ASHFORD (Gray Wolf Security #5)

by Glenna Sinclair

  Those eyes had watched me asleep and awake, watched me even when I wasn’t aware they were watching me — in the shower, getting dressed, interacting with other people, playing outside in the yard. They’d watched after Carl had asked me to do horrible things, watched the aftermath of those events, watched me struggle to have semi-normal relationships and conversations with people, watched me fight with myself. Those eyes had continued to watch me long after Carl had left, on the myriad videotapes he’d taken of me to use for his own foul purpose. To continue to control and terrorize me with their presence, knowing they were out there, squirming at the fear of what would happen if he’d show them to someone. To anyone. To Levi, to show the man I loved just how obedient I’d been, just how complicit I’d been in my own abuse.

  I’d done everything he asked on those tapes. There was no proof of the time that I’d stood up to him — except for my mother’s grave.

  “Don’t you recognize me?” he asked, and I finally did. He was different, but it was Carl. Those piggish, garbage eyes had given away his ruse. If only I’d been able to accurately describe them to the police sketch artist, if only I’d been able to get anything right, then maybe Carl wouldn’t have been able to so successfully infiltrate the safety netting Levi had so carefully put into place around us.

  “What do you want?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice casual, detached, forcing my tone to be even while the rest of me trembled.

  He laughed. “I see right through you,” he told me, and I believed him. He knew me better than anyone, knew me in ways no one else ever would. He could see I was trying to be brave, and that false emotion made me look even more vulnerable.

  “Leave me alone,” I tried again, but it was an even feebler attempt.

  “No, this has been too long in coming,” Carl said, shaking his head. “I’ve waited too long, left you alone too long, gotten distracted, sidetracked for too long. But now we’re here, together, and we’re going to make up for some lost time.”

  I tried to still myself for what was coming, for the steps that Carl starting taking toward me, my heart hammering in my chest. I tried to take heart that Levi was only a room away, unconscious but still alive — for the time being. He said he would always be here for me, and he was, but it was different. I needed him. I really, really needed him, and he wasn’t there.

  “Touch yourself, Meagan,” Carl purred, that suggestion chilling me to the bone, making me shiver. I gagged at my own body’s helpless reaction to those words. It had been conditioned to react to that command, and I was ashamed to realize that I was wet between my legs, unable to resist to what had been ingrained in me even as it made me want to vomit.

  “Don’t disappoint me,” he said, making me jerk in sick reaction, stumbling backward, away from him. He’d gotten so close to me while I’d been stuck in place, paralyzed with self-loathing. “You do what I say. You know what happens when you don’t.”

  “You can’t take anything else from me,” I told him, unable to conceal my voice’s shaking. “I can’t be hurt anymore by you. I refuse to be.”

  He threw his head back and laughed mirthlessly. “You’re an idiot. Of course I can take things from you. Don’t you understand what you have? You’re in love.”

  My breath caught in my throat. Carl was right. I was in love. I loved Levi, the man in the other room, injured only because he loved me.

  “Don’t you see?” Carl prompted me. “Everything you get close to — everyone — turns to shit. You’re not allowed to be happy unless I say you are. You’ll never be normal again. You’re a broken-down girl, Meagan. You should be put out of your misery — but I love you too much for that. I love that misery. I crave it. You should watch some of the videos I took of you. Your eyes hate me the entire time you’re touching yourself. And then, right on the brink of your climax, they change. You don’t hate me anymore. You love me for letting you feel good. You love me, and you hate yourself. It’s the most exquisite thing I’ve ever witnessed.”

  My knees were in danger of giving out. If I fell, it would all be over. I wouldn’t be able to resist Carl. As repulsive as he was to me, as badly as I wanted to push him away, I couldn’t. He was inside of me already, inside of my head, and I couldn’t get him out. He had always been there, and would always be there. He was the hole I always struggled to fill. The one that always cried out for relief.

