Chapter 30 Willow
WILLOW
We stay like that for a long time, and I doze a little between Malice and Ransom.
I can hear their steady breathing and feel their heartbeats, and it soothes me.
But there’s still enough adrenaline leftover in my system that not even the exhaustion of being thoroughly fucked is enough to pull me under and put me fully to sleep.
My body is sore and worn out, both in good and bad ways. The warm, lingering throb from where Malice spanked me feels almost pleasant, but the sting at my wrist from where Ransom had to cut the tracker out is a reminder of everything that came before that.
I can also feel the sweat, grime, and cum drying on my skin, making me feel kind of gross after the long day I’ve had.
Neither of the brothers show any signs of moving, so I squirm between them after a while, making a face.
“I really do need to get cleaned up now,” I murmur. “I’m even more dirty than I was before.”
Ransom snorts, nuzzling against my neck. “Huh. I don’t see the problem, angel.”
“I agree,” Malice adds, his voice rough and warm. “I like you filthy, Solnyshka. I like you painted in our cum.”
His hand skims up my thigh and then over my pussy, not probing inside but settling possessively over the mound of it.
Ransom dips his head and finds my mouth with his, kissing me deeply.
It makes me catch my breath, and I lean up into it, kissing him back.
Warmth spreads through my body as I grind against Malice’s hand a little.
I’m definitely too worn out to go another round, but I like being touched by them like this, so possessive and familiar.
When they finally pull away, I can take stock of just how much of a mess I am. My makeup is probably ruined, my hair is a bird’s nest, dirt and blood smear my skin, and when Malice pulled out of me, he left a trickle of his cum sliding down my leg.
My ass cheek still aches, and my pussy throbs from the hard fuck, but it’s the good kind of soreness. The kind that does just what Malice probably intended, grounding me and reminding me that I’m his.
That I’m theirs.
“Alright, let’s get you out of that damn dress,” Ransom says.
“Thank god,” I mutter.
He gets up and then holds his hands out to me, helping me to my feet. Malice gets up as well, and between the two of them, they rip away the laces holding the dress up. It slides down my body and pools at my feet, leaving me bare, and it’s such a fucking relief to have it off me.
I glare at the messy pile of white fabric, liberally stained with grime and blood and cum now, then kick it into a corner, wishing I could burn it instead.
“I hope this place has hot water,” I say, testing my legs to see if they’ll hold me as I walk toward the ensuite bathroom.
They do, and I flip on the light, blinking in the brightness. It’s not a fancy bathroom, but the shower looks clean, and that’s all I care about. My body practically screams at me to get under the spray, my muscles aching for some hot water.
Ransom comes up behind me and skims his hands over my sides before dropping a kiss between my shoulder blades.
“You good?” he asks.
When I turn to face him, he searches my face, and I let him, not sure what he’s looking for.
“Yeah. I’m good,” I promise. “I’m just really tired. It’s been a long-ass day.”
He chuckles, reaching up to twist a lock of my hair around his finger. “You can say that again. Go ahead and get cleaned up, and if you need help with anything, give a call. We’ll be downstairs.”
I smile at him, then shift my attention to Malice, who’s standing just a few feet behind him, still in the bedroom.
“Thanks,” I murmur. It hits me suddenly that I haven’t even told them how much it means that they came to get me. I was too busy being angry about it. “And thank you for coming to my rescue. I… really didn’t want to marry Troy.”
Malice huffs a breath, his eyes glittering in the soft light of the bedroom. “You sure put up a fight like you did. Here I was thinking you wanted to be that fucker’s wife.”
Clearly, he’s still planning on giving me a hard time about it, but there’s nowhere near as much heat in his voice as there was before.
Things feel more settled between us now, and even if it takes a little while, I know we’re going to be okay.
I held on to my anger after they lied to me for a good long time, and even though the circumstances are a bit different, I guess this is one way in which Malice and I are more similar than I would’ve thought when we first met.
