Chapter Nine – Laina
A pounding headache was the first thing that told me I was slowly regaining my consciousness. My ears came back next, because I heard myself groan. Every minute that went by I came back into myself, until my eyelids finally listened to me and lifted.
Everything was fuzzy. I couldn’t quite remember how I got here or where I was. I didn’t recognize the room I was in—a living room, it looked like. A room whose windows had their curtains drawn. Nice, modern, not exactly the kind of living room you’d expect to wake up in after you were kidnapped.
For a third freaking time.
Yeah, yeah. It was getting old.
I tried to get up, but I was fastened with rope to a wooden chair, the only thing that was out of place in this nice living room.
My ankles were separated and also tied to the chair’s legs.
I glanced down and noticed my metal fingers were gone; I only saw the stubs of my pinky and ring finger on my left hand.
And then I saw where my fingers were—on the coffee table, a few feet away, sitting right next to the clawed gauntlet Fang made for me.
Someone went digging. It came back to me slowly. I’d thought Kelly had been in my room, but she wasn’t. This person, whoever it was, had been, and they’d dug deep to find that gauntlet. Silly me for not checking the very night I first suspected.
Kelly. Crap. I found her passed out on her bed. She must’ve been chloroformed like me. I hoped she was okay; I didn’t see her here, which meant whoever took me took me alone. If I had to guess, it was someone working for Tessa, the bitch.
I struggled against the restraints on my wrists, but they were tied pretty tightly.
Regardless of how I moved, the rope wouldn’t budge.
I had no idea how long I’d been out; if it had been hours or less than that.
With all the windows blocked with curtains, I didn’t know what time it was.
The lights were all on in the room, so everything was bright, but that didn’t change the fact that it could’ve been midnight.
I just had the worst luck, didn’t I?
This was all too familiar to me. After being kidnapped twice, I wasn’t so much freaked out as I was simply annoyed at the whole thing. Like, what a nuisance. Couldn’t we have skipped this whole kidnapping and gotten straight to the point?
With that headache pounding away in my head, I spoke as loud as I could, “Hello? Anyone there?” I sounded like I was both annoyed and bored beyond belief. After being kidnapped three times now, I was getting pretty fed up with all this shit. “Can we get this show on the road?”
A few quiet seconds went by, and then I heard a deep voice say, “You’re impatient, aren’t you?” The man came from my left, from an adjacent hall, and I couldn’t hide my shock at seeing his face.
The sexy tattooed man from the club.
Figured. He wasn’t there to score with any college girls—he was there to stalk me. This guy, whoever he was, must’ve been working for Tessa. Should’ve known an attractive older guy like this didn’t just pop up out of thin air. They were not a dime a dozen.
“You,” I said, unable to sound anything but surprised as I watched him sit on the couch across from me. The only thing between us was the coffee table, and the two items of mine on top of it.
I regretted to inform you the man was just as attractive now as he was then in the club.
You’d think the light from the room would shed harsh angles on his face or point to more wrinkles, but nope.
The heavily-tatted man was still drop-dead gorgeous, and his gray hair was a solid, ashy color, not salt-and-peppered like was typical.
Damn. I could’ve stared at him all night, but that would be wrong for a whole multitude of reasons.
“Kelly,” I started to say my roomie’s name, but I barely managed to get it out before he spoke, “She’s fine.
She’ll wake up with a groggy head, like I imagine you just did.
She wasn’t the one I wanted. You were.” He leaned back and lifted his arms, resting them on the couch’s back as he continued to stare at me.
Not with hate, but with a firm intensity that didn’t seem like it was going anywhere.
“Let me guess,” I spoke dryly, “you work for Tessa.”
He smirked at me, dimples beneath his thick gray stubble. He was well-groomed; I couldn’t see any facial hair growing on his neck, over his blackout tattoo. It followed the square cut of his chin, which gave him an even more imposing aura.
“I do what needs to be done,” the man said.
“So you’re a master at kidnapping girls, then?”
“Again, I do what needs to be done. You… I’ve been watching you a while, Laina, and I just can’t put my finger on you.” He abruptly leaned forward and snatched my clawed gauntlet off the coffee table, holding it up between us. “Take this, for instance. Found it buried in your closet.”
