Chapter 11 Victor
VICTOR
The feed from Willow’s apartment is up on one of the screens in my room, and I sit behind the desk, watching it intently.
I watched as she went from the kitchen to the bathroom. I watched as she stripped out of her clothes and filled the tub, and then as she started to touch herself.
It’s not strictly necessary to have a camera in her bathroom, but I’m a thorough person, so I wasn’t leaving any space out in my surveillance of her apartment.
I’ve tuned into the feed from her apartment for hours every day and night. I know her routine by heart now, from the moment her alarm goes off in the morning to the moment she lies down to sleep at night.
I’ve watched her until I know dozens of little things about her.
Like the fact that she leaves time left on the microwave when she reheats things, instead of clearing it or letting the time run its course.
She talks to herself when she’s alone, muttering little affirmations or going over lists to make sure she has everything.
I saw her practice giving some kind of report or speech, something for school probably, going over it until she had it down.
I’ve been keeping meticulous track of what she does and what she likes, cataloging her habits and quirks to build a profile on her.
Even so, there’s no real need for me to be watching this. What she’s doing right now is a first.
My gaze is glued to the screen, and I clench my jaw tightly. At the moment, I wish I’d put another camera in the bathroom to get a different angle.
I can tell what she’s doing, and I can see her face in profile. I can partially make out the expressions flitting over her features, the way her eyes are closed and her lips are parted.
But it’s not enough.
I want to see all of it.
I want every expression. I want to see under the water, where I can tell her hand is moving.
She took her time at first, letting it build up.
Maybe she was playing some fantasy in her mind, and I wonder what it was.
Nothing I’ve seen of her so far has given me any indication what might turn her on, and she’s not at all like the women Malice sometimes brings here—the ones who scream that they want it harder and try to call him ‘daddy.’
Aside from a few moans and breathy curses, and a moment where she briefly stopped and muttered to herself, Willow hasn’t said much at all.
One of her hands rests on her breast as she teases and toys with her nipple. Her fingers pinch and twist at it, and I can see her spine arch, letting me know she’s not being gentle with herself.
She likes it rough.
I file that away for some reason. Just adding to the information about her that I keep in my head.
Water slops over the side of the tub as she scrunches up her face, and I can tell she’s getting close. Her arm jostles a little as she moves her hand faster under the water, and her body arches into her touch again and again, her head tossing from side to side.
My body reacts to the sight, my abs clenching and my shoulders going tight.
I’m hard just from watching her, from hearing those breathy moans.
I’m almost tempted to shove my hand down my pants and jerk off, but it’s not the day I normally do that.
Or the time. Jerking off now would mean deviating from my routine, and I never do that.
So instead, I clench my jaw and suck in air through my nose, letting it out in a rush through my mouth. My hand balls up into a fist against the desk, my nails biting into my palms while I try to control my reactions.
It’s usually not this hard.
I’ve watched porn before, although I usually don’t need anything to get me hard on the days when I take care of my body’s needs.
But this is nothing like anything I’ve ever seen.
Willow looks like she’s lost in it entirely, her hand moving from one breast to the other, her pink tongue flashing out to lick her lips.
My hand almost has a mind of its own as I direct the hidden camera to zoom in on her face. The flush to her cheeks looks like a dusky rose in the flickering candlelight of the bathroom, and her lips look soft and wet.
Her head falls back, a soft cry pouring from her lips. That’s it. She’s right there, poised on the edge, about to fall apart, and it’s as if that knowledge vibrates through my entire body. I’m tense as I lean over the desk, my gaze glued to the screen.
And then she comes.
She cries out again, and the sound seems to echo both in the bathroom and in my head. She writhes under the water, her chest rising and falling as she gasps for breath.
It’s like my body is somehow synced with hers, and my cock pulses in my pants, my balls drawing up tight. I exhale harshly through my nose and grit my teeth, forcing it all back.
No.
It’s not the right day or the right time, and I can’t afford to be losing control like this.
Not over some girl that we should have killed in the first place.
In my head, I start counting the seconds as I inhale and then hold the breath in, waiting until my lungs burn to release it.
