by Katy Evans
“Melanie. You’re Melanie,” he repeats, speaking the word like he just found gold.
“Do I know you?” I ask, glancing past his shoulder while praying to see a glimpse of Derek’s big, broad back. Suddenly I can’t stand it; I want to go back and stand before Grey and say, I love you. I love you and I trust you and we’re going to make it work. Somehow. You fucking asshole, you’re my prince whether you want to be or not!
“No, you don’t know me yet.” The young man grins and extends his hand. “I’m Greyson’s brother, Wyatt. I overheard that you were leaving. I even thought I’d missed your flight, and yet here I was hoping I’d convince you to stay.” His eyes twinkle as though he knows about Greyson and me, what we have between us. What we just lost because I’m a chicken and he was being . . . noble.
Noble.
And letting me go.
The anxiety to see him increases by the second. “Are you going to see him now? Where are you going? I was hoping for a ride.”
“Actually, first I was going to see Greyson’s mother.”
“What?” The joy I feel almost doubles me over. “You know where she is?”
“I just found out myself, but shh. Don’t tell Greyson first, it’s a surprise. My father’s not doing so good . . . he’s been in the hospital for days and doesn’t have much longer.”
I’m nearly bowled over by the news. Bowled over with happiness, hope, anticipation. “Omigod.” My eyes blur as I think of what this will mean for Greyson. After how many years will he finally see his own mother?
“Wanna come and bring her to him?” Wyatt suddenly offers.
“YES!”
TWENTY-THREE
* * *
NEWS
Greyson
The text comes from Melanie’s phone, but immediately my gut freezes when I realize whoever is writing is not her.
Congratulations. You won.
I text back, And you are?
Melanie forgot her phone in the plane. This is Pandora. You won, I hope you’re happy. She’s on her way back to you. She’s blindly, hopelessly in love with fucking ole you.
The words wrap around me like some sort of blanket, heating me. At the same time, an oddly primitive warning sounds in my brain. I punch Derek’s number. “Where the fuck are you?”
“On my way back from dropping your queen. Why?”
“Get your ass to the airport and bring her back to me. Bring her back to me RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”
All my protective instincts have kick-started with a vengeance, mingled with the wild, primal excitement of what I just read on my phone.
She’s coming to me.
She’s coming back to me.
Twenty minutes of pacing later, I get Derek’s call.
“She’s gone. Taxi dispatcher saw her leave with a guy in a checkered shirt and boots.”
My stomach roils, and suddenly it all clicks, and my blood turns to ice in my veins.
Wyatt.
Eric’s familiar voice rings behind me. “Son, your father wants you . . .”
I’d been waiting outside his hospital room, waiting to talk to him, my checkbook handy, ready to settle things for Melanie, now I glance at Eric and grind my molars in rage.
“Tell him I’m gone. Tell him I’ll be back!” I run down the hall and pull out the keys to my rental, punching C.C.’s number. “Wyatt’s got her. Go to the south of the city, I’ll take the north, spread Derek on the east, get the rest of the team on it. FIND WYATT, HELP ME FUCKING FIND HER!”
Thirteen years I’ve looked for my mother.
Thirteen.
If Melanie disappears for longer than a day, I’m going to become a monster, a full-on monster on a rampage with one mission and one mission only.
Find her, protect her, keep her, mate her. NEVER LET HER GO AGAIN.
I’ve never prayed but I throw myself up to a god I’ve never believed in and yell at him to take anything, anything of mine he wants, but not her.
TWENTY-FOUR
* * *
REVELATION
Melanie
“So where is she? Where has she been all this time?” I ask curiously from the backseat.
Greyson’s brother just smiles and keeps driving deeper into the bad neighborhoods on the outskirts of Denver. He’s a shorter guy, with a manner of dress that says I-wanted-to-be-a-cowboy.
I don’t know if it’s the sixth sense they say women have, or the chilling look in his eyes, or the way my heart speeds up in my chest, but something is very, very wrong here.
