13. Elle
ELLE
The room changes when Lorcan steps over the velvet ropes.
It doesn’t get louder.
It gets quieter.
That scares me more.
The men who were shouting a second ago settle into their seats. The women with bright mouths and dead eyes go still. Even the staff at the bar stop moving for a beat too long. Everyone watches him. It’s hard not to.
Tiernan shifts beside me, and the cuff tugs against my wrist.
“Who is he fighting?” I whisper.
Tiernan looks toward the far side of the room. “Him.”
A man is dragged out of a darkened area. He doesn’t look willing.
I swallow hard. “Why?”
“Because he pissed Lorcan off,” Fintan says from across the booth.
Apparently that is all that is needed.
Lorcan holds his hands out, and two men with tape wrap his hands and wrists. Lorcan doesn’t look at or speak to either of them. They finish up quickly and move away.
The man he is fighting stumbles as one of Lorcan’s men shoves him forward. He is dressed well, but his shirt is torn at the collar, and one side of his face is already swollen. His eyes dart around the room, searching for mercy in a place clearly built without it.
My stomach turns, and my blood goes cold. I turn back to the ring as the man is pushed under the ropes. He falls to one knee, catches himself, then scrambles upright. Lorcan stands in the centre of the stone floor, shirtless, calm, every inch of him controlled and terrifying while he waits.
The other man talks fast. I can’t hear the words over the low rumble of the room, but I see desperation in the movement of his mouth. He holds up both hands.
Lorcan doesn’t respond.
He hits him.
No warning. No posturing. No circling.
Lorcan’s first punch connects with the man’s jaw before his hands are fully up, and the crack of it cuts through the low murmur of the room. The man’s head snaps sideways. His knees buckle. He stays upright through sheer animal panic and nothing else.
A small noise escapes my throat.
Tiernan’s hand presses flat against my knee under the table. It’s a warning to stay still, quiet, and watch.
The man spits blood onto the stone and tries to back up, but there’s nowhere to go.
The make-shift ring isn’t large. Lorcan follows him without hurrying, each step deliberate, his expression the same blank mask I’ve been trying to read since he walked into my flat with my grocery bag and sat backwards on my kitchen chair.
He hits him again.
This time to the ribs. The sound is different. Lower. Worse.
The man doubles over with a sound that turns my stomach inside out, but he straightens up, and anger must fill his veins because he makes a decision.
Everyone can see it. Even me, and I’m not really sure what the hell is going on.
He clenches his fists and lashes out at Lorcan. Lorcan takes the hit with a smile that chills me.
Lorcan takes another fist to the cheekbone and doesn’t move back an inch.
The man swings again, wild this time. Lorcan ducks it without effort and drives his elbow into the man’s face. The crack is obscene. I feel it in my back teeth. The man staggers sideways, and one of Lorcan’s men grabs him by the collar before he can fall, holding him upright.
I can’t look away now. My body has decided that freezing is the only option available to me right now, and my eyes are stuck on the ring like they’ve been nailed there. Lorcan shoves him away, and then the real fight starts.
I flinch as Lorcan hits the man in the face. The man lashes back, catching Lorcan on the chin.
The crowd cheers, bloodthirsty, with money exchanging hands.
Illegal fighting and gambling. No wonder they want this kept a secret, but surely they can just pay a lawyer to get rid of the charges, or pay off the judge and police?
Or maybe that isn’t how this works. Or maybe it’s not even the point.
What’s that old saying? Snitches get stitches? In this case, snitches get dead.
If this was a lesson in keeping my mouth shut, I learn it fast.
Lorcan appears to break the man’s nose with a left hook that comes so fast I barely see it move.
The man’s hands fly up to his face.
The crowd reacts with a grim appreciation, like they’ve just watched something beautiful instead of something that makes me want to empty my stomach onto the red dress Tiernan slid down my body an hour ago.
Lorcan doesn’t wait for him to reset. His taped fist flies out again, his muscles bunching tightly. I focus on his chest, on the tattoos crawling across his skin.
