Queen of Quarantine

by Caroline Peckham

  "You said that at the last ridge," I pointed out and he grimaced at that mistake.

  "Yes. Well, it should be no surprise that I am not suited to mountaineering. But I recognise this view. It is very similar to the one you can see from the cabin and I have checked the GPS so this time I am almost certain." Saint scowled at the trees like he was daring them to disagree.

  "Almost?" I teased and he ground his teeth as he stalked ahead, clearly needing to find out if he was right or not for himself.

  "Tease," Tatum mocked as she appeared beside me, slipping out of the trees silently, like she'd been born to do it. She was like some little forest nymph at one with nature and I was loving getting a chance to see this side of her.

  "He makes it too easy," I replied with a shrug.

  The sun was low in the sky and we needed to make camp soon or we'd be stuck out here in the dark, scrambling to put everything together. I just hoped Saint was right about us seeing the damn cabin soon because knowing him, he'd insist we keep walking until we did.

  "Ca-caw!" Blake's voice came from above us and I looked up to find him grinning down from the branch of a tree. The moment my gaze met his, he threw a pinecone straight into my face and I cursed him as I scooped it from the ground to return fire.

  Tatum squealed as she ran for cover behind Kyan who whipped her off of her feet and threw her over his shoulder then ran on up the hill. "I'll save you, baby!"

  Blake scrambled back out of the tree while I launched more pinecones at his ass and he cursed me as I took off after the others before he could make it to the ground.

  We ran between the trees, launching more missiles at each other and laughing until we came up on a clearing at the top of the ridge where Saint stood smiling triumphantly.

  "I see it," he announced, ignoring our game as Kyan set Tatum down on her feet and kissed her like it was the end of some movie from the fifties, dipping her low and hooking her leg into his grasp.

  It was hard to make out in the dim light, but in the distance, I could just see an immense stone…castle. It was at least three floors high with smoke coiling from several chimneys. There was a dusting of snow on the roof of it and – are those freaking turrets?? The thing looked like it had been built to look like Henry the Eighth’s winter retreat and in no way resembled a damn cabin.

  "I was imagining some little cosy cabin," I muttered, wondering why on earth I hadn't realised Troy Memphis would have built himself a freaking luxury escape out here.

  "That was an absurd notion," Saint scoffed. “Though it looks like he’s had an extension added since the last time I was here a few years ago, so it’s a little bigger than I expected too.”

  “You called it a cabin!” I accused.

  “Clearly that is just a mocking name my family uses for it. You can’t seriously have expected to find Troy Memphis vacationing out here in some filthy shack, can you?” Saint looked at me like I was the one who needed his head checked and I just kind of stared back.

  “Please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks this is fucking ridiculous?” I implored and Blake laughed.

  “Nah, man, it’s not insane. It’s Troy Memphis. He’s like Saint on steroids with a god complex. Nothing he does should surprise you,” he said.

  “Wait a minute, are you trying to say Saint doesn’t have a god complex?” Tatum scoffed in disbelief and Kyan roared a laugh. “He literally set himself up to live in a church.”

  “Not to mention the fact that you enjoy worshipping me on your knees, siren,” Saint teased, looking nowhere near embarrassed by the accusation.

  I shook my head at him and focused on the ‘cabin’ once more. It was still a good distance away, but at least now we knew we hadn't fucked up and gotten ourselves lost out here.

  The others all dropped their packs and started setting up the tent in the trees, but I found myself just standing there, staring across the forest that filled the valley and wondering if my fate awaited me beyond it.

  I'd given up everything I'd ever been to get here. I'd sacrificed all I had left of myself after my family was torn from me that night. Sometimes I couldn't even remember the boy I'd been before my brother and mom were stolen from me, and the knowledge of that cut me deeply, because if he was gone then that was the last piece of them destroyed too.

  Would killing Troy Memphis offer me a reprieve from all of this pain at last? Would I be free of it? Or was I always going to hurt like this? Would the sting of the injustice he'd served up to my family always be there? Was there any true hope of me making peace with this?

