by Skye Warren
One second he was sitting there regarding me with bemusement. The next he launched himself across the seat, his large body moving with surprising grace. I hadn’t taken into account how fast he could move. Of course he’d been strong. He could have overpowered me in a second. But he also moved like a goddamn panther, wrapping his hands around my wrists before I could blink. I didn’t even have time to pull my arm back, much less punch.
Instead he had my hands pressed against the side of the car, his body looming over mine, his hips between mine. His face was only inches away from me, gaze trained on my mouth.
“Like this?” he asked softly.
“Not fair.” My voice was breathless. A spark of heat between my legs reminded me that while my brain might have been mad at him and my heart might have felt conflicted, my body was one hundred percent on his team.
“Oh, I think it was completely fair. You wanted me to come at you. And that’s what I did. So hit me.”
I yanked my wrists, but he held strong. His eyes flared with arousal at watching me struggle. Oh God. I couldn’t deny I felt it too, the clench of delicious surrender. He was holding me down, and I loved it.
“Let go of me.”
“No, kitten. I’m just doing what you asked.” His lips brushed a millimeter from mine. “Enabling you.” The warmth of his breath was the only warning before he kissed me, fever-hot lips pressed against mine, his arms like iron bars around me. I melted into the seat, into the car—and against his body in the places we touched. My hips rocked against his, and he groaned into my mouth.
He lifted his head but left his body around me, an erotic cage. I blinked slowly, disoriented.
Only then did I realize the car had stopped moving.
“One,” he said softly, his eyes almost sympathetic. “Time’s up.”
“Why did you do that?” I whispered. My lips were still tingling. My body was still aching. And there was nowhere for it to go, no future with a man like this. A cold-blooded killer, even if he felt hot in my arms. “I’m still angry at you.”
“Good,” he said, eyes almost black in the late-afternoon shadows. “That means you’re taking it seriously.”
Not seriously enough. And not in the way that he meant. He wanted me to accept that my life was over, but it wasn’t. I hadn’t let a bunch of thugs ruin my life. I wasn’t going to let Philip start now. “You’re insane,” I whispered.
A small smile, made more sinister by the shadows on the vehicle. “They were coming after you, kitten.” He paused, allowing the words to sink in. “I got in the way. I stopped them, but they were hired guns. Street soldiers. That means that whoever sent them is still out there. And he’ll be looking for you.”
My chest felt tight, hard with denial, stunned with shock.
No, he had to be wrong. After me? Why would they?
And even if someone had been after me, I couldn’t accept that my life was over.
I was a fighter, and I fought for what I wanted. What I wanted was a real family, with real kindness. Real love. That was something Philip was incapable of giving, and his behavior now proved it. He could only kiss me when he was holding me down. He could only want me when he was stalking me. He could only claim to care when he ruined everything I had worked for.
All he knew how to do was destroy things. I wouldn’t let him destroy me.
Chapter Seventeen
PHILIP LEFT ALMOST immediately, shutting himself away in a dark paneled study—on the phone again. The door shut with a click. Maybe he’d stop speaking in riddles. He had used vague words in the car: ask and push. He really meant bribe and threaten.
Adrian fussed over me, showing me the guest room that would be mine. Beautiful and dusty. How many of these safe houses did Philip keep stashed around the city?
“Hungry?” he asked.
“No, but I could use the company,” I admitted.
“Come on. I’ll make hot chocolate,” he said before leading me back down to the kitchen.
I had spent the last few years trying to distance myself from those dark weeks, fighting the memories and the illicit desire to see Philip again. I had thought I’d succeeded. But here I was, all over again. Déjà vu lay thick in the air. It was like I’d defied my fate—and destiny required that I return to the same place until I succumbed.
Adrian pulled out two mugs, sympathy on his face, though he couldn’t hide the curiosity.
He was a good-looking guy, always quick with a smile. Lean body and sandy hair. So different from Philip’s sinister power and looming height. A man like Adrian would probably be better suited to someone short like me—assuming he swung my way, which he didn’t. But I’d never felt an ounce of attraction to clean-cut, safe men like him and Sloan. Nothing like the raw yearning I felt for Philip.
“Go ahead,” I said drily. “Ask your questions before you bite your tongue clean off.”
He adopted a wounded expression. “Forgive me for caring about you. You go off to college. You don’t call; you don’t write.”
I shook my head, a smile tugging at my lips. I’d had no contact with him since those weeks, which was part of what made this so strange. It was as if nothing had changed, as if no time had passed—even though I was a woman now, no longer a lost and scared teenager. Everything had changed, but not him. He still worked for Philip, still loved him in secret desperation.
“You could have written me, you know.” I’d had no contact with Adrian—and no contact with Philip. Except for the postcards.
He pushed a steaming mug across the granite countertop. “And corrupt an innocent? I don’t think so.”
I laughed. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been innocent.”
He cast me a doubtful look. “Okay, we’ll start with an easy question. Why the sociology major?”
I’d struggled with what my major would be—and still did. “If that’s an easy question, I’m a little scared of the hard ones.”