  But if I fell, everything would fall down around me. The progress I’d made, the steps forward I was continuing to take. Levi. Carl wouldn’t let him live, no matter what I did. He’d controlled me for so long with the threat of taking my mother from me, and I knew that even if I did what he asked of me to try and protect Levi, it would only be a matter of time before Carl ended him anyway.

  I knew it was more than a possibility. Carl was capable of it, and all too willing to do it. He’d killed my mother because I didn’t do what he said. He killed my brother just to flush me out into the open again. And he’d kill Levi if I didn’t obey him — whether I obeyed him or not. Just to make me come undone.

  Levi’s life hung in the balance, and I was the only person who could do anything about it.

  That much was clear to me, now. Yes, Carl was the person who was responsible for all of this pain and turmoil. I wasn’t the responsible party. My doctor had been working on that point with me — that I wasn’t responsible for what had happened. I hadn’t asked for bad things to happen to me. I’d coped with the situation as best I could for as long as I could until I tried to do something about it. Carl had been the one behind all of it.

  But I couldn’t turn away from the idea that I was the one who would determine what happened next. If I didn’t make my stand now, there wouldn’t be a way to come back from it — no Levi to help me pick up the pieces, no doctors to help sew the parts back together, no police to put the bad guy in jail. There would only be Carl. Carl and me.

  I was done backing away from him. I was done orbiting around his horror. If I was ever going to get as close to normal as was possible for me, I needed to dig my heels in and face this.

  I had weapons in my arsenal this time that I didn’t have before — a better understanding of what Carl was capable of, a burgeoning strength inside of me from the sessions with the doctor, a literal weapon, the gun I’d used to pepper a target with holes, and the love of the man in the next room, above all else. I loved Levi with everything I had, everything I could give him. I would do anything for him, and I knew what I had to do.

  “I’ll do what you want,” I said finally, forcing my eyes to meet his.

  “Of course you will. I’ll kill Levi Morgan if you don’t.”

  “But I want to do it in the other room. So I can see him. Make sure he’s all right.”

  Carl paused for a moment to consider this while I inwardly cringed. Was it too obvious that I wanted to be in the other room? That was where my purse was that I carried today — and, by extension, the gun within it.

  A laugh jolted me from my anxiety. “You sick little whore. You’re hoping he wakes up in the middle of it, don’t you? You want him to see you touching yourself for me.”

  “I just want to make sure he’s okay,” I said again, lowering my eyes. He had to let me into that room. I wouldn’t be able to do this otherwise.

  “Let’s go, then,” Carl said, making me stifle a sigh of relief. “I’ve waited long enough for this. I won’t wait any longer. Look. Look at what all this waiting has done.”

  He grabbed my hand a pressed it against his crotch, and I gagged again at the feel of his erection. God, I couldn’t do this. I wasn’t strong enough to do this, to face him. But I didn’t have any other choice, now. Levi needed me. Carl would kill him if I didn’t do this, just like he’d killed my mother.

  “Go on,” Carl egged me on. “Get up there on the bed next to your asshole rich boy. I hope he wakes up right as you’re coming.”

  My eyes darted around the room until they fell on my purse, resting on the bedside table on my side of th
e bed. It was too much of a stretch to get it without arousing suspicion, and I couldn’t risk Levi’s life. Not now. Not when I was so close. I got up on the bed, looking at Levi, who was still passed out. I hoped he was okay. I didn’t know how hard Carl had hit him. All I could do now was what I’d done for so long and hope for the best.

  “Touch yourself,” Carl said again, and Levi’s eyelids didn’t so much as flicker. I spread my legs, obedient, and moved my hand down between them, just as I’d done so many times before.

  But something was different this time. Something was crucially different, and even as I went through the motions, my hand twisting against my body, my lips parting automatically, Carl watching my every move, I knew that it wasn’t the same.

