Threads That Bind Us (Syndicate of Fate Book 1)

14. Gwen

The blade is so sharp it slips through Kayden’s pants and skin with ease. I register his screaming, but my senses are overwhelmed with the feeling of Charlie’s hand on top of mine, his breath at my ear.

“Gently,” he murmurs, pulling our hands back and removing the knife. There’s a thin slice like a filet in Kayden’s leg, blood seeping from it in a steady, uneven stream. “This area here,” he drags his finger over the center of Kayden’s thigh up toward his groin, smearing the blood like paint, “is where the femoral artery is. Good for a quick death, but not if you’re looking for information. Puncturing larger veins can lead to bloodletting too, but they’re harder to avoid. You’ll learn with time.”

He maneuvers our hands, his fingers now laced through mine, so the tip of the knife is pressing into Kayden’s knee, who whimpers above us.

“The kneecap tends to be particularly effective, and painful,” Charlie says, and when I start to push forward, I feel pressure on my fingers.

“Give him a chance to answer, mia filettatura,” he chides softly, and I can hear a smile in his voice.

It’s the second time he’s called me that, but I’m afraid I’ll break the moment if I ask him what it means. Instead, I turn to the man writhing in the chair above me. His pale face is nearly gray, blond hair sweat-stuck to his forehead.

“What did you mean when you said we were no different?” I ask again, my voice a lot stronger than I actually feel. And it’s not fear or revulsion making my heart pound in my throat and my bloom hum. I feel almost like I’m disassociating, having an out-of-body experience. Only potent desire is grounding me.

Kayden doesn’t answer, his bloody lips pressed together in defiance, but still shaking. I lock eyes with him as Charlie and I press the tip of the blade into his kneecap together.

“Fucking psycho bitch!” Kayden sobs, the words coming in broken breaths.

I feel Charlie shift, plunging the knife deeper, under the bone of his kneecap, and Kayden’s screams become more frantic.

“You don’t fucking speak to her like that,” he commands, his voice deadly, the smooth flirtation I detected earlier gone.

The hairs on the back of my neck raise, and I nudge my knuckles against his on the handle.

“The artery goes behind the knee, right? We need more time with him.”

Charlie releases a long breath behind me before he loosens his grip.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, his lips a hair’s breadth from the skin of my spine, and a flush crawls up my chest.

“One more time, Kayden,” I say neutrally, putting just a slight amount of pressure on the blade to tilt it up. He screams, and his blood flows thinly down the weapon to my wrist. “Explain what you meant.”

“Fucking stop!” he begs, animalistic sounds tearing from his throat.

“Fucking answer,” I reply, holding the blade still.

Charlie’s not guiding me now, just brushing his fingertips over my knuckles gently. The logical part of my brain knows it’s concerning that I can feel that touch everywhere, but something instinctual is taking over.

The feeling I had in the alley—the control, the vindication—is nothing compared to this. It’s like I’ve only known the surface of myself my entire life, and now that I’ve dived below, I’ve discovered a riptide. The sensation is magnified one thousand-fold by Charlie’s warm body hovering behind me, his eyes tracking my every movement, his skin so close to mine.

Kayden has his head thrown back, his eyes pressed shut and leaking tears. I shrug.

“Suit yourself.”

But before I can move more than a centimeter, he’s screaming.

“No, fuck, stop,” he pleads, his voice cracking with agony.

I still, looking up at him with raised eyebrows and a placid smile.

“Something to contribute to the conversation?” I ask.

Charlie huffs a laugh behind me.

Kayden pants hard, watching the blood seep out of the gashes in his leg, and I wonder if everyone looks like this when they know they’re conceding to their own death.

“No one from Konstantin’s team approached me,” he says, and Charlie’s hand finds its place on top of mine again. Kayden must feel the pressure, because he whips his head up to stare at me. “I fucking swear they didn’t. Someone told me in April that I was reporting to a new handler. They started giving me more money, telling me I was working on higher-profile shit, that I shouldn’t worry about the girls and the trafficking.” He chokes on some of the blood still filling his mouth.

“And at what point did you realize you were no longer reporting to The Syndicate?” Charlie asks from behind me, voice condescending and authoritative.

“You don’t fucking get it, dude. I am working for The Syndicate. You just don’t know what’s going on in your own fucking house.”

Charlie grasps my hand tightly and pushes the blade, shoving it further into Kaden’s body than before. His scream is piercing, agonized, but Charlie doesn’t flinch, even as my hand pulls back against him.

