Chapter 2 Sebastian #2
A decent person would regret damaging her the way I have, but I don’t.
I’d make every choice over again if it ended with her tied to me, mine in all of the ways.
But knowing that she could leave me makes me want to destroy her all over again.
Only this time I’d make sure that when she clawed her way out of the debris, every part of her was melted into every part of me until she couldn’t breathe without me and the thought of leaving became impossible to consider.
Pulling my cell from my pocket, I open the tracking app and watch as the dot on the screen that indicates her location moves steadily along the beach.
She might be running, but she’s not free.
Sending a live tracking link to her security team, I exhale and step onto the sand.
Taking off my shoes and socks, I bend down to pick them up and spot hers abandoned haphazardly a few feet away.
Collecting hers too, I line them up neatly side by side, then stroll down to the waterline, feeling the wet sand moving beneath my toes. Turning around, I look up at the house I built for Starling and me. It’s a beautiful modern box, full of windows that flood each room with light.
We only officially moved in a couple of weeks ago, and instead of fucking in every room of the house and making the most of not having roommates, I’m watching her like she’s ready to bolt and spending hours on end staring at my wife sleeping beside me just in case that night is the night she tries to leave me.
After we moved in, I searched all of Starling’s things for any hint that she’s planning to leave me. I had a private investigator check for bank accounts I don’t know about, large cash withdrawals, or anything that could look like her stockpiling money.
Right now, I’m supposed to be focused on learning the ins and outs of my family’s businesses so I can step in and allow my dad to retire. But instead, all I can think about is where she is, what she’s doing, and if this is the day that she’s going to leave me.
All four girls are due to return to school today for their junior year. But as Sammy’s nearly eight months pregnant, she’s decided to defer until after the baby is born, leaving Starling, January, and Bunny commuting to campus every day instead of living on site.
After Sammy and Evan found out they were pregnant, they basically moved off campus and into their house, which prompted the rest of us to push up the timetables on our construction.
So for the first time in years, instead of living together, the eight of us all have our own homes within the private estate we’ve created on the beach.
I don’t really know how my brothers feel about their wives heading off to school alone, but I’ve been haunted by the idea of Starling spending all day without me, all summer.
Since I officially graduated and Starling finished her sophomore year, we’ve spent glorious weeks together, traveling, sleeping late, and hanging out with our friends.
We went to Maine to see Starling’s dad. He still hates me, but now he only mean-mugs me when he thinks Starling can’t see, which is a vast improvement on his usual open hostility. We visited with my parents, and Starling even agreed to go and meet her and Evan’s half brother Lysander.
I think that Starling’s mom, Cassidy, hoped that the baby might be the key to fixing their broken relationship, but even though Starling told Cassidy and Harry she was happy for them, it’s clear that she has zero interest in having any relationship with her mom.
Strangely, despite Starling and Evan’s tempestuous relationship in the past, since he and Sammy got married, Starling and Evan have developed a true sibling bond. They text all the time, have inside jokes, and she calls him “big bro,” sometimes not even ironically.
I don’t understand how she went from hating him to helping Sammy trick him to considering him a brother, but I’m glad that she has. Especially since her and Hunter’s friendship is still firmly in slightly hostile civility status.
Both Bunny and Sammy have told Hunter in no uncertain terms that Bunny leaving him is not Starling’s fault, but he still blames her because she was the one to plot and plan Bunny’s escape.
He’s angry with her, and if it was Starling who had fled and Bunny who had helped her, I’d probably feel the same way.
But the underlying discontent in our group is just one more thing that keeps me awake at night.
Sighing, I stare at our home and wonder if I should abandon this place and take my wife to the island I bought for us shortly after Bunny went missing. It’s tiny, just big enough for a house and some space to roam, but isolated enough that if I took my wife there, she’d never be able to leave.
I have to admit, the thought is more tempting than it should be. It wouldn’t take much to slip a sedative into her coffee. I could have her on a plane and caged on our own paradise island in less than twenty-four hours.