  I was doing this because I was choosing to do this. I was doing this as a means to an end, and the end would be final. I’d done it hopelessly and helplessly back at home, held hostage by Carl’s threat against my mother. But this time, he didn’t realize that he was the one in danger.

  I inhaled sharply, then let out a low moan, just as I’d done for him in the past, but it was all playacting. I didn’t feel the animal attraction. The maw didn’t yawn open, beckoning for me to use an orgasm to fall inside of it. I had a clear, singular purpose, and I manipulated Carl with my quickening breathing, my fluttering eyelids, and one long, loud cry …

  … there. Carl’s eyes fluttered closed in response to me, a stain spreading in his pants, I was sure, and I lunged across the bed for my purse, grabbing the gun and whirling around even before he could open his eyes, disengaging the safety, knowing, by the weight of it, that it was fully loaded, waiting, my hand not even shaking, for him to open his eyes, to know what was happening.

  To know why.

  His eyes finally did open, his mouth opening as well to tell me something disgusting, probably, but he stopped in shock, looking at the metal of the gun gleam in my hand, trying to puzzle over what was happening — perhaps, why I wasn’t collapsed on the bed, crying because of my betrayal of Levi, because I’d fallen back down into the hole I’d started climbing up out of.

  No, nothing was as Carl expected. Poor, poor Carl.

  “Meagan?” he managed to ask.

  “Fuck you.” I pulled the trigger, the shots deafening in the bedroom, echoing through the rest of the townhouse, probably audible throughout the entire block. I squeezed it until it was empty, the thump of Carl hitting the floor somehow louder than the shots that put them there. I squeezed until all my gun did was click and click, staring at the stain that spread around my tormenter.

  As the room filled with people, rushing around, rushing around me, I looked over at Levi, wide eyed and panting, panicking, wondering why he hadn’t woken up.

  Chapter 20

  “What did you want to have for dinner?” Levi asked me, making me look up from the book I was reading.

  “I thought you sent the chef home,” I remarked, smiling.

  “I did.”

  “And I thought we were going to have a meal in for once,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

  “We are.”

  “And so who is going to cook this meal in question?” He knew for a fact that I was worthless in the kitchen. I’d subsided almost entirely on gas station food for nearly an entire year, after all. He was the one with the good taste in food.

  “I’m going to cook.” He grinned at my expression of surprise. “You don’t believe me?”

  “I do not believe you,” I said. “I would have to see it.”

  “Have faith, Meagan,” he chided me, his blue eyes sparkling with mirth. “I’m a hell of a cook.”

  “I might believe that, but you do realize you’re paying a chef to be on call at all hours to prepare food for you, right?” I took the hand he offered me and rose from the couch. “Just seems like a waste for someone who already knows how to cook.”

  “Do you want me to tell her that — that you think she’s a waste.”

  “You better not!” I squawked, slapping him on his rump as I followed him into the kitchen. “I’d starve to death!”

  “I like cooking, but I never have time to,” Levi explained as I perched on the other side of the counter, watching him set out bowls and ingredients, prepping the stove and oven.

  “You have time to now? I thought there was that big design deadline that you had to push to meet.”

  “I’m making time to now because I want to,” he said, opening various packages and tossing the wrappings in the garbage. “The design will get met. This is more important to me, now.”

  “It looks like you were planning this,” I observed as he seasoned a pair of steaks, rubbing the herbs and spices into the red, raw meat. “What if I told you I’d become a vegetarian? Would that change the menu?”

  He halted his preparations for a second before scoffing. “You ate two hotdogs at the park yesterday — two. You’ll never be a vegetarian.”

  The weather had been so nice lately that everyone was convinced we had shrugged off winter for the year. New York City’s spring was magical — flowers and trees blooming, people emerging from their season-long hibernations to seek out the sun, spread out on colorful blankets over what free patches of grass they could find. It was so special to be here — even more special to be here with Levi.

  His support had remained unwavering even in my darkest moments. It had seen me through to the light on the other side.

