Captive Souls

Chapter 1

One

Knox

T he room I stood in reeked of expensive cigars and bespoke aftershave.

My body craved the scent of iron. Blood.

Soon.

The man in front of me was a necessary evil, one who thought controlled me. I’d let him believe that as long as he served a purpose—offering me an endless supply of victims.

“I need you to catch someone for me.”

“Catch?” I repeated, even though I’d heard him just fine.

He nodded once, steepling his fingers as his elbows rested on the oak desk between us. “ Catch .”

I was standing in front of him. He’d offered me a chair, as he did every time I was in this room. And as always, I stood. My posture didn’t change, my expression stayed the same—blank, uninterested. But Stone knew me as well as anyone could truly know me. Which meant he understood that I was questioning his request.

He leaned back in his chair, smiling. “When I say catch, I mean alive. And she stays that way until you hand her over to me.”

I felt the dynamics of our relationship shift as I processed this request. “You want me to catch, not kill, a woman?” I wasn’t one to ask rhetorical questions, but this ventured far outside our regular formula. Stone and I had enjoyed a stable, predictable and mutually beneficial relationship over the years. I enjoyed stability. Predictable. Controlling all the variables.

He thought that I worked for him. His rabid, dangerous dog who obeyed his every command and never stretched the leash.

Maybe he thought it was because I was loyal to him or because he paid me well or because I was scared of him.

None of that was true.

Without a leash, I was scared of myself.

His leash kept the world safe from monsters like me.

“Catch, not kill,” Stone said for the third time. “And keep her safe. Whole.”

Irritation bloomed in my gut, yet I didn’t show it, giving him a flat stare. “You want me to babysit. I don’t babysit. And I do not keep people safe.” It annoyed me that he even asked this of me. He was stretching the limits of what I would tolerate.

Stone chuckled. He did that, laughed often and easily. He had a decade on my forty years with creases in his face to show it. The creases did not just signify his age but the variety of expressions this man wore, plenty of them smiles.

He was tall but not overly so, fit but not cut with muscle. His hair was cropped close to his head, a sensible cut. He was always clean-shaven. He wore exquisitely tailored suits, one of the only shows of his wealth. Otherwise, he looked like any other middle-aged banker.

He did not look like the don of one of the most dangerous and lethal organized crime syndicates in the country.

Most of the time, he looked and acted like the American archetype of the ‘fun uncle.’

I’d seen him peel the skin off someone who’d betrayed him without breaking a sweat. You’d be very unwise to let his demeanor lower your guard or think you could best him.

More than one Made Man had been stupid enough to try to steal power from him. I’d killed them myself.

That was my job, after all.

Killing.

He did it when he needed to get the point across, but mostly he didn’t like getting his hands dirty. Literally or figuratively.

Hence our mutually beneficial relationship.

“I know this job may seem beneath you.” He stroked his chin. “But rest assured, there is no one else in my organization I want in charge of this. Of her.”

“Her?” I questioned again. Women were unusual but not unheard of in my role. And the way he spoke of this woman was different. Possessive. My instincts prickled with warning bells.

His smile turned predatory. “Yes. My future wife.”

I didn’t let my surprise show. Stone liked women. He always had them around. Young, shallow, stupid, unaware of how dangerous he was, blinded by his wealth. He used them then discarded them. Alive, luckily. But a little wiser to what the world truly was.

“It’s time,” he told me, as if I’d questioned him. “For me to settle down, make a family.”

Again, I didn’t react, but the idea of this man inflicting himself on a child was vaguely sickening to me. And for me to say that meant something.

“And your wife needs…” I stare off unsure of what my role was to be in this charade, though I could take an educated guess as to why he was involving me. It did not speak of a mutually consenting courtship.

“She needs some convincing that marrying me is the best and safest decision for her.” He spoke carefully, reasonably, as if what he was saying was completely sane. To him, it was. “I need you to break her.”

He needed me to scare the shit out of her and let her know that death was the only way to get out of this marriage.

Should I have deemed this deplorable? Absolutely. If I had morals, I’d walk out of the room, refusing such a mission.

If she had to be persuaded to say yes, this woman, his bride , was probably not someone who had chosen this life.

That should go against my code.

Criminals had codes, fucked-up belief systems that gave justification for what they did. That helped them sleep at night, deluded themselves into thinking they were heroes of their own stories. They didn’t touch innocents, women.

No one in life was innocent.

And women could be murderers, criminals just as well, if not better, than men could.

I hadn’t killed one that wasn’t deserving, but that didn’t mean I had a code. It just meant I hadn’t happened upon an innocent woman I was ordered to kill.

I didn’t delude myself into thinking I was a hero. I knew exactly what I was.

“Don’t kill her, hurt her or fuck her.” Stone’s eyes twinkled. “Not that I have to worry about the latter with you.”

