Chapter 6 Victor
VICTOR
I slide into my car, buckle the seatbelt, and crank the key in the ignition, then peel out of the hospital parking lot.
In this moment, I’m grateful that I drove to meet Malice and Ransom separately, once I figured out where Willow was.
Malice’s uncontrolled anger and Ransom’s strung out expression were making me too tense.
My own emotions are much closer to the surface than I usually allow them to be, and I need a few minutes alone to get myself under control.
Glancing in my rearview mirror, I see Malice’s car right behind me.
After we watched Willow leave with the woman she called her grandmother, we all stared at each other in silence for a long moment before Mal jerked his head in the direction of our cars, taking the lead the way he always does. Now we’re all heading back to our place—without what we came for.
Without Willow.
I keep turning what she said over and over in my mind, pressing my foot down on the gas as I methodically merge into another lane.
She saw the video.
She saw the note I wrote to X, calling her a whore. Calling her worthless.
From the very beginning, it didn’t sit right with me to write those words about her.
But I knew it was necessary. We all did.
X was so attached to Willow being delivered to him as a virgin that the only way to break his interest in her was to remove what he found so valuable. To turn her into trash in his eyes.
But that was just for the ruse.
She was never trash to us. She was never worthless.
Willow was never supposed to know about any of it, but she found out, and now everything feels fractured and out of control in the way that makes my skin hum unpleasantly.
I lose sight of Malice and Ransom in the rearview after a while, and I get home before them, pulling into the garage and cutting the engine.
Even just walking into the warehouse feels different. It’s so obvious that something is missing. That something isn’t right. Maybe it’s just in my head, but it feels emptier than it did before.
Dead inside.
Like Willow took all the oxygen with her when she left.
She came into our lives like a butterfly, flapping its wings and causing chaos. Changing things little by little until she had rewritten so much of our everyday existence. Until she had imprinted herself on our DNA.
And now the butterfly is gone.
It’s odd, considering how much I chafed against her being here in the first place, and I don’t think I realized at the time how used to her presence I had gotten.
Before I can sink any deeper into my thoughts, the eerie silence in the warehouse is broken by the sound of a car door slamming. A second later, Malice and Ransom burst into the space, mid-argument.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Ransom demands, his eyebrow ring flashing as he wheels on Malice. “Why wouldn’t you just let me tell her? Now she thinks we actually think all that shit about her, and she’s never going to come back.”
“I did it to fucking protect her,” my twin snaps back. “It’s not safe for her to know about any of that. It would’ve just dragged her deeper into all this shit. We sent that video in the first fucking place to get X off her back. Telling her about him would just make her a potential target again.”
“So it’s better for her to just be out there, alone, thinking we think she’s a whore?” Ransom shakes his head, his lips pressed together. “No. I don’t believe that.”
“It fucking is better.” Malice’s tattooed hands ball into fists. “Because she was right. What she said at the hospital is true. Ilya’s dead, and that threat is over. We don’t need to watch her anymore, because there’s no one else to give a shit about Nikolai’s death. Which means she’s safe now.”
Ransom grinds his teeth, looking more like Mal than usual with his jaw clenched and anger rolling off him in waves.
I can understand how he feels. I’m still agitated myself.
Everything just feels… wrong.
I turn to head upstairs, and the two of them follow me, still arguing.
“What about what we said? How we promised we weren’t going to let her go?” Ransom asks. “You were right there, so I know you fucking remember.”
“For fuck’s sake, Ransom,” Malice growls.
“You know good and damned well I just didn’t want to see her go to X and be used for whatever sick shit he had in mind.
But use your fucking head for a second. Did you really think we could just keep her forever?
Did you think someone like her was just going to fit into our lives with the way things are? ”
Ransom doesn’t have an answer for that, but he glares at Malice anyway, fury burning in his green eyes. After a beat, he finally speaks again.
“You’re kidding yourself, Mal,” he mutters. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
I let them keep going at each other in the hall, walking into my room to log into my computers.
Whenever the real world gets too intense, sitting down at my keyboard always helps me focus and pull myself back under control.
It helps keep me from spiraling into the chaos and darkness that always sit at the edges of my consciousness, just waiting for a chance to rush up and swamp me.
But as my computer screens come to life, my pulse jumps, my shoulders going tight as I sit up straighter.
Because the first thing that pops up is a message from X, responding to the one I sent him earlier—the one with the video of Willow.
I click to open it, glancing quickly at Ransom and Malice, who are still standing in the hall in front of my door.
“We got a reply,” I say, raising my voice enough to cut over the sound of their argument and get their attention. “Stop fighting and come look at this.”
Ransom breaks off mid-sentence as he and Malice both snap their heads in my direction, immediately on alert. They both come in and cluster behind my chair as I bring the message up, and all three of us read it in silence.
The message is short, and my fingers drum against the desk as my gaze scans the text.
It’s pretty obvious that X is pissed at us for what we did, and that he knows we ‘purposefully ruined her.’ But he doesn’t tell us to bring her to him anyway, so it seems like it worked.
All he cared about was her virginity. He doesn’t have any interest in her anymore.
Relief floods me at that, and I sit back in my chair, letting out an inaudible breath.
I hated seeing the hurt in Willow’s eyes, knowing that it was because of us and what we did, but it’s better that she have her heart hurt and despise us for it than end up in X’s clutches.
He would have sold her for her body or traded her virginity away to the highest bidder, and she deserves so much better than that.
There’s more to the message, and I look back at the screen as I refocus and keep reading. Since we failed to deliver Willow and ruined her in the process, X considers that job a failure, and he tells us that he has several other jobs he’ll need us to do to make up for it.
Malice snorts as we all finish reading, the sound full of disdain.
“Yeah, I’ll just bet he has more work for us. Asshole doesn’t even have the decency to say what these jobs are or how many or what. He just wants to keep us on the hook for as long as he can.”
“It’s not the best news, no,” I agree, counting out the beats as I tap my fingers against the smooth surface of the desk again. “But we knew going into it that he wouldn’t be happy about us defying him.”
“And at least it means our plan worked,” Ransom puts in. “He doesn’t want Willow anymore.”
There’s a note of satisfaction in his voice, but it’s mixed with something dull and heavy. Something like pain.
Because even though our plan worked and we managed to protect Willow…
We lost her too.