Chapter 20
Ella
I feel better when I wake up, though a little tender. I haven’t been having enough sex, that’s my problem. It’s hard to get laid when you spend your days running around the world and occasionally getting kidnapped. I need to lock in.
Luke is eyeing me, the big blond hulk of a man making the space look small. Unlike Aiden, he’s not concerned with what’s going to happen to us all. That’s above his pay grade.
I smile at him over breakfast. The food isn’t too bad if you don’t mind that everything has to be rehydrated, and I don’t. I’m not fussy. Food is food. If it’s good, that’s nice. If it’s not, it still keeps me alive, which is better than the alternative.
“Want to see my room?” Luke makes the invitation with a purposeful grin. “You spent the first night in Leo’s, so I figure we’d do a rotation.”
“Oh, you figured that, huh?”
Aiden is sitting on one of the couches, pretending not to listen. He’s too busy planning some kind of escape, or perhaps plotting for a war. I think we all know that even though we started on the back foot here, Aiden will turn this to his advantage.
“So? My room?” Luke grins at me.
“We need to talk,” Aiden says, interrupting his artless advance. “Can you all come to the couches, please.”
We go and sit down. I sit between Luke and Leo. Aiden has pride of place in front of us, holding court.
“I am going to leave,” he says. “I need to be able to act in the world. The three of you need to stay here for your own safety. Leo, you need to heal that wound, Luke, you need to keep an eye on Ella, and Ella, you need to keep them both sane. Each of you has a job to do. I expect you to do it.”
I don’t like the idea of Aiden not being here with us, and neither do his brothers.
“I say we all go wherever we go together,” Luke says. “We stay underground until we’re ready to emerge, like…” He pauses for a second, reaching for a metaphor.
“Cicadas,” I say helpfully.
“Sure,” he says. “Like cicadas.”
“If you go, we’re all going to go,” Leo says. “I won’t be able to keep those two in. You’re stuck with us.”
That argument is much stronger. Leo’s not physically able to dominate Luke right now, and Luke’s not interested in keeping me prisoner in the first place. If it were the three of us, the inmates would be running the proverbial madhouse. Aiden’s sanity and strength is needed.
“I can use proxies,” Aiden admits. “But it will be slower, and less efficient.”
“Good. Yes. Use proxies,” Luke says, grabbing me and picking me up. I squeal with laughter as he manhandles me to his room. It’s fun to struggle against him, even though it gets me nowhere. Really, because it gets me nowhere.
Luke tosses me down on the bed and follows me down. He pins me to the mattress with one hand over both my wrists and grins down at me.
“You’re in trouble with me,” he says. “You ran away and left us to chase you. Aiden found you, Leo’s had whatever fun he could have had so far, at least until he is healed, and now it’s my turn.”
“I’m in trouble with you?” I grin the question. “How could I possibly be in trouble with you? You don’t care what I do.”
“I care if you run away. I care if you get kidnapped. I may not be like the other two, but I am a man, and I love you. I want you obedient, and protected, and I know very well what you need. I might know better than the other two.”
“How do you figure?”
“Aiden has always been in charge, one way or another, and Leo… we know Leo’s mind doesn’t work like most people’s. He’s got a darkness in him, a sadism that’s got to be fed or it breaks out and starts devouring people. But I’m normal.”
I laugh at that very hard. “Luke, you’re not normal. You couldn’t imagine normal in a thousand years.”
“I’m the most normal,” he says. “I know what it’s like to fuck up. I know what it feels like when you’re not the biggest or the baddest. I know how you learn to work in shadows and get away with things nobody wants you to get away with.”
His knee is parting my thighs, spreading my legs. I know he’s already hard, keeping me in place against the bed. His eyes sear into mine with intensity that leaves me quite struck.
He’s revealing himself to me, showing me something I haven’t seen in him before.
“You start to act out. Start to do silly things. Maybe you try a few substances. Maybe you run with the wrong crowd. And maybe you become the black sheep. Not the sweet baby, not the trustworthy oldest, not even the magnetic second born. The middle child even in a family of four. Overlooked, but never forgotten.”
He lowers his head and grazes his teeth along the side of my neck.
“That’s some of what I would have said to you if you’d talked to me before you decided to run. I would have told you that you had a place with us, that there was no way to run away from us really, and to reason to either. But you wouldn’t have listened.”
“I thought you were all too good for me,” I say. “I still do. I’ve caused more trouble… ow!”
My sentence ends in a yelp as he bites down swiftly on the side of my neck.
“You’ve caused us no trouble at all,” he says.
“You came into our lives like a fucking angel delivering us from grief. You led us to the man who needed to die. You gave yourself to us. We love you. All of us. We were never going to be able to have typical marriages. How would that have worked? We would have had to lie constantly to these women, hidden who we really were, what we really did…”
“A lot of guys do that kinda recreationally,” I point out.
