Beast rolls his eyes. "You're a fucking idiot, you know that? Do you know how hard I've worked to find a relationship even remotely like the one you had with Celeste? And you're going to throw it away because,” he points a wild finger at Mal, “he doesn't approve? When the actual fuck did you start caring about Malachi White's fucking approval?"
Beast is staring at me, and the question hangs heavy and full in the room, and I don't—
I don't have an answer.
Beast leans forward. "That girl needs you. She wants you. And she's yours. Quit being such a dick and go get her."
He doesn't wait for a response, just shoves out of the office, into the hallway, and away from us.
"I'm not letting any of you near the staff again," Mal says, his voice flat and unamused, and I'd laugh except I know he's telling the truth. I twist to glare at him. He doesn’t bat an eye. "Stop scowling and sit down, Charm."
I hesitate, and he arches an eyebrow.
I sit.
"Celeste quit. She's gone, man. Cora is collecting her severance pay, and I'm giving her a recommendation for a position outside the community, but she's not here anymore. She wants space, and you need to respect that."
My heart is beating too hard, because they're both gone, Cinderella and Celeste, and I can't find either of them.
"You need to let them go," he says, sighing. "Maybe—maybe it's not time to collar a submissive."
I laugh. "Because you've cared about that this whole time? Or is it that we played your game, Mal, and now our position in the Kingdom is secure again, so it doesn't matter if I'm single or not, because hey, everyone knows we rule the fucking roost around here, right? No Dom is gonna challenge you here."
He stiffens and stares at me.
"Safe, sane, and consensual," he says, finally, and I flinch before he even finishes with, "Leave them alone."
I can't argue, not with that. So I nod once, gritting my teeth, and I take a page from Beast's book.
I get the fuck outta there, and leave Wolf with the mess to clean up.
For the past decade, my cornerstone has been the three men who get me. We were brought together by circumstance and chance, all of us a little damaged and broken, and we made a family, weird and slightly incestuous though it was.
Mal put the first riding crop in my hand. Wolf showed me what this desire to control could be.
Beast...
Beast was the first person who let me break them. He took all of my frustration and my violence, all of my need, and wore it on his skin, met it with a grin, and came for me, wet white heat in the pink of my marks.
Mal was our leader, a position he filled as easy as breathing. Wolf was my best friend, my brother in every respect of the word.
But Beast was the glue that held us together, the laughter when we were all wound too tight, the easy smiles that kept reminding us that this was supposed to be fun.
And now we were fighting. It sat on me like a weight, as the days and week stretched out, this living thing that filled the space between us where friendship usually sat, and it made the Kingdom awful to bear.
Honestly, I wasn’t paying the Kingdom much attention.
I wasn’t there. It’s the longest I’ve avoided it since we opened the place two years ago, but I can’t deal with Mal’s quiet disapproval or the way Wolf looks so fucking lost.
And Beast—well, Beast just stayed away too.
I tried not to think about that.
“Son?”
I blinked at Dad as I tried to focus on the moment at hand, not the friendships that were falling apart.
“Sir?”
“Did you hear anything I said?” he grins.
I shrug a little.
“What’s going on, Sam?” he asks, and I watch him.
Dad never really understood my friendship with Mal, Wolf, and Beast. He liked them, tolerated them—even welcomed Wolf the way Mama did—, but he didn’t get it.
He never needed or wanted friends the way I needed Wolf and Beast and Mal. He had Mama and he had the Pharm, and later he had us.
“We’re having a business disagreement,” I say quietly.
“Wolf said it was a little more personal than that,” he objects, and my gaze flips up to him, startled. He flaps a hand. “I pay attention to my children, Sam. Even the ones who wish I wouldn’t.”
“Dad,” I say and he waves it off.
“Look, Sam, you have responsibilities. I expect you to live up to them. But you also have a life that’s full and good and you’re happy. I don’t want to take that from you. If there’s something going on with your brothers—fix it.”
“I don’t know if I can be what you want,” I confess, and he gives me a wry smile.
“You’ve been exactly what I want for the past twenty eight years, son. That’s not gonna change, no matter how you handle my company. And your sisters won’t let you fuck up. You’ll do just fine.” He claps me on the shoulder. “Now. Are you going to fix this shit?”
I nod, helpless to do anything else.
I have no idea how, but I will.
I don’t think Dad will tolerate anything else.
It's lonely.
Fighting with your best friends is fucking lonely. I wake up aching for something I can't have and every time, I want to turn to my best friends, want to talk to them about it. Once I actually dial Beast's number before I remember that we're not talking and I haven't seen him in a week.
I dream about her, which is fucking ridiculous. I had Celeste for such a brief time, barely had her at all, and it makes no sense that I miss her this much.
It's driving me crazy.
After two weeks, I feel like I’m going to shoot something if I have to stare at my own walls any longer, or listen to any more of the fucking self-recriminations rattling around in my head. I call Bek and she sounds a little startled, and then she just sounds scared when I tell her what I want, but she agrees and by the next morning, I'm striding up to Charming Pharmaceuticals, dressed in a three piece business suit.
