Chapter 6 – CARTER
6
CARTER
“ L ittle late for a meeting, isn’t it, boss?” Paulson said.
“Is it?” I asked dryly. It might be late for anyone else, but 6pm was right in the middle of Paulson’s work day. PIs weren’t exactly known for keeping normal business hours.
Still, Paulson looked rough. He hadn’t shaved his uneven beard in a few days, and there were visible coffee stains on his cheap button-up.
“So, why wasn’t this meeting an email?” he asked.
“You’ve failed me, Paulson,” I said, picking up the platinum letter opener I kept on my desk. I twirled the handle casually in my fingers, and Paulson visibly gulped. He knew exactly what I was talking about.
“You’re right,” he said quickly. “I should have known Anna would be back. Hudson Vaughn kept a tight lid on things.”
“For what I’m paying you, I expect you to get into all his nooks and crannies,” I said coolly. “Or are you trying to say you’re no longer up for the job?”
“No, no,” Paulson assured me. “In fact, I’ve got some new information about Anna Vaughn that I think will make up for that little lapse.”
I glared cooly at him, pressing the tip of the letter opener against the pad of my thumb. My instincts warred between letting him dangle a little longer, and impatiently demanding information.
“What do you have for me?” I said finally, cutting to the chase.
The man smirked and pulled out the chair opposite me. Over the years, Paulson had become a favorite of my private investigators. He scored low on professionalism, but high on results. His willingness to go the extra mile always earned him my continued patronage as well as a few thousand extra to pad his bank account. It almost made me forgive his catastrophic failure to alert me that Anna was back.
Almost .
I had competitors. I needed to stay one step ahead of them. But this time, Paulson wasn’t looking into Hudson Vaughn or anyone else in this damned city worth mentioning on the six o’clock news.
“I’ve got a few answers about where she’s been the past few years,” Paulson said eagerly. “And of course, surveillance of her since she returned.”
“Let me see the report,” I said. He opened the bag he carried and took out the file. The printed pictures of her on the sidewalk, coming in and out of a car, and having lunch with another woman felt so intimate. A primal sense of satisfaction filled me. She was mine , and now, I could watch her all I liked. I could consume her every move. Her every word. Until I knew her inside out. Until I knew her better than my own reflection.
“Well, right now everything seems fine. She’s out and about, usually alone. She has a driver and nothing seems out of the ordinary.”
“And the injuries?”
I hated revealing Anna’s bruises to Paulson. It seemed too private, too intimate to share. But I had to know whether her father had caused them. If Vaughn was hurting Anna in that house, I was ready to drop a bomb on it. I only had to get her out first. Fuck the collateral damage.
“No luck infiltrating Vaughn’s security system yet, so it’s hard to know for sure. I didn’t see her anywhere near a hospital either,” he said.
I chewed on my bottom lip. That meant Anna’s injuries hadn’t been severe—or, at least, that a visit from a home doctor was enough to treat them. Paulson pointed at the report impatiently.
“I found out a little something about her past. Keep looking.”
I leafed through the file, past the recent pictures of Anna, to a group photo of a bunch of strangers. I squinted at the image. Two women and three men at what looked like an upscale bar or something, huddled together for the group shot, smiling at the camera. What the fuck was this? My lip curled in agitation, then I saw it.
“Where was this?”
“The picture is a year old. The one holding the pool cue? His name is Josh.”
“Tell me something useful, Paulson,” I spat.
“He’s been to jail for resisting arrest and booked in for domestic abuse,” Paulson said. I stared at him. “I found a couple more pictures of them like that. Close. Lovey-dovey even.”
“She dated this man?”
My upper lip curled into a snarl, analyzing this Josh in a new light. No. He didn’t look her type at all.
“No solid intel yet, but you wanted to know who might have hit her. This could be the guy. After I found these photos, I followed the trail and managed to dig up a few more. Looks like she worked at this place. It’s an upper class bar for wealthy clientele in St. Louis. Flip to the next ones. See. The other men look to be…close to her…but Josh appears to be the most recent.”