The two of them leave, probably to go scope out the house some more and consult with Vic, and I close the bathroom door, sighing into the silence.
The shower has one of those rainfall shower heads, and I turn the water on, letting it run a little hotter than I usually like it. Once the bathroom is filled with steam, I step into the tub and start washing up.
For the first time in a while, I feel like I can take my time. There’s a target on our backs now, but I don’t think Olivia will find us here. Not tonight.
So I stand under the hot spray as it pours down on my shoulders, soothing my aches and pains. Dirty, bloodstained water rushes down the drain, and I let it take the last of my anger with it.
It’s too late to undo what happened, and as much as I wanted to protect the Voronin brothers, I was terrified to marry Troy.
It’s hard to stay angry at them for wanting to protect me when I just wanted to do the same thing for them.
Hell, maybe it was stupid of me to ever imagine that they would stand by and accept that kind of sacrifice from me, when I definitely wouldn’t accept it if our places were reversed.
We’re too tangled up in each other, bound together in a way that’s hard to even describe.
And now we’re in this together, until the very end.
Whatever that end might be.
There are some basic toiletries on the shower shelf, and I’m not sure if they were left here by the previous owners, or if the guys put them in here when they did their sweep of the place.
Either way, I’m happy to have them, and I lather my skin with soap before moving on to my hair and face.
I scrub off all the makeup from the wedding, happy to have it gone.
When the water runs clear, I shut it off and step out.
There’s no towel, so I bend over and twist my hair above the tub, wringing it out as much as I can.
When I glance in the mirror above the sink, I look a bit more like myself.
Less like a miserable, terrified bride, and more just tired and worried.
After my skin has mostly air dried, I step back into the bedroom and find a small bundle of clothes on the bed that wasn’t there before. Left by one of the guys, clearly.
It’s a shirt that’s too big for me, falling down past my knees and exposing my shoulder where the collar gapes at my neck.
With it are a pair of sweats that I have to cinch tight to keep on my hips.
But it feels so good to be clean and dry and wearing clothes that weren’t picked out by Olivia, so I’m not complaining one bit.
I comb my fingers through my hair then head down to the kitchen, my stomach grumbling.
It hits me that I haven’t really eaten anything at all today.
I felt too sick this morning, carrying the weight of everything that was going to happen, and after that, we were too busy running for our lives for me to think about food.
“There are some snack bars in that box,” Vic says as soon as I walk into the kitchen, nodding toward the counter. “And some bottles of water.”
“How did you know I was starving?” I ask, glancing over.
A hint of a smile twitches on his lips, but he doesn’t look up from his computer.
I smile back anyway and rummage through the box until I find an oatmeal raisin bar. It’s not exactly what I wanted, but the guys packed for practicality, not taste. Either way, it goes down well enough as I devour it, chasing it with half the bottle of water in a couple of swallows.
The sound of Vic’s typing is subtle background noise, and I lean against the counter, watching him.
“What are you doing?” I ask after a moment.
“Scrubbing the last traces of us from any footage near the church. Or on the way here. I’m trying to buy us as much time as I can before anyone finds us.”
I touch the wound on my wrist where the tracker was, grateful they remembered to dig it out of me before we got too far away from the church.
“Thank you,” I say. “For doing that. And I’m sorry I wasn’t much help settling in here.”
Suddenly, I feel guilty. While Vic was down here working, I was upstairs, fucking Malice and being marked by Ransom. That seems to be a trend, really. Victor doing the work while we’re… occupied.
Vic’s gaze flicks to me, and there’s something different than usual behind his eyes. A spark that seems heated, but with an edge of something else I can’t quite read.
“You were busy,” he says simply. “I heard you with the others.”
The eye contact turns charged in a way I can’t define, the moment stretching out between the two of us. My heart flutters, and I remember how loud I screamed as Malice fucked me into the mattress and spanked me until I came.