My teeth gnashed together as my blood suddenly turned to acid. I stayed placid outwardly. Stone knew me as well as anyone could, which wasn’t at all. But he did notice things, and he obviously had me followed or watched closely enough to know that I didn’t fuck. Women or men. He’d offered, plenty of times, both women and men, seemingly nonjudgmental of my sexual orientation—he just wanted me to have one. If I fucked someone, had an appetite for something, it was something he could use to control me, manipulate me. But I didn’t take any of his offers, uninterested in the variety of people he’d either threatened or paid to throw themselves at me.

He’d eventually given up on trying to make me fuck something.

He’d considered that a weakness, my lack of sexual appetite, assuming it must mean there was something wrong with my manhood.

Probably why he chose me for this particular task. I wasn’t a threat.

Not that he thought, at least.

I was always a threat.

He watched me carefully, eyes narrowing. “Is there a problem?” There was a challenge in his question. He was daring me to refuse. Not that I’d face repercussions. It would be a show of weakness for me to refuse.

I didn’t trouble myself with archaic shows of masculinity and mind games within this world. I didn’t need either to show who I was. I could easily say no to this. Stone would likely try to punish me in some kind of way, but he wouldn’t succeed. No one could hurt me or punish me as profoundly as I did to myself.

This was the fork in the road, one that I’d been waiting for. I’d known Stone would eventually challenge the boundaries of this relationship, ask things of me that I didn’t want to do. Kill... That’s all I wanted. None of these benign tasks that made things messy.

It was time for me to part ways. This was a sign. For me to disappear into the ether and find a new path.

“No,” I said slowly. “There’s no problem.”

In a split second, I decided against walking down a different path. Disappearing at this juncture in my life would be complicated. One job outside the norm, one job to continue to delude Stone into thinking his leash was unbreakable... Then it would be back to regular scheduled programming.

I didn’t see any reason to make him stop believing I was anything but his loyal beast.

Four days later, I was in Central Park, following my target.

If I was the kind of person to smile, I would’ve grinned at the dark irony of her heading into a dense part of the park, me following her, her clothed in red.

Like some kind of fucking fairy tale. The monster following her into the woods.

Except this wasn’t a fairy tale. And she wasn’t going to triumphantly defeat me. Or outsmart me.

Piper Matthews was doomed the second I laid eyes on her.

Piper

I didn’t mean to get involved with the mob.

To be fair, I didn’t think anyone really meant to get involved with the mob.

Sure, there were the select few who watched The Sopranos and decided that’s exactly what they wanted out of their life then dove headfirst into the world of organized crime. But I’d bet that most people tried their hardest to avoid it, beyond enjoying arguably one of the best television series to be written.

I was one of the latter people.

My sister, unfortunately, was one of the former.

She did not want to be a ‘Made Man’—was it still a Made Man if the person in question was a woman? Did they even let women fill that role? I’m guessing not, since the patriarchy was still going strong, but maybe the mob was progressive. She did, however, get tangled up in the ‘romance’ of what it would be like to be with a morally- gray man who looked tough and didn’t live by the word of federal law. An outlaw. The ultimate bad boy in an Armani suit.

Yes, all of this was romantic to her, and she got swept up with the wrong man.

Trouble ensued, as it tended to do with my sister.

I tried to come to her rescue, as I always had and always would with my sister.

Usually, I was a dab hand at dealing with trouble.

Not this time. Not only did I not get her off the mob’s radar, but I somehow got myself in the crosshairs of the don of the mob. The don being the big boss. And though he seemed polite enough in the scant interactions I had with him, I was under no illusions that one got to the top of a ruthless, international crime syndicate by being nice .

I knew he was a murderer, among other things. And that did not charm me.

It sickened me.

His suits, his shiny, Botoxed skin, the manicured hands, the smiles that never reached his eyes... All of it.

He wasn’t unattractive, but he turned my stomach, nonetheless.

I didn’t let this show. Though I might not have been practiced at moving around in the criminal underworld, I’d been in the dating scene since I was eighteen, so I understood that even the ‘safest’ of men could turn deadly if they were rejected.

As I’d been trying to do, all while slowly coming to the realization that if I didn’t want to be involved with this gross murderer, I would either have to learn how to fight off him and his underlings for the rest of time, go to the police, or disappear.

I was competent at defending myself, no slouch at all. I didn’t own one, but I knew how to operate a weapon. Though I understood that I wouldn’t be a match for men who literally killed for a living. And again, my knowledge of the mob was based solely on my love for The Sopranos , but I understood that going to the police in any capacity was likely a death sentence, especially since I had no actual evidence of anyone breaking the law, merely them grossing me out with unwanted advances.

Therefore, disappear it was. Disappear from the job I loved, the friends I’d made, the home I’d finally settled into and the cat who had just recently decided he might tolerate me. Not to mention I’d have to figure out a way to bring my sister with me. Most likely I’d have to chloroform her because she wouldn’t go willingly. And even then, if I did manage to convince her we couldn’t come back to New York, she would probably make some slip-ups when it came to disappearing from your old identity so that killers couldn’t find you and punish you for running.

