Chapter 3 – Ferrin
FERRIN
Most of the time, I like it when a beautiful girl gets the best of me.
I don’t even mind if she wants to tie me up.
This isn’t one of those times. Yet I can’t help the way my gaze clings to her, and my cock twitches accordingly.
I mean, fuuuck. She’s a vision with a gorgeous face and a knockout body.
It’s not even the head injury speaking for me, though that’s no joke. My head is fucking killing me.
That aside, if I weren’t tied to a table…
Except I am. She’s got the necklace and my gun, so there’s that.
“Darlin’, for the third time, I didn’t find you. I found your cottage. That’s all.”
Her pretty gray eyes narrow. “Why would I believe that? In all the years I’ve lived here, you’re the first person to do so.”
That gives me pause and raises some serious questions. No one voluntarily lives like this unless they’re hiding something they don’t want anyone else to find or know about.
I do my best to hitch a shoulder. “It’s true. I was working a job, had to flee, and came across your house. I thought it would be the perfect spot to hide out for a day or two, and then you cracked me across the skull. I never expected anyone to live out here.”
That does something unexpected to her. For the first time since I set eyes on her, her tough veneer cracks. Her shoulders droop, and she looks down at her hands in her lap.
“Are you someone famous? Is that why you're hiding here?” I ask again. She has to be, right?
She shakes her head, and the rush of anguish on her face makes my stomach twist uncomfortably. I don’t like it.
My eyebrows slant. “I don’t understand. If you’re not hiding out and you’re not famous, then why were you so worried that I found you?”
She licks her lips and lifts her chin. “The world is a dangerous place, filled with evil people wanting to do evil deeds.” She points at me. “Like you.”
“I’m not evil,” I defend, even though I am. I’m ruthless and callous and make no apologies for it because no one’s ever apologized to me for their cruelty. But telling her the truth won’t set me free. Staying light and charming might, though.
She arches an unimpressed eyebrow. “You have a gun and a necklace I’m assuming you stole.”
“That doesn’t make me evil, simply opportunistic and self-protective. I’m a jewelry connoisseur and collector.” Not quite a lie. “The gun is protection, but in all my years, I’ve never fired it.” That’s definitely a lie.
She tilts her head, her brows pinching. “Never?”
“Not once. I don’t like violence.”
She stands and comes closer to me, her long hair damp on the ends, but the golden color and the way the waves move as she walks are distracting. Hell, everything about her is from how she looks to the fact that she’s a young woman alone, living in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.
She sinks down in front of me, appraising me, and I get a hint of her shampoo or bodywash. She smells like honeysuckle. I wonder if all of her would taste so sweet.
“Why should I trust you?”
I grin but don’t give her my full smolder since she thought it was creepy. “Why shouldn’t you?”
“I can think of several reasons.”
I’m sure she can, and she’d be right on all of them. But right now, my head throbs, my wrists and shoulders burn from being tied up, and I just want to get the fuck out of here.
I hold her gaze. “I won’t hurt you. I swear. You can even hold my knife to my back and walk me to the perimeter before you let me go.”
She inches in closer, her silver eyes full of cautious distrust. “Say I let you go. What then?”
“Just as I said. I take my knapsack and leave. Case closed.”
“And you won’t tell anyone you were here?”
“No.”
She thinks about this with more seriousness than I’ve ever given anything in my life. “Have you ever been to Carona?”
Confusion at the topic change hits me, and I answer reflexively. “Of course.”
“Is it as dangerous as I’ve seen on the news?”
“Dangerous?” There’s that word again. “Why do you think everything is dangerous and everyone is evil?” Something bad must have happened to her. Why else would she be saying that and hiding here?
Uncertainty shifts her mouth and posture, and she inches back until she’s nearly sitting on the ground by my legs. “I… well, my mother told me it is.”
“Your mother told you it is?” I repeat, testing the words and their meaning on my tongue, not quite wrapping my head around them. “Haven’t you seen it’s not that way for yourself?” How long has she been here?
Another flash of anguish hits her, but she shakes it off quickly. “Answer me,” she demands, her bite returning.