“I like that I am everything I am with you,” he says.
“I like that Aiden is who he is, and Leo is who he is, and Teddy was who he was. You’re someone who makes us all whole.
You’re a universal key to our hearts. The fact that you could ever run, ever think we don’t need you, ever think you were anything less than everything to us is unforgivable.
And the sin is ours, because you should never have felt that way. ”
Tears run down my cheeks. I can’t help them. I thought this was a seduction, but Luke has just declared his love so eloquently I can barely stand the feelings that are welling up inside me.
“What’s wrong, baby?”
“I thought you were going to ravage me, not tell me your feelings,” I sniff.
Luke smirks at me and cups my face, wiping away a tear with his thumb. “You’d have preferred it if I’d whipped your ass, I bet,” he says. “That would have been easier for you.”
“Shut up,” I mutter. He’s right. Physical pain would have been less disturbing to my equilibrium than this declaration of love that makes me feel weak and helpless and so fucking vulnerable. “It was my fault.”
“It was never your fault,” he says. “Whatever role you played it was one of survival. None of us blame you. None of us fault you.”
“But you should,” I whimper.
“And now I really do want to thrash you,” he growls.
“Because these things have been said to you over and over and yet you insist on not hearing them. Trust me, Ella. I know something about taking responsibility. I’ve been locked away until I learned how to do it.
And you are taking too much. You were being used, and you were being abused, and Teddy tried to intervene but the game being played was bigger than he knew… ”
“And that’s happening again!” I wail, now outright crying.
“As soon as one evil man was dead, another appeared to take his place, and now Leo has a hole in his stomach, and we are all hiding, and Aiden is going to have to… I don’t even know what he’s going to do, but I know I was the way in again.
I was the door that they came through. I’m attached to evil. ”
“Glued, or sewn?” Luke deadpans the question, his expression softening as he strokes my hair back from my tearstained face.
“Evil will always try to corrupt and use good. It’s how it functions.
It’s the only way it can feed, because unlike you, it cannot make its own energy.
It doesn’t emit light the way you do. Ella, you were a beacon in the darkness, and probably, yes, the darkness in my brothers is attracted to you for less than savory reasons, but healthy people know how to mix their dark and light drives together…
” He frowns at me. “Am I making sense, or is this just a kind of completely impenetrable metaphysical blather to you?”
“No, I get it, I think,” I sniff. “You’re saying I’m a lightbulb, and evil people are moths and also badness can be sexy, but only when it’s not totally fucking depraved, and when it’s tempered with love.”
“That’s exactly what I am trying to say,” he smiles.
“We love you. We all know we love you, each in our own way, each with our own capacities and abilities. And no two of us are going to be the same in how that feels, but we all mean it. I know we do. I know when we found you gone, the first thing all three of us wanted to do was find you at any cost. And when I had to shoot Leo…” He pauses.
“When I had to shoot Leo, there was a small part of me that was glad he’d be slowed down because I wanted to get to you first,” he says. “I’m not proud of that, but it is true.”
“I… don’t know what to say about that. Kind of thought you were the goofy sweet one.”
“That was Teddy. He was the best of us. And he’s in heaven now because of it.
I hope he’s being rewarded. I hope he’s with our parents and they’re all having the best fucking time.
One day, the rest of us will follow and join them.
But not any time soon, because us three?
The ones of us who are left on this fucking rock?
We’re not going to be hunted like animals for long.
I know it feels like we’re running and hiding, but if you ever saw a trapdoor spider operate, you’d know that not everything that hides is prey. ”
Aiden
I shouldn’t be listening into their conversations. They should be private. But when I hear Ella cry, I can’t help but pay attention. I am standing at the door, their voices coming through quite clearly.
I don’t give Luke enough credit, I realize.
He’s always come across as something of a jacked-up jock, too jovial and too superficial to have a real understanding of how all of this works.
But listening to him now, I am beginning to see how much I have underestimated him.
When he delved into his addiction, I further discounted him.
Now, though, I am understanding that it was sensitivity that led him there.
He feels everything so deeply, but he’s never been in a position to express it the way Teddy did.
Theodore was the baby of the family. When our parents died, he became my baby.
I was made a father in the moment of their loss, and the fact that I will never see his smiling face again, and the knowledge that all the darkness in me could not stop the darkness of the world from claiming him will always rankle.
But he was not the only one of us who had that sweetness, or who should have been allowed to express love freely.
Each of us has been twisted by the loss of our parents in a different way, and each of us has found native ways to compensate.
But it’s time for a new way of things. If Luke can express himself so eloquently, and if Leo can soften, then I can deal with Eric fucking Red.