“Oh, that? That’s part of my Halloween costume—” My deadpanned response made him chuckle.
He traced one of the blades on it, all the way down to the pointed tip, and once his finger reached the tip, he pressed down and drew a dot of blood instantly.
“A Halloween prop doesn’t come this sharp.
You know it, I know it, any person with common sense would know it—which makes me wonder what a girl like you would be doing with a thing like this. ”
“What do you want to hear?” I asked with a shrug, or as much of a shrug as I could muster, given I was tied up. “That one of my boyfriends made me that claw so I could use it on smug assholes like you?”
Okay, that might’ve been going too far. Oopsies.
His smirk broke out into a full-blown grin then, and he set down the claw, getting up and approaching me. He circled me like a vulture, studying me with the probable intent of making me feel small and inferior. Too bad his tactics wouldn’t work on me.
“Yeah, you’re talking about Fang, aren’t you?
” he asked while he circled me. “He is a peculiar one, I’ll give him that…
as are you. You made not only a reclusive shut-in fall for you, but also one of the most respected men from the local mafia group…
and, somehow, Kieran.” He stopped circling when he stood directly before me. “What, one wasn’t enough for you?”
Of course this guy knew me. If he was the one who’d been watching me, he’d had plenty of time to do recon, to get to know me and my guys. Shit. That meant Tessa knew everything he did.
“You know kids my age. We’re greedy, think we’re owed the world.” That came out less deadpanned and more bitter, but whatever. The joke still stood on its own.
He was smiling when he slowly knelt in front of me. “How did you lure Kieran away? I’m curious.”
Lure Kieran away? From what? From his psycho sister? As if it was hard. As if I did it on purpose and Kieran wasn’t the one who latched onto me, first. Still, if this was Tessa’s way of trying to find out the truth, there was only one thing I could say.
“Why don’t you untie me, and then I’ll tell you everything you want to know?”
His gaze fell, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think he was actually mulling it over.
Seconds passed, and then his stare snapped up.
“I’ve watched you for so long, longer than I’ve ever watched anyone.
I think you lured Kieran without meaning to.
I think it just happened and Tessa is giving you way too much credit. ”
Shit. This guy… he was good. Too good.
“And you know what else?” He reached for me, for my hair, specifically, which he then ran between two fingers, curling the pink and blue strands around it. “This hair… these eyes.” He stopped fiddling with my hair to grab me by the chin and force me to look at him—as if I would look anywhere else.
“It’s not real,” he whispered, his voice so low I had to fight the shiver that threatened to creep up my spine the moment it hit my ears.
“What is real is this.” The man released my chin and dropped his hand to my left, where he gingerly touched the side of my hand.
“What’s real,” he paused as he pulled away and stood, pointing to the coffee table, “are those. That’s the real you, not this pastel goth bullshit. ”
Pastel goth? Was that an actual thing?
He went to sit down on the couch, and this time he spread his knees like he owned the damn place, which I supposed he just might’ve.
“Who are you?” I asked, finding my voice after that whole thing.
Not going to lie, I still felt his touch on my hand, on my face.
It was a weird sensation, ghostly, and with those knees of his spread, well…
a girl with a thing for sexy older men could only be so strong before her willpower caved and she glanced somewhere she probably shouldn’t have.
The man wore all black. He didn’t give off rich-person energy. No, he was more gangster than mafia. And those pants? They weren’t exactly loose.
Oh, no, they were tight in all the right places.
“You obviously work for Tessa,” I went on once I forced my gaze to avert back to his face, “but you’re not some low-ranking grunt. You’re someone who knows how to take care of business.”
“That I am,” he said. “You can call me Jason.”
“Jason,” I repeated his name, liking the sound of it, for whatever reason. “Well, Jason, let me ask you this: if you work for Tessa, why am I not dead? Why didn’t you just kill me so she could be rid of me forever and finally get what she wants?”
The smirk lingered on his face as he asked, “What is it you think she wants?”
“My dad. To climb the political ladder. Hell, maybe her end goal is to be the first lady someday.” I frowned to myself. “She wants more. She’s never happy with whatever she has. She’s always gotta be looking up, onto the next big thing.”
“You act like you’ve known her for years, but you didn’t really know her well before you tried to kick her out of the city.”