Heat raced across my back and I looked up at the image of the moon over the water, going back there, to that calm place to get the thought of her with numerous different men that weren’t me out of my fucking head.
I wanted to castrate each and every one of them.
So much for building sustainable housing in Africa.
It wasn’t as if I could judge her. Not with the way I went through women faster than you could fucking blink. But I still loathed that anyone else managed to get close to her.
She promised me.
She fucking promised me.
Anna Vaughn was mine.
… until the day you shattered her.
I threw off the thought. That didn’t matter. I didn’t mean it and if I thought for one fucking second that she would disappear before I had the chance to make it right I never would’ve…
It didn’t matter now.
“I can’t speak to Mr. Vaughn,” Paulson continued. “It’s still possible he could have hurt her, I just haven’t found any evidence of that yet. But if this was her man.” He tapped the image lying on the table. “He was knocking his exes around long before Anna. He probably wouldn’t have spared her.”
Bile rose in my throat looking at the pixelated image of the man with his arm around Anna’s waist. The glazed over, too drunk look in his eyes. The way her hand on his almost seemed to be trying to peel it away from her skin.
Was there some strain in her eyes? Some fear?
I pressed my palms flat to the table and breathed deep through my nose. When I opened my eyes, Paulson looked nervous.
“There’s one more thing,” he said. “It’s big. Just don’t shoot the messenger.”
I turned the page quickly, and immediately recognized a notice from a dark web bulletin. An advertisement featuring a picture of Anna, offering a quarter of a million dollars to anyone who could deliver her alive.
What the fuck was this?
My mind raced and my blood went cold and the dead thing in my chest came alive with a deep, painful beating that made my skin prickle and a thudding start in my ears.
What. The. Fuck.
I rushed to make sense of it, connecting the dots, putting things in order in my head to find where and how I could fix it.
This was her last boyfriend and she obviously left him. Whether or not these injuries were his doing, I had no doubt he hurt her before, and he obviously intended to hurt her again. Who else would’ve put out this bulletin?
Those photos were taken at this club for the wealthy and powerful. He’d have the money for this ransom. The connections to make it happen.
If he wanted her alive, he probably wanted to keep her as his goddamn sex slave, or worse.
I covered a shuddering breath as it pushed from my mouth like steam from a boiling pit of hell.
That wasn’t fucking happening.
Did she know?
Did she know he was looking for her? That he plastered her face— my Anna’s face —all over the dark web for every sick, depraved criminal to…
Josh had no idea what devil he invoked. Because I would move heaven and earth to keep Anna Vaughn safe, and then I’d serve her Josh’s head roasted on a fucking pike.
“Take it down,” I hissed. “Destroy the ad.”
“Already done,” Paulson assured me. “And I’m watching for any new posts, but I can’t guarantee that nobody else has seen it.”
That meant Anna was in danger from every bounty hunter on the west coast. She had her father’s security around her, but I didn’t trust them to be enough. What if they didn’t know?
“At least they don’t have her name. Looks like she went by Annie Taylor. But I did a reverse image search on Google and it isn’t good. Anyone with a half a brain cell and an internet connection can probably find out who she really is.”
My hands shook and I turned and swept the file and every other piece of useless paper and junk off my desk, hearing metal and glass knock and shatter into the hardwood.
“Keep looking,” I growled. “I want everything you can find on her. Her friends’ names. Her boss’ name. Phone numbers. Any other aliases she might’ve used. Where she lived. All of it.”
I bent and snatched the photo of Josh from the floor, tearing it in two to separate him from Anna. I thrust the half that depicted Josh at Paulson. “And I want everything on this fucker. Family, education, work. His address. Phone number. Socials. Last known location. Fuck, I want the last place he took a shit.”
“You got it.” Paulson gulped.
“I want my people watching Anna at all times. Talk to my head of security. He knows who to call. I want the best of the best on this. No compromises. I’ll handpick the men, you coordinate with them. If anything happens to her, it’s on your head, Paulson.”
Paulson nodded and left, leaving the copy of the file with me.
