17. Logan
Maddoc rapshis knuckles on the door jamb and walks into my room, a courtesy that I know is meant to avoid startling me, even though it’s unnecessary. I saw him coming on one of the monitors.
I swivel my chair around to face him and look up from the surveillance logs I was reviewing, my heart rate steady and my mind deliberately empty of everything but the facts on hand. The trail of digital breadcrumbs I’ve been following to try and determine how McKenna’s people got past ours today. How they got to Troy. To one of ours.
Rage surges inside me again, threatening that emptiness, but I automatically tamp it down and tuck it away where it won’t interfere with my focus before it gets out of hand. Emotional reactions can’t be avoided, but instead of letting this one out to create chaos and destruction, I do what I’ve become so adept at over the years and compartmentalize it. Store it away like fuel, ready to be lit on fire when it can actually be useful.
“Anything?” Maddoc asks, nodding toward the data on the monitor in front of me.
His rage is also admirably contained. Not being ruled by it is part of the reason he’s such a great leader. But it’s still there, visible to someone who knows him as well as I do by the tight set of his jaw and the pulsing veins at his temples.
“Nothing we can move on yet, but McKenna’s organization is sloppy. I will find out how they got to him.”
But not necessarily what they learned from him. Troy took the knowledge of whatever they managed to torture out of him to his grave.
Maddoc’s lips tighten into a grim line, and he gives me a short, sharp nod. “I know you will, but it will have to wait.”
I school myself before I can show any surprise. Maddoc would never let anything get in the way of avenging his people, not unless it was the need to take care of the ones still living. He obviously has a reason to tell me to put my investigation into the West Point attack on hold, so I wait for it.
“I’ve got to go deal with some shit at our borders in the aftermath of Troy’s death,” he starts.
My mind takes that statement and immediately races ahead, making a series of connections between the facts I’ve already uncovered about this attack and the status of our relations with the city’s other gangs. I mentally sift through what kind of message McKenna’s bold recklessness will send to both our allies and enemies, and after a moment, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what Maddoc intends to head out and take care of.
I nod, approving. He’s not just our leader because of his ruthless drive—although he definitely has that in spades—but also because of his talent for seeing the big picture and strategically looking ten moves ahead of everyone else.
Maddoc nods back, acknowledging that I’ve brought myself up to speed and don’t need him to elaborate with further details.
“While I’m gone,” he goes on, “I need you to figure out Chloe’s trail, especially where she’s been recently in relation to that bus depot she made that call from.”
“We need to track her down,” I say, weighing and rejecting different ideas on how to manage that when we haven’t been able to so far. But failure isn’t an option anymore. Gaining access to her inheritance will change everything, and if McKenna found out about it, if his people got that information from Troy before Troy died...
“Finding her just got more urgent,” Maddoc says grimly, following the same train of thought. “We don’t know what West Point knows now, but we sure as shit know what lengths they’ll go to. We need to find her now, Logan.”
I nod. “I can—”
“Work with Riley,” he cuts in. “Get her in here and find out what insights she’s got about where her sister might be hiding.” He gestures toward the monitors on my desk. “You’re going to need her eyes on that to figure out where to focus your attention. What kinds of things Chloe might do when she’s scared. Where she’d feel safe.”
I stiffen, the idea of inviting Riley into my room without the buffer of my brothers here with us too makes me decidedly uncomfortable. It was different when I had her in here solely to stitch her up. That was a finite task with the added safeguard of her pain to hold her attention. But this space is mine. It’s where I come as close to relaxing and dropping my guard as I’ve ever been able to, and I’m not at all sure I’m ready to welcome her into my sanctuary.
Maddoc frowns, and just like I can see through his tells, I know he’s seen through mine.
“That’s fine,” I say quickly, realizing how foolish my hesitation is. “I’ll go get her now.”
Maddoc is right about everything, and me being uncomfortable is just one more unpleasant emotion I can and will ignore if it gets in the way.
We need to find Chloe.
I stand, intending to follow through and go find Riley, but Maddoc, of course, doesn’t let it go that easily. He grips my shoulder, staring into my eyes. “You okay? Got your shit under control, even if she pushes your buttons?”
I nod, but he keeps staring hard, like he’s trying to determine whether or not I really mean it.
I’m not offended. Both Maddoc and Dante are better at people than I am, and sometimes they see me better than I see myself.
