Posseduto (Owned #2)

Chapter 1

“Have fun, call me when you land, and be safe,” Eri stated as she hugged Avian.

“Yes, Mom,” her friend replied teasingly. “But seriously, don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

Eri couldn’t dispute that fact. She knew Marco would never let anything happen to Avian, but it didn’t mean she wouldn’t worry a little. When they pulled apart, she wiggled her eyebrows at the couple.

“Make me a nibling,” she requested.

“We will not,” Avian responded as Marco simultaneously said, “Trust me, I’m working on it.”

Avian elbowed him in the side, and the small group shared a laugh before the newlyweds headed to their terminal.

“We laughed, but he isn’t joking,” Elias stated.

“Oh, I know,” she responded, turning her attention to him. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“You’re pretty bossy for someone playing passenger princess.”

“Your point?” she countered, looking over her shoulder as they approached the exit, and he chuckled. That deep, rumbling sound she long ago stopped pretending she didn’t enjoy, at least with herself.

He held his hands up as he licked his lips. “Trust me, Amate. I’m not complaining.”

Eri rolled her eyes at him, but her faux irritation did nothing to stop the quiver in her stomach that enjoyed making itself known when he was around. When he complimented her or smirked and laughed at her being mean to him, because she was being mean to him.

It was her defense mechanism. She had learned the hard way that being friendly to men you weren’t interested in, even when you weren’t leading them on, equated to doing just that if they made a pass and you turned them down, but she also knew ignoring them didn’t always work out well either.

She didn’t think it was something she’d have to worry about with Elias.

She was sure he’d take the L if she turned him down, but that was the problem.

Eri didn’t quite want to, yet she also didn’t want to reciprocate his flirting.

She was in a strange place when it came to him.

She was interested, sure, but she wasn’t at a place where she was comfortable enough to want to pursue anything with anyone.

She knew it was unfair to him, but he didn’t seem to mind. Maybe she was taking advantage of that, and she knew she shouldn’t have been, but he was the first man she’d felt comfortable flirting with in almost two years.

He opened the passenger door for her. She was grateful it was still warm, and the walk through the January weather had been brief.

“What do you have planned for the rest of your break?” Elias asked on the way back to the wedding venue.

“Nothing, really. I’m going to get a jump-start on projects for mid-terms and finals, but besides that, enjoy sleeping in until classes start back.” He hummed in acknowledgment, and she turned to him. “That motorcycle you were making for the streamer. Did he like it?”

“He did and referred a few friends. I had a consultation with one a couple of weeks ago, and I’m working on his design. I have the other two scheduled for later in the month.”

“Congrats. How long does it normally take you to build a bike?”

“It depends,” he responded, switching lanes.

“On what?” Eri asked.

“Do you really want to know, or do you just want to hear my voice?” He glanced at her with a smirk.

Both, she thought, but said, “And you wonder why I’m annoyed with you all the time. Forget it.” She turned her attention out the window as that deep, rumbling laugh filled the car again over the soft music.

“Don’t be like that, Amate. I’m only playing.”

“Play with someone else.”

“I’d prefer to play with you.”

It was only a conscious effort that kept her from squeezing her thighs together and biting her lip. Instead, she scoffed.

“Well, I don’t want to play with you.”

“Adoro il modo in cui mi menti,” he responded, and before she could ask him what he said, he returned to their previous conversation. “How long it takes depends on the type of motorcycle I’m building and the specs.”

“Dirt bikes are quicker than cruisers. Black ships in faster than blue,” she responded passively.

“Yes, to the first one. No, to the last. You aren’t wrong. Black is always faster to get because it’s the most standard color, but since my bikes are custom, it means they come with a custom paint job.”

“So it doesn’t matter what color you order because you’ll paint over it.”

“Right,” Elias agreed.

They lapsed into silence, and a couple of minutes later, they pulled into the venue parking lot.

There were a few cars there, hers included, but she didn’t see Willa’s car.

She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket and dialed Mickey’s number.

When it went to voicemail, she called her again, getting the same automated message.

“Damn it, Mickey.”

“Are you okay?” Elias asked.

