Chapter 36 Ransom
RANSOM
It’s been a shitty as fuck day, mostly due to the message we got from X outlining his latest “job” for us, and even now, I can’t get it out of my head.
It’s late, and I’m lying in bed with Willow in my arms. She’s sleeping soundly, curled up against me the way she’s started to do easily every night.
The separation she tried to keep between us at first is gone, and her face is soft and unbothered in her sleep.
I watch her, taking in the way she breathes, the way her lips part, the little sounds she makes as she shifts closer to me unconsciously.
She’s becoming such a fixture in our lives.
I’ve been teaching her about cars, and the two of us spend hours in the garage together. I love the way her face lights up a little when I show her something new, and how she picks things up so quickly.
I love the way she melts against me as if she trusts me, all that distance and wariness seeming to disappear when we’re close. I love having her that close during the day, the two of us bent over a car together, and I love it even more at night, when she’s in my arms like this.
The rule my brothers and I agreed to is still in place, and I’ve been following it. I haven’t fucked her. But just making her come on my hand was one of the hottest things I’ve ever seen.
She was dreaming about me and the others, shifting and moaning in her sleep. The way she sounded had my cock hard immediately. The sound was throaty and low, but somehow still sweet and soft, even though I have a feeling her dream was dirty as hell.
Part of me wishes I’d asked her to describe it, but a bigger part—the smarter part—knows that would have been dangerous. Hearing about it would have just made it that much harder to keep my hands to myself.
Well… to keep my dick to myself, I guess. My hands were pretty involved.
Either way, it was bending the rules a little, making Willow come in my bed, even though we didn’t take it any farther than that.
She was so unrestrained, losing herself in it and breaking apart for me as she rode my hand.
She still seemed shy, but she let herself go, and the memory of her face as she came, staring into my eyes, her soft blonde hair spread out across my pillows…
Fuck. Just thinking about it now makes my cock twitch.
It’s one of those images that’s going to have a permanent spot in my spank bank, I think. Maybe even the top spot, since I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything hotter—unless something even better replaces it.
I grin at that thought. There’s a lot we could do and still stay true to the rule of not fucking.
But then I think about X’s message, and it’s like a bucket of fucking ice water dumped over my head, cooling the heat in my veins instantly. My gut twists, and it’s the same way I felt when I walked into Vic’s room and saw Willow’s face on his computer screen.
X wants her. And if we’re right about what he wants her for, then that’s even worse. There’s so much shit we don’t know. So much we’re just guessing on, trying to come up with something like a plan for how to handle this.
It pisses me off just thinking about it.
I’m not like Malice, not as brutal and primed for violence at the slightest provocation, but I could fucking kill someone right now. And every time I think about Willow being sold like she’s a piece of cattle or something, it just makes it worse.
Eventually, I sigh, realizing lying here isn’t going to help me get to sleep. I ease Willow out of my arms and slip out of bed, heading downstairs to the living room.
Malice is already there, and I’m not really surprised to see him.
There’s a bottle of whiskey on the table and a glass in his hand, already mostly empty.
He’s shirtless, and I can see that the sprawling tattoo he’s been working on for a while has gotten a new addition, so he must be as worked up about this shit as I am.
Probably more, knowing Malice. He always seems to feel things in extremes.
Judging from the way he’s brooding, glaring off into the distance, he’s thinking about the same shit I am.
“You’ve got the right idea for tonight,” I tell him, snagging the whiskey bottle before dropping to sit in one of the chairs across from the couch. I bring it to my lips, taking a long swallow.
“Vic hates when we drink from the bottle,” Malice reminds me, but I shrug.
“Yeah, but he’s not here.”
He holds out a hand for the bottle, and I rise and pass it back to him, watching as he sloshes more of the dark amber liquid into his glass.
“Did you sell those parts earlier?” I ask. It seems like forever ago that Malice went out to make that sale. All of the shit with the Donovan gang and our disrupted business seems like it’s very far away right now.
He nods, rubbing his hand over the stubble on his jaw. “Yeah. No issues.”
“That’s something, I guess.”
I take the bottle back and take another long drink, feeling the whiskey burn straight down to my stomach.
We fall into silence again, drinking together without speaking. When I catch sight of Victor out of the corner of my eye, I jump, because I didn’t hear him on the stairs.
He gives me a look when he catches me mid sip from the bottle, and Malice snorts dryly.
“Told you,” Mal comments.
“It’s fine.” I gesture to Vic with the bottle. “It’s alcohol. Whatever germs I’m leaving behind get killed by the booze.”
“It’s still disgusting,” he says, sitting down on the couch with Mal.
It’s no different from a lot of nights the three of us have shared. We’re a unit, a family. Whenever there’s something big going on, or we need to talk, we fall into this pattern. Sitting up together, hashing shit out.
When Malice was in jail, it felt wrong. Like we were missing something essential, something we needed in order to function the way we were supposed to. It’s always been the three of us, and we’ve always faced anything that’s come our way head on.
But now, we’re all united in dancing around the elephant in the room. The reason none of us are asleep.
“How’s the fallout from you pissing off the Donovans?” Vic asks. That’s close to the topic that we’re all skirting around, since Willow is involved in both situations, but not quite it.
She’s involved in everything now, it feels like.
Malice shrugs a shoulder. “Eh. I didn’t want to work with them anyway. Bunch of fucking cunts.”
“Yeah, but we’re going to have to do something,” I put in. “We need to have a good reputation if we want our shop to succeed. Right now, not everyone in Detroit has heard or believed the shit Ethan is spreading about us. But if that changes, we could be fucked.”
“We’ll work it out,” Malice grunts.
