Lysander changes tactics again. “I can deal with it,” he says humbly. “You were on your way to your room. I’m more than capable of setting things up so that—”
“That’s not how we do things.” I stare into his eyes, daring him to argue with me.
For a long moment, he holds my gaze, his matching dark eyes hard on mine.
But it doesn’t last.
It never does.
His eyes slide to the floor, and then to his watch. “She’ll be here any second. Justice Danes.”
“Then I have work to do.” I turn on my heel, the sound of the name ringing like a bell in my mind. The moment my reckless, irresponsible brother’s face is out of my sight a weight lifts, like it was a yoke around my neck. “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”
“It’s a done deal,” he says to my back. “You know that.”
I fucking do know that, but I’m not going to give him the satisfaction.
Back through the living room I go. Lysander doesn’t follow me.
The door into the contract wing is coded from both sides, and I punch the numbers in while I swallow the bitter dregs of my own frustration. I hate that sensation—that loss of control. But I’ve practiced long enough that I can paint it over in my mind in a matter of seconds.
Through the door and into the hallway. I can feel the difference here through the soles of my shoes. The carpet here was both expensive and sound-dampening. Extra security.
At the other end of the hall, three figures are silhouetted in the light from the stairwell. They’re not actually in the hallway—still on the landing—but I can still hear everything.
My heart goes from zero to fifty—a reaction I couldn’t control if I tried.
I’ve had contracts cry upon delivery. I’ve had them tremble and shake and beg.
I’ve never had one fight back.
3
Justice
It takes three of them to drag me up the stairs, and then the third one has to go ahead and push open the door.
Somewhere, deep beneath the fear that I’m going to fucking die right now, I feel a flicker of pride. At least I haven’t made it easy. I kick out at goon number one again, but my arms are starting to burn—the tension between their grip and my fight is like holding my hands in a fire. But what’s my alternative?
“You can’t fucking do this.” My shout sinks into what looks like plush carpet as they wrestle me through the door. Clearly, I’m wrong about this. Clearly, they can.
A dark voice whispers that this was bound to happen. That I deserve this.
“Feet,” the second one says, as if I haven’t said anything at all.
“I can’t get ‘em, are you blind?”
I’m trying to hook my feet around the doorframe to stop them from taking me into this hallway. The second one reaches for my ankles and I push back against the one with his arm locked around my collarbone. I try to dig my heels into the carpet. I make myself heavy.
It doesn’t matter.
I lost my shoes a long time ago, though I can’t remember when or where. They could be out on that sidewalk corner—I don’t know. What I do know is that they’ve got my hands cuffed in front of me, but not with metal handcuffs. Nothing so fucking pedestrian as that. Padded on the inside, worked leather on the outside, and it doesn’t matter how much I try to yank my hands apart. I’ll rip my arms apart before the handcuffs break.
With my heels dug into the carpet like this, there is one thing that I can confirm: it’s expensive, the pile high enough that whoever owns this place hires someone else to clean it. The walls of the hallway are painted a dusky blue. I twist my body again, pain arcing in my lower back, and catch a glimpse of artwork encased in expensive frames on the walls—flowers in a vase.
All of it is understated in a way that I recognize.
All of it is understated in a way that screams money.
One of the goons finally gets hold of my ankle and I pull it back so hard that sharp pain sears up my leg—it’s the one I twisted out on the sidewalk.
“Give it up.” He doesn’t have to say you little bitch. It’s right there in his tone.
“No.”
“Your funeral.”
Despite everything—despite the way I throw my weight from side to side, despite the way I slip my ankle out of his hand and aim a kick at his face, the way I shout and scream and thrash—they drag me into a room.
The walls of this room are a flatter, darker blue, so the bench at the center of the wall seems like an optical illusion, the black leather covering flickering in and out of view against the navy.
The sight of it is a truth slamming down like a gate. I’ve seen benches like that before. In videos. In other people’s houses. The kind of thing I’d giggle at behind my hand, heat creeping into my cheeks.
My own mind shoves it away. No. No…
My blood is hot with the missed opportunity. I was supposed to be somewhere else by now. I was supposed to be safe, with Tripp’s hand in mine. Anyone’s hand in mine, I’m willing to admit, honestly, anyone. We were supposed to be crossing a bridge out of the city, the entire country spread out before us under cover.
Instead I’ve been kidnapped.
No—not kidnapped. This isn’t a kidnapping.
This is a reckoning.
What have I done? What have I done?
I’m wearing him out, at least a little—the man with his arms wrapped around me like the worst hug of a lifetime. The other one’s guarding the door while I wrestle with the first in a furious, futile battle. He has to be three times my size but I won’t quit, won’t stop, can’t. I kick my heels into the front of his shins and he doesn’t flinch. Without high heels, I’m all soft pink flesh, and no matter how much I picture him as a bug to be crushed beneath my heel, I might as well be banging my fists against exposed rock. He’s breathing a little faster, though, and my adrenaline-soaked brain seizes on this. The odds are terrible. The odds are insurmountable. But if I can just…keep…fighting…
The man at the door steps aside. I am struggling futilely against my own wrists, against the cuffs.
