by Penelope Sky
I liked being rich just like everyone else, but I also thought it was evil.
Her hand moved to mine as it rested on the center console. Her fingers moved in between mine, and she gave me a gentle squeeze, telling me she was there even though she didn’t have the words to comfort me.
“My mother was a housewife. She kept that place perfect at all times, ready for any unexpected company that would stop by. Our meals were homemade every single evening. If she ever saw anyone less fortunate than us, she didn’t hesitate to open her purse and hand over all her cash. She was really generous with her time, money, and her love…”
Her hand squeezed mine again.
“I have good memories of my father too. Before he pissed our inheritance away, he was a good man…for the most part. But he lost his mind when he lost his money.” My father laughed loudest at the dinner table and was eager to take my brothers and me to sporting events. He loved us…at one time. “My eldest brother was quiet and studious. He went to university but chose to live at home because he wouldn’t be able to survive without my mother’s cooking. Can’t blame him. And my sister…” I pulled my gaze away from the front door and looked straight ahead over the steering wheel. I could still hear her voice in my head sometimes, in my dreams, and she had the most innocent soul of anyone I’d ever known. Losing every member of my family was difficult, but her death was the worst. “She was my twin.”
Raven released a quiet breath, a silent gasp.
“It’s hard to explain, but when you’re a twin, there’s a different connection there. She was the hardest one to lose.”
She pulled my hand to her lips and kissed my knuckles.
The feeling of her soft lips made me turn to face her.
Her eyes were wet, like my story had moved her down to her core. “I’m so sorry, Magnus.”
I’d never talked about this with anyone before. Fender and I didn’t even speak of it. The only conversation we’d had occurred when we hunted down our father and killed him. But once he was gone, that was it. We never spoke of that evening ever again. We never visited their graves. It was almost like it didn’t happen at all…even though we both thought about it all the time. “It was a long time ago. But it’s one of the things you never really forget…no matter how much time has passed.”
She lowered my hand and held it on the armrest between us. “I know…”
I kept our hands joined for a moment longer, my eyes gazing down at our affection. My hand was twice the size of hers, with little scars. She had small scars too, from her time at the camp, from her battles to survive. They were almost the same.
Like we were the same person.
We arrived at the camp at sunrise.
The girls were being escorted to the clearing, and the guards stood along the perimeter, wearing their uniforms to hide their faces from the women, to engage an extra layer of fear to keep them focused on their tasks.
When I stepped into the clearing with Raven in tow, I could feel the change in energy.
I could even hear it, even though it had no sound.
I walked with her to her station, where she would pick up the boxes and distribute them to her table. Once she was back in that camp, it was back to work. Her freedom was gone. There were no long walks to the coffee shop near the tower. She was back to her empty existence, just another worker on the line.
There was nothing I could do about it.
She immediately got to work without saying goodbye or behaving like I was more than her guard.
I stared at her for a few extra seconds than I should have, thinking about that painful conversation we had about the future…about us. She was right—it was hard to leave Paris to work as a prisoner when she was more than that. But I turned around and departed the clearing, feeling the gaze of the guards right in my back.
It’d been a long night and I wanted to go to sleep, but I stayed awake and caught up on everything I’d missed. I needed to talk to my contacts in Colombia to begin the shipment to Spain so Napoleon could have a higher product quantity than our other distributors. I didn’t agree with it, but I wouldn’t defy Fender by purposely sabotaging his plan. I just hoped I was wrong…about all of it.
I walked into the communal cabin to find the guys playing poker, their favorite activity when the camp was asleep. It’d been two weeks since I’d left, and Alix’s face was still a bit bruised—along with everyone else’s.
Breaking the bones in his face wasn’t enough satisfaction.
I was still angry.
I stopped at the table and looked down at them.
Alix didn’t hide his raw reaction, the glimpse of fear that entered his eyes when he saw me staring down at them all with that furious look. He dropped his cards on the table. “You want in, Magnus?”
“No.” I was angry at the other guys for their participation in the plan, but I knew Alix was the one who brainstormed the entire thing. I didn’t need to waste my time interrogating them all to figure it out. “Trying to decide if I want to break your nose again.”
The guys stilled at the threat, keeping their heads down as if they wanted to disappear, even the ones who hadn’t been the problem in the past.
“Or your dick.”
Alix held my gaze, but he wasn’t the confident thug he used to be. “I thought we moved past this.”
“I did too—the first three times.”
Alix dropped his gaze, as if he knew this was entirely his fault.
“Come within twenty feet of her, and I’ll kill you. Look at her…and I’ll kill you.” Her screams would haunt me for the rest of my life. They would play on repeat, even though she’d been spared from his ultimate cruelty. That feeling of pure helplessness, stuck to the floor while she begged for me to rescue her, was the worst experience of my life. It was somehow worse than listening to Fender tell me how our father had executed our family. “That goes for the rest of you, too.”
