Black Sheep

by Zara Cox

  I’m not aware that my curiosity filters through until she looks down at herself with a grimace.

  “Senator Otis is downstairs. Tonight it’s English-boarding-school-and-his-dinner-lady-serving-him-gruel night. I left him eating the slop and crying.”

  I nod, neither amused nor amazed. Her gaze slides over me before returning to mine. She knows better than to probe, but she’s not afraid to stare.

  Others might be foolish enough to believe it’s softness they see in her eyes, but like me, nothing about her is soft.

  We stare at each other in silence before I calmly lay my hands palm up on the armrests. Still in silence, she drops her gaze to the cuffs then back to me.

  I nod.

  With a graceful sway that hints at a deep sensuality I have no interest in exploring, she closes the distance to the chair and sinks down to pick up the first cuff. The click is loud, specifically designed that way to add severity to the moment. My soul barely twitches. The second cuffs secure me to the chair. I don’t test their resilience. I already know they won’t free me until I desire it.

  She stands back and stares down at me.

  “How long? The usual two hours?”

  “No. Longer.”

  “Four.”

  I shake my head, the sight of that Please on my phone screen flashing across my mind. Taunting me.

  “Five?” Her voice doesn’t change, but there’s something in there. The tiniest hint of concern.

  I stare at her. “Six.”

  “No—”

  “Do as I say. Or I’ll get someone else to do it.”

  I trust no one. But like I do with Quinn Blackwood, the Black Widow and I share a special bond. Not one I would swear life or death on by a long shot. But there’s an…understanding. She’s the only one who’s been allowed into my special room, the only one who knows the ingredients of my sweet poison. The only one who’s seen what this room does to me. The longest I’ve been able to withstand is five hours.

  Her concern is warranted.

  I see her swallow before she reaches into her pocket. The small remote is directly linked to the chains. She sets the time but hesitates before pressing the requisite button.

  Boldly she steps up to me, and she slides her hands through the hair at my nape. I jerk away but cannot escape her touch because of the cuffs. She stops, staring down at me with narrowed eyes.

  I’m on the edge. Hell, who the fuck am I kidding? I was born on the edge. But tonight I’m a whisper away from annihilation and we both know it.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Fuck no. Hell yes.”

  She opens her mouth.

  “No,” I preempt her.

  “I don’t have to stay here with you, but I can be outside.”

  “No. Press the button. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

  “Axel…”

  I close my eyes and shudder as my fists ball. I want to hear my name, but I don’t want the voice to be The Black Widow’s. There’s only one voice I want to hear right now. One face I want to see. Cleo’s.

  “Do it and leave. Now.”

  “I will, but at least let me come back and check on you—”

  “Say another word and I’ll fire you.”

  Her eyes harden to ice chips. “Fuck you. Have your six hours if you want. But I’m coming back in three hours to check on you. Fire me then if you want.”

  With a defiant flick of her wrist, she sets the timer down between my feet, within touching distance.

  The moment her back is turned, I kick the remote. It bounces against the last step and skids sideways halfway across the room. She hesitates, her back stiff, but she doesn’t turn back around. In silence, she leaves.

  The moment the door shuts, twenty projectors on the dark gray walls flicker to life. Large, small, and in-between, they take up every inch of the circular wall. If space allowed I would have had more screens put in, but I work with what I have.

  Each one is set on a half-hour loop at full volume with a different video. With barely an inch between them, they could be one jumbled-up picture but I know each screen like I know the length of my cock.

  I take a deep breath as the first reel plays on the middle screen. The chair moves, the wheels beneath the floor spinning it slowly around.

  Fading sunlight dapples over a lake before the camera swings to the figure in the tiny white bikini fleeing a large wave.

  The wave catches her, splashes up to mid-thigh. She shrieks. “Omigod, you’re such a liar. The water is colllllld—What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?”

  She approaches. Her hands come up to block the lens. “Stop filming me. I look fat.”

  A different set of hands reaches out to grasp hers, gently nudging hers aside. “You don’t look fat, Cleo. You’re perfect.”

  Feminine hands curl around a masculine one. Together they slowly lower until long-lashed, deep blue knowing eyes stare into the camera. “You’re only saying that because you’re in love with me.” Sultry words whispered from between kiss-swollen lips.

  “Yes, I’m saying that because I’m in love with you.” Gruff, hopelessly young, newly broken voice, thick with seething emotion. “I’m also saying it because I have fucking eyes in my fucking head.”

  A naughty, goes-straight-to-an-eager-cock giggle. “You’re so bad swearing all the time. Daddy says he’ll paddle my behind if he catches me swearing.”

  A wobble of the camera before it steadies. “If he lays a fucking hand on you, I’ll tear his fucking head off.” A voice no longer gruff, hard with rigid purpose. Harsh breathing. “I mean it, Cleo. I see so much as a scratch on you, someone will fucking die.”

  A gasp. “You can’t say things like that!”

  “I can. I fucking am. Because you belong to me. I don’t care who created you. You are mine. No one else is fucking allowed to touch you. No one is allowed to take you away from me, do you hear me?”