Lorcan catches him with another shot to the body, and the man folds forward with a sound like something tearing. He doesn’t fall. He should fall. The fact that he doesn’t seems to make Lorcan hit him harder.
I press back against the booth.
Tiernan’s hand stays flat on my knee.
The man manages to get one arm up and block the next hit, but it costs him. His legs buckle, and he goes down on one knee. The crowd shifts, leaning in. Someone shouts something I can’t make out. Someone else laughs.
Lorcan steps back.
He waits.
The man drags himself upright. His face is a mess of blood and swelling. His shirt hangs off one shoulder. He looks at Lorcan with the eyes of someone who has stopped calculating and started praying.
Lorcan hits him twice in quick succession.
The man goes down.
He hits the stone floor and doesn’t get back up. His body curls slightly, one arm underneath him, and then he is still.
The crowd erupts.
I press so hard into the back of the booth that the leather creaks under me. Tiernan’s hand doesn’t move from my knee. The cuff pulls tight as my wrist tries to draw back instinctively, and the metal bites.
Lorcan stands over the man. He doesn’t look down at him. He looks at me.
Across the room, through the cigar smoke and the crowds, he finds me in this booth like I’m the only fixed point in the space.
His chest rises and falls with controlled breath.
The man on the floor in front of him is motionless, and Lorcan looks like he’s just returned from a mildly inconvenient errand.
I don’t look away.
I’m disgusted. I’m fascinated. I’m not sure what that prickle over my skin is doing right now. Fintan stares at me from across the booth. His blue eyes don’t miss a thing.
I force myself to breathe slowly through my nose and look away from the ring.
The man on the floor still hasn’t moved.
Two of Lorcan’s men drag him out from under the velvet ropes by his ankles.
No one looks twice. No one stops their conversation for longer than a second. The women are already laughing again.
This is normal to them.
That is perhaps the most terrifying thing about this entire night.
Lorcan steps out of the ring and holds his hands out.
The same two men who taped them unwrap the tape, then place ice packs over them.
He grips one while keeping the other over his hand.
He doesn’t look at the man being dragged away or at the crowd and the money still changing hands.
He walks back toward the booth, and every person between him and me steps aside.
He stops at the edge of the table and looks down at me. He grips my chin and bends down to brush his lips over mine. “Do you see what happens to people who piss me off, Elle?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Do you plan to piss me off?”
“No.”
“Good girl,” he murmurs and then sits down while Fintan arranges the ice packs on his hands.
“Did he deserve that? Or was he a lesson for me?”
Blue eyes meet mine. “Both.”
Fintan hands Lorcan a glass of water, and Lorcan drinks half of it, keeping his eyes on me.
I sit with that answer turning over in my head. The man on the floor was both a punishment he deserved, and a warning designed specifically for me. Lorcan doesn’t waste anything. Not a move, not a word, not a beating.
I file that away somewhere deep.
The crowd around us is settling back into its usual rhythm.
Drinks ordered, money counted, conversations resuming at full volume now that the fight is over.
A woman two tables away tips her head back and laughs at something, the sound bright and completely hollow.
She is wearing more diamonds than I am, and she watched a man get beaten unconscious without blinking.
I wonder what it costs to become that.
Lorcan sets the water glass down and looks at his hands. The knuckles are red. He flexes his fingers once, testing them, then seems satisfied with whatever answer that gives him.
“Who was he?” I ask, because I can’t help it.
“Someone who thought my name was a suggestion rather than a guarantee,” Lorcan says.
“That tells me nothing.”
“It isn’t supposed to. You don’t ask questions, Elle. You sit, you watch, you fuck me when I demand it.”
The words land exactly as he intends them to.
Sit, watch, fuck him on demand. Clean and simple. A set of instructions for an object, not a person.
I look down at my lap. My free hand is still while the cuffed wrist rests against the leather booth. The metal is warm from my skin. I’ve almost stopped noticing the weight of it, which might be the most disturbing thing that has happened tonight.
“You brought me here in handcuffs,” I say quietly. “You dressed me and put diamonds on me and dragged me to watch you beat a man half to death, and you’re telling me I don’t get to ask questions.”
“Correct,” Lorcan says.
