Chapter 9
Ella
I was feeling so small, so lost. I was starting to feel like I didn’t know myself at all. Living in captivity under Aiden Levin is not for the faint of heart. He is too smart, too observant. It is as though nothing can be kept from him, no secret tucked away in any corner of my soul.
And then I saw him. The guy I dosed to the fucking gills with a psychedelic compound and left to face his demons. I was at my lowest, most broken point, feeling very cowed by being put into position by Aiden and told to wait. This man is an evil fucking genius.
Seeing Leo activates the part of my brain that remembers what it feels like to fucking win.
Leo had me completely captive, and I broke free. If I could best him, then perhaps his older brother isn’t as infallible as he seems.
There’s a heavy silence in the room, while the three brothers stare at me. I make direct eye contact with Leo.
“How was the cabin?”
It’s a smart-ass question, but I ask it anyway because I want him to think about it all over again. It was one of the most satisfying moments of my life, cuffing him there and walking away. I had wondered if I killed him too, by mistake. But clearly not.
Aiden grips my hair hard and turns my head back to look up at him at one of the most uncomfortable angles there is.
“No,” he says softly.
I feel that pride in me melt, turn into the submission he has demanded of me. I feel myself soften and flush, knowing that everybody in the room is well aware of the effect he has on me. Aiden knows how to make me helpless with the barest of effort.
Something happened in that forest. I can’t call it supernatural, but some kind of bond was forged there. He found me. Somehow he got through all the layers I’ve built up around myself over the years and he grabbed the soft core of me and now he has me wrapped around his fist.
The brothers are still staring at me. Leo has the expression of a wolf denied his favorite prey.
I can’t read Luke. He is the one I know least, but I sense he has been searching for me too.
He was just too slow. The other two were on me first. Luke looks the most like Teddy did.
He’s like an older, more muscular, and I guess at this point, less well-dressed version.
“Why are we here?” Luke asks the question. “And why is she here?”
“It’s time we all talked and came to an understanding,” Aiden says. “Teddy loved Ella. We are going to do our brotherly duty and look after her.”
“We?” Leo says the word as a question.
“Yes, Leo,” Aiden says. “I know you want her. I know you’ve had her, and in spite of your past exploits, I happen to think you would overall be a positive influence.”
“This is sick,” Luke says. “We should buy her a house and set her up with a trust fund or something. Keeping her captive as some kind of group sex toy is just wrong. And it’s not what Teddy would have wanted.”
“Theodore is dead,” Aiden says. “And I know why.”
All the hair on the back of my neck stands up. I have a distinctly eerie feeling.
“Why?”
“Because he was lured into a honeypot trap, and he was killed,” Aiden says.
“Our enemies saw him as the weakest link. The youngest brother, with the least amount of investment in the family businesses, the kindest, the easiest to lead astray, the one who dated for love, rather than hunted his prey…”
Aiden grips the back of my neck so firmly it hurts. I let out a little yelp at just the right time to inadvertently emphasize his point.
“And this was who they chose to use to lure him out from the family fold.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Theodore had already shared information with various hostile entities,” Aiden says.
“And she was in on it?”
“She was used like the gorgeous little fuck puppet she is,” Aiden growls, wrapping another arm around my upper body and hauling me up onto his lap as he takes a seat.
I am naked and I am afraid, and both of those things combine to make me soaked as he slides a finger inside me in a display of casual domination.
“Ordinary people might be under the impression that the world is ruled by presidents and prime ministers, or maybe royal families,” Aiden monologues while he fingers me devastatingly slowly.
“But we know better. We know that power has always been concentrated in the hands of a few select families who have lineages stretching back tens of thousands of years. True ancient power. The people on the street might be able to trace their family trees back to Charlemagne, but those with true power know their way back to ancestors who should be lost to history. Our forebears were trading copper in ancient Ur. We know who we are, because we are who we were bred to be.”
The man knows how to give a speech, and he knows even better how to emphasize his points while he taps and rubs my clit with his thumb.