  A bite of her lip as her nostrils flutter in a shaky inhale. “You’re scaring me.”

  Deep, harsh breath. “Am I? Really? Tell the truth. Are you scared, Cleo?” Camera poised with intent, recording every flutter of her lashes.

  A pause. A firming of plump lips. Then a shake of the head. Thick, vibrant locks frame her stunning face.

  “Say it. I want to hear you say how it makes you feel when I say this to you.”

  “It…it excites me.”

  “That I claim you as mine?”

  A shy nod.

  “What else excites you?”

  A flick of her gaze between the lens and the face behind it. “Come on. I can’t say it on camera.” She reaches out.

  The camera angles away from her but remains on her. Focused. Rabid. “Tell me.” The voice that will one day command hell itself.

  “It excites me when you say that you’ll do…all of that for me.”

  “All of what?”

  “That you’ll…tear his head off.”

  “I fucking will.” A solemn promise. A brief pause. “You think I’m a sick psycho?”

  “I think you’re…you’re…”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re effing amazing.”

  “Effing?”

  Pink color stains her cheeks. “Don’t tease me.”

  “I won’t if you say the word. The actual word, Cleo.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Right. Then I’m not as amazing as you want me to think, am I?”

  Blue eyes, opened wide. “You are.”

  “Then say it. You’re not going to burn for it. It’s just a word.”

  “I hate you when you’re like this.”

  “You don’t hate me, but fine. Don’t say it.”

  The camera swings out to the lake, to the setting sun that’s almost swallowed up by the orange water.

  “You’re f-fucking amazing. There. Are you happy?”

  “Nope.”

  A crunch of footsteps in the sand before she steps boldl
y in front of the camera. “You’re fu-fucking incredible and f-fucking amazing, Axel Rutherford.”

  “Am I?”

  “Fuck, yes! Now will you stop being fucking mad at me?”

  “I will if you stop saying fuck!”

  An outraged yell before she lunges. The camera drops to the ground a second before grappling bodies swing into frame.

  It shows a bear of a teenage boy in swimming trunks, his heart in his eyes, his arms slowly drawing her to him.

  A voluptuous teenage girl who holds his world in her soft, deceptive hands.

  She makes space for him between her young thighs and pushes his overgrown hair behind his ears.

  “I can never be mad at you, Cleo. I fucking love you,” he whispers.

  She frames his face in her hands. “I love you, too. My Axel. My Romeo.”

  A long, endless kiss sealing his doom.

  Another screen. Another camera, this one manned by Troy, his middle brother. Ronan stands next to their father, who’s seated behind his massive cherrywood desk, elbows on armrests, fingers in a steeple. Despite being in his mid-fifties, Finnan Rutherford has little to no gray hair. He liked to brag that it was because he was planning to live forever and his body knew it.

  Axel knew it was because his barber didn’t just give him a trim once a month.

  “You getting all this, boy?” Finnan barks.

  “Yes, Pa,” Troy responds. He pans around, stops at a chair occupied by none other than yours truly. The blood running down my nose is nothing compared to the pain shooting from my ribs.

  One of the many brainless minders trained to follow Finnan’s bidding looms above me, eyeing me with snakelike beady eyes.

  “Good. Now, tell me again what has you in a snit, son?”

  Bolton Rutherford, the comedian of the family, snorts from wherever he’s watching this spectacle unfold. I don’t know when Finnan decided it would be a fantastic idea to start documenting every event of his life. Considering he’s eyeball deep in organized crime, it was one of his spectacularly stupid ideas. But here we are.

  “I don’t want to go to West Point,” I gurgle, blood sliding from the corner of my mouth. The pain in my chest and throat is relentless, the hour-long beating having ruptured something I’m one hundred percent sure I don’t want to know about.

  “Why not?”

  The camera is trained on me, ready to record my every word. I grit my teeth and remain silent.

  “Because he’s in love,” Bolton jeers, then pisses himself laughing. My other brothers join in with various degrees of mirth. Troy religiously captures it all.

  Including Finnan’s nod to the minder.

  The beating starts again.

  At some point, I pass out, and I’m left slumped over on the floor, my blood pooling on the expensive Aubusson rug. The camera is set down but left running, whether by design or neglect, I’ll never know. I suspect it’s the former. Finnan Rutherford believes himself too clever to admit neglect. It records him eating lunch, making a few non-incriminating calls, even arranging to have flowers placed on Ma’s grave.

  But it’s the next frame that makes me jerk in my seat, high in my present hell above Hell’s Kitchen.

  She walks in, dressed in white. An angel with tumbling hair. She barely spares me a glance as she heads straight to Finnan. They embrace.

  “Did he agree?” she asks.

  My father sneers in my direction. “Of course not. Heaven knows how an ass like that sprung from my loins.”

  Blue eyes I’ve looked into more times than I’ve drawn breath flick my way. Completely devoid of expression she regards me dispassionately before she dismisses me like the sack of shit I am. She sighs. “Leave it with me. I’ll work on him.”

  He touches her…caresses her cheek. “You’re a godsend, Cleo, my angel. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Her hands slide around his neck, and she presses the body I believed was mine against his. Even though their voices are muffled, I hear her clearly. “You will never have to find out. I promise.”