“I think your mother was exaggerating a bit, darlin’. Carona is one of the safest cities in Messalina. Hell, Messalina is one of the safest countries in the EU.”
Her eyes glass over, and she releases a shaky breath. She rights herself and goes over to a TV on the wall and turns it on. A news station comes on, talking about a mass shooting by rival gangs.
A laugh hits my lungs. “What the fuck is that? There are no gangs in Messalina, certainly not with guns like that. That looks like America, not here, and even that footage seems old.”
She shakes her head. “That can’t be.”
There’s no sound, but the headline across the bottom is written in Italian and says, ‘Warfare strikes Carona as rival gangs destroy city streets and terrorize citizens.’
“I was in Carona two days ago. There was no gang warfare.”
Her voice climbs. “Why should I trust you when I can see it here?” She points to the TV.
I inwardly sigh, more than a little freaked out. I have no clue what the fuck is going on or why any of this matters to her, but it clearly does. If I want my freedom, I need to prove it to her.
“Come here.”
She glares.
“I’m tied up, aren’t I? I can’t get my phone out of my back pocket without your help. Pull out my phone, and I’ll prove it to you.”
With trepidation in her every move, she makes her way over to me. “Which pocket?”
“My right.”
She crouches beside me, her hair tickling my arm as her hand slides down my back to my ass.
I shift my weight to my left side, and her hand slips into my pocket.
I twist my head and watch as she works to free my phone.
She has her cute little pink tongue tucked into the corner of her mouth, captured by her teeth, and her face is taut with concentration.
This day has already been unexpected in so many ways, but she might be the biggest surprise yet. She has a story, and I bet it’s a big one. I mean, look where she is. The things she’s asking. The bullshit television that looks more like the opening scene from a movie than the news.
Someone is fucking with this girl and fucking with her hard. Her mother, I guess. All I know is that I don’t want any part of it. She’s trouble and baggage, and I have enough of my own.
Once she’s secured my phone, she rights herself and stares at the screen.
“How do I turn it on?”
What in the absolute fuck is this? “You don’t know how to work a smartphone?”
She shakes her head.
Jesus Christ. “Bring it to my face and hold the screen in front of it.”
She gives me a funny look but does it. The screen comes to life, and she stares curiously at it for a long moment. “Wow. Okay. I have no idea how to work this.”
“Untie me, and I’ll help.”
“Or you can guide me.”
I hiss out a curse, already more than losing my patience with this game. “Go to the internet app at the bottom. It has the up-angled arrow. Click on that and type in Carona crime rates into the search engine.”
It takes her an interminable minute or five to get there, but then she’s quietly scrolling and reading. That takes another fucking five minutes.
“Believe me now?”
She sets my phone down on the table I’m tied to, points the remote at the TV, and shuts it off before she chucks it against the wall.
The thing hits the stone and explodes into a million pieces, but it’s got nothing on the shrill cry she releases.
I have no idea what’s happening here, but it’s making my stomach churn with unease.
Has she been kept here by the lies of her mother?
Is it by her choice or is she a prisoner?
“How long have you been here?” I find myself asking, but that was the wrong thing to question because, in a flash, she straddles my thighs and grabs me by my shirt, yanking me in toward her until the rope tugs and burns at my wrists.
My stupid cock reacts, which makes zero fucking sense since this woman is clearly unstable, and nothing about this situation is in my favor or even remotely sexy other than her.
Her silver-gray eyes pierce mine. “Sixteen years, eleven months, and twenty-five days.”
I blink, the hairs at the back of my neck prickling.
My heart hasn’t so much as been stirred or shifted since I was a boy.
It became as black as my soul, and I welcomed that.
Reveled in it. After all, I worked hard for that level of cold indifference.
But the one thing that’s always managed to pick at the necrotic tissue is abused women or children.
I fucking hate that weakness in me.
“Are you serious?”
“I was brought here on my sixth birthday.”
I swallow thickly. Jesus fuck. “Have you never left?”