It’s the first major thing I’ve bought that I haven’t told my family about. If I resort to taking Starling there, I don’t want anyone to know where we are and try to come after us. If I take her there, it’s because she’s given me no other choice.
After a few years with only each other for company, I’m pretty sure I could make her understand that leaving me simply isn’t an option and that I truly am willing to go to any lengths to keep her.
On one particularly wild, sleep-deprived night, I considered chaining Starling, physically detaining her with cuffs on her wrists and ankles, and despite how insane it sounds—even to me—I’m keeping the idea in my back pocket for if I need it.
Truthfully, the idea of taking away all of my wife’s clothes and shackling her with an ankle cuff and a metal chain appeals more to me than it should.
I’ve spent years threatening to cage her, and calling her my little bird.
But locking her in a literal gilded cage has crossed my mind too, not all the time, obviously, just whenever she seems most likely to run.
A wide yawn splits my lips, reminding me that I didn’t sleep at all last night.
After we’d gotten into bed, I’d told her to ride my cock, slamming up into her as she bounced up and down on my hardness.
Once she’d screamed my name and I’d filled her with my cum, she’d rolled to the mattress, curled into my side, and fallen asleep as my cum had dripped down her thighs.
I’d spent the night counting down the moments until I had to watch her leave for school, knowing that my control of the campus has dwindled since I’ve graduated.
It was around three a.m. that I texted her security team and advised them they were no longer covert and would be a visible presence from now on.
This morning in our driveway was the first time Starling had ever seen the team of four security personnel that have been following her on a daily basis for four years.
I knew that she’d refuse to take four huge security guards to campus with her.
I knew that she’d spit feathers and tell me I was crazy when I offered her the option of taking security or finishing her degree online.
But I also knew she’d be too angry to see what I was doing or recognize that I was planning to take away her need to be on campus so that I could force her to stay home and under my watch.
Our home is rigged with more cameras than we will ever need. Even Clay, who oversaw the design of our security system, said it was overkill, but I need to know everything my wife is doing. I need to see everything she’s planning, and I need to know the moment she decides to leave so I can stop her.
Glancing back down at the tracking app on my cell, I refresh the screen and watch her flashing dot moving at a steady pace. Running. Always running.
A part of me wants to go after her, but chasing her has never worked that well for me.
This time I need to outmatch her, and I’m not entirely sure how to do that.
The first time I spoke to her in that disgusting diner, she was full of fire and snark, but below the surface she was young, innocent, and scared.
After I brought her back to me under the guise of a scholarship to Kingsacre University, she was angry, guarded, and broken.
Now, she’s shrewd, intelligent, and my equal in every way.
For years I’ve made the stupid assumption that she was so wrapped up in me and our relationship, that she was oblivious to all the things Clay, Hunter, Evan, and I have done to fully claim our women.
I was wrong.
Starling wasn’t just aware, she was learning.
She was watching, cataloging, and absorbing all of the fucked-up things we’ve done, and now, she’s every bit as much of a psycho as we all are.
She proved that when she took a scalpel and cut the tracker from Bunny’s neck.
She proved it when she artfully manipulated Evan into doing exactly what she wanted.
She’s proved it over and over again, I just didn’t want to admit what that meant.
That she’s changed.
I don’t think any of us ever considered that her desperate pleas to Evan to help bring her friend home were all an act.
The tears in her eyes looked genuinely desperate.
Her heartfelt admittance of the double standard she was asking for felt real.
She played us all, and honestly, I’m almost as impressed by her manipulation as I am terrified that I had no clue.
I’ve racked my brain searching for a hint that I saw my wife’s subterfuge.
But I can’t think of a single moment when I considered anything about Sammy’s rekindled romance with her ex, her transfer to Harvard, or any of the other things they both said and did to lay the groundwork for Sammy to claim her man as suspicious or anything other than real.