“I was gonna take Dante with me,” Maddoc goes on, “but if you’re not sure about working with Riley on your own, I can have him stay and—”
“No.” It’s my turn to cut him off. “There’s no need.”
Even though, if I’m honest, it’s tempting. But after what West Point just pulled, Maddoc will need Dante to have his back. And also… not all my uneasiness at the idea of being alone with Riley is about not wanting her in my space. A part of me is drawn to the idea.
A part I’m not sure what to do with, so I ignore it.
Maddoc takes me at my word, and when we both leave my room, he heads out with Dante while I go to find Riley. She’s in her room. I already know it from the monitors, but I hesitate a moment before barging in and, instead, knock.
After a moment, she cracks open the door.
And stares at me.
“I need you,” I tell her after a beat of awkward silence, unaccountably put out by her standoffishness. She usually has more spirit, even when she’s upset—especially when she’s upset—but now, it’s dimmed, as if she’s retreated behind a wall.
I don’t like it.
She raises an eyebrow and crosses her arms over her chest, annoying me even further as she waits me out with her face carefully kept blank, clearly expecting more of an explanation than I’ve given her.
Fine.
“Maddoc pointed out that you can assist me. We need to find Chloe.”
“Of course we do,” she says, the stiff set of her shoulders softening as she drops her arms. “But do you have something new? Because so far we’ve had shit luck with that.”
“No,” I say with a grimace I fail to control. “We don’t have anything new, but McKenna might.”
Riley’s eyes go wide. “You think West Point did that to your… to that man, because of Chloe?”
“I think they know we’ve mobilized our people to search for something, and I think McKenna wanted to find out why.”
And to let us know in the most brutal way possible that he’s getting bolder about interfering in Reaper business, but I don’t say that part.
I don’t have to. Riley is clearly thinking along the same lines.
“He’s a fucking sadist,” she snaps.
I nod. Austin McKenna most definitely has a monster inside him, and I’ve seen what that can do when the host has no desire to control it.
I grew up in the shadow of that kind of monster.
“It’s one of the reasons we can’t afford to let him take over more of the city. We need…”
Riley’s eyes narrow when I don’t finish, but of course she understands what I’m alluding to.
“My sister’s money,” she says flatly.
I don’t deny it, and she looks away for a moment, swallowing hard. When she looks back, her eyes are determined. Instead of ripping into me about how cold and calculating she finds our plan for Chloe’s inheritance, she lifts her chin.
“What can I do?”
I know she’s not agreeing, she’s simply being pragmatic. Watching her actively choose not to let her emotions take over gives me an inexplicable sensation in my chest, almost as if it’s pulling me toward her.
I’ve never felt anything like it before, and it’s unsettling.
I turn away. “Come to my room.”
An odd thrill goes through me when she immediately complies, and when she steps through the door to my room, invades my private space at my own invitation, another strange feeling washes over me.
I’m too aware of her. She’s too present. Too vibrant. She changes everything, as if she disturbs the very air just by breathing it.
I do my best to compartmentalize the odd sensation and excuse myself to collect a second chair from the library down the hall. When I come back, she’s seated in my chair, and I freeze.
“Logan?” she asks, swiveling it around to face me.
I mean to tell her to get the fuck out, but no words come out. And when I place the second chair down next to her and slip into it, I don’t pull away when our knees touch. When our thighs press together. When she leans into me, smelling of something smoky and intriguing, to see the digitized maps of Halston that I’ve overlaid with all the information we’ve already gathered about Chloe’s trail as I quickly click through them, explaining what I’ve inferred so far.
“Stop,” she says, an oddly breathless note in her voice as she points to the screen. “Can you switch to a satellite view?”
I do it, an unfamiliar tension thrumming in my body. Light from the monitor glints off the blue jewel in her nose, and the quick smile she throws my way feels like an electrical arc snapping between us.
“We should check there,” she says, pointing to a building on the screen. “I know she’s caught a few punk shows there with her friends.”
I drag my eyes off her face and mark the building with a pin as she rambles on about her sister’s taste in music.
“And there,” she says, pointing out another. And then another.
I zoom in on the grid-like streets surrounding the bus depot. “Let’s concentrate here, then move outward in concentric circles.”
She nods, and we spend another twenty minutes discussing her sister’s habits and picking out possible areas she may have sought refuge.