And then another man steps into the room.
I taste his power the moment he enters—a metallic crackle across the air—and my mind splits neatly in half.
Part of me is still struggling, flailing, anything to get leverage, anything to get away.
And part of me sees nothing but him. Feels nothing but him.
His eyes meet mine, but in a breathless rush I realize he’s not looking at me, Justice Danes, a woman with choices and an identity and plans other than this. He’s assessing. Measuring me up. And there is nothing, nothing, in those dark eyes that gives me even a candle’s wick of hope.
He lifts one wrist and adjusts a cufflink. The lines of his face are so sharp, so regal. The lines of his suit, the same. And the body underneath that suit is a monument to the kind of manliness that Tripp could never hope to achieve. I can see from here that there’s not an inch of softness beneath that suit. Some sick, dark part of me wants to run my fingernails over the hard planes of his muscles, but I know it as clearly as I know the sun will rise—this is the man responsible for my capture.
My capture. They stole me off the streets, they threw me in a car, they held me down. It did not matter how much I screamed or protested or threw myself against the locked door. The horror of it sweeps over me in a sweaty cold rush. Monsters. I am in a room full of monsters, and for what? For what?
“They’ll pay your ransom.” I stare into his eyes, I force myself not to look down and away. My mouth is working separately from my body. I am still thrashing. I will never stop thrashing. “They’ll pay your fucking ransom, whatever you want.”
He looks at me coolly, the hint of something playing at the corner of his mouth, and my stomach sinks like a stone into the ocean. This man, after only seeing this room and the hallway, doesn’t need money. He doesn’t care about money. I don’t think he cares about anything.
&nb
sp; The man holding me tightens his grip, compressing his lungs. I’m writhing in his grasp, trying to find any purchase, anywhere.
“You must know by now that this is pointless.”
Those are the first words he says to me, the lines of them cutting into my skin even though his tone is absolutely indifferent. He says this in the way that one would say to grab an umbrella, it’s raining out.
I have to work for the next breath. It comes when I get my feet to make contact with the tops of the man’s shoes, and I shove upward. I almost get enough momentum to hit the bottom of his chin with the top of my head, but not quite. Fuck. “What’s. Pointless.”
He cocks his head to the side and I swear the temperature in the room rises by several degrees. The way his eyes hold me sets me on fire.
“This little display.”
I can smell him.
I’ve been in rooms with a lot of rich men in my life, and not a single one has had power rolling off his skin in waves. Not like this. Not like leather and woodsmoke and a pure metal that has to be dug out of the ground by hand. The scent whips through me like a storm, a cry on the wind—run, run, run.
He comes another step into the room and the nearness of him is a lightning strike. I twist and heave against my captor, anything to get away from such raw dominance. The man holding me must feel it, too, because he takes a tiny step backward, squeezing tighter. It squeezes the breath out of me, the last of that pure, sweet oxygen.
Christ. Who is he? What is he? And what is he doing here? Dread seeps into every available crevice of my mind. I’ve heard rumors of a person like him. Hushed ones. The word arbitration whispered behind hands, but I never knew why. I thought they were talking about a legal process I’d learned about in one of the prelaw classes I half paid attention to.
Not a person.
Not this man, who is pulling all the air in the room toward himself as if we’re past the event horizon of a black hole. No light can escape from its center. No light. Nothing.
My vision is going dark at the edges when he gestures to the man pressing the life out of me.
He lets go.
My knees hit the floor with a crack—here it’s thin carpet laid over a hard surface—and I gasp in air that tastes cleaner and fresher than any breath I’ve ever taken before. Only its tinged with him. It’s full of him. Too full for my lungs.
A shadow moves past and disappears out the door, leaving me alone with him. Terror buzzes its way from my fingertips up to the back of my neck.
He removes his jacket, hanging it somewhere out of sight on my next blink. And then he’s adjusting his other cufflink.
Not adjusting.
He’s rolling up his sleeves.
“Stay on your knees.”
The command is so smooth, so easy, that my body begs to obey it. But my mind crumbles under a fresh wave of adrenaline and fear.
I fold up one of my bare feet underneath me, then the other, and push myself to my feet.
And then I spit at his shoes.
4
Cassian
My blood roars to life in my veins, a tidal rush that threatens to sweep me under and drag me across a rocky ocean floor. The next breath I can force into my lungs feels like the one I’d take if I were crawling up out of the surf, clothes soaked and heavy, making my limbs drag against the sand.
What.
Fucking.
Nerve.
I can feel my entire mind, my entire soul, bending towards her.
In this moment she is the only light left in the universe, and she is a blaze of fire.
Only that flame has been molded into a furious blonde woman with huge blue eyes and hair that’s come partway loose from a neat little clip, making her look feral and post-apocalyptic in the black dress she wears. It glitters in the dim light of the room like it’s made of sequins…or diamonds. Something forged through intense pressure and heat.
I know it will burn me to touch her.