“No. Mickey has my car keys and wallet, and Willa’s car is gone.”

“Maybe she’s inside. There are still people here.”

Eri got out and headed into the building.

Mickey might still have been there. Eri drove the three of them that afternoon.

She hadn’t bothered to bring her purse, so Mickey had offered to keep her items in her backpack.

She hadn’t thought to get them from her before she went with Elias to drop off the newlyweds because she assumed Mickey would wait, but she discovered that wasn’t the case when she entered and found the staff cleaning.

Elias was standing beside her car when she returned outside.

“You wouldn’t have Avian’s keys, would you?”

Her friend had a spare key to her apartment in case of emergencies. She lived in an apartment on campus, and they were notorious for not answering the maintenance phone after six o’clock.

“I don’t. I can ask Zia Lorna if she has them.”

“Please,” Eri responded, and while he called his aunt, she attempted to call Mickey again with no luck. She was sure Mickey was somewhere with some woman she’d met, and the last thing Eri was trying to do was cockblock, but damn.

She tried the handles on her car just in case Mickey had put her belongings in it and left it unlocked, but she hadn’t.

“She doesn’t have Avian’s keys. Just Marco’s,” Elias informed her after getting off the phone.

“Great.”

“We can call Pop-A-Lock. Get them to come and open it.”

“Doesn’t really help me, Elias. It gets me in the car, but I can’t start it and don’t have my house key.”

“I can start it,” he told her. “But you’re right; that doesn’t help if you can’t get into your apartment.”

Eri decided not to speak about his offer to hot-wire her car and ignored that it oddly appealed to her. She would have taken him up on it and gone to her dad’s if he weren’t off skiing somewhere.

“We can go to my place until you get ahold of Mickey,” he offered.

Eri bit her bottom lip. She didn’t have very many choices. Sure, she had other friends besides Avian, but most of them had gone home for the holiday.

“Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

He opened the door for her, and she got back into his car. As he pulled out of the parking lot, she texted Mickey to call her.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

Elias opened his front door, allowing Eri in first. It was the first time she’d been to his house. The first time other than their car ride, they’d been alone together. He hung his keys on the hook and his coat on the rack after helping her out of hers.

“Make yourself at home,” he stated, steering her into the living room before entering the kitchen. He took two drinks from the fridge and returned to the living room. Elias found her looking at the collage of pictures on the far wall.

“Are these all the bikes you’ve built?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at him.

“They are.” He put the drinks on the coffee table and joined her. “My first to my most recent.”

“This looks like your motorcycle.” She pointed to a picture. “But it’s missing the design on the side.”

Elias was impressed. She’d only seen his bike once, but he supposed it was hard to forget the detailing on the side.

“That’s before I put the design on it. It had been finished for two weeks when I decided it needed something extra.”

Initially, he’d built it as a gift from a wife to her husband, but a few weeks before he’d finished it, she informed him they were getting a divorce, and she didn’t care what he did with it.

She’d paid for it in full, and his policy stated he’d give a partial refund, minus the parts and hours worked during the time of cancellation.

She wouldn’t have gotten much, but he’d still offered, and she’d passed.

He got the distinct feeling she had used her soon-to-be husband’s money or joint funds to purchase it.

In the end, he’d kept it and made it his own.

“Maybe when the weather gets warmer, you’ll let me take you for a ride.”

“Maybe,” she responded, going over to the couch. “Is it hard building them alone?”

“No.” He joined her. “But I’m not always alone. Christa’s there sometimes.”

“Christa?” she asked, brow raised as he picked up one of the bottles from the table.

Elias refrained from smirking because her tone spoke loudly of curiosity. She wasn’t interested in knowing who Christa was, but who she was to him.

“She works for me part-time. Schedules consultations, orders parts, informs me of competitions, runs social media, and passes me tools now and then.”

“I see. How did you transition from doing tattoos to building motorcycles?”

“I didn’t transition. I still tattoo.”

“Okay, then, what made you want to add it to your repertoire?”

“It’s more accurate to say that I was building bikes before tattooing. Marco and I found a dirt bike sitting outside a house when we were younger. It had a sign that said, ‘Take it if you want,’ and it listed what was wrong with it, which was everything. We took it anyway, deciding we’d fix it.