Despite my best efforts to stay focused, Riley’s subtly enticing scent and the heat of her body so close to mine are distracting… although not quite as distracting as the picture she weaves with her stories about Chloe.
My gaze drifts toward the keepsake box on my dresser, and for a split second, I let myself wonder how different it would have been to have had a little sister to look out for. Then I yank my eyes away and stop wondering, because I know from experience that I won’t be able to contain the rage, or the monster inside me, if I let my thoughts stray toward what life would have been like if Emma had lived.
Riley is staring at me.
“What?” I grunt.
She shakes her head, her lips quirking up at the corners. “Nothing.”
I narrow my eyes. “If you lie to me, we won’t find your sister.”
Riley raises a single eyebrow, not looking even a little bit intimidated, and I’m torn between admiration and reminding her that I held her life in my hands—literally—just a few weeks ago.
“Really? You’re going to go there? This isn’t about Chloe. I was just curious about your… space.”
“My space,” I repeat flatly, my pulse speeding up without my permission.
She waves a hand in the air, presumably taking in my room decor. “You know, your things.”
“What things?” I ask, a dangerous edge creeping into my voice when I realize that instead of putting a hard stop to this conversation, a part of me wants to lean in to her curiosity.
She starts to answer me, but then stops.
Instead of being grateful that she’s dropped it, I find myself pushing. “Just say it.”
Riley still hesitates, and I can’t help noticing how close we are now. Close enough that I can easily read the wariness in her eyes.
“It’s just… your room is so neat and tidy,” she finally says, “and that first day—”
“When you snuck in,” I interrupt.
“When you tried to kill me,” she snaps right back.
I nod, a faint flush of shame moving through me, and Riley answers with an equally faint smile before she continues.
“But since I didn’t touch anything—”
“Yes, you did.”
“Okay, fine! I did, but that’s the thing. It’s so tidy in here that I made extra sure that anything I did touch got put right back in its spot! So how did you know I was even in here?”
For a moment, I tense. Is she mocking me? I have no reason to care if she is, and yet I still don’t like it. But then I realize she’s not, so I tell her.
“The rug.”
At least, that was my first clue.
She swivels the chair to stare at it. “You, what, saw my footprint on it or something?”
She almost sounds awed, and I laugh, a short, scratchy bark that feels entirely unfamiliar as it leaves my throat.
“No,” I say quickly to cover up my own shock at my reaction. I stand and go to the rug, then crouch down to show her. “The corner of this pattern was out of alignment with the floorboards. This edge… here, should be parallel to the seam… here.”
Riley blinks, then cocks her head to the side, staring not at the rug, but at me. “And you actually noticed that?”
I stand. “Among other things.”
Like the slight gap where she’d failed to fully shut my dresser drawer. The faint smudge her fingers had left on the metal base of my lamp. The curve in the cord connecting the eReader I’d been charging to the wall, when of course I’d made sure to leave it lying perfectly straight and perpendicular to the wall.
“Did you just notice, or did it… bother you?” Riley asks after a slight hesitation.
I frown. Is she joking? Of course it bothered me. My fingers flex spasmodically by my sides, remembering the soft feel of her skin as I gripped her throat, the rapid flutter of her pulse under my hands, the unsettling tension that built between us before Dante came in and brought me back to myself.
I clasp my hands together behind my back, forcing my fingers to be still. “You came in uninvited. You were in my space. You touched my things.”
Riley nods, looking thoughtful.
“What?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.
She answers my question with another question. “Have you always been so particular about things like that?”
No one asks me these things. My brothers understand me on a level deeper than words, and they accept my traits and exacting requirements without question. But we don’t talk about things like this. We just exist.
And it’s much, much more comfortable than Riley’s gentle, insidious questions.
I want to lash out at her, but I also have the most absurd impulse to tell her the truth. To explain that I have a good reason for needing to be particular. That it’s a learned skill, a survival mechanism, not a weakness.
Keeping my things in order gave me a small measure of control while growing up in a household where Emma and I had none, and noticing when they were out of order was sometimes all the warning I’d get when the monster inside our mother took over. And after she…
Afterward, when it was just me, living on the streets with no space to call my own and no one to watch out for, then yes. I’m not stupid. I know my habit of being “particular” about my things slowly evolved from survival to an actual compulsion.
But it still kept me alive.
And if, now, it feels like a prison sometimes? Well, at least it’s one without unpleasant surprises lurking around every corner. Without… dangerous ones.