And suddenly I know—I know—that Wyatt is not taking me to Greyson’s mother, like he’d said he would.
“Take me back,” I say softly.
He laughs. “Seriously? You give orders now?” He clucks and meets my gaze. “Let’s just make him come to you, hmm? Don’t all girls like that? Being rescued? My brother’s definitely going to want to rescue his ‘princess.’ ”
“Listen, he doesn’t care about me right now. He and I are over . . .”
When I reach over to open the door, he pulls out a gun. “Sit down and shut up.”
The shock of having a gun trained on me makes me slam back against the seat, instantly silent. My heart is hammering now, my breathing ragged. I don’t want him to know I’m afraid, but I feel a shudder of fear as I remember hands pulling me . . . taking me away . . .
It was him.
“Oh, trust me, he cares. Hell, I’ve made studying him a religion. My fucking father wanted me to be just like him.” He sneers. “He’s in love with you. He’s had your name on that list for ages and he worked his way from number forty-eight downward, instead of upward, all to postpone the time he’d have to collect from you. In the meantime he’d disappear and I saw him watching you through the cameras of the Underground. All those fights you’ve come to? Greyson has been watching you. He pauses you, rewinds you, replays you. Oh, he fucking cares more than he has about anything else in his life—and I wanted his mind fucked ! I wanted him to think he’d lost you too. So fucked he can’t finish the list—and then the Underground would be where it belongs. In my hands.”
He laughs to himself, a laugh that conveys some unnamable fury in him. “He even made my father promise no one would touch his marks . . . all because the bastard couldn’t have anyone getting close to you.”
He gives me a sideways glance and his smile is the fakest thing I’ve ever seen. “You trust me, princess, he gives a thousand shits about you, more than he’s given about anything. It used to be impossible to bargain with him. His mother was gone, nowhere to be found. He doesn’t give two shits about our father. He didn’t even give a shit about being alive. Until you . . .”
That laugh again, making every alarm bell in my system ring even when I have nowhere to go—and I’m trapped, trapped, in broad daylight, in the backseat of this car.
“Greyson’s smart, methodical,” his half brother says, his eyes narrowing on my face. “But he doesn’t have what it takes. He wants to keep it too clean, too nice, gentlemen doing business. This is my world. He doesn’t even want it. He’s just doing all this to find out where his mom is.”
He smiles again, laughs again.
I hate that smile.
I hate that laugh.
“Yeah, pretty boy Grey thinking Dad is a bad guy. Always saving people. Kills for the wrong reasons. It’s a dirty world, the Underground. When my dad’s gone, Zero’s going to turn it into a legit enterprise. What? Are we going to sit down at a committee table and fucking negotiate?” He laughs. “That’s not the way the Underground runs—as long as I live, it ain’t running like that. Now I have you, so I got him. Now I’m the one taking the woman out of his life.”
“You can negotiate without me. He doesn’t want me anymore,” I assure. “Why don’t we go to his mother . . .” I suggest.
“Bitch, nobody knows where the bitch is but Slaughter, and he won’t say SHIT!” He jerks the wheel so we weave to the side, then he glares at me as he straightens the car bac
k out. “God! It’s beyond interesting to me that my brilliant, talented brother would fall for a bimbo like you. But I’m sure you give good head.”
I remain silent, too scared to speak now.
Greyson thinks I left. He let me GO.
He won’t come for me.
I know the exact shade of Grey’s eyes when he looks at me.
How he sleeps with an arm under a pillow, facedown with his head turned to me.
I know he smells like a forest I want to get lost in, forever, and never be found.
And I don’t know shit about his stupid criminal actions.
Except that he was hiding them all from me.
And now I don’t even know how dangerous his brother is. If he’s a rapist and a killer in addition to a kidnapper. If he’s just holding me for ransom or planning to torture me simply because he can . . .
I don’t know what the fuck to do!
“Go ahead. Judge me. I don’t give a shit,” the guy spits out.