It was somewhat of a conundrum. And though I’d done a lot for my sister, I would do almost anything for her, I didn’t think I could date—and maybe marry, if he was to be believed—a crime boss.

With all of this chaos swimming through my mind, I’d understandably been distracted during my run this morning.

Running in Central Park at six in the morning wasn’t exactly a dangerous pastime; there were plenty of other people around. But as a woman doing it alone, it was risky. Made even riskier when you were on the radar of a mob boss who you very politely rebuked. Multiple times. And he just kept coming.

Half of me was expecting it. Some kind of attack, or at least an intimidating man in a leather jacket coming to tell me what might happen if I did not accept Stone’s not-so-decent proposal.

What I didn’t expect was the man in a bespoke suit, looking like midnight against the sunrise, standing directly in my path.

I knew immediately he was there for me.

I’d done all the things women were supposed to do. I ran differing routes at differing times, never making my routine predictable, trying to make myself less vulnerable. There was no way he could’ve possibly predicted where I could’ve been running. Yet there he was, standing in my path. Evidence that no matter what precautions you took, being a woman existing in a world of men was a dangerous thing in and of itself.

I could’ve gone around him; there was a wide enough berth for me to do so. And I was in gear equipped to run while he was wearing loafers that wouldn’t do well in a chase. Theoretically, I could’ve gotten away from him.

But some part of me knew, just by laying eyes on him, that he’d catch me eventually. A part of me was tired, exhausted by living in this state of fight-or-flight, waiting for this to happen. I was relieved, in a way. The parts of me that weren’t utterly and completely terrified, that was.

Nausea swirled through my gut as the music from my earphones continued playing. Not loud enough for me to be defenseless from the world around me, though.

I still heard the far-off city sounds, traffic, sirens, other people in the park. But somehow, on this stretch of path, there was only me and this man.

The Midnight Man.

He was gorgeous. With the sharp, angular bone structure of a model, high cheekbones, severe jaw, broad shoulders, shiny black hair that bordered his face exquisitely.

Eyes so blue they were like hardened sapphires.

He seemed like a work of art. A truly gorgeous villain had walked off the pages of a book. An immensely odd thing to notice about the man who was going to be my murderer at the very worst and threaten me at the very best. But I couldn’t not notice it. The sweat on my body turned to ice as my instincts recognized him as a deadly predator.

My chest rose and fell rapidly as my body screamed at me to run as fast as I could from this man. I could make it to my apartment before he did—if more of his people weren’t waiting there. I had a go bag, I could leave. But I had no idea where my sister was, and no way would she be answering her phone at six in the morning. That meant if I couldn’t find her, I’d have to leave her. Not an option.

I came to a stop a healthy distance away from him—even though a healthy distance away from this man would likely be Rhode Island. My heart thrummed, my breath coming in quick pants. I didn’t dare take my attention away from him even though the prolonged eye contact felt sticky, heavy and uncomfortable.

He watched me for longer than I expected, remaining silent. His gaze froze me down to the bone, my lips trembling from the force of it. I’d never been in the presence of someone like this. Not even Stone, my would-be suitor, had this kind of coldness about him.

I was suddenly aware of my clothing, or lack thereof. In my attempts at keeping myself safe from stalkers, rapists and the Italian mob, I listened to music at a low volume and varied my route, but I didn’t cover myself from head to toe. I ran five miles a day, and though it was spring, I got hot. I started with a windbreaker on, but about halfway through, I slung it around my waist, leaving me in only a bright red, cropped sports bra and matching leggings.

I knew my skin was likely flushed with that same red, my cheeks warm, and the hair that had escaped from my ponytail was sticking to the sides of my face.

Though it bothered me plenty that men stared at my exposed skin like they had a right to, I’d never let it get to me like it did now. I had a wild urge to cover every soft spot, every vulnerable piece of flesh from this man’s gaze.

But I was frozen in place, waiting. Unmoving, paralyzed by the knowledge that nothing I could cover myself with would make me invulnerable to a creature like this.

I might as well have served myself up on a silver platter.

There was no expression on the man’s face. Nothing I could glean. It was empty, a handsome, menacing mask of nothingness.

“You need to come with me,” was what he said when he finally spoke.

My body shivered upon hearing his voice.

It was deep. Quieter than I expected. Barely above a whisper, but it had a resonance to it, an authority that made me want to obey him.

I licked my lips, suddenly absolutely parched, my throat burning.

When his eyes followed the motion, I clamped my mouth shut.

I could disagree. Yell. Try to reason with him. But something told me all of those things would fail, and I’d eventually be going with him anyway. And I might or might not be unconscious.

I didn’t run.

I said one word.

“Okay.”

And though I was a millennial who liked all things witchy, I didn’t consider myself a psychic in any kind of way. Nonetheless, I knew deep in my bones that that single word, that submission, would change the trajectory—and maybe the length—of my entire life.