Marked (Branded Book 3)

by Scarlett Finn

  “No.” He let her sit up again, and crossing her legs, one of her knees came to rest against his lap that was tilted toward her. “I would never have run off without telling you.” Nya smiled. “This reaction is much better than the one I thought you might have. It’s good to file that away for future reference.”

  “What did you think I would do?” he asked and had to have accepted her denial because he lay down and tucked a hand behind his head.

  “I don’t know. But if I had been, and we weren’t together… I don’t know how I’d have dealt with that.”

  Archer didn’t offer any suggestions and Nya didn’t blame him for coming up short. She’d actually had time to think about it and hadn’t managed to reach any conclusions herself. “I was trying to work out what to do about the renovations,” she said, not wanting to dwell on a non-existent pregnancy. “I figured if I was selling, I might get more if the place was newly renovated. But whoever buys it might do it themselves, so would it be a waste of money?”

  “You’re not selling now though,” he said. “You’re sticking around.”

  Still with her legs crossed, she shuffled higher. “You dumped me, Archer.”

  He curved an arm around to her back. “I’m so fucking in love with you, and that never went away.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to cope if you do it again.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how much sense it makes to keep you out of my life. I would never have been able to let you walk away. I knew it before tonight; I was never gonna let you leave town.”

  “What was your plan?” she asked. “Chain me to your bathroom?”

  With complete conviction, his eyes locked to hers. “If it came to it, that’s exactly what I would’ve done, Ny. I can’t figure out the balance between needing to protect you and my craving to love you and keep you. Those first few days I think I managed to be so cold because I didn’t know if I was gonna forgive you or not. I hated myself because it was selfish to want you. I wanted to say ‘fuck it, it doesn’t matter’ but I knew you’d always be at risk as long as you were with me.”

  “And then you realized it didn’t matter if I was with you, I was still gonna love you and protect you.”

  “You’re tenacious, Squirm, I’ll give you that. I couldn’t get rid of you.”

  Pressing a palm to his heart, she lowered to kiss him. “When I watched Ester and Derren argue in Louie’s, I wondered if that would be you and me in twenty, twenty-five years.”

  “Fuck no,” he said. “I mean, yeah, they fight, and I know they fuck, but they live separate lives. If the last forty days showed you and me anything it’s that we can’t stay the fuck out of each other’s lives.”

  That was a truth she couldn’t deny. “I do need you, Arch. I know I’m a burden and a pain in the ass. But whenever anything goes wrong or I’m scared, you’re the first person I think of. If you’re around, all that goes away. Even when I was sure I’d lost you, when I thought we’d never be together again, everything in my mind…” she said. Pressing the heel of her hand into her forehead, her elbow landed on her bended knee to support her head. “I thought of everything in terms of you, in terms of us. It was before the break-up or after the break-up, or ‘how will Archer feel about this?’ ‘What would he tell me to do?’ I don’t know how to get you out of my head, it’s like you’re a part of my consciousness.”

  “And that’s why you thought you should run?” he asked. “Fuck, Nya, I was in Vegas, thousands of miles from here, surrounded by liquor and naked women, and all I could think about was if you’d taken your pill or if you were getting enough sleep.”

  So they were each engrained in the other. “How are we gonna work this out now? Do we go back to the way things were? What did Ester say?”

  “I shouldn’t be too rough with you because of the baby,” he said.

  She cringed. “I meant when you said the other thing. Did she ask if we were back together?”

  “No,” he said. “She’ll figure it out. I don’t give a fuck about anyone except us. We can go back to the way things were. You tell me what will make you happy. If you want to blow out of town, we’ll do that. Fuck this place, fuck them all. You just tell me—”

  Nya put her fingers to his lips and climbed over to straddle him. “I was happy with you. Always happy. We don’t have to make big changes, what we had worked for me. Although I don’t know how it’ll be now that we’re in the same building,” she said, because technically, they hadn’t been in a relationship while both living in this building. He’d broken up with her as soon as he got back from Columbia. “You always said you won’t live with me.”