“How about you start from the beginning, huh?” Charlie’s tone is so light and carefree you’d think we were having this conversation over a pleasant dinner.

Kayden pisses himself, and I wrinkle my nose.

“The new handler,” Kayden sobs, straining against his restraints. “She gave me cash, said I’d been switched to a new team. Guns, not trafficking. I thought I’d be checking in on small arms dealers, since you guys are so high and fucking mighty about your greater good shit. But I just passed information, facilitated deals. Arms into Estonia and Lithuania. Smoothing over shit at ports.”

Kayden’s panting now, sweat sticking his t-shirt fully to his chest, shivering from the cold. I wonder if he’s going into shock, but Charlie doesn’t seem concerned.

“And you didn’t think to ask any questions? You just trusted that this new handler was truly from The Syndicate?” Frustration coats Charlie’s words, like he’s annoyed by Kayden’s stupidity.

Can’t say I blame him.

Kayden glares down, his eyes glazed over in pain, his skin ghostly white.

“Number one rule of working for your fucking family is to not ask questions you don’t need the answer to,” he chokes out, his eyes rolling back in his head a bit. “Plus, she had the dove.”

Charlie stills, his body frozen behind me. It doesn’t even sound like he’s breathing.

“She showed you her sigil?” He asks, and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard him sound unsettled.

Kayden closes his eyes, nodding once as he shivers.

There are a few beats of strained silence, cut only by Kayden’s labored breathing, before Charlie moves.

The sudden absence of his body behind me feels like being dropped into the frigid ocean. I barely have time to turn around and look for him when he’s back, looping some kind of strap around Kayden’s injured leg. It takes me a few seconds to realize he’s putting a tourniquet on him. I can’t get my body to move the way I want it to, to do anything at all, as I watch him rachet the band tighter and tighter as Kayden screams. The little stream of blood that was flowing from Kayden’s leg peters out, and Charlie turns back to me.

He doesn”t say a word. Just holds his hand out to me. My body feels frozen though, my limbs heavy, and my brain is two steps behind whatever is happening. Charlie doesn’t seem upset or surprised, though. He just kneels down again, lacing his fingers through mine, and guides my body up.

I don’t look at Kayden as we leave. I’m not sure what’s happening to me, but the sudden shift in energy is making me feel weak and unmoored, and not in the pleasantly erotic way I was feeling with Charlie guiding my fingers on his blade. The stairs seem uneven and twice as long as they did on the way down as we head back to the main house.

As soon as the door clicks behind me, it’s like the blood that was pounding through my body suddenly stops moving at all. Stars dance in front of my eyes, and I don’t even have the wherewithal to be embarrassed as a cold sweat breaks out over my skin.

Charlie’s still silent, gripping me around the waist as I slump against him. He navigates me past Emily on the couch and through a little archway. I barely realize I’m about to throw up before he gently helps me to the floor, holding my hair back and away from my face.

I empty the contents of my stomach into the toilet, sweat pooling at the nape of my neck and dripping down my back. I grip the side of the bowl, trying to forcibly steady myself as I heave again and again. Every part of me feels raw and feverish, chills weakening my limbs and making me see double.

It”s a few minutes before the muscles of my abdomen stop twitching, and the haziness at the edge of my vision starts to dissipate. I cough, wipe my mouth, clean myself up, all while Charlie rubs soft circles on my back.

As my senses come back to me, the humiliation I was missing before comes flooding in. I shrug Charlie’s hand off of me and force myself to stand.

I don’t even know how to explain what happened in that basement. The overwhelming feeling of rightness. The way my body seemed to know what to do before my brain did. The intimacy.

I can still feel Charlie’s touch against my skin, the thump of his heartbeat against my back, his breath so warm and close that his lips had to be nearly touching me.

It’s bad enough I was that turned on by his hand wrapped around mine, guiding the blade into Kayden’s skin. But to project that feeling onto Charlie? To imagine he wanted to be closer, to close my eyes and pretend this little lesson made him feel the same?

He told me he’s not interested. He’s made it clear. For fuck’s sake, I made it clear. I grip the edge of the bathroom sink and shake myself. I’m so fucking frustrated. In a few weeks, I’ve gone from pissed at the thought of him blackmailing me into fucking him, to reluctantly attracted to him, to this? Wet and feeling like a live wire from nearly killing a man with him?