He pulls the car into an underground garage and slides a gate closed behind us, and pulls me out of the back of the car, pressing the gun to my temple. Cold. Hard. Steel.
My stomach roils as he clenches my arm and drags me to the underground elevator.
“Tell me,” he says as we ride up, and I can hardly hear him through the pounding of my own heartbeat. “Who was doing Slaughter’s dirty work when his precious Greyson took off? I was sure he’d never come back, but oh, no. Julian was willing to practically beg. He was too afraid to lose his golden child. When Julian learned he was sick, he couldn’t sleep thinking he’d never see his precious Zero again, his Underground—all the fights, all the gambling, the lucrative business, the prestige among fighting leagues—it would all go to waste if Zero wasn’t behind the reins.”
I hear his words, but most of all, I feel the sick resentment that he’s venting out on to me.
Kick his nuts, Melanie! But I’m frozen.
“See, I’m not jealous.”
Melanie, twist around, run away!
It looks so easy on television, but my stupid knees . . . my stupid knees feel like Jell-O and it seems that, apparently, I can’t run to save myself.
“When Slaughter dies, Greyson gets nothing so long as I got you,” Wyatt continues as he opens the elevator gate and shoves me into an abandoned loft, littered with old wood, dried-out paint cans. “Sit on that fucking chair or I shoot your legs.”
I drop down on the chair without question, clenching my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.
“He’s dying right now. And I got you. Greyson loses. The list is incomplete and he loses. Even if he were to fight me for it, if he wants you back, he’s going to need to give it up in exchange for you, and I’m going to have to kill him. And you—you want to live, then give me a juicy little fuck and we’ll see.” He looks at me. “That’s right, Melanie. You see, I’ve been watching you lately too. All those videos he plays. I’ve been watching you. Your tits bouncing. You screaming, ‘Riptiiiiide!’ Yeah, my brother’s not the only one with a hard-on for you.”
Wyatt starts tying my arms behind my back with thick hemp rope.
Fear. It’s eating me alive now. I can hear the chatter of my teeth knocking.
The wind whistling outside.
He straps me down and I blink my eyes because, no, I don’t want this asshole to see me crying.
“He’ll kill you when he finds you,” I rasp, hating the fear in my voice.
He laughs. “Darling, I’m already dead.” He leans over. “And he won’t. Kill me. See, that’s the thing about him. He doesn’t like to kill. He does it only when he has to. But I’m the only family he’ll have left. He still feels responsible for me. Bailing me out of my shit. He’ll feel, in that part of him that hates being a Slater, that it’s my father’s fault I’m like this too. He’ll let me live.”
He ties something around my mouth and leaves for a moment. Suddenly it’s so still, and the silence frightens me most of all.
My eyes burn from the need to cry.
My throat is raw, my tongue is dry and sticky under the cloth he wrapped around my mouth.
I may die today.
I failed myself, my sister, my parents. And it gives me no pleasure that the last time I saw the only man I’ve ever loved, I threw our love away. Oh god.
I told him how wrong he was for me, but never how right. He never knew that I was happy, blissfully happy—even if afraid—to be in love with him. I didn’t say that I think I fell from the moment he charged into the rain to spare me getting wet. I never told him that deep down I think it’s hot that he’s bad, and even hotter that he’s so good at being bad. I never told him that even after he lied, I trusted that he’d never, ever hurt me. I never told him any of that, only that I was scared. A fucking pussy.
He will never know that I believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that either by a cruel twist of fate or a blessing from heaven, he’s mine. And that I was his before he even touched me.
He is what I never knew I wanted and now all I need.
I believed it enough to come back to him. Enough to leave my fairy-tale land and follow him right into his exciting and frightening Underground.
He might never, ever know this.
Noises shuffle across an adjoining room and my stomach pulls and wrenches into knots as he approaches again.
Uncontrollable quavers seize me as I try edging my nails into the rope knot biting into my wrists. My hair is all over my face. I hate it. I. Hate. It. All my muscles are cramped as my blood rushes through me in an effort to make me move, to help me escape. The chair screeches beneath me and I wince at the sound.