  “I won’t. This is a safe place for you. It works to have you close.”

  “So we can hang out together and then if you have guests,” she said, meaning captives, “you can send me on my way.”

  “It means if the fucker is up there, I can come down here and screw you, and catch him before he ever makes a break for it.”

  Lying down, Nya put her hand to her temple, letting the underside of her arm rest against his chest. “Have you ever had a captive get free?” she asked. “You always talk about not having me around in case something goes wrong, but have you ever actually had one of your captives take advantage of you or manipulate you?”

  He ran his fingers through the ends of her hair that were tickling his chest and let his fingertips brush the top of her breasts. “Squirm, we’re naked in an apartment I rent for you and you take advantage of me all the time.”

  She laughed because technically he was lying with one of his captives now and he’d told her that she had the power to manipulate him. “I don’t count,” she said, and then drew a little higher. “Have you ever fucked any of your captives before?”

  “You’re asking a lot of questions tonight, Squirm. Don’t you wanna talk about something Tag fucked up that you need me to fix?”

  “No. I think you know more about what’s going on with Tag than I do. Although, I’ll have to tell him that I won’t be leaving town. I don’t know how nuts he was about the idea. But I guess that might change if Gio’s coming back into town. To be honest, I’m sort of disappointed. He’s always on something when I see him. I’m worried. I want to get him help, but I know he’ll never take it, and he pushes back so hard he becomes agitated and single-minded. I think he forgets how to treat people.”

  “He never knew how to treat them good,” he said.

  Archer wasn’t Mr. Congeniality himself, but getting into another debate about her friendship with Tag wouldn’t change anything, so she just enjoyed being in Archer’s arms. “I can’t believe how close we came to losing this,” she said.

  Because if she’d managed to get out of town, she’d never have been able to come back to see how Archer’s life had moved on without her.

  “I know I have a lot of apologizing to do,” he said, lifting her by her hips to put her on her back again. “I’m not gonna skip my Cheerios anymore.”

  Archer slipped down her body to kiss her mound, then her clit. Slipping his tongue into her, he hummed with pleasure as he tasted her.

  Someone started pounding on the front door.

  It was Nya’s turn to say, “Fuck!”

  “Expecting someone?” he asked, propping his chin on her.

  “No,” she said, happy to close her thighs around his ears for a second. But she sat up in a panic. “Oh, God. You don’t think it’s Levi, do you? His bedroom’s right under here.”

  A smug look spread on his face as he sat up. “Oh, baby, wouldn’t that be a gift?”

  He shifted to sit at the end of the bed, snatched up his jeans, and pulled them on. “Where are you going?” she asked, trying to catch his shoulders as he stood up, except he was too quick for her.

  “To tell our neighbor to watch a movie and stop listening to the show.”

  “Archer,” she said, as he went through the door.

  He stopped to twist, his hand on the handle as
he hung back into the room. “Stay fucking here, I’ll handle this.”

  He disappeared and Nya stayed on her knees in the middle of the bed wondering what the fuck she should do. If it was Levi, there could be a fight, but he had to know that Archer had got one up on him already. Not because of her, but twice now in the hallways he’d been pinned to the wall and threatened.

  If Levi was the spiteful sort, he might have called the cops, but they wouldn’t do much without witnesses to the assaults. Despite the noise she’d made while they were screwing, it wasn’t like she and Archer were having a party, so the cops wouldn’t care about that.

  Ester might have come to visit, but the apartment was in darkness and she wanted her son and maybe-one-day daughter-in-law to reconcile—and the woman appreciated the value of good sex. So Nya didn’t think that Ester would interrupt them.

  She continued to consider possibilities and went toward the door that hadn’t quite caught on its latch. Voices drifted to her ears from beyond the room.

  “Where the fuck is Nya?” Tag exclaimed. Oh no, Nya thought, and her head fell against the door frame. Archer might have told her to stay here, but she couldn’t, not now. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you, you fucking prick. Don’t you pick up your goddamn phone?”