I do it anyway.
There is only one answer to the defiance she’s thrown at my feet.
I take one step forward as if it isn’t there at all and hook my hand through her elbow. She turns instinctively, forgetting for once to fight until I’ve already taken three more steps, hauling her along with me.
Then she digs in her heels.
I round on her, pulling her as close as I can bear. “You have already made things worse for yourself. You’re dangerously close to my limit.”
Those blue eyes go even wider and she sets her jaw, but when I tug her forward again she allows it—with minimal resistance. It’s token resistance, a token pull of her bound wrists, but I feel it like a burst of electricity through connected wires.
I haul my head above the surface of my shock, of my anger, and my lungs fill with clarity.
I cannot let her do this.
I will not let her do this.
She can scream, she can kick, she can fight—but a contract has been signed. I’d wait until morning in any other case. I’d let her wear herself out in the holding cell. But this defiance must be met with an answer.
Now.
The chair in the corner of the room is straight-backed and armless, and the moment I turn toward her, it becomes clear that Justice Danes has no idea what’s coming.
Good.
Knowing that—that she’s in a moment of hesitation, and fear, if she’s smart—sends an icy determination through every one of my veins. It quiets the rush of blood in my ears, slows my heart, sets my jaw.
I sit on the chair and pull her over my lap, her weight clumsily heavy across my legs, bound wrists dangling toward the floor. She rears back, startled, shouting. It likely seems to her that I have snapped, that I have gone beyond all reason, but I am coldly focused as I flip up the back of her dress, exposing a scrap of lace that could charitably be called a thong.
It’s not the first curve of flesh I’ve seen in my life. It’s not the first rounded, upturned ass I’ve seen today. But the sight of it, dancing side to side as she shoves herself back and forth, her hip grazing my kneecap…
…the sight of it does things to me.
Unforgivable things.
But no less unforgivable than what she’s already done, and she’s not the one who’s going to run this fucking show.
I tell myself that I’m only looking because it’s my responsibility to fulfill this contract, and then I bring my hand down squarely in the center of her right cheek.
The silence is astounding.
I hadn’t realized how much noise she was making until she stopped, with a strangled gasp.
I bring my hand down again.
Two bright, red handprints. Matching.
I hardly take any time admiring my handiwork before I give her another set.
By the third, Justice Danes is trying to protest. She’s given up her attempts to get away. I have my left arm locked too tightly around her waist for her to go anywhere. Her shock has transformed into a rigid spine. Her head is too high for my taste, making the angle of her ass slightly less than ideal, but it does mean I can hear every sound that escapes her lips.
They are not quite words, not quite whimpers, and all of them tinged with a hot frustration that threatens to crush the lock on the cage around my heart.
As for my cock, it has no such reservations. Not that I can ever let her feel that. Not that I can ever let anyone feel that. I can’t even acknowledge it myself. Not now. That would mean throwing away everything I’ve built, and I won’t do it.
Her ass is pink by the fourth set.
Red by the fifth.
By the sixth the muscles of her back give out and her head tips down. She’s hanging on by a thread, by the sheer force of her toes gripping the floor, legs pinned together so tightly she’s trembling.
Trembling.
It shakes us both.
Seventh.
Eighth.
I got what I wanted.
I have her over my lap, no longer spitting, no longe
r fighting. I’d call it the first step toward submission, but I have no idea if we’re dealing with steps and ladders and progress. Fire doesn’t need an invitation to leap from a shorted wire to the rooftop without stopping to take a breath.
My palm is already stinging by the time I deliver the ninth and tenth sets.
The trembling has moved through her entire body now, rattling the short chain that connects the cuffs on her wrists.
This will be a telling moment.
I half expect her to throw her weight, to leap up and hiss at me like a cat, and my body prepares for it. I’d never do something so obvious as tense while she’s still on my lap, but I am intimately involved with every deliberate breath she takes.
Oh, she’s trying. She’s trying so fucking hard not to act like it affected her, but it did. The back of her neck is pink, right up to where her hair slopes down over her shoulder. And I can feel the tiny hitch in every one of those breaths against my thighs.
The only sound in the room is her breathing.
I give her three more heartbeats to make her escape, and then I rub my hand gently over the handprints I left. It’s meant to be businesslike. It’s meant to be part of this transaction—the literal finishing touch. But something seizes at the center of my chest when I do it, and again when her body relaxes almost imperceptibly in response.
So imperceptibly that I dismiss it as a fantasy. Emotions like that—anger like that—it’s like a drug. The effects don’t wear off right away.
Which is how I know it’s time for me to exit this little scene and put as much space as possible between me and Justice Danes. I’m going to need the rest of the night to sort out exactly what the fuck is happening here. What Lysander was thinking.
Whether or not I can actually go through with this.
“Up.”
Justice lags behind the order for long enough that I have to tap on her shoulder, prompting her. I have half a mind to put her back over my lap, but I can’t. The zipper of my pants is on the verge of exploding open, and that would end everything.
Cards of Love: Justice Page 2