There’s something seriously wrong with me. What’s worse, I have absolutely no urge to fix it.

I snap my head up at the feeling of Charlie’s tentative touch against my back. When I find his eyes in the mirror, they still hold the same unforgiving hardness as they did when we walked down the stairs, but there’s something different at the edges. I’m too overwhelmed to read it, though.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs, his eyes tracing my reflection. “It’s a normal reaction.”

My stomach turns at his words, and I can feel a flush crawl up my chest and neck. Suddenly, it’s impossible to meet his gaze. Was I really so obvious? Could he tell how intoxicated I was by not only his touch, but what we were doing together?

Could he tell that wielding that knife to exact what I wanted felt like foreplay?

“Everyone gets sick their first few times. Even after years of experience, sometimes the adrenaline drop is just too much for your body to handle. It doesn’t make you any less capable.”

Of course. Of fucking course, that’s what he means.

I try to swallow down the relief that he couldn’t see my desire, and the disappointment that he doesn’t want to see it. I turn on the faucet, splashing water on my face and rinsing out my mouth.

“Yeah, okay, thanks,” I stammer, pulling down my hair and retying it. I can feel his eyes on me, but I’m not brave enough to see the pity in them.

“I mean it, Gwen,” he says, and the heat of his body grows closer. I busy myself with washing my hands. “It happens to all of us.”

“Charlie puked on a ski lift two years ago because my method of gutting someone didn’t settle well with him,” Emily calls from the living room, and I take the opportunity to slip away from Charlie, walking toward her voice.

“I thought this wasn’t your thing?” I ask, my voice rough and scratchy. “Research and development, right?”

Emily’s got her feet kicked up on the couch’s armrest, her laptop resting against her thighs. She’s watching some sort of surveillance video with her arms crossed behind her head.

“I said I didn’t have the patience for Charlie’s line of work,” she replies, sending a cruel wink my way. “I tend to be a little trigger-happy. More of a shoot first, talk never kind of girl.”

“Speaking of patience, you’re going to have to stay here a little longer,” Charlie says from behind me. “We think our friend has more to say.”

I take a seat as Charlie relays the information we have so far to Emily. Her expression becomes more and more serious, and she shuts off her video and sits up straight on the couch as he finishes.

“I was really fucking hoping it was bad luck and a coincidence,” she groans, rubbing the back of her neck in small circles.

“I don’t understand why this is so significant,” I say, crossing my legs and resting my elbows on my knees. “So Kayden was recruited to Konstantin’s team from someone else inside The Syndicate. It shouldn’t be that hard to figure out who, right?”

Charlie glances at me and then turns back to his cousin.

“The problem is, The Syndicate is structured so that this shouldn’t happen.” She blows out a breath and meets Charlie’s eyes, who nods for her to continue. “We have lots of low-level people doing small things for us—translating, passing information, surveillance. For the most part, they don’t even know they’re working for us. They’re hired as contract workers by shell security or data processing companies. A few who show promise, like Kayden, are given a little more information so they can look into specialized targets. But above that level, every single member of The Syndicate is hand-picked and monitored by voting members—basically just us and our parents. It’s why our teams are so small.”

“So if Kayden was introduced to Konstantin’s team by someone within The Syndicate who had information about my mother’s whereabouts, then we have a much bigger problem,” Charlie interjects, looking down at his hands. “Do we tell Bea? Or Gia?”

Emily hesitates, her fingers pressing harder into the back of her neck.

“I think we need to have more information first. Kayden may not know the names of The Syndicate members who are working for Konstantin, but if he could see the fucking sigil, he’s got to know more than he’s letting on.”

“The sigil?” I ask, glancing between the two of them. Charlie doesn’t look up, and after a beat, Emily answers.

“The dove tattoo. We’ve all got one.” She lifts her hip off the couch and inches down her shorts so I can see the ink covering her hip bone. It’s smaller than Charlie’s, but the design is nearly identical. “It’s unique to the upper echelons of The Syndicate—a dove with tears of blood. Something about the blindness of fate, the sacrifice of upholding it. Fucking dramatic, in my opinion, but we’ve gotten them for generations. If the woman he talked to showed him one, she has to be important to us.”

I watch Charlie rub the wings tattooed onto his hand absentmindedly, nodding along with Emily’s words. I convince myself that the urge in my chest to soothe him is completely platonic. After a few beats of silence, Charlie looks up at me.

“You up for another round?”