  Nya had only managed to pull on Archer’s tee shirt, but it was enough, she had to get out there and between the men.

  ten

  Hurrying up the apartment hallway, she flipped on the lights, and went to the door to slide a hand onto Archer’s back as she ducked down beneath his arm to see Tag in the corridor.

  “Tag, what are you doing here?” she asked. “Come in.”

  Being in front of Archer now meant she could use her body to urge him back. He offered momentary resistance, silently telling her he’d be happy to slam the door in Tag’s face. But this was her best friend and he was worked up about something.

  Tag came storming in and she went after him as Archer closed the door. “I told you I had to talk to him and you said you didn’t know where he was,” Tag said, his words coming out at super-speed.

  “I didn’t,” she said.

  Tag yanked off his jacket and threw it across the room. “I fucking rely on you, Nya! I fucking need you! And what the fuck is this?” He pointed at her and Archer, who’d come up at her side to slide a hand onto the back of her neck.

  “What the fuck does it look like?” Archer asked.

  “It looks like you’re using my friend,” Tag said, puffing himself up. “It looks like you’re a fucking prick who’s come to take advantage of a woman who’s besotted with you, though fuck knows why.”

  “He’s not taking advantage,” Nya said, walking away from Archer’s hand to touch Tag’s chest. “We’re back together.”

  She wanted to tell Tag that her and Archer’s relationship didn’t matter so she could find out why her friend was so upset, but she figured it was best to get the news out since they had the opportunity. Technically, it was news that suited Tag if he was going to need Archer’s help, which he must if he was here and desperate to talk to him.

  Except her friend didn’t seem to see it that way. “Back together? I told you to stay the fuck away from him,” Tag barked.

  “I think Taggert has to go now,” Archer murmured in his ready-for-murder tone.

  “No,” she said. “And you two are not going to get in each other’s faces again. Tag, my relationship is my business. You know I’ll always listen to your opinion, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll do everything you tell me.”

  His anger seemed to be teetering on the precipice of mania. “You do everything he tells you,” Tag sneered, pointing past her to Archer.

  “I don’t,” she said. “He’d like me to. But I don’t.”

  Tag wasn’t going to back down. “Oh, yeah, name one thing he’s told you to do that you haven’t.”

  “I can name plenty,” Archer muttered from behind her. “I’d keep her locked up safe in this apartment for the rest of time if I got my way, ‘cept the woman insists on going out there and living her life, protecting fuckers like you and me. I told the woman to get you the fuck out of her life. I said you do nothing but cause shit for her. But she didn’t consider it for a second. So if you’ve got beef with me, that’s fucking fine. But don’t dare question Nya, ‘cause much as I fucking hate it, she loves you.”

  “Yeah?” Tag spat. “Well I hate that she loves you.”

  They despised each other and glared over the top of her head, but neither man was making a move to get physical with the other and this was when she’d expect that to happen. When the scowling continued for another few seconds, she wondered if they’d be here all night. Nya had other plans, and to get to them, she’d have to hurry this meeting along.

  “Tag what happened?” she asked. “Forget Archer and me, tell me what’s going on.”

  “Gio’s coming back,” Tag said. “And I plan to take the fucker down.”

  So he didn’t reserve all his hatred for Archer. “He’s one of your oldest friends,” Nya said.

  “I want to kill him,” Tag said, storming over to flop onto the couch. Sliding to the edge, he was rigid as he cracked his knuckles.

  Archer dragged Nya under his arm and with the heavy weight of it burdening her shoulders, he tugged her to an armchair and pulled her onto his lap.

  “And you brought that shit to my girl’s door? I think you and I need to have another little chat,” Archer drawled, sinking against the backrest.

  Nya wriggled her ass on his thigh. “Who knows what hobbies I’ve picked up since we split? I could be an assassin now.”

  Except her joke wasn’t so funny when she said it aloud. Not long ago, they’d believed she was a murderer and it was a title she’d always been uncomfortable with, even if the man they thought she’d killed deserved to die. Archer’s arm dropped from the back of his head to curve around her waist in unspoken comfort.