“Logan?”
I don’t even realize Riley left the chair and joined me on the rug until her fingertips brush my arm, so lightly that the touch is barely there. A butterfly kiss.
My eyes snap up to meet hers, and I’m perfectly aware how my gaze typically affects people, but she doesn’t jump back.
If my pale eyes are as colorless as chips of ice, her warm brown ones are the opposite.
“No. I haven’t always been like this,” I find myself answering without meaning to.
She nods like I said more than that, and for a moment I’m overcome with the oddest feeling that I did. That I told her more than I meant to, or else that she simply understood what I didn’t have to say, the way Maddoc and Dante—only Maddoc and Dante—often do.
“I’m sorry I came in here uninvited,” she says after a moment, her fingers still hovering just above my arm. “I didn’t know it would matter so much to you.”
I blink. I’m not used to apologies. Neither to giving them nor to receiving them.
“I’m also sorry,” I say stiffly. “For what I did about it. After. I don’t… always have control.”
How could I? I’m the child of a monster, and my mother passed that heritage on to me. Order helps. Routine helps. I may have ways to keep it on a leash and—usually—stop it from doing anything awful, but the monster is still there and always will be.
It’s a part of me, all the same.
A part that, just by thinking about it like this, has it trying to rise up and break free.
But then Riley pulls her fingers away from my arm and rubs one over her chest, directly between the slight swell of her breasts, and the monster loses its hold on me, my attention suddenly riveted to the spot.
It’s where I marked her.
My breath quickens, and I don’t even realize I’ve moved too, until I find my fingers lying over hers.
They tremble. Hers, I think, or maybe mine. Maybe both.
“You cut me,” she whispers, not pushing me away.
Heat races through me, swift and overwhelming, and I drag my fingers over the spot. I can’t look away. I want her shirt gone so I can see. “Did it leave a scar?”
“Yes,” she says, a shudder going through her body when I stroke the spot again. Her nipples pebble under her shirt. Then her chin lifts. “And you seemed to have perfect control the night you gave it to me. That wasn’t an accident.”
She’s not wrong about that, but she is wrong about me having perfect control. If I’d had that, I never would have gone to her room that night.
But I did have some control. Enough to keep the monster in check. Not enough to keep it from taking over, but enough that I was able to refocus my rage and confusion over the way she affected me—the way she still affects me—into the clean, precise, methodical action of cutting up her clothes.
I systematically shredded each item she brought into our home, and then, when that wasn’t enough, I climbed on top of her and cut the ones she was wearing off her while she slept. All without marking her skin.
And that still wasn’t enough.
“You wanted to cut me,” Riley whispers, her voice trembling as she captures my fingers and holds them still.
I can feel her heart beating under my fingertips, and the heat of her body sends a sizzling awareness all the way down to my cock. It starts to thicken and fill, but shame fills me too.
She’s right. I cut her on purpose that night. I did have enough control.
I did it because I wanted to.
“I’m… sorry,” I repeat, blood rushing in my ears as my body sways toward her, the memory both repelling me and drawing me closer with a magnetic pull.
Riley’s breath hitches, her pupils blowing wide, and heat spills down my spine at the way she subtly tips her head back and looks up at me.
Not glaring. Not accusing. It looks like an invitation, and I freeze. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never let myself get close to a woman like this. Not physically, and not any other way, either.
I’ve never admitted the kinds of truths I’ve just shared with her to anyone.
I’ve never even wanted to… until now.
The monster starts to rise up inside me, either sensing my weakness or recognizing the danger, but I beat it back down.
It can’t have her.
A chime sounds, and Riley jumps back, her cheeks flooding with color as she drops my hand and looks back toward the monitors. “Is that, um, something important?”
Both grateful and resentful for the interruption, I tell her, “It’s an alert I set up.”
I sidestep around her, careful not to touch her again, and focus all of my attention on the commands I need to type into the keyboard, chasing the information my spyware just coughed up.
Riley slips into the chair next to me, and I don’t notice that compelling, enticing scent she has or the soft feel of her long, wavy hair as the bold colors brush my arm. Instead, I fall back on what’s familiar. I block out the disruptive… feelings and point out what I’m looking for on the monitors in front of us, quickly zooming through the city maps as Riley gives her input.
She leans in close, focusing on the task at hand, and we get back to work.