  A hand slipped into mine and I looked down at Tatum as she stood there with the fading light reflecting off of her golden hair.

  "Tomorrow we put our ghosts to rest," she said, knowing what I was thinking about without even having to ask. "We face the Devil and send him back to hell with our demons in tow. We need to let it go then, Nash. All of it."

  "What if it isn't enough?" I murmured, my brow furrowing.

  "It won't be," she replied, surprising me. "How could it be? Killing Mortez may have helped pay for my dad’s death, but it didn’t heal my wounds. Vengeance won't bring the people we love back to us. Our families are a piece of our souls which will always be missing. But they're not lost. They're here with us." She placed her hand over my heart. "They'd want us to find happiness. To live and remember them, but not to use them as an excuse to keep punishing ourselves. We let our anger die with the people who are responsible for the pain of their deaths. Then we focus on the love we had for them and they had for us. That's how we move on. By making peace with the way they were taken and holding on tight to the best memories we have of them."

  "Tell me one," I prompted, and she hesitated a moment as she thought on that.

  "When we were kids, this one time, Jess and I were camping with our dad and we played hide and seek with him. But he couldn't find us. We'd managed to wedge ourselves into the hollow of a tree and we must have stayed in there, silently giggling for half an hour or more. Finally, he started yelling for us with this fear in his voice, telling us the game was over and that he really needed us to let him know that we were okay. So we burst out and ran to him, finding him wild-eyed and worried, but the moment he spotted us his face split into the biggest smile you've ever seen. He wrapped us in his arms and squeezed us so tight that we couldn't breathe. I asked him what would have happened if we hadn't come out. Would he have given up on us and just gone home alone? And he told us that we were the only things in his life that truly mattered. That he would have hunted night and day for the rest of his life for us and never given up. I felt so loved when he told us that." Tears welled in her eyes, but she blinked them back and I tightened my hold on her hand. "Now you tell me one."

  I hesitated for longer than she had and with a jolt, I realised that was because I never really let myself linger on my memories of my family. But that was making them fade and I couldn't bear the thought of that. I refused to allow it to happen. So I closed my eyes and submerged myself in a memory of Christmas Day, the scent of Mom making dinner in the air while me and Michael opened presents.

  "Every Christmas, my mom would go all out with the dinner," I said with a smile. "She'd buy everything, even the stuff none of us liked and would slave away in the kitchen for hours - but she couldn't cook for shit." I laughed and Tatum smiled too. "Me and Michael would eat the lot anyway, scrape our plates and hide our grimaces while we crunched on burnt vegetables and devoured salty gravy. I kinda love the taste of badly cooked food because of those days. She'd ask us if we were enjoying it and we'd tell her it was amazing, and she'd smile because she knew damn well it was awful. But none of us would crack, keeping up the pretence of a perfect Christmas because it was our version of perfect and that was all we wanted. Then we'd crash out in front of the TV together and eat chocolate until we wanted to puke. We fell asleep like that every year, all of us together with Christmas movies playing on repeat."

  "I can burn a Christmas dinner for you this y
ear if you want to keep the tradition going?" Tatum offered as she reached up to cup my cheek in her hand and I smiled.

  "Yeah. I think I'd like that. Saint probably won't though."

  "I can handle him," she said, quirking a grin at me and I snorted because I knew damn well she could, even though I hadn't fully figured out how yet.

  Tatum tugged on my hand and I let her lead me over to the others who were almost done with setting up the tent.

  "Good boys!" Tatum said, praising them like they were dogs and clapping her hands in an over the top way.

  "This shit is harder than it looks," Blake muttered as Kyan started rolling out sleeping bags inside the canvas space.

  "Sure it is," she teased and Blake lunged at her with a playful growl.

  Tatum ran for it, using me as a human shield while Saint rolled his eyes at us and started grabbing out food.

  "Help me catch her, Nash," Blake urged as Tatum held onto me, making me move with her and keeping me between them. "Then we can pin her down and have our wicked way with her."