Raven constantly possessed a somber mood while at the camp.
She wasn’t playful or talkative.
I used to be the one who craved silence in the cabin, to work on my laptop without hearing the sound of her voice, but now that situation had been reversed. She was the one who craved the quiet.
She was also exhausted at bedtime because she worked in the scorching heat all day. Summer brought constant sunshine to the camp along with humidity, and the tarp over the clearing wasn’t enough to combat the temperature of the sun.
Time seemed to pause.
We weren’t living like we were in Paris…just existing.
The small bed didn’t bother me anymore because we were practically one person during the night. The cabin had AC, so we weren’t hot when we were close together, but we did sleep in the nude.
My eyes were on the window up above, looking at the moonlight as it poked through the curtain. It’d been a long day, but I couldn’t sleep. She was in my arms, her hand on my chest and her cheek on my shoulder.
She started to shift in her sleep, moving like she couldn’t get comfortable. Then her breathing escalated, a couple of suppressed whimpers coming from her mouth.
I watched her, wondering if she was suffering through a nightmare.
Then she jolted upright quickly, her eyes wide open and on the door, panting like she’d just sprinted a mile. When she realized the door was closed and there was no one in the cabin, she leaned against the wall and let her breathing return to normal.
I sat up and watched her.
Her hand moved over her chest like she had a stitch in the muscle. Her fingers slid through her hair next, taking a long time to bring herself back to a state of calm.
I didn’t know how to comfort her. She was against the wall like she wanted to get as far away from me as possible. Her eyes didn’t turn my way, like my existence didn’t make her feel better either. After a final deep breath, she started to breathe normally, to drop her gaze from the door when the danger was really over.
Without having to ask, I kn
ew exactly what her nightmare was about.
Alix had stormed in here and stripped all her clothes away before parading her outside, taking away all her dignity as if he had the right to claim it for himself. My power wasn’t enough to keep her safe—not in that instance. If Fender hadn’t randomly entered the camp and shown his loyalty to me, her fate would have been unspeakable.
A tear formed in the corner of her eye and streaked down her cheek, illuminated like a liquid diamond. She was calm now, so the tear must have formed previously but didn’t have the weight to fall.
It was hard to look at her, hard to see the strongest woman I knew break down from her fears. “That will never happen again, Raven. You’re safe.”
She turned her body so her back was completely against the wall, and she crossed her arms over her chest like she was somehow cold in this summer heat. “As long as I’m here, I’ll never really feel safe.”
At nightfall, I waited at the gate.
The sound of approaching hooves announced Fender’s arrival. One of his armed guards shouted over the fence to let us know they were there. They turned the lock on their side of the door, and then I turned mine.
I pulled both the doors open and let the horses pass through. Fender was in the center and in the lead. He was in his typical jeans, boots, and a long-sleeved shirt because it was a bit cooler that night than usual. The guys behind him turned off their flashlights once they were in the lit-up camp.
My brother got off his horse then removed his gloves. The men immediately moved in to take his things and lead his horse away to the stables without making a single noise. There was no greeting. No questions. Fender stepped farther into the camp and scanned his surroundings, as if a simple observation was enough to gauge the progress of the work happening in his absence. He looked at the clearing for a few seconds before he glanced at the edge of the fence, his paranoid mind needing assurance of safety with his own gaze.
I came to his side. “Do you want to talk tomorrow?” I noticed that he hadn’t brought Melanie to the camp again. That seemed to be a one-time thing. I wondered what she was doing while he was away. Did she have the liberty to go anywhere she chose? Like Raven did?
“No.” He moved ahead, crossing the space between the cabins toward his at the rear of the camp. The man was never tired, despite the long journey it took to bring him there.
I walked with him.
“Alix giving you any trouble?”
“No. I’m the one giving him trouble.”
“Well, don’t kill him. Executioners are hard to come by.”
I suddenly felt sick. Men volunteered to do the dirty work because it wasn’t the kind of job you could simply assign. You had to possess a special kind of evil to be able to stomach that kind of violence.
Fender asked me about production and our status with the shipment to Spain. “Were you able to negotiate a deal?”
“I did. But it’s considerably more expensive to do it this way, which means we’ll need to raise our prices.”
“Done.”
“But this will make it much riskier. Not sure if it makes sense to pursue it.”
Fender stopped and turned on me. “It’ll increase our revenue by fifty percent. Tell me, how does that not make sense?”
I stared at my brother’s hard face, seeing a man so focused on the past and the future at the same time. He turned to money as the answer to all his problems, the cure to his nightmares. But it was driving him mad. “I think continuing an existing successful business takes precedence over higher profits. Fender, you’re already wealthier than all other wealthy men—combined. What is it gonna take for you to be satisfied?”
He stared at me a bit longer before he continued forward.