Wyatt marches to a small, cracked window and peers outside, then he cants his head in my direction and stares at me, his eyes raking me on the chair.
The lust in his gaze is unmistakable, and it sends my fear spiraling out of control. Oh god, this can’t be happening!
A jolt of adrenaline kicks through me. Holding my breath, I press the inside of my wrists tight together and wedge my thumb in between the knot, using my nail to try to catch a tiny opening to get the knot to creak open. The rope loosens as I jam my thumb inside, followed by my other thumb, pulling it open on opposite sides, and I pretend to stretch and arch my back as I finally jerk one of my hands free, then wiggle the other one out.
In less than three seconds, he’s back on me. He grabs my hair with one fist and pulls me off the chair, then jerks me facedown on a rumpled makeshift mattress. “What are you trying to do? Huh? Escape?”
I’m scrambling, fighting to get free, but he flips me around and straddles me with his hips as he grabs my breasts and squeezes. My blood pounds, my face growing hot with humiliation as I fight him.
“Don’t touch me, asshole!” I cry as I buck and try using my knees.
He pins my arms above me and I turn my head and bite blindly, pulling out a chunk of meat.
He wails and I squirm free, panting as I get my bearings while my heart keeps pounding frantically in the middle of my throat.
He roars and lunges and I clip him with my heel, the gun clattering to the floor. Spitting out the blood from where I bit him, I grab the gun and swiftly turn when he kicks it away from me.
“Bitch.”
He smacks me.
The pain rips through me, then he grabs me by the throat and lifts me up in the air, and pain and the urgency for oxygen screams with every breath wheezing out of my throat. He grabs the gun and I kick in the air and raise my knee, ramming it in his nuts. “Ooof.”
He drops me.
I start running to the elevator, but when I spot the exit stairs just three steps away, I sprint over, grab the door handle, and jerk hard, trying to open it, yelling at it, “Come on, come on!” But it’s jammed, and I’m about to kick it open when I hear the elevator gate open and angry bellows behind me.
“Get over here, you fucking cunt!”
Which is when the door I’m struggling to open finally gives. It swings open,
outward, and I’m so attached to the knob, I follow it, taking a giant step forward—only to find there are no stairs, only a five-story fall, my body plunging into nothingness as I hear the most blood-chilling, desperate call I’ve ever heard in my life—“NO! PRINCESS!”—and I crash into blackness.
TWENTY-FIVE
* * *
FALLEN
Greyson
My world bottoms out.
I watch Melanie disappear through the gaping hole of the open door. Something takes over me. I hear myself yelling one more time, “PRINCESS!” as I charge for the empty space. My brother lunges at me, tackling me against the wall, grabbing my arm where I’m holding my gun. I overpower him easily, slide my SIG between us and aim it right in the center of his rib cage.
BOOM!
He howls, and I drop his writhing body to the ground and drop the gun as I run to the empty doorway. My chest is tight. I can’t breathe. Five stories below, I see a pool of golden hair.
“MELANIE!”
No response.
Derek steps out of the elevator and is instantly by my side, unrolling a piece of rope as I bark, “Lower me, I don’t want to crush her.” I grab one end of the rope as he slowly lowers me one floor, and then two, until there’s no more rope, and from two stories up, I leap down, crashing to the ground with a curse. “Call an ambulance!” I yell at Derek.
“Princess.” I roll to the side and crawl over to her. “Princess.”
She’s pale and lifeless. Streaks of blood cover her cheeks, streaming from her lips and nose. She mumbles something unintelligible.
“Baby,” I say as I reach out to touch her neck for a pulse.
I feel it, fluttering faintly under my fingers. My heart hurts in my rib cage. It hurts so fucking bad. For the first time in my life, I feel impotent.
“Melanie, stay with me.” I sound like a pussy. Begging. But holy shit, she can’t leave me. She can’t fucking leave me.