She shakes her head. “You’re the first person I’ve seen other than my mother and the ones on television since that night.”
“Genevieve,” I try, though her name is a tongue twister. “Why don’t you go? Just walk right out of here.”
A tear tracks down her face. “I already told you why. It’s not safe for me.”
I shake my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why you?”
“There are people out there who want to get me. Who have in the past before my mother saved me.”
I lick my chapped lips, my tongue like sandpaper. I need to get out of here. Right fucking now. “I’m not one of those people.”
Her face is inches from mine, and I can feel the heat of her body, smell her sweet fragrance, and see every fleck of silver in her lost eyes. “I believe you.”
“Then you need to let me go.”
Before she can answer, a loud chime sounds throughout the house.
Her eyes round, and a ripple of fear parts her lips and colors her cheeks. “My mother is here.”
Fuck. I struggle against the rope, trying to twist my wrists free. “Let me go.”
She shakes her head but reaches around to untie me. Her chest is practically touching mine, and her forehead is beside my mouth. “If you try to run or make yourself known in any way, you’ll die. I’m not exaggerating.”
“Just let me go!”
“It’s too late for that,” she cries urgently. “Do what I say or she’ll kill you. Or make me do it.”
This is some horror-film-caliber shit. Who are these people?
The knot slips from my wrist, and a rush of blood shoots up my arms and prickles my fingertips. I swing my arm around, ready to push myself to my feet and make a run for it. I could take her mother. How difficult could that be? Genevieve climbs off me, grabs my wrist, and helps me up.
She tugs me sharply toward the back of the cottage to a winding staircase that leads up to her tower.
“Gen, darlin’—” I start to pull away, but she grabs the back of my hair and holds on tight, giving it a small rip that compels me into motion.
“Move! Please, move!” She’s more than a little panicked. Her hands are trembling, and her voice is wobbling. We race up the stairs, going up and up in a spiral. “You said you needed a place to hide out. Consider this hiding out. I’ll be back in a bit with food for you.”
“This is not what I had in mind.”
“Too late for that.”
We reach the top landing, and I note a large studio space followed by a bedroom that I can’t see much of before I’m shoved into the bathroom and the door slams shut behind me.
A key goes into the lock, and I didn’t think you could lock a bathroom door from the outside, but evidently you can when it’s one of those ancient keyhole locks.
“Gene—”
“I mean it. Be quiet. It’s the only way you’ll survive.”
Then she’s gone, the sound of her footfalls growing distant.
I try the door, but the lock is solid, and the door is too.
I glance around. It’s a spacious room with a separate tub and shower and large vanity.
There’s a window beside the toilet, and I go there, about to open the pane, when a woman walking through the garden stops me dead.
Her face is cast down, only giving me a view of her mass of wild dark curls with strands of gray. There’s something about her. Something familiar, and when she glances up at the tower, I duck back while angling myself to see her.
Because fuck me, I know her.
She hired me to steal the tiara three years ago, and I did.
I was fresh in the country and looking for bigger jobs than I’d had in Belgium or France.
I was done with the UK. It took me four weeks to track it down.
The person who had it wasn’t easy to find because she didn’t want to be found.
It was a woman living under the name Evia.
I tracked her pattern for a week before I broke into the place she was staying when she wasn’t home. I nicked the tiara from a bloody drawer she had it in. It wasn’t even locked. It was easy as sin. Almost too easy.
When I went to make the trade—twenty thousand euros for the tiara—the woman tried to kill me, and I got away with the tiara.
I’d held onto it until a woman stole it from Sven and Lars’s house a few months back.
The police—whom Lars and Sven were not excited to have in their house—claimed they had no suspects, but they did accidentally drop two she pronouns when describing the perpetrator.
They knew something and weren’t sharing.
At the time, I questioned if it was her. If she’d finally found me and come for the tiara she never got.
Lars and Sven had no clue what was in the safe other than cash, and I wasn’t about to make my presence known since Rhys Stephan is a wanted man with several warrants on his head.
So this is her mother. Absolutely fascinating.
Suddenly, I’m not so anxious to go.