I joined him.
He looked ahead as if I hadn’t asked a question at all. “I will never be satisfied. Don’t ask a question when you already know the answer.” He reached the cabin and stepped inside. His meal was already on the table, along with a decanter of scotch and a glass. Everyone knew of his visit to the camp that evening, so they were all prepared.
Fender fell onto the couch and immediately started to eat.
I stayed by the door. “Goodnight.” I turned to leave.
“No. I have something to say to you.”
With my hand on the door, I stared at his back. His muscles shifted and moved as he ate his dinner, staring at the opposite wall. I could see all the good and all the bad instantaneously, and I knew my brother wasn’t just the wealthiest man I’d ever known but also the stubbornest. I released the door and joined him on the couch.
Fender took a drink of scotch before he looked at me. He held my stare for a long time, processing the words in his head before he spoke them aloud. “Raven is free to leave the camp.”
I heard what he said because there could be no confusion at all, but I continued my blank stare because his words entered my ears but not my brain. The stubbornest man in the world had changed his mind.
“Next time you return to Paris, take her with you. And leave her there.” As if he had finished saying everything he wanted to say on the matter, he dropped his chin and looked at his plate so he could continue eating his steak and potatoes. After a long journey on the road, he always wanted a good meal on his table.
For a minute, I was speechless. I’d begged for her release many times, and every request was denied. I didn’t want her to be here a moment longer, to wake up in the middle of the night and stare at the door like someone was about to break through it to take her. She was so joyful in Paris, and that was what I wanted for her every day. “Thank you.” It didn’t matter why he’d changed his mind. I got what I wanted, and I was grateful.
“I didn’t do it for you.” He finished chewing before he set down his fork and grabbed a drink. He tilted his head back and poured a good amount into his mouth before he set down the glass once again. “I did it for Melanie.”
“Then I guess you two made up.” Last time I saw them together, she’d slapped him across the face before she’d stormed into the house.
“I asked her to marry me.”
With a non-blinking stare, I looked at my brother, never expecting him to say something like that. Time had passed strangely for the last few months, but that was all it had been…a few months. A woman he hardly knew had stolen his affection, and he was so obsessively blinded by her beauty that he became irrational and impulsive. It wasn’t like him at all. Sometimes his greed made him do stupid things, but a woman had never made him do stupid things.
“She said yes.” He stopped eating his dinner and rubbed his hands together, his eyes a little hazy like he was replaying the moment in his head. “But only if I let Raven go. She said she couldn’t marry the man who kept her sister as a prisoner. I didn’t have a choice, so I agreed.”
Whether Melanie actually wanted to marry him or not didn’t make a difference. I got what I wanted. It was such a relief, a load off my shoulders. I was powerful enough to keep her safe, but I would never make her happy…not here.
“But if she returns to this camp and pulls another stunt like she did last time…I’ll execute her myself. If she does anything at all to interfere with business, I’ll kill her. I suggest you make that very clear to her.”
After everything we’d been through, I didn’t think that would be a problem. Raven knew there was nothing she could do to change the situation. Even if she came back and burned the camp to the ground, it would just be rebuilt in a couple months, and the process would start all over. But I also knew that as long as this camp continued to function in this manner, it would haunt her until her dying day.
Fender grabbed his glass and took a drink. “I thought you would be more cheerful.”
My eyes dropped for a moment, thinking about the best way to phrase my words, to give myself the best chance of success. “There are other ways of running this camp, better ways.”
His gaze turned cold, like he already knew what I was trying to do.
&n
bsp; “We could replace the girls with paid labor, and we could threaten—”
“No.”
Damn, I’d barely gotten past the first sentence.
“If I won’t do it for Melanie, why would I do it for you?”
At least Melanie had tried.
“I told her I would honor one of her demands, but not both. Raven will be free, but the camp will continue to run flawlessly as it has for years. There is no better system of operation—and we both know that.”
The only reason I’d mentioned it to him at all was because it was important to Raven. But I knew it was futile. I wouldn’t move against him, but convincing him with just words was ineffective. It didn’t matter how strongly opposed I was to all of this; it would never change. I’d tried for years and years. When Raven was free, she might feel differently; she might learn to let it go.
Fender returned to eating. There were a few stalks of asparagus left, so he grabbed each one by the base and bit the tip, crunching the vegetable between his teeth.
I didn’t agree with a lot of things Fender did, but he was my brother, and my loyalty would always be ironclad. That was why I started to feel guilty, harboring this secret from him when I should’ve told him months ago. “Melanie only came back to you to save Raven.” I would’ve kept that information to myself, but now that my brother intended to marry her, I couldn’t just look the other way.
He continued to eat, as if that information were irrelevant.
I studied him, waiting for some kind of reaction.
When he reached the bottom of the stalk, he tossed it back onto the plate. “You kept this from me.”