  “Three minutes ago, I thought you were split up,” Tag said, having missed the couple’s subtle exchange.

  “So it was fine to bring it here if I wasn’t around to kick your ass? News flash, I’d have done it anyway.” Archer squeezed her boob. “What else has he asked you to do while I haven’t been watching?”

  “He doesn’t make me do stuff,” Nya said.

  Archer pulled her back to show her his grimace. “You made that sound dirty.”

  That hadn’t been her intention at all. “Did I?” she asked.

  But he stroked the back of his finger over the swell of her breast. “Maybe that’s just where my head’s at.”

  Yeah, they had a lot of catching up to do and this was an interruption she could’ve done without. He wasn’t even close to satisfied yet and just that moment of shared eye contact was enough to reignite their arousal.

  “Uh,” Tag said, smacking his hands on the arms of the chair. “I have a serious problem. Don’t you give a fuck?”

  “Yes,” Nya said. Shaking her head to force her eyes away from Archer’s, she ran her hands into her hair and deliberately turned her back on her lover. “Gio stole your money, he’s coming into town, you want to kill him. I’m paying attention.”

  “I’m not,” Archer grumbled behind her. Slouching down in the chair, he squeezed her hips to rock her ass over his groin as he let his head fall against the low back of the chair. “I forgot how sweet that ass feels right there.”

  Nya tried to be as discreet as she could about grinding herself down, but Archer’s groan gave her away. She had to smile; she’d never let him forget again. It felt so damn good to be exploring her power over the man again.

  Tag wasn’t amused. “It’s his fucking attention I need,” he said, getting up just to sit down again. Tag straightened his jeans and curled his fingers around his knees, then around the arms of the chair.

  Observing her frantic friend made some of her joy dwindle. “If it’s Archer you need, what are you doing here?” she asked.

  It wasn’t difficul
t to be curt with her friend at this minute because all she felt when she looked at him was pissed off. He’d come here high and she hated drugs; he knew that. It just proved to her how far gone he was that he couldn’t go without the drugs for one simple visit to a friend’s house.

  “When was the last time you slept?” she snapped before he could answer her last question.

  “What the fuck does that matter?” he asked, curling and straightening his fingers on his thighs.

  Tag rubbed his palms on his lap and she noticed how much weight he’d lost as he worked his jaw. Driving his fingers into his hair, her friend shifted to the front of his seat and then slid back into it again.

  What an idiot; she’d probably never been so mad at him. “You can’t keep your ass still for two minutes, how are you gonna kill a guy?” she asked.

  “Killing a guy is easy,” Tag said. “You just have to know who to pay.”

  Outrage made Nya shoot to her feet. “That better not be why you’re here,” she exclaimed. “That’s not what Archer does. He wouldn’t kill for you! He wouldn’t—”

  “Hush,” Archer said, seizing her hips to yank her into his lap again. “He knows I’ll know a guy.”

  “Not just one,” Tag said, becoming alert. “I bet you know a bunch. Any who take requests?”

  “Why?” Archer asked. She twisted to see that the back of his head was on the top of the armchair, and he was staring at the ceiling completely unfazed by this intense conversation that was making her heart pound against the inside of her ribs. “You want to make it hurt? Or you wanna make it slow?”

  “I knew it!” Tag exclaimed.

  Archer’s voice drifted. “I know a guy who spends days taking a man apart, piece by piece. He won’t leave a drop of blood at the crime scene, but he’ll send an inch of flesh to every person who ever met your victim. I know another guy, who can slide a knife between the ribs, right into the aorta—lot of blood though. If you want a bloodless scene, you want to shatter the skull at the temple, rupture the meningeal artery… There’s a menu of ways; poisoning, dismemberment, piercing the brainstem, cracking the neck. You could shoot the guy, but no one should hire anyone else to do that for them. A gunshot’s easy,” Archer said. “It’s knowing when and where to do it that’s the problem.”