I’m in here. You’re the only one with the key.”

Oh. When I got the idea to put her in the cage, it was to keep her in her place. Eventually, I hoped she’d come to like being in there—that she’d see it as a set period of time where there was no pressure on her. I wanted her to eventually crave the idea of me locking her up, but I never imagined it would make her feel physically safe.

“It’s perfectly safe out here.” I reach in and tug on her arm. “Come on.”

“He’ll—he’ll find me,” she protests, even as she slowly climbs out of the cage.

“He won’t.”

“But—”

“Shh.” The second she’s all the way out, I lift her into my arms and carry her to the bed. I’m not used to her clinging to me like this, and a wave of memories and suppressed desires flood my mind. “I’ll protect you.”

“Like you used to?” she asks.

I grit my teeth while I set her on the bed. She’s not even trying to get under my skin right now, but she’s managing to do it anyway. “Yeah.”

The moment I crawl under the covers next to her, Haven clings to me like a koala. Her stuffed dragon is sandwiched between us, flattened like a pancake because she’s trying to erase any distance between us.

“Colt?” she whispers.

It’s just the shortened version of my name, but hearing her say it is like a stab to the gut. She stopped when she betrayed us, I think as a way to put emotional distance between her and me. I did a similar thing with what her nickname morphed into—an insult instead of a token of my obsession with her.

“Yes?”

“What if he comes in here?”

“He won’t.”

“But—but what if he does?”

I sigh. “Angel—”

“Will you kill him for me?” she asks, so quietly I can barely make out the words. “I know I said—I know I asked you not to. But I don’t… I can’t… I won’t survive there.”

My lips part as I stare down at her in shock. She’s been so adamant that we can’t kill him. Are these her true, unfiltered thoughts? Is this what she actually wants but refuses to let herself have? Only for the sake of people who stood by and watched her get hurt again and again?

“Please,” she begs. “Please, Colt, please will you kill him?”

“I will,” I say softly. “I’ll always keep you safe.”

That finally gets her to stop rambling, but she’s still trembling against me. I need her to relax, goddammit. There’s no way either of us can sleep like this.

Emotional support has never been my strong suit. If you need someone to hide a body or beat an asshole up, I’m your guy. Hell, I’d even go grocery shopping for the right person, and I fucking hate grocery shopping. Just don’t ask me to be a shoulder to cry on.

So it’s no surprise that seeing Haven like this has me half-tempted to dump her in Lucas and Xander’s room and call it a night. Yet I can’t bring myself to do it. Her emotional state may be way out of my comfort zone, but there’s a side of me that doesn’t want her to cling to anyone else like this.

She asked me to keep her safe.

She begged me to kill Isaiah.

And that’s how things will stay for as long as I can manage. She’s fucking mine. Like I told her when I first brought her here, I take care of my belongings—even when they’re trying my patience.

I roll Haven onto her back and move onto my side so I’m facing her. She doesn’t seem to like it because she tries to wrap her leg around me again, but I stop her.

“Hold on, angel,” I say when she lets out a distressed sound.

It’s possible that talking through things will help calm her down, but I doubt it. Fuck that shit, anyway. Talking about your problems doesn’t make them go away, and it never will.

What Haven needs is for her thoughts to be rerouted away from Isaiah. She needs someone to force her body to relax, and I can only think of one way to do that right now.

Leaning over her, I cup her face and lightly fit my mouth to hers. She makes a startled noise, as I expected, but she’s too lost in her fear to think to pull away. Hesitantly, she kisses me back, the action feeling almost automatic.

My hand travels down her body until I’m nudging her legs open. With a gasp, she clamps them together and shakes her head, but I flatten my palm against her thigh and push harder.

“Trust me,” I say quietly.

“But—”

“Shh, shh, just relax. You’re too worked up to think straight.” My lips feather across her forehead. “I know what you need, don’t worry.”

“But I’m scared.”

“You want to feel better, don’t you?”

She nods, and she lets me coax her legs apart a few inches.

“You want me to help you?”

“Yes,” she whispers. “Please help me.”

Fuck me. I’ve never given her an orgasm for the sake of her own pleasure. Even when I ate her out, I couldn’t give two shits about how she felt about it. I did it because it was what I wanted to do.

This, though? This is entirely for her—something I never thought I’d do.

When I push her thighs apart more, they give easily. I slide my hand into her panties as I kiss her again. She’s not wet, but I gently work her up to it within a couple minutes. Once my fingers are slipping through her desire, I move a little faster. It pulls a whimper out of her, but all I care about is that it seems to be working.

She’s stopped shaking, and her panicked breaths have turned into quiet gasps. I almost default to making fun of her for being too easy, but I catch myself just in time. This isn’t meant to humiliate her or upset her. She just needs a little help calming down, that’s all.

“I don’t want you to focus on anything except the way I’m making you feel, you got it?”

She nods, panting. I seal my lips to hers, and this time, she starts grinding against my hand like she can’t stop herself.

“Look at you,” I whisper in between kisses. “You’re doing so well.”

I don’t degrade her, don’t throw her around. All I do is kiss her and circle her clit with my finger until she comes. It’s not an explosive orgasm—she’s too drained for that. But her body tenses, and her back arches, and a strained moan escapes her throat.

“That’s it,” I murmur, still rubbing her clit. “You’re such a good girl for me, aren’t you?”

“Colt,” she whines, and I finally slow my fingers to a stop.

“Feel better?” I ask.

She turns into me, once again draping her leg over my body to keep me close. “Mmhmm. Thank you, Colt.”

I slip one arm under her head and wrap my other one around her waist. With her dragon still between us, Haven drifts off again, her expression finally relaxed, and I follow a few minutes later.