Chapter 3
Leo
I have made a huge mistake.
Once I am certain she is back home unharmed, I return to my private apartment in the city. I have a good view of the park from here, and a sense of lofty privacy that few others can afford.
The family home is cozier, but this space feels more like mine.
The family home is full of history and the trappings of generations of wealth.
This apartment is sparse, modern, and without decoration.
I have what I need, and nothing else. Once a week a woman comes in to clean.
She changes the sheets, cleans the bathrooms, vacuums the floors, wipes the surfaces and leaves.
There is rarely anything to tidy. I despise clutter and objects.
I like a clear mind, and I find a clear space facilitates that.
I can think of nothing but Ella Chick. The way she looked. How much smaller than me she was. How curvy she really is. How her ass felt underneath my hand when it made sharp contact with it.
There’s more, too. The rage I felt when I saw an unworthy wretch lunge for her as if she was just anybody’s woman.
She belonged to Teddy. She was his. And that means she is mine.
I think I killed him. I hope I did. I did not bother to check if he was alive or not, and by now there is a good chance he is not.
If such a death is good enough for the best man I have ever known, then it must be acceptable for scum like that.
She took her spanking well.
The sound of her gasps and moans, the ones she did involuntarily without even being aware that she was doing them, is locked in my mind, playing on a loop.
I expected more resistance and brattiness.
I suppose that’s because of her appearance.
She looks sassy. I think she might be, when she is not caught off guard and then completely taken in hand.
I was supposed to stay at a distance and keep myself a secret. But now I know her scent—both her perfume, and the more intimate one that is uniquely hers. I know the way her hips move when she both wants to escape something and wants it to happen to her.
I am rock fucking hard with recollection.
Sitting in my armchair, looking out over the city the way old kings must have once only imagined being able to do, I play our little interaction out in my head over and over again.
It lasted less than two minutes in real time, but it has filled my mind for hours.
I am used to being outside the law. I live most of my life outside it. My willingness to do what should not be done is the reason Aiden can be so successful doing what should be done. The two of us are two sides of the same coin.
I don’t usually feel a thrill when I do something wrong, as it were. But what I just did with Ella, that fleeting contact, felt like something Luke would get addicted to. Adrenaline, arousal, tenderness, anticipation, all wrapped up together.
I’ve set her free again, but her butt is going to show the marks of our meeting for a little while at least. I wonder if she is at home touching herself.
I wonder if she can admit she enjoyed what happened, or if she is trying to erase all memory of it as fast as she can so she doesn’t have to face what she is.
I unzip my pants, wrap my hand around my cock, and imagine what else I could have done to her in that alley. I could have hiked that skirt, torn her hose, pulled her panties to the side, and pushed myself inside her. I could have fucked her like a little animal. I could have forced her submission.
She was cute when she cried, too. Comforting her made me feel even more protective than I did when I saw she was in danger.
Something about Ella makes me want to look after her.
There’s an echo in her that reminds her of me, and of Teddy.
I might be imagining it, but I don’t often imagine things.
The cold ability to see precisely what is there, and nothing else, is one of my greatest assets.
I fist my cock and pump it slowly. I imagine fucking her while she sobs out of contrition. It’s a dark fantasy, but there’s some part of me that very much enjoys punishing a deserving woman, and this little funeral-crashing brat feels like a valid candidate.
I could have questioned her, I realize. Perhaps I should have.
I still don’t know how she found us on the day of the burial.
I don’t know what she was doing with Teddy, if she was just a friend, or something more.
Aiden is following some of those leads, I am sure.
But asking any of those questions would likely have given my identity away, and in the moment I knew that she didn’t need to be interrogated.
She needed to be looked after. So that is what I did.
I close my eyes and stroke myself to completion imagining how prettily she would come for me when I made her.
I know she’s tight. I can sense that about her.
The way she wriggled that ass made me almost certain I know how she feels to fuck.
Hot, wet, desperate to be driven to the point of release.
She needs to come as much as she needs to be spanked to tears.
I could do both with my cock inside her. Over and over again.
“Fuck…” I curse the word to myself as hot seed spurts from the head of my cock, arcs onto a rug worth more than some people’s cars, then settles in a warm strand across the top of my fingers.
I need to clean up.
Just as I go to do that, my phone rings.
I answer it with my left hand. My right remains occupied with my erection.
“Yes?”
“Can you come home, please?” Aiden’s voice comes through calmly. “I could use your help with Luke.”
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll be there soon.”
I wash my hands, dab the rug, and go home.
As soon as I arrive, I am led into the kitchen. Kitchens are always the heart of the home, and in this instance, it is handy because it has a floor that can be wiped clean. Fortunate, because Luke has obviously been bleeding copiously.
My younger brother is sitting on a kitchen stool looking guilty and hangdog.
Aiden is on the other side of the kitchen island.
He is wearing a white shirt, the sleeves turned up to his elbows, his arms folded across his chest as he looks on impassively.
He doesn’t want to judge. He certainly doesn’t want to be caught judging.
Luke wouldn’t notice even if he did. Luke looks like absolute shit. He has prominent dark circles under his eyes, and our personal doctor is stitching up a cut on his head, just under his hairline. Cuts to the head like to bleed, so that explains the sanguine mess on the floor.
“What the hell happened to you?” I ask the question curtly.
When Luke gets out of hand, I have no patience for coddling him.
He knows better than to act out. He’s not five years old anymore.
He’s a grown man in his twenties. It’s time he learned to process his emotions like the rest of us, by repressing them.