“You want to help people, et cetera.”
That did it; I burst out a laugh. “Only you could make helping people sound boring.”
He grinned, unrepentant. “I used to be innocent too. Philip corrupted me.”
I suspected that was truer than he wanted to admit, although not in the way that he meant. Philip’s corruption wasn’t about guns and drugs. It was about his pure physicality, his magnetism that reached deep inside and left its mark. Adrian had given up the chance at a normal life, at a normal relationship, to be near the man he wanted, even knowing it would never come to anything.
But he’d started me off with an easy question, so I wasn’t going to ask him about years of unrequited love. At least, not yet.
“Helping people is nice. I took a sip of the hot liquid, relishing that rich-man’s hot chocolate I’d tasted here and nowhere else. “That’s more for when I graduate, though. The application of what I’m learning now. But the classes are what drew me, the study. I like knowing how people work. What makes them tick.”
How did you explain mob violence from people who weren’t normally cruel? How did you explain a captive teenage girl held down by a group of average-looking businessmen with families waiting at home? What explained my endless fascination with a man who was the antithesis of what I wanted—safety, family?
“Hmm,” he said. “So what would your textbooks say about Philip?”
I snorted. “He’s one of a kind.”
“That he is,” Adrian muttered.
Of course my mind was already working through every study, every book, every class, trying to put a label on him. I had tried to do this since the first day—and had never been able to. I had read the sociological factors of criminal behavior, but he defied the vital parts of the structure. He could be classified but never predicted. But I also didn’t know enough about him—his history, his childhood. More study was required.
I took a sip, letting the creamy liquid soothe the burn of curiosity, of longing. “There’s a common theory called the structural strain theory
. A way to describe people with deviant behavior.”
Adrian snickered. “I know something about deviant behavior.”
“Conformists are those who believe in society’s rules and follow them to try and achieve their goals. Ritualists don’t believe in society’s rules but follow them anyway.” I fell into the second category. My experience as both an adopted child and at the hands of those men had crushed any belief of true acceptance. But still I went to college, like my parents expected me to do. I followed the rules because it was the only chance I had at a normal life. The only chance to have a family.
“And Philip?”
“Would be classified as an innovator,” I admitted. “He accepts the cultural goals of society—wealth, power. Independence. But he disregards the rules.”
Adrian studied me, looking fascinated. “And you admire that, don’t you?”
A sound at the door had us both jerking, startled—hot chocolate sloshing in the mug.
Philip strode into the room. He took me in with an enigmatic glance. “Why are your cheeks red?”
Oh God. “Are they?”
I pressed my hands to my cheeks, and sure enough they were hot. Him mentioning them only made them burn hotter.
Philip’s eyes flared. He stalked closer.
Adrian mumbled something about the wine cellar and left the kitchen. For a split second I wondered if he was leaving to give his boss privacy or if it hurt him to see the man he loved lust after someone else. Because there could be no mistaking the heat in Philip’s eyes as he took me in, head to toe.
There could be no mistaking the heat in my body either, as I watched Philip. He had an aristocratic nose and piercing eyes, dark hair and sensual lips. It was impossible to ignore the size of him. My body reacted subconsciously, shrinking as if to make room for something bigger, making myself small in front of a threat.
“What were you talking about?” the threat asked softly.
“You.”
His lips quirked. “And what’s the verdict?”
Guilty of a lot of things, probably. Justified in some of them, at least according to the unwritten rules of the criminal underworld if not our legal system. I doubted a charge would ever stick, despite that cop at the dorm and his warrant.
“Why?” I asked softly. “Commit any crimes lately?”
“Only ten since breakfast.” There he went—innovating again. What I didn’t mention to Adrian was that the strain theory suggested that social structures actually pressured some people to commit crimes. And it rejected the idea that deviation was necessarily a bad thing.
I took a sip of hot chocolate, feeling warmth slide down my center. Somehow even the act of drinking became sensual when Philip was in the room—and when he studied my mouth, heat banked in his eyes.
Fighting to distract myself from the ache between my legs, I asked, “What was the first crime you committed?”
One eyebrow rose. “Trying to use your psychology shit on me?”
“Sociology shit,” I corrected.
“What’s the difference?”
“Psychology is the study of an individual person.” And while context certainly came into play, it wasn’t enough for me. A person didn’t exist in a vacuum. A man in a suit wasn’t only a businessman or the leader of a crime organization. A girl in a tight dress wasn’t only a call girl or a victim. “Sociology is about how people interact with each other.”
“I see.”
He didn’t. “It’s about digging into a person. Archeology on the personal level.”
He looked amused. “And that’s what you’d do to me? Dig?”
I flushed with heat, without quite knowing why. It wasn’t dirty, what he’d say. It just felt that way when he stood two feet from me, close enough that I could smell his aftershave.
“Maybe,” I managed, my voice rough.
“What makes you think there’s anything underneath?”
Oh, there was plenty beneath his hard, sculpted surface—layers of rock formations, granite and marble, maybe molten lava in the middle. He would take a lifetime to explore. My pulse raced.