Even though Vic didn’t watch us, he was listening from down here. And it turned him on to hear it.
I swallow, taking another drink of water to steady myself as I hold Vic’s gaze.
“You could have come up,” I tell him. “I would have wanted you there.”
His throat works as he swallows, and my stomach flips over as I think about what might’ve happened if he had come up. Would he have touched me again, like he did last time? Would he have kissed me? Would he have pushed past whatever is holding him back and done even more than that?
Vic’s gaze bores into mine, almost like he’s imagining every scenario I’m picturing, plucking them out of my head and seeing every filthy thing I wish he would do to me.
Every nerve ending in my body is practically screaming for him. Even though it’s been days since he kissed me, I can still remember exactly what his lips felt like, and I want to feel them again, so badly.
The air is so thick I can hardly breathe, and when Malice and Ransom walk into the room, Vic and I don’t look away from each other, neither of us reacting.
“Um… what’s going on in here?” Ransom asks, stopping in place. In my periphery, I can see his head turn as he glances back and forth between the two of us.
“Nothing,” Vic murmurs, still staring at me. “I’m just checking for any security footage that might’ve picked us up.”
“How’s it coming along?” Malice asks.
Vic blinks, finally wrenching his attention back to his computer.
The little bubble that seemed to surround us breaks, and his voice is back to its usual tone as he says, “It’s just about done.
I’m covering our tracks from the last part of the trip up here.
With the tracker out of Willow and the footage scrubbed, that should buy us enough time to make our next move. ”
“Yeah, about that. What is our next move?” Ransom grimaces. “We can’t stay here, right? Charming as this mostly empty house in the middle of nowhere is, it’s not really my dream home.”
Malice answers before Vic can. “Fuck, no, we’re not staying here. We can’t stay anywhere for too long. It’s too risky. We know Olivia has a shitload of resources, and we don’t know how widespread they are. If someone spots us and reports back to her, then we’re fucked.”
“We keep moving,” Vic agrees. “The more distance we put between her and us, and the more we vary where we stay, the harder we’ll be to catch.”
“Do you think she’s going to have people out looking for us by now?” I ask, biting my lip.
“Hard to say,” Malice muses. “She’s clever, but I don’t know how well she can anticipate what we’ll do. She can probably guess that we wouldn’t be stupid enough to hang around Detroit, but beyond that, I don’t know how good she’ll be at guessing our next move. We just have to be on our guard.”
“We could head some place tropical,” Ransom offers, grinning at his brothers. “Do some island hopping. Work on our tans.”
“This isn’t a fucking vacation, you know,” Malice replies, rolling his eyes.
“And how would we get there?” Vic asks with an arched brow. “Just walk into an airport and show our IDs and let Olivia catch us? Use your damn head.”
Ransom winks at me when I glance at him, and I know he’s just kidding, trying to keep the mood light like always. I’m filled with a rush of gratitude for him and the way he never seems to let things keep him down for very long.
“The problem is going to be finding abandoned places to hunker down in,” Malice says. “It might be better to sleep during the day and then drive at night. Put some miles between us and Detroit while everyone else is asleep.”
“Yeah, or that might make us stand out more,” Vic murmurs. “It could be best to blend in as much as we can.”
Malice nods, acknowledging the point.
Ransom plays with his tongue piercing, sliding it between his teeth. “We also don’t want to plan too far ahead, in case we need to pivot at the last minute. In fact, pivoting a good bit will probably do a lot to keep us one step ahead of her.”
“Backup plans are always good,” Malice agrees. “Maybe sometimes we stash the car in one place and then head to another.”
“We should probably dump the car at some point anyway,” Vic adds, “It will be harder for her to track us that way.”
He opens his mouth to say something else, but before he can, something on his screen catches his attention. He sits up straighter, his eyes going wide as his shoulders tense.
“What?” I ask, leaning forward. “What is it?”
“We just got a message,” he tells us. “From X.”