I close my eyes, and I can almost feel a warm Mesopotamian sun beaming down on me as some ancient incarnation of myself is used just as I am being used now, as a sexual slave girl to a powerful man who has no qualms about taking what he wants.
I can feel the eyes of Luke and Leo on me.
Even with my eyes closed, they feel different.
One is warm and intense. The other is cooler, but powerful.
Each of these brothers is a very different man, but they do all share the lineage Aiden is holding court about in this moment, and I am sure it manifests strongly in each of them.
“We could punish this girl, and we will,” he says. “We will use her tears as lubricant from time to time, I am sure, because that is the sort of men we are.”
I gasp as he says that incredibly dark thing, but I know my sound of outrage is entirely undermined by the way my inner walls clenched his probing fingers even harder when he said it.
“You’re both fucking sick,” Luke says again. “This isn’t what Teddy wanted.”
“I don’t care what Teddy wanted. Teddy was weak and he got himself killed because he chose something other than family.
You don’t have to be part of this arrangement.
Leo and I will happily share our prize between us.
You can go and be righteous all you like.
But it won’t bring Theodore back. Open your legs. ”
The last order is given to me, and accompanied by his free hand spreading me lewdly wide on his lap. He slides three fingers inside me now, continuing to put me on display. He has no qualms about making me the subject of a humiliating scene, but rewarding me with pleasure while he does it.
I know I am lucky.
They could have just killed me on the spot for my involvement with Teddy, and what came from it. They want to keep me alive, and where there is life, there is hope.
Aiden gives me a few rougher, faster, harder strokes, pushing me toward climax before slowing to a complete halt. His other hand wraps lightly around my throat, symbolically holding my life in his hand.
“I want to punish her,” Leo says. “For what she did with the sedative.”
“And you will,” Aiden says. “She is going to atone for her part in our brother’s death by becoming our little fuck toy.
She will live with us, she will always be with one of us at all times.
She will be used and bred. We have lost a brother.
It is time we began producing sons and daughters. The line must go on.”
All of these things could have been said at almost any point in history, I realize as orgasm starts to build inside me.
I should find his attitude and declarations frightening or repulsive, but Aiden has wrapped me up in his spell.
He truly believes he owns me, and I am starting to believe it too, because of the power of his influence and his damn near hypnotic ability to redefine reality.
Luke
I have always known Aiden was a sick fuck. This is what I was trying to protect her from. He’s going to take his grief and channel it all into ruining this woman, I just know it.
And she’s not even making it difficult. She’s submitting to him, arching her back, looking under her lashes at me. She’s locked in on me. She wants me to help her. I’m sure of it.
I step forward and take hold of her, picking her up off Aiden’s lap and tossing her over my shoulder. I step back and pick up a poker from the stand next to the fireplace.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I tell them. “But I’m doing this for Teddy. And for you. This is fucked up. Even for us. We have to grieve like normal people. We have to move on.”
Aiden and Leo both look at me with that eerie calm they both inherited and I didn’t.
It used to be a kind of two on two sometimes.
Me and Teddy against these two older brothers who thought they knew fucking everything.
I miss Teddy so much it feels like my physical body is being ripped apart by sadness.
If he was here, none of this would be happening.
“You’re making a mistake,” Aiden says.
“Let him make it,” Leo responds.
I carry Ella out of the house. I take one of the cars and I drive her to my place. I have an apartment in the city in the same building as Leo. We thought living away from home would bring real independence. We were only half right. Being a Levin is a lifelong sentence. There’s only one way out.
“I need to have a shower,” I tell her. “I’m sorry I look crazy. I’ve been through… well. I need a shower.”
“You were fighting,” she says, sitting neatly in the passenger seat. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing that matters,” I reply. “Nothing you need to worry about, I mean.”
I grabbed a coat from the rack before we left, and I put it around her to give her some sense of modesty. The way Aiden treated her as if she were nothing more than a toy for his pleasure was so wrong. Even if she did seem to enjoy it, how could she possibly have wanted it?