It’s something I’ve done since I was a child, a way to cope with the shit my father put me through.
Settling deeper into the chair in front of my desk, I watch the water lapping at the edge of Willow’s bathtub and remember how my father used to hold my head underwater.
How I’d take a huge, gasping breath beforehand, filling my lungs to the brim with as much air as I could fit in them.
Then I’d count the seconds, waiting to be allowed to breathe again.
My vision goes blurry for a second, and my chest aches the way it used to back then, when I had to remind myself to breathe more often than was probably normal. But who the fuck knows what normal is anyway?
Thinking about that isn’t helping, so I shake the memories off. I don’t like to remember that shit.
My fingers feel stiff, aching with a phantom memory of my dad breaking them, one by one. I flex them and shake my hands out, trying to banish the feeling.
None of that is useful to be thinking about now.
“And neither is this,” I mutter to myself, clicking away from the video feed in Willow’s bathroom just as one of her arms moves to grab for her body wash.
My fingers hesitate, and a small part of me wonders what she’d look like, wet and soapy in the bath.
My cock gives an interested twitch, and I growl under my breath, furious with myself for this fucked up addiction to watching her.
It serves no purpose and does nothing to make things better for me and my brothers, so there’s no reason to do it.
By that logic, it’s a waste of time, and I hate wasting my time.
Still, I find myself checking the feeds to her apartment several times a day.
With the video of Willow minimized and out of sight, I switch over to check my inbox for messages.
My eyebrows twitch upward when I realize I’ve gotten an encrypted message from X.
My brain switches back into work mode immediately, and it feels comforting, like putting on a jacket that fits perfectly.
I put Willow out of my head and get to work decrypting the message, my fingers flying over the keyboard as I run the necessary programs.
Once decrypted, the message is clear to read, and I scan through it, memorizing the necessary details before pushing my chair back from my desk. I open the door and head downstairs, following the sounds of muted cursing and metal on metal that mean someone is working on something in the garage.
The cursing isn’t angry enough to be Malice, so it has to be Ransom.
I find him where I expect, working on his motorcycle.
His head bobs, and I notice he has earbuds in, playing music and mouthing the lyrics to some song while he works.
There are tools and pieces of car parts scattered around, piled in what Malice calls ‘organized chaos.’ They’re leftover from the last car we chopped up, but the bulk of the garage is empty, since we don’t have anything we’re currently working on.
“Ransom,” I say, trying to get his attention.
He spins a wrench in his hand and keeps bobbing his head, using the wrench like a drumstick to play imaginary drums one-handed.
I roll my eyes and step closer, snapping my fingers in his face.
That catches his attention, and he jerks a little, leaning back before pulling one earbud out.
“Shit, Vic. Give a guy a heart attack, why don’t you?”
“We have a message from X,” I tell him, getting right to the point.
He understands the importance of that, and he straightens up immediately, wiping his oily hands on an already oily rag.
“Should we wait for Mal to get back before we go over the details?” he asks. “I know how you hate to repeat yourself.”
The words are half teasing and half serious, but he’s right. Repeating myself isn’t up there with my favorite things to do.
“We’ll give him a few minutes,” I say.
“Is this thing that X wants urgent?”
I shoot Ransom a look. “What do you think? It’s X.”
He nods, taking my point. Although we don’t know a lot about our mysterious benefactor’s identity, we do know that he likes things done promptly. Even when he doesn’t give us an exact date, it’s always best to treat every task from him as being fairly urgent.
Before we can discuss much more, the front door to our living space bangs open and then slams shut.
“There’s Mal,” Ransom notes, shooting me a half smile. “Good timing.”
Heavy footsteps ring out on the concrete floor in the hallway, and Ransom raises his voice and calls out for Malice to join us in the garage. My twin appears a moment later, shucking his leather jacket and tossing it over a workbench before he strides toward us.
“Did you unload those parts?” Ransom asks, cocking his pierced brow.
“Yeah,” Malice grunts. “Checked up on the girl too.”
Ransom nods, grabbing a few of his tools and hanging them up on the rack set up against one wall, although he places them in an order that makes me immediately want to re-organize them. “Is she back home now?”