I closed, trying to ground myself—shoving every disturbing possibility out of my mind.
What if there were men already on their way to find her? To capture her?
My head spun and I sat down hard on my chair, the caster protesting my weight as I bent forward and pressed my palms into my eye sockets.
I forced myself to picture the beach, like I always did.
The water.
The navy sky.
The moon.
And her there waiting for me.
When my breathing evened out, I pulled the mess of Paulson’s file from the floor and set it in my lap, flipping to the pictures of her.
The recent ones of her walking around downtown and eating at restaurants. I thought about seeing her again so much that it still felt like a dream. As though my mind was still the only place she existed even though there was proof right in front of me.
Seeing her vibrant and alive almost made me forget the sheer rage I felt learning about the hit on her. I was going to make Josh regret the day he set eyes on my Anna.
I pulled up the computer program that let me access Anna’s phone. Hacking into it had been one of my first orders of business. Her location was in the Vaughn mansion, which comforted me. She should be safe there, with the governor’s intense security system.
Clicking again, I accessed the view of her phone screen, my jaw dropping when I saw my own face staring back at me. My name was in the search bar, and she was scrolling through photos of me. A sick smile spread across my face.
I knew my obsession with her wasn’t one-sided. After all this time, she was still curious. Still just as starved for me as I was for her.
The top results for me were mostly professional headshots and photos from work events, me in a suit giving the camera a closed-mouth smile. But eventually, more candid, casual photos started filtering in. Anna paused longer at the pictures of me with other women, my dates for galas and fundraisers. Their names and faces had long blurred from my memory, but they were all stunningly beautiful and dressed to match my Brioni suits.
Anna scrolled down, pausing at a photo of me shirtless on my yacht. The photo was taken by a photographer with a long lens—I didn’t give the paparazzo permission, but it hadn’t annoyed me enough to force him to take it down.
Anna lingered on that picture for a long time. Minutes seemed to pass. Acting on suspicion, I pressed the tool to give me access to her microphone. The sounds of soft moans and heavy breathing filtered from my speakers. Fuck, I recognized those sounds.
She was touching herself to photos of me.
I groaned aloud, and my cock stiffened instantly in my pants. What I wouldn’t give to be there with her, watching her slender fingers move between her legs. I would have buried my face in her, drowned in the scent of her musk.
Unbuttoning my pants, I wrapped my fist around my cock. My hand was a poor substitute for Anna’s touch, but being able to hear her moaning, knowing she was thinking of me, had me harder than I’d been in years. I stroked myself slowly at first, but as Anna’s breathing quickened, I moved to match her pace.
I ached to press the camera button, but then she’d know. There was no way to access it without the little red light turning on on her end. I had to settle for my own imagination, but with those sounds she was making, it wasn’t hard.
I didn’t bother remembering the sweet, practically chaste way we’d made love the first time as a pair of broken teenagers in the sand. My fantasies now were far darker.
I was going to own every fucking part of her. I’d fuck her mouth, her pussy, and her ass, claiming her so thoroughly that no other man could ever hope to satisfy her. When I got the chance, I would fuck her throat hard enough to make her gag on it. I pictured wrapping my fingers around her long neck and squeezing until she came, harder than ever.
She’d had a taste of that side of me when we were nothing but juvenile delinquents. She liked it when I pinched her nipples and dragged my teeth over her slit. She cried out when I fucked her so hard I left bright red on her ass and thighs from our bodies slapping together.
Anna’s quick, short gasps meant she was close now. I increased my own pace, wanting to come with her, even if she had no idea I was listening. She cried out, a wordless, blissful scream. That was enough to send me over the edge, spilling into my own hand with a hard, teeth bearing groan. My head was full of nothing but her.
There was no better buzz.
No better high.
Her breathing slowed as she came down, the little sounds hitched at first and then evening out.
If she knew the depths of my obsession, the things I wanted to do to her that were far from sweet, would she run for the hills?
I was going to make her mine again. That much I knew.
But just how much of me could my little siren handle?