“That’s not how people work.”
“You keep using that word: people.” He tilts his head slightly. “As if I’m confused about what you are.”
“I’m not your property.”
“Elle.” He says my name the way he said it in my flat earlier, quiet and flat, and it shuts me down faster than a shout would. His ice-blue eyes hold mine. “You are in my club. You are wearing my necklace. You came on my cock this afternoon, and you will do it again when I decide.”
“And that’s it?”
“For now.”
“Take me back to that prison then. I don’t want to sit here and be treated like an object.”
“Like a whore you mean.”
My temper ignites because he knows exactly how to rile me. He is doing it on purpose, so I keep my mouth shut and drop my gaze. It might look like submission to him, but I don’t care. If I start, I won’t stop and then it will be me in that ring being battered to death in this empire of violence.
“Remove her from my sight,” Lorcan says after a beat where he clearly expected me to bite back.
“Move,” Tiernan says without hesitation, pushing against me.
I don’t give him a chance to do it again, and I rise. I’d rather be locked up in the penthouse than sitting here like this.
“I’ll be around later for that fuck,” Lorcan says, without looking at me.
“How nice for you. I’ll be asleep.”
His eyes shoot to mine, dangerous, deadly. “If you think that will stop me, you clearly haven’t learned fuck all tonight, Elle.” The look on his face makes my blood go cold.
I know it. I learn it fast, and I don’t push it any further. I turn away and let Tiernan steer me through the crowd. I concentrate on putting one heel in front of the other without stumbling, without giving anyone in this room a reason to remember my face.
The noise drops behind us as we move through a heavy door and into a narrow corridor. The sounds of the crowd muffle and then vanish entirely when the door swings shut.
I breathe for the first time in what feels like an hour.
Tiernan doesn’t slow down. But then he suddenly stops dead and turns, pressing me into the wall with his body as the sounds of a man talking comes closer.
I look up at him in surprise. He stares down at me with those green eyes that do something to my insides.
He places his free hand on the wall next to my head and then captures my lips in a kiss that is rough but not painful.
The man and maybe a couple of other people walk past us, not even pausing to stare at this display.
Tiernan ends the kiss by biting my bottom lip gently, a smirk on his lips. “Snowden.”
I frown. “What?”
“That was the man who has it out for Lorcan. He will use you to get to him if he gets the chance.”
“So you kissed me instead?”
“I protected you. He didn’t know it was you.”
I stare at him. The corridor is empty now, the footsteps faded, and it’s just the two of us pressed against the cold wall with the muffled sounds of the club somewhere behind that door.
“You could have just turned me around,” I say.
“Could have. Didn’t.” He doesn’t move back. His body is still close enough that I can feel his heat, and the cuff between our wrists means there isn’t anywhere to go even if I wanted to put distance between us.
“Is this the part where you expect me to beg?” I murmur.
He chuckles, but it’s dark, not amused, and he steps back, tugging me forward by the cuff, and we’re moving again.
I touch my bottom lip with my free hand. It tingles where his teeth caught it. I drop my hand and concentrate on the corridor instead.
It’s long and lit with a single strip of light overhead that flickers at the far end. The walls are bare concrete. Whatever expensive veneer the club presents to its members stops here, behind the door, where the bones of the place show through.
“Move,” he says.
I move because what choice do I have when the six-two monster is hauling me along with his giant strides.
He keeps close as we navigate the narrow corridor which inclines towards the outdoors.
We reach a heavy fire door at the end, and Tiernan pushes it open with his shoulder.
Cold air hits me immediately, sharp and wet.
We’re in the narrow alley at the back of the building where we entered earlier.
The door swings shut behind us with a thud.
A black car idles at the far end of the alley. Tiernan steers me toward it without breaking stride.
I concentrate on the uneven ground under my heels and not on the fact that my lip is still tingling, or that I just watched a man get beaten unconscious by the man who fucked me senseless earlier.
The driver gets out and opens the rear door without a word.
Tiernan reaches the car and stops, looking down at me. “Get in, Elle.”
Our stare holds for several seconds before I give up and get in, dragging him with me by the cuff.