“Don’t know,” Luke shrugs.
“He’s been fighting for money again,” Aiden says. His exasperation makes sense. None of us need to do anything like fighting for money. Luke doesn’t need a few hundred bucks. Luke just needed a valid reason to get in a ring and hit people.
To be fair to him, this is a better, more acceptable outlet than some of the ones he used to indulge in when he was younger. Illegal boxing ring is better than street brawl.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Luke says. “I didn’t even want to be brought back here. That fucker you have watching me forced me to come. Just let me fucking go.”
“No,” Aiden says. “What makes you think you are any different than Teddy? What makes you think you couldn’t be next?”
“What makes you think I care?” Luke spits the words impudently.
I watch Aiden’s face shift. One moment it is completely controlled and calm.
The next, it flashes with rage. His eyes brighten and narrow, his lips become taut.
His jaw clenches. His brows draw down a fraction.
Each one of those little mini movements would be easy to miss.
Together, they are apocalyptic. Aiden has spent his entire life trying to keep each of us alive.
He has suffered the loss of Teddy perhaps worse than any of us, and now Luke is casually suggesting that he does not care if he lives or dies. This is going to be nasty.
Aiden goes over to the kitchen island in one smooth motion that I don’t think I would have believed if I did not see it myself. He vaults it as if it were barely there, his active grace belying the notion that he is not every bit as athletic as Luke or me.
Instantly, there is a knife at Luke’s throat. Held in Aiden’s hand. A switchblade that came from a pocket I did not see in a movement too practiced and swift for my eyes to catch.
When Aiden speaks, his voice is low and apparently calm.
“Should I kill you then? End it now? The dirt on Teddy’s grave is barely compacted yet. It would be easy enough to dig him up and throw you in beside him, if that’s what you want so badly.”
Luke wants to say he doesn’t care, but the sheer intensity in Aiden’s face tells him he shouldn’t say that unless he wants to die here and now.
Aiden’s eyes are black. There is nothing inside him right now. I don’t know if this is a state of pure rage, or something more like a revelation of character that always abides but usually hides from view.
A lot of people think Aiden is in charge because he is the eldest. Aiden is in charge because he has always instinctively known how to wield power.
If he had been born hundreds of years ago, he would have been a legendary king.
As it is, he is one of many very rich men in a world that rewards very rich men with almost complete immunity from consequence and law.
Whatever animates my eldest brother is a mystery to me.
I’ve seen it several times over the course of our lives.
I know he doesn’t want to be like this. What he’s manifesting right now is a darkness that’s not really any different from Luke’s addiction.
You could call it a familial curse, if that’s how you wanted to think about it.
It is time I intervened.
I put my hand on Aiden’s shoulder. “He doesn’t mean it,” I remind him. “He’s hurting. Like we are. He’s just much more stupid about it.”
I see Aiden come back to himself. Some of the light comes back to his eyes. They become reddish brown again, rather than completely obsidian. He is still angry, but he sheathes the knife.
The doctor has moved away from us all in this moment, standing several feet back. The needle and thread are dangling from Luke’s head. It’s a messy scene.
“You’re grounded,” Aiden says. “You’re not leaving the estate until further notice.”
“You can’t fucking ground me. I’m a grown man!”
“Try leaving and I’ll have you locked up in the basement,” Aiden says. “Test me, and you’ll see I am not joking.”
With that, Aiden turns on his heel and leaves the room. He knows he is at a point of potential explosion. He cannot risk listening to more of Luke’s immature words. Luke should know better by now, but his frontal lobe appears to be taking its sweet time growing in.
“Can you fucking believe that guy? Thinks he’s our father,” Luke says to me once Aiden is gone.
“Yeah,” I say. “He does. And you know better than to make him worry when all he’s doing is trying to keep us safe. You know what he’s like. And you know why he’s that way.”
“Yeah,” Luke sighs, beckoning the doctor over to finish sewing up his head. “I thought going to fight would be a good thing, you know? Better than getting back into drugs.”
“You already got back into drugs,” I say simply. There is very little judgment in my voice, but I want him to know he is not going unobserved. We see what he’s doing, and we are going to get in the way of it.
“I had a little,” he says. “Just to take the edge off. I knew it was a mistake, so I went to the fight place. I won like a thousand dollars too!” He grins, proud.
Luke is the sort of man who does not stay down for too long. The damage that gets done when he is down can be absolutely devastating, though.
“Can you talk to Aiden?”
“About what?” I ask. I can imagine a lot of things that Luke might want me to talk to our eldest brother about.
“He’s going to force me to get clean. Can you tell him to just get off my back?”
“It’s not the worst thing to do,” I say. “We need to find who killed Teddy, and you’ve been off your face since it happened.”
“I like being off my face.”
“Yeah. Well. When we work out who is trying to kill us all, you can go back and get as high as you like on whatever you like. For now, try not to get Aiden to kill you. We have to avenge Teddy.”
“Yeah. We do,” he says. “No leads yet, though, right? I tried to see if anybody at the fights had anything to say, but they clam up every time. I tried beating something out of a couple of them, but…” He gestures to his head.
“There’s the girl,” I say. “Ella.”
I watch as Luke powers down in front of me.
He knows something. I’m fucking sure of it.
But he doesn’t want to say. Luke has a bad habit of running off half-cocked on his own.
This drug thing. This fight thing. It’s all the same shit.
It’s his way of trying to handle stuff without help.
And now he’s holding back on something important.
I’m not going to let him do that. I’m going to find out what significance Ella Chick has.
And I’m going to do it tonight.