  "Oh, is that the deal?" I asked, whipping around and catching Tatum by the waist.

  "No!" she laughed. "I never agreed to that!"

  "Come on, siren, we all know you can't resist us for long," Saint said, matter of fact, like he knew Tatum's libido better than she did.

  Tatum ran past him, snatching one of the packets of dehydrated food and a bowl from his hands before hooking a bottle of water from Kyan's open pack which was sitting at the foot of a tree. Then she leapt up and managed to scramble into the branches above our heads before making herself comfortable sitting back against the trunk and smirking at us.

  "Are you going to hide up there, princess?" I called as I looked up at her.

  "I think I have to if I wanna protect my virtue long enough for me to eat," she replied with a laugh as she started making her food up in the bowl.

  I chuckled and turned away to find her a spoon before tossing it up to her in her perch.

  "I think we should forgo the fire tonight," Saint said as I took a seat on the ground beside him where he’d sat his ass on a fallen tree trunk. Far be it from Saint Memphis to ever sit in the dirt of course. "We don't want to risk the smoke being seen."

  I looked over my shoulder in the direction of the monstrosity Troy Memphis called a winter getaway home even though I couldn't see it from this position.

  "I guess so. But it'll be cold," I pointed out unnecessarily.

  "We could gather the wood in case we get desperate enough to risk it," he said slowly. "But I think we can make do with body heat tonight."

  A twitch of his lips was the only indication I got of his thoughts for how we could best make use of said body heat and I chuckled as I ate my food, having plenty of ideas of my own.

  "It's hard to say exactly how things will go tomorrow," Saint said lightly. "And it may well be that we don't get much choice in how the events unravel. But if it comes down to a decision, would you like to be the one to finish my father?"

  I raised my eyebrows at him discussing this so casually and tossed my now empty bowl down before us.

  "Are you sure you don't need to do it?" I asked him. "To take back control and all that?"

  Saint shook his head with that cunning little smile on his face. "I'll be happy just knowing he's gone. Besides, there would be a sense of poetic justice to it being you, Nash. You epitomise everything he thinks he is superior to. Your lack of good breeding, of money, the very fact that someone like you could be the end of him would never even cross his mind. And I think I’d quite enjoy the look on his face when it came to fruition.”

  "Ah, you want the token poor boy to do it and rub salt into the wound?" I joked.

  "Don't take offence," he replied, catching my gaze and holding it. "I see plainly enough your value and I can assure you that I am well aware that money and position have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of a man's character. You are my brother. And yes, if you do it, it will cast an extra blow to him as we shatter his pride along with ending his life, but I also think you need this more than I do. He may have never offered me love, but he stole it from you in the most brutal of ways. So if you wish to be the one to see him ended-"

  "Yeah," I agreed. "I think I'd like that. But when all is said and done, all I really want is to see him lying dead before me. If the chips don't fall in my favour for the task, then I'm not going to ask anyone to hold back on my account."

  "Either way," Saint said. "Let's hope that tomorrow is the last sunrise that bastard ever lives to see."

  "Agreed," Kyan said loudly as he finished laying out the bed inside the tent and came to grab his own food.

  I started cleaning everything up as the light seeped from the sky, not wanting to be scrambling about for it in the dark.

  The distant howl of a wolf caught my ear and I looked around with a shiver running down my spine.

  Blake helped me to clean everything the way Tatum had taught us to and we walked out into the trees to rinse out the food bowls so that there weren’t any smells lingering to attract a hungry beast in the night.

  By the time we returned to everyone else, Saint was already inside the tent and Tatum and Kyan were packing the last things away.

  The temperature was dropping with the setting sun and I noticed Tatum shivering as I closed in on her.

  "Come on, princess," I said, winding an arm around her waist and drawing her towards the tent. "Let's get you in to the warm."

  Blake and Kyan followed us into the fancy ass tent that Saint had bought and the moment Kyan zipped the thing closed, the wind was cut off, making us all feel much warmer.