We seem to be saying that about a lot more shit than usual these days. We’ll work it out. We’ve always managed to do it in the past, but there are so many things up in the air right now. This mess with the Donovan gang, whoever’s poking around asking questions about Nikolai, the message from X…
It feels like it’s all snowballing, one thing feeding into the next, making it impossible to keep up.
I know Vic must be having a hell of a time with it.
He’s a problem solver, but he has a specific set of skills.
When those skills can’t solve the problem, he gets antsy and irritated.
Right now, he’s focused on figuring out who the face he found on that security footage belongs to, but it’s not like he can ignore everything else on top of it.
“I know some guys I can call,” I offer. “They usually try to move whole cars, because they’re idiots, but I can probably convince them there’s more money in chopping.”
“Sure,” Victor agrees. “Do that. It’ll at least get us by until this thing with the Donovan gang blows over.”
We fall silent again, and when Malice pushes the bottle toward Victor, our brother actually looks like he’s considering it for a second before he shakes his head. He doesn’t really drink, ever, so the fact that he looked tempted is a pretty good sign that he’s just as wound up as the rest of us.
Finally, I can’t take it anymore. We all know why we’re up and what we’ve been avoiding bringing up, and I decide to just come out and say it.
“What the fuck are we gonna do?”
My brothers both look at me, and then Malice goes back to glaring at the rug that fills the space between the couch and the chairs.
Vic sighs, tapping his fingers on his knee. “We have a little time before X expects us to deliver her.”
“But he won’t wait forever,” Malice grunts.
Vic and I both nod because we know that.
None of us have ever met X, and we don’t know who he is, but he doesn’t strike me as someone with a lot of patience.
Power, yeah. Probably in spades if he was able to get Malice out of jail after he took the fall for murdering our dad.
Resources, probably. But he likes things done in a certain time frame, and the longer we take to deliver what he wants, the higher the stakes get.
“So what do we do?” Victor asks. He’s usually the one with the plan or an idea of how to come up with one, but now he seems as lost as Malice and I feel.
“I don’t want to give her up,” I say, once again being the first to speak up.
“Not knowing what he’s probably going to do to her.
Who the fuck knows what would happen if she got sold to some asshole?
We all know there are some depraved fucking scumbags in this city, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing we just…
gave her up to that.” I cross my arms, sitting back in my chair. “That’s where I stand.”
Victor taps his fingers together thoughtfully. “I agree. It’s not her fault that she’s in this mess. And she’s done what we’ve asked of her so far. Handing her over would make our lives easier, but…”
He shakes his head.
We both look to Malice, because he has the most to lose here.
He’s also been the most vocal about not wanting Willow around.
Mal’s jaw clenches, and he grips the glass in his hand hard enough that I’m worried he’s going to break it.
His eyes flash, and they look haunted for a second, like he’s reliving everything that happened to him in prison or something.
Then he takes a deep breath and lets it out, grabbing for the whiskey again.
“We keep her,” he declares. “We don’t give her up.”
He takes a swig from the bottle, and for once, Victor doesn’t even make a comment about it.
“We’ve never disobeyed X before,” I point out, not sure whether to be relieved that we’re all on that same page or worried that we’re about to do something monumentally stupid.
Malice makes a face, his sharp features twisting. “Don’t say it like that. It makes it seem like we’re his fucking lap dogs and he’s our master.”
I grimace. “But you know what I mean, Mal. We’ve always done what he wants. I don’t think he’s going to take it lightly if we ignore his request.”
“Yeah, I know.” He drags a hand through his hair. “But we’ve got two choices here—we either give him Willow, or we don’t. Either he loses, or she does. We’re gonna have to fuck someone over, and I’d rather it be X.”
Vic’s eyebrows climb up his forehead at that, because it’s a pretty big declaration from Malice. Especially considering how desperate he is to stay out of prison now that he knows what it’s like in there.
“He’ll be a powerful enemy if we piss him off,” Vic points out. Then he winces. “We seem to be collecting them now.”
“Donovan and his gang aren’t that powerful,” Malice retorts.
Vic nods in concession. “Fine. But X is. Do we really want someone else up against us? Especially considering how much leverage he has over us?”
Malice sets his glass down on the end table with a thud and cracks his knuckles. His hackles are up, and I don’t blame him for that. He usually tries not to talk about what happened to him when he was locked up. He probably tries not to think about it too much.
But this is so close to home for him, and those feelings and memories are probably right there beneath the surface.
We can’t let him go back to prison. No matter what happens, we’re not giving him up again.
When the cops figured out our dad had been murdered, he insisted on taking the fall to protect me and Victor.
To keep us from having to face the punishment for something we all did.
It would be too much to ask him to do that again.
But even with that threat hanging over his head, my brother still nods decisively.
“We’re keeping her,” he says again. “We’ll just… figure it out. It’s like when we decided to take out Nikolai. We knew there was going to be a risk. We knew people might come after us for it, but we decided it was worth it in the end. I guess we’re deciding this is worth it too.”
“Okay,” I murmur, nodding. “Then that’s the plan.”
“It’s not a plan,” Victor counters. “It’s a rough idea at best.”
Silence falls in the living room for a moment as we all fall into thought, and I rub at my temples as the gears in my brain grind over and over.
We’re trapped in a fucking impossible situation, and no matter what we decide to do, someone will likely get hurt. There are no great options and no clean way out.
Even with all of Vic’s skills at hacking and the resources at his disposal through his computers, we have no idea who X is. We don’t know what to expect from him, so it’s best to expect the worst and try to figure out some way to minimize the damage—which is definitely easier said than done.
The three of us stay in the living room for a couple more hours, debating on different courses of action and weighing our options, and by the time I head back upstairs, we actually do have the beginnings of a plan.
It’s risky as fuck, and none of us like it.
But it’s all we’ve got.