“Your first time?” I asked again.
He studied me with calculating eyes, taking my measure. It was almost as if he saw me as a threat, only I knew that couldn’t be true. A girl like me could never threaten a man like him.
“Murder,” he said softly.
I didn’t flinch. I had seen enough in those dark weeks that he couldn’t shock me. “Who was it?”
He shook his head on a rough laugh, darkly rueful. “Why? So you can justify it? So I give you all my excuses? Should I tell you about the way my daddy beat me?”
I did flinch then. He mocked me, but he exposed himself too. There was truth in that statement. He had been hurt, abused—a rock turned to diamond. Did that excuse that first crime? Did it excuse all the crimes that had come after? I doubted it would, but an explanation wasn’t an excuse.
Gravity didn’t excuse or apologize for what it did, didn’t make excuses for rocks falling down a mountain, trampling whatever was in their path. It simply existed, following the equations it always had.
A force of nature. That was Philip.
“Do you think you were justified?” I asked instead of answering.
“No,” he said flatly. “It wasn’t my father that I killed. It was a fifteen-year-old kid. He wanted my turf. So I defended it with the only weapon I had at the time. A steel pipe.”
Gruesome images flashed through my mind. Death by steel pipe wouldn’t have been pretty. Death was never pretty. A fifteen-year-old boy, crushed in long, painful minutes.
“How old were you at the time?”
“Twelve.”
God. Fifteen had been young. Twelve was a baby. I managed not to show my shock, my sympathy. He wouldn’t want either of them.
Twelve years old and he’d already been working on the streets, fighting to defend himself, to survive. He didn’t want me to justify what he’d done, but the situation unfolded in front of me—as gritty and dark and terrifying now as it had been then.
Shelly had told me how he had taken care of his younger sister and brother, already knew how protective he was of them. It wasn’t only himself he’d been protecting with that steel pipe, wasn’t only his business. It was his brother and sister, saved with every dark, soul-crushing blow. It was the food they would eat and the safety in their beds.
No matter the reason, killing made him a murderer. And to some people, a monster.
No matter how I’d ended up in the situation, being sold to a man for money made me a whore. And to some people, not worth saving. Philip had never given up on me. He’d started protecting me the second he saw me, and no matter what explanations he claimed, whether it was for sex or selfish reasons, I instinctively knew he would continue protecting me in his own twisted way.
Chapter Eighteen
I KNEW I needed to contact my adoptive parents. Even if we hadn’t been close, even if I doubted they would care. So it was just a matter of finding a phone. Shelly had teased Philip about his aversion to technology, but he would put business first. If this was where he came when he needed to hide out from the cops—or worse—then he would have already had this place fully stocked.
The search took me through a tour of Philip that I wasn’t expecting.
In an otherwise empty kitchen drawer I found a glossy, corner-bent photograph of him and his sister. I had seen them in pictures before, austere half-smiles after one of her ballet performances.
This one showed them around a table, with Rose reaching over to smear something on Philip—cake maybe. Her smile lit up the picture, but Philip’s smile, a smaller version, more reserved even in the midst of revelry, was like a rare, precious jewel.
In the background I could see Colin, mouth open in the middle of some word. Probably encouraging Rose. The two younger siblings liked to team up against their older brother, but only for pretend. They worshipped him.
My heart twisted at both Ph
ilip’s happiness in the photograph and the strange reserve that had led him to stow this picture in a drawer instead of framing it on the wall. As if happiness was a weakness he couldn’t expose, even to the select few who visited this place—even to himself.
In a library I found wall-to-wall books. There were many on business, which I’d expected. The Art of War wasn’t a surprise. The many books on engineering, on physics, however, were a surprise. As were the array of tiny figures lined up on the shelves in front of books, a small army defending their country.
Not figures, I realized on touching one. Machines.
A little bird cage looked like it was made out of paper-clip wire. But when I tapped the bird that rested on the outside, its feet opened the door for the second birdlike bundle of wire perched inside. The legs of a man turned the wheels on a miniature bicycle—raised off the ground by wooden blocks so it didn’t move. A tiny lever drew an open-air metal bucket up and down the wire outline of a well.
And I knew without asking that he had made them. There were too many of them, some of them half-finished, others trying to be something else. None of them quite polished and pretty enough to be purchased from a store.
A Luddite, Shelly had called him once. Well, he might not prefer technology in the way most people did, with flashy tablets and apps, but he did enjoy technology. He enjoyed the mechanics of it, understanding how things worked. He enjoyed creating things.
So why then, did he earn his money destroying things?
He destroyed livelihoods. He destroyed lives.
He destroyed families.
God, he was destroying mine. So casually, too. My protests were just an annoyance, the flap of a sparrow’s wings against the great hurricane force of him.
Behind the well made of wire, I spied a section of books about Chicago. A biography of Frank Lloyd Wright—my second-grade class had taken a field trip to his house in Oak Park. There was a book on suspected haunted locations, with dog-eared pages and highlights for places in Chicago: an abandoned theater, a church.