  Saint was sitting up on the heaped bedding, the glow of his cell phone lighting his face and bare chest as he checked the GPS for the hundredth time. He was damn good at hiding it, but I could recognise the signs that gave away his stress now, so I could see it in the tension of his posture.

  We all kicked our boots off before moving closer onto the bedding and Blake switched on the little camp light which hung overhead, casting us all in a slightly red glow as the light reflected off of the canvas.

  Tatum unzipped her coat, tossing it aside before peeling off her sweater too. Next she dropped her pants and kicked them away alongside her socks before taking her shirt off and moving towards Saint in a set of matching red underwear.

  She lowered down to her knees before him and he slowly moved his phone aside, switching it off as he looked at her.

  I exchanged a glance with the others and Kyan chuckled as he unbuckled his jeans and dropped them before ripping his shirt off so that he was left in his boxers. He moved to kneel beside Tatum, looking a lot less submissive even while he played the part and he smirked at Saint as he looked at him.

  "Come on then, master," Kyan taunted. "Take control of us. You know it'll help with those Daddy issues that are plaguing you."

  "Are we seriously doing this?" I asked, looking at Blake with a brow arched. "Just giving in to the will of the Devil?"

  "I dunno about you, dude. But if the Devil is gonna command I make Tatum come, then I think I'm gonna have to go join the dark side." Blake grinned at me as he quickly stripped too and I rolled my eyes.

  Tatum turned to look at me over her shoulder as Blake kneeled on her other side and my gaze slid over her near naked body in the red light as she bit her lip seductively.

  "You're not playing fair," I groaned, my self-control losing a battle against my pride. We all knew I wouldn't just stand here and get left out, but fuck if I was going to kneel in front of that asshole.

  Saint smirked at me over Tatum's head as he seemed to realise what my objections were to this and he jerked his chin my way, commanding her to move.

  "Let's see if you can bring him to his knees then, siren," he suggested and my pulse picked up as her eyes lit with that challenge.

  I stayed where I was, standing beside the large heap of sleeping bags as she crawled towards me and the others watched her with hungry eyes. />
  Her hands landed on my knees and I looked down at her as she ran them up my thighs until she found the solid ridge of my cock through my jeans. I groaned as she unzipped my fly, reaching out to run my fingers over her hair.

  "Hands behind your head, Nash. But take your shirt off first," Saint commanded and Tatum actually fucking stopped what she was doing as she waited for me to comply.

  I grunted something that may have included an insult for our evil overlord then fell into line like a good boy, yanked my shirt and sweater off and laced my hands together behind my head.

  The moment I'd done it, Tatum worked my fly lower, pulling my boxers down too and freeing my cock with a sultry gasp that made me ache.

  "Slowly," Saint said, and I almost groaned again as she followed his order to the letter, taking her sweet time wrapping the base of my shaft in her hand before running her tongue up the underside of it.

  She continued to lick and tease me, tasting the bead of moisture that formed on the head of my dick, but not actually closing her lips around me until Saint commanded it.

  “Now,” he growled and her mouth closed over the head of my cock before she slid me right to the back of her throat, making me growl with the desire to grip her head between my hands. But I didn’t, I kept to the game and my hands remained locked behind my head as instructed.

  It was equally infuriating and exhilarating, never knowing what moment he'd pick to interrupt us or change what she was doing, and my muscles bunched with tension as I fought to keep my hands locked behind my head.

  When I was certain I was about to come between those perfect lips of hers, he suddenly commanded her to stop and I couldn't help but lurch forward a step, reaching out and trying to stop her from retreating as she sat back onto her feet.

  "If you won't kneel for me, Nash, maybe you'll do it for your queen?" Saint suggested and I gave up any pretence of fighting this as I shoved my jeans the rest of the way off and stalked her back onto the bed.

  "Yes," I agreed. "For her."

  Tatum took my hand and I let her draw me down as she smiled at me, pulling me into the middle of this little harem she'd claimed for herself as the others drew closer instinctively.