She spends the morning showing me around the office, explaining everything she does, and showing me the office that would be mine.
"What are you doing?" she asks, finally, when I'm sitting behind my desk.
It's a good question.
I'm a kid, playing at being an adult.
I'm fucking drowning, and I don't have anything to hold on to, not anymore.
I'm running.
I don't say any of that. Of course I don't say any of that. I shrug and smile.
"Gotta grow up sometime, right, sis?"
She frowns, all worried concern, and shakes her head but leaves me there.
By close of business, the Board is in a fucking uproar.
“Sir? You have a call on line three.”
I blink and my secretary, a small girl with a quick smile and the ability to make it look like I’m actually doing something, shrugs once. She says again, “Line three.”
“Who is it?”
“Wolf.”
I wait until the door shuts behind her and stare at the phone.
He’d called twice last night, and I’d ignored it. I wasn’t sure what to say, what I even wanted right now.
If he was calling here, though—
I pick up the phone.
“You need to answer your fucking phone,” he snarls and I sigh, lean back in my chair, and close my eyes.
Headaches are apparently a thing you get when you take a corner office.
“What do you want, Wolf?”
“You to get your head out of your ass,” he says. “You need to come over. It’s important.”
“I’m not—“
“Beast is in trouble, Charm,” he says, and his voice is tired and scared and it stops me cold.
“Just—please.”
I don’t hesitate.
“I’m leaving now.”
Wolf's house feels, as it ever has, like coming home. Some of the tension eases in my shoulders as I step i
nside, and I take a breath.
Wolf is standing in the living room, and he looks like shit. His hair is spiked up like he can't keep his hands out of it, his clothes are wrinkled, and he looks like he hasn't slept in days.
Mal, sitting on the couch, doesn't look much better.
And Beast—
"Where is he?" I ask, my voice shaking.
Mal just shakes his head and hands me the tablet he's holding.
Don't come after me. It's on the up and up. I'll be back when the three months are over.
I stare at it and then up, at them, hoping like hell someone will explain.
Mal does. “Beast is gone.”
Chapter 15.
"Why?" Wolf demands, again. He's been raging for the better part of two hours, since I got to his house. "I don't get why he'd do something so fucking stupid."
"Well, I'm sure she'll let him off the leash eventually. We can ask him then," I say, trying to ignore the fact that my stomach is twisting and I feel, ridiculously, guilty about this.
I know Beast's pattern. This is what he does, when he thinks he's fucked up. He does something stupid and reckless and inevitably self-destructive.
"Fuck you, Charm," Wolf snaps.
Mal stands. "If y'all are just going to argue, I'm gonna go ahead and leave. We can't fix this for him. He doesn't want us to and I've seen the contract—he's not being hurt."
I snort, and Mal glares at me.
"I'm not leaving Beast out in the wind with no one looking out for him," he says, severely.
Of course he isn't. Mal's a lot better man than I am, even if he is a scary motherfucker.
"Charm, Hunter is looking for you. Do all of us a fucking favor and answer your goddamn phone," Mal says, then nods at his brother and leaves the house.
It shouldn't be tense, this silence between us, but fuck is it.
"You really screwed up," Wolf says, eventually.
I grunt, a quiet acknowledgement.
"Is she worth it?"
"What would you do, if you could have Scarlet?" I ask, staring at the twisting woodwork of the table in front of me. He made it, because Wolf is such a fucking mess of talent, damn it all. "How far would you go?"
"I wouldn't turn my back on you and my brothers," Wolf says, quietly. "Whatever Beast did, you know he had a reason for it."
"Then maybe he should share that reason with the class."
Wolf nods. "Maybe you should have given him the chance to."
Two days later, Hunter strolls into my office. Scarlet isn't with him, and I think about how strange that is, but don't comment on it.
I've never gotten to know Hunter, not the way Wolf has. I think I could like him, if he wasn't the biggest obstacle between Wolf and happiness, but that kinda left me predisposed to tolerate him with barely concealed hostility.
"Your girl doesn't want to be found," Hunter says. He tosses me a flashdrive and I catch it instinctively. "She's gone to ground pretty hardcore, man. I dug up what I could—and I'm good, so that's quite a bit. Kid's got a lot of baggage. You sure you wanna tangle with that?"
I stare at him, my eyes cold, and he shrugs. "Just saying. There are easier girls."
"Easy is overrated," I say.
He's quiet, and then, "You need to be good to her. When you find her, you need to be good, ok?"
I stare at him. He's frowning at the desk, this deep broody scowl that makes me want to read everything on that damn flashdrive right now.
"She's mine, Hunter. Of course I'll be careful with her."
He watches me for a minute before adding, "Read the file. All of it."
He stands and I wait for more, but nothing's forthcoming. He leaves me like that, with a file of information and a host of questions.
Celeste Queen was born the only daughter of John and Magdalene Queen. She came from old money, a deep rooted Savannah family that made their fortune in textiles in the early 1900s. They expanded, shifting into banking and investment trading in the early seventies, and what had been a small fortune grew.
She was, by every definition, a southern heiress.
