Chapter Two
Olivia
W ell. There’s no going back now. I have a brawling six-foot-something man in my back seat taking a self-imposed nap—kind of.
And not just any man. Austin Black. King of The Unseen, despicable human being, torturer, murderer, and my brother's boss. He’s in over his head, my brother that is.
He signed up to some organization offering advanced career progression and opportunities to earn fat checks.
He’s nineteen, and while I’m only twenty-four, he’s been my responsibility since he was fourteen and our parents died in a car crash.
Money was tight and I know that’s why he’s taken this gig.
He was tired of scraping by. There wasn’t just an emotional hole left when our parents died; there was a financial one, too.
I can’t say for sure, but he’s not exactly working nine-to-five while he purchases obscenely expensive things and comes home all hours of the day and night, if he comes home at all.
I was honored to raise him into adulthood.
There was no way I was going to let him go into care when I was an adult and capable of looking after both of us.
We were both grieving, and life was lived on a tight budget and not a lot of fun.
He had this part-time job during his final year of high school, but I hadn’t thought much of it.
I’d been busy studying and working. It wasn’t until just under two years ago that a seed of doubt started to build inside me .
Since then, his curly shoulder-length hair has been styled short on the sides with blond wavy hair on top.
He’s still as short as me, but he’s built up muscle over the last few years, like he’s working out.
He regularly comes home with scraped knuckles and mud all over his clothes.
I’ve asked him to explain what it is that he’s doing, but he just laughs it off and says I worry too much.
I’d even gone as far as to follow him one day, and that’s where I spotted Austin. I didn’t know who he was at that point, of course. But he ruffled my brother’s hair affectionately when no one was looking, and that was when I realized Danny had an entirely separate life I didn’t know about.
After a little online sleuthing, I found a Reddit thread on The Unseen.
The stories they told were horrific. Acts of violence littered the anecdotes, with commenters adding their own version of the legends they’d heard.
Reading between the lines of the hopefully exaggerated stories, it seems that The Unseen is a subset of a larger enterprise named The Organization.
This at least had some genuine articles from reputable newspapers.
The leader? John Black, sixty-five years old, white hair, muscular build, with an imposing height.
If he wasn’t running it with his brains, the blurred photo of him on The Seattle Times news website would suggest he could certainly do it with his brawn.
Even for a sixty-five-year-old, the guy was jacked.
According to the exposé article, his two sons, Augustus and Austin, worked with him to run The Organization, and for all intents and purposes, Austin cleaned up messes—or rather, made messes and then cleaned them up.
There were no photos of Austin, but he didn’t match the one the website showed of Augustus so I had assumed it was him up until Danny let his name slip in conversation one night.
When I followed Danny, he went back to the same warehouse repeatedly, and all sorts of trucks were coming in and out at all times of night, too. I was never brave enough to leave my car to check it out. The Reddit thread had given me nightmares, but I continued to watch from afar nonetheless.
Once Austin had started coming into Squeeze the Day just a few weeks later, I’d panicked.
At first, I thought he knew I’d been watching him, and panic traveled up my throat that I was in danger.
When I made eye contact, he observed me with a curiosity that made my skin crawl, but there was nothing familiar in the way he looked at me—more of an appreciation, as sick as it made me feel.
I knew I couldn’t risk spying on Danny anymore.
It would be risking his life if Austin found out I was observing his operation, whatever it was.
It was obvious The Unseen didn’t want people to know what was going on behind the dull gray roller doors of their warehouse.
What I had managed to find out really was just rumors.
The Unseen stupidly have matching tattoos, which Danny described to me as an initiation when I asked him about it.
But he wouldn’t tell me what the initiation was for.
I only know it’s a tattoo for The Unseen because a girl I went to high school with dated someone who works for Austin, and that guy also has the same tattoo: a blindfolded brunette staring up to the sky as a tear rolls down her cheek.
Also, my brother is nineteen. He’s about as subtle as lighting a bag of shit on someone’s doorstep and ringing the bell.