  After Carl had fallen, the gun hot and heavy in my hand, and both police and security personnel swarmed the place from the outside to the inside, I’d thought that all would be lost. I was moved to recall the time when authorities had surrounded me in my mother’s room, me sobbing over her body and trying to convince them that the man who’d killed her was still out there. They hadn’t believed me then, thinking I was simply in shock, grieving over the inevitable death of my sick mother.

  What reason would they have to believe me now?

  Even as someone pried the gun from my fingers, I insisted over and over again that the man who’d fallen, the man whose blood marred the rug on the bedroom floor was Carl Prentice. I was so frightened no one would believe me, especially since he looked nothing like the description I’d given to the police sketcher. I was afraid that Carl would continue to ruin my life after he was dead and gone, sending me to jail for killing him.

  There were a tense couple of days of waiting for the investigation to find something, expedited, of course, through Levi’s influence, but fingerprints were the only thing Carl couldn’t disguise.

  Across the nation, police records and warrants lit up like the Fourth of July. Carl was a wanted man in more states than I’d ever been to, masterfully changing his appearance in each place to suit whatever situation he’d found to exploit for the time being. There were charges of rape, fraud, assault, and many more I couldn’t wrap my mind around. Somehow, seeing it all there, displayed on multiple computer screens at the police station, validated everything I’d been through.

  The things I hadn’t been able to tell my mother — and hadn’t had a chance to tell my brother — were supported by the other horrors Carl had committed, as documented by those screens.

  I didn’t need Levi to believe me, to believe what I’d been through. He’d supported me from the very beginning, even when he hadn’t fully understood what had happened. But as he studied those records alongside me, his hand squeezing mine, his mouth set in a tight line, I was validated all the same.

  “They should make a medal to give to you, Ms. Green,” a detective murmured at my shoulder, making me turn around.

  “A medal? Why?” I’d killed somebody. I still fully expected to be led to the cells past the door on the far side of the room in handcuffs.

  “Because you stood up to him,” the detective said. “Now, he can’t hurt anyone else.”

  It was a huge moment for me to realize that — “transformative,” my doctor called it. I’d been able to stand up to Carl — or whatever his real name was — and not only free myse
lf from him, but protect anyone else he might’ve preyed upon in the future.

  To call it empowering would be almost selling it short. I was newly self-confident, shrugging myself out of the chains that had surrounded me, the weight of my past slowly lessening.

  During one of our sessions, my doctor had warned me against expecting some miraculous, immediate “cure” for what ailed me. However, realizing that I’d protected people who might’ve experience what I went through was an immediate balm on much of my soul. There were still open wounds, sure, but they would fade, given time.

  And given love.

  I’d been so frightened when Levi hadn't so much as flinched at the gunfire after I pulled the trigger, or at least cracked an eye open at the thud when Carl collapsed to the floor. But he’d started stirring when his security team hefted him up, carrying him downstairs as the EMTs tried to bustle upstairs to help him.

  “I’m fine,” he’d said crossly as one of them tried to secure a cuff around his upper arm to take his blood pressure. “Where’s Meagan?”

  “Here,” I said weakly. I was still hearing the shots in my mind, over and over again, still seeing Carl drop to the floor, still so frightened at the fact that Levi hadn’t moved when it all happened that it was difficult to believe that he was sitting up, being angry at people fussing over him.

  He couldn’t have known what happened, but he held his arms out to me all the same, willing to comfort me even if he didn't understand what had almost happened to him, what had almost happened to me.

  “It’s over,” I said, trying to convince myself of the fact more than anything else. “It’s finally over.”

  Levi was horrified when he finally learned what had happened, angry with himself and everyone around us, threatening to jettison the entire security team because of Carl’s ability to ooze in and fool people, but I was able to convince him to relax. To let it go. To accept that it had happened and accept that it was over.

  Somehow, through the horror, we came out on the other side relatively unscathed and stronger than ever.