And then Magdalene died. Celeste was there, walking with her mother in Central Park on a summer vacation when a mugger attacked them. Magdalene was stabbed twenty times, and Celeste didn't speak for a year. When she finally did, the sweet child she'd once was had been replaced with a cynical, sarcastic blonde hell bent on trouble.
A drug problem and two stints in rehab later, John remarried (to his therapist) and settled Celeste with her new stepsisters in Atlanta. For a while, things were good. She got into UGA, lived at home, and stayed clean. She even dated, briefly.
When John died, though—everything went ass up when John died.
I stare at it, the story of my girl's life spelled out on a screen, and I get it. I may not know everything, but I understand her fear.
Every good thing in her life was ripped away from her. She had absolutely no reason to think I wouldn't be too, and I had practically convinced her I would.
I told her I was looking for a submissive, showed her my world and said with every fucking thing I did that she wasn't good enough for it.
It was no wonder she ran.
I fucked up. I know and I can't blame her for running.
I wonder if Sophia knew it, when she came to me during the Audition. I wonder if Cora's control is more than jealousy, but also a strange way of caring.
Celeste is self-destructive in a way that makes Beast look well adjusted. That terrifies me, because where the fuck is she and how badly is she spiraling?
I go to the club.
I haven't been there in almost two weeks, staying away because of my own anger, my fight with Beast, my fury over losing not just Celeste but my Cinderella girl.
I've been hiding, at Charming Pharm and in my oversized, empty as fuck apartment.
I've never been that much of a wuss before, and it annoys me to realize how pathetically I’ve been behaving.
So I dress down, and I go to the club, slinking in while the place is still quiet and empty. It's Thursday—later tonight the Kingdom will fill up. Music will pulse like a heartbeat, and there will be sex and decadence and the sounds of pained pleasure.
God, I fucking missed this. I missed the way it made me feel, alive and right, the way I should always feel, the way I only feel when I'm with Wolf and Beast, or when I'm here.
I felt this way too, when I was with Celeste, when she smiled at the Board from under my arm and fell apart under my touch, beneath the twisting light of an aquarium.
I shove that thought away and slip into the Quiet Room, absorbing the atmosphere of the club that is so much a part of who I am.
I can feel people watching me—staff and members—but I sit on one of the low, plush couches, close my eyes, and let them and their whispered rumors drift around me.
Chapter 16.
I sit at the head of the conference table and listen as my sister talks about quarterly profits.
She's been talking about it for the past thirty minutes, and it's the first thing on an agenda of twelve items to go over. I have come, faster than I anticipated, to the conclusion that I fucking hate being the president of Charming Pharmaceuticals.
The thing is, they don't need me. I'm just fucking window dressing. Bek and Rachel will make a decision and I'll sign my name to it, and hopefully it lines up with what the Board wants, because if not, there'll be a long drawn out bid for power on that front, but my opinion doesn't mean shit.
I don't know this company, I don't want to know it, and what I've always known to be true is that my sisters don't need me here.
My computer pings a message at me and I bring it up, hiding behind the screen as Bek drones on.
Wolf: we need you at the club this weekend. Mal is going to see B.
I stare at it for a moment.
I still haven't told Wolf and Mal that I'm leaving the Kingdom, that I have a different set of responsibilities.
Wolf: Beast will be th
ere too. You need to fix that shit, man. It's been over a month.
I type before I can stop myself.
Me: I have a dinner for the company on Saturday. I can be there late.
Wolf: since when do you do company shit that Mama doesn't demand? And when do you do it without me?
Me: Things change, brother. People grow up.
He doesn't respond and I blink at the silence of the room. Bek is staring at me, and I can see how angry she is.
"I'm sorry," I say, a little blank. "Can you please repeat that?"
Bek and Rachel commandeer me before the Board can—before Mr. Grigson even finishes talking, Rachel has me by the arm and is dragging me away. Bek makes a few apologetic noises and then she's following, both of them flanking me.
It is, I know, a little bit intimidating, the Charming siblings marching through the halls of headquarters.
Or, it would be, if I weren't being almost dragged.
"I was impressive, once," I murmur wistfully and Rachel snorts. She opens the door to my too spacious office, shoves me inside, and Bek steps in after her. She sticks her head out and snaps, "We're not to be disturbed," to the rest of the floor and then snaps the door shut.
Here's the thing: my sisters are brilliant and gorgeous and scary as fuck, and right now, they're glaring at me like I'm the biggest disappointment they've ever seen.
It sounds about right.
"What the fuck, Sam?" Bek snaps. "You can't text your damn frat buddies while you're in a goddamn Board meeting."
I straighten and answer in a sharper tone than I intend, "I was answering a question from my business partner.”
She snorts and crosses her arms.
"Why are you here, Sam?" Rachel asks, dropping onto the couch and crossing her legs. "You don't want to be. You aren't interested in the company. So why the fuck are you here?"
"Did you miss the part where I don't have a choice?" I demand, and she shrugs.
"You do though. You could cede control to me and Bek, attend Board meetings and be a figurehead president, but leave us the company. You could actually get involved and give a damn. What you can't do, brother mine, is this in-and-out bullshit."
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