So when I said he came home with scrapes and bruises, it was true, and it was all the time.
And unless he’d got a side gig digging graves at the cemetery, there was no reason for him to come back late at night covered in mud.
The third concern came with the amount of cash he started to throw around.
He handed me a bundle of one hundred dollar bills one night accompanied by a Post-it note with a smiley face on it.
No explanation. Just money. Covered in dirt.
All he’d said when I pressed him was that it was a bonus for a job well done.
So drastic times call for drastic measures. Danny won’t listen to me. He’s made up his mind. And besides, as he jokingly said one night when I caught him coming home at 4 a.m., “there’s no way out now.”
But it’s not funny, and my parents didn’t leave him in my care so that he would get killed by some gangster that has shitty taste in coffee. I mean, who goes to a juice bar to order coffee, anyway?
The plan is to: one, temporarily house him in my basement; two, keep things chill; three, flip the switch and make him believe I’m a psycho and that his life might possibly be in danger.
And finally, when he agrees to let my brother go, I’ll let him go, too.
But not before Danny and I have enough time to get out of town. See? A four-part plan. Easy.
I pull into my driveway. It’s our parents’ house and is looking a little run down. My mom used to garden and keep everything full of flowers. Now, the path is overgrown, the weeds creeping in through the cracks, and the grass needs mowing—well, hacking might be a better word.
I pull out the trolley I’d prepared and place the blanket on top. Bending my knees and engaging my core, I drag him out by hooking my arms under his armpits. Linking my fingers across his chest, I drag him out of my old Land Rover Defender—another item left over from my parents’ passing.
I let his legs flop out of the vehicle and angle him so his ass hits the trolley.
I place him down gently, making sure his head isn’t gonna hit any overgrown bushes on the way up to the house.
It’s the first time I’m grateful for no porch—I hop the trolley over the lip of the entryway and pull him through the hallway, just like I’d practiced last night.
I reach the door to the basement and brace myself for the next phase.
Call me a genie and marvel at my magic carpet.
This bad boy helps me transport this hunk of muscle down a flight of stairs with no obvious injuries, and I only hit his head once— obviously not on purpose .
But with no lasting damage, I pull his legs up onto the mattress I prepared and roll him over.
As unseemly as it is, you can’t have an angry murderer wandering around your basement.
When considering whether you should chain someone to your heating pipe, it’s always better to err on the side of caution.
One huge prison- style chain later, and his hands are connected loosely to his stomach with enough room that he could, well, alleviate himself without his pee flying round like a hose pipe, and he could, at a stretch, use his hands to eat.
I’ve left some hand sanitizer so he can swap between both tasks with clean hands.
Unfortunately, wrapping the chain around his body has been a little tricky, and I did have to balance his head on my chest as I wrapped my arms around him.
Despite being the most despicable man on the planet, he smells heavenly.
And when he sighed deeply, face on tit, his warm breath cascaded down my crop top making my nipples ache.
I’m absolutely not attracted to him. I mean, I can see the appeal, of course; I’m not blind, or nose blind, or deaf—he has quite a lovely voice as well, in all honesty.
But he is an awful person, dead set on being the villain in this situation.
And yes , that is said without a trace of irony, as I do appreciate he’s the one who’s chained up in my basement.
I gently place him back onto the pillow and pull the blanket over him. I don’t want him to think I’m an animal. I don’t actually want to hurt him. Just maybe scare him enough that he will set my brother free the moment he wakes up. Speaking of which, he should be waking up in a few minutes.
Okay, deep breath, the hard part is done. Getting his big ass down the stairs and tied up. Now, it's just a negotiation, and I do those all the time.
I look around the basement. The light is shining through the small window on the north side of the house. It isn’t large by any means, but there’s a lamp I’ve placed close to his bed, which he could use if he needs more light.
The space is pretty empty, except for a big storage rack filled with equipment for my business. I’d made sure his chains were short enough that he couldn’t reach anything else in the room, but honestly, what was he going to do? Throw a yoga mat at me?