  The clanging sounds jerk my focus downward. The tendons on my arms stand out in my blind battle with the cuffs. The skin on either side of the tight metal braces is oozing blood, and my lungs burn with the need to break free and howl.

  The words that will activate the fail-safe and summon the Black Widow claw the back of my throat. I swallow them down. I’m nowhere near done reliving every one of Cleo’s transgressions.

  All the screens are lit up, each one playing a different recording of my spiral to sub-humanity.

  But one screen remains dark. I’m not ready for that one last video. The faceless one that haunts me alongside hers and projects my suffering to another level. The one that makes me wish I were dead in one moment. Then glad I’m not in the next.

  Dead means forgotten.

  And I don’t plan on forgetting anytime soon.

  Chapter Three

  GUNPOWDER AND LEAD

  Cleo

  For far longer than I care to remember, I’ve held the power of life and death in my hands. Between one breath and the next, the responsibility was thrust on me. A permanent state I have no hope of escaping. Not if I wish to keep the one remaining parent I have, my mother, on life-supporting machines rather than six feet under with my dead father. Machines that stay on or could be turned off in an instant, depending on which move I make in this deadly game of chess that is my life.

  At twenty-six, I should be putting my actively pursued, proudly earned interior design degree to good use. Instead it’s a front for my real vocation as Finnan Rutherford’s companion. A career I didn’t choose but find I’m now irreversibly immersed in.

  I had to learn the game fast or risk losing my life through apathy. It’s a good thing I’m a fast learner. I discovered that I’m an even better student with a loaded gun against my temple.

  I’ve stood over too many graves and seen too many of the risks Finnan takes with others’ lives not to have learned my lesson. So now I comply. I obey. I smile through the ravaging pain and the blood-red rage in my heart.

  And I plot.

  Revenge is the only thing that sustains me. It keeps me breathing, helps me place one foot in front of the other, and steers my compass true.

  On the worst days, I wonder if everything I’m fighting for is even worth it. Those dark days I yearn to give in. But I can’t. Not yet. Not if I don’t want my mother’s death and countless others’ on my hands. Having finally accepted the responsibility of my birthright, I’ve also accepted responsibility for those in my care. I do this for the dozens who don’t know that me staying on my knees is the only way they get to breathe.

  Checking out would be the cowardly. Although I haven’t ruled it out completely as a last resort. For now, like the six prom dresses I tormented myself over choosing from what feels like a million years ago, I’m keeping my options open. The grim, otherworldly humor behind the sentiment almost makes me smile.

  The oil-smooth door swings open behind me, wiping away every last trace of phantom humor. In the den where countless lives have hung in the balance, I fight the shiver that trembles up from my ankles.

  In the half hour since my return from New York, he’s kept me waiting in this room that reeks of violence and corruption. A deliberate act meant to establish my weakness and his power.

  “You failed me again, my angel.” The accusation is softly voiced in a deadly rasp.

  I force my spine not to stiffen and take a breath. My gaze rests on the view of the immaculately kept Connecticut mansion grounds and encroaching dawn for an extra moment before I turn around.

  Finnan Rutherford, the man everyone thinks is my adopted father but is as far from a father figure as the moon is from the stars, regards me from his impressive six-foot-plus height. Despite the early hour, he’s fully dressed in a tailored white shirt and navy three-piece suit, his Oxford pinstriped tie neatly knotted. Not a hair out of place. Like his four sons, he’s built of strong Iri
sh stock with a square jaw, thick shoulders and smoky gray eyes always set with narrow-eyed focus. For the longest time, I was terrified of that stare, couldn’t imagine that he didn’t see into my soul and read the intentions in my heart. But I’ve learned to contain that emotion when in his presence, much like I contain all of my emotions these days.

  I stride forward, slowly, and pause against his desk, my own gaze direct. “I warned you this plan would fail. You didn’t listen. Don’t blame me now that my predictions are coming true.”

  One dark eyebrow lifts. “Are you saying you weren’t the right person to handle this? That I was I wrong to think I could trust you to get it done?”

  I swallow the kernel of terror that threatens to break free. I know better than to answer in the affirmative. “I’m saying I would’ve done things differently. Sending me to him almost every night for two weeks reeks of desperation,” I say with a shrug, even though my heart is hammering. Finnan doesn’t like his faults pointed out. But I’m done dancing around the issue. Or subjecting myself to another long night involved in a staring contest with Axel Rutherford.

  Being forced to face Axel again after years of meticulous avoidance has been ten different kinds of hell. Doing it night after night from behind the mask of my rage has been crucifying. But the state of being that sustained me all these years did nothing to protect me from what seeing him again did to me.

  What it continues to do to me. Even now, I can barely contain the trembling inside, the volatile electricity pulsing through me.

  I wrestle down my emotions and watch Finnan cross the room to the drinks bar he had custom built two years ago. Like most of the prominent furnishings in the house, the initials FR are etched into the polished teak surface.

  Finnan Rutherford is very much into branding. He placed his most intimate brand on me on my nineteenth birthday.