Our parents, wanting to teach us the value of hard work and a dollar, wouldn’t buy any of the parts for us.

We did chores and worked around the neighborhood to buy all the parts for the bike, which we worked on with one of our dads supervising.

We took almost a year to finish it, but I had fun doing it. ”

The smile she gave him always did something to him.

He’d always wonder how his cousin had found himself so utterly enamored, how he had fallen as hard as he did, when he did.

Elias could damn near relate when he got a glimpse of that smile, when she wasn’t putting up ten-foot walls and trying to keep him at bay, when they both knew what she wanted was for him to come closer.

He wasn’t sure why she was doing it, but he’d resigned himself to going at her pace.

“How old were you?”

“Twelve,” he replied.

“Okay, then, what made you become a tattoo artist?”

“I liked to draw, and my cousin had already gone through the course while in college. I didn’t want to waste more years of my life on academics I wouldn’t use in the real world, so I pursued that instead after graduating high school.”

“Aww. You followed in his footsteps,” Eri teased.

“You could say that. I don’t have any siblings. It’s me, Marco, and Vince. As the oldest, we looked up to him.”

“Mm, Avi isn’t a big fan of Vince.”

“No one is. He ensures that, but I cut him slack sometimes. He’s…spoiled. Marco and I excluded him after a while, which probably didn’t help. We might have even subconsciously excluded him before accidentally.”

“Why do you think that?” Eri asked, and he could read the genuine curiosity on her face.

“In Italian families, we like to live in close proximity. Our parents lived next door to each other, and when we moved here, they found houses on the same block. Federico, Vince’s dad, moved across town to be away from the family.”

“So he broke the dynamic.”

“I guess we didn’t feel like family to him.”

“That’s dumb. Sure, it’s probably tough being an in-law at first, but the others were handling it well.”

Elias realized she didn’t know, and why would she? It wasn’t a big deal. “Technically, he was the only ‘true’ in-law.”

“What?”

“Marco and I are double cousins.”

“Your moms are sisters. Your dads are…cousins?”

“Right. So we’re first and second cousins.”

She laughed. “That’s kind of cool. But I guess I get it. He felt like the odd man out; not being related to anyone outside of marriage and moving away made his son the odd kid out.”

“Exactly. Then he started doing ridiculous shit, making himself the odd man out. At first, we thought he was acting out, going through a change after his dad died. It took me a few years to realize my zia is like the serpent that whispered to Eve.”

“I’m sorry.”

Elias tilted his head at her. “Why?”

“Because it bothers you. You feel bad about excluding him when you were kids, but I don’t think it would have made a difference. Not if she was feeding him poison.”

“I feel bad for the kid he was, but I don’t feel bad for him now. I tolerate him until he irritates me.” He shook his head. “Enough about that. You’re an only child?”

“...yes.”

He caught the hesitation but decided not to question it. He knew she likely wouldn’t tell him and he changed the subject.

By the time eleven o’clock rolled around, they’d had takeout, watched a movie, she’d pretended to be annoyed with him, and she still hadn’t heard from Mickey. Elias was sure it would be tomorrow before she did.

“You can stay here tonight,” he told her as she yawned. “I have a spare room.”

“I don’t think I have a choice but to take you up on that.”

He led her to the guest room, leaving her for a few minutes to retrieve something for her to sleep in from his room. When he brought it back to her, she was removing her earrings.

“Here you go. Everything else you’ll need is in the bathroom. There are spare toothbrushes under the sink, and I’m across the hall if you need me.”

“Thank you.”

“You don’t need to thank me.”

“I do because you could have easily left me to deal with the problem myself.”

“I could have,” he started, tipping her chin up. “If I were some young ass boy who didn’t care about your safety and well-being, but I’m not. Do me a favor and remember that.” He didn’t allow her to respond as he brushed his thumb across her cheek. “Goodnight, Eri.”

He left, checking the front door and turning the lights off before entering his bedroom. He needed a cold shower. Going at her pace always tested his patience, and tonight had been no different.