Chapter 15
chapter
fifteen
CALDER
I’d rented a home thirty minutes outside of Salt Lake City, in the mountain town of Park City. Below the mountains, the city twinkled like a glittering ocean. I gripped the steering wheel, taking the winding canyon roads up to my home a little too steeply.
Expectedly, I’d barely made a dent in the pile of boxes. The operation was built for a fucking supercomputer, and there was absolutely no way any human could do it. Which meant I was either a necessity or a liability.
My mind kept drifting back to Shay.
To the diagnosis I wasn’t supposed to know.
So as I got out of the car, even though it was all kinds of wrong, I opened her notes again and stuttered on a newer list.
My garage door closed automatically behind me, shutting me in darkness as I read the title of a new note labeled Kinks—
My arm was yanked and shoved behind my back. I used the inertia to drag whoever was there with me to the ground. As I did so, something sharp and cold sliced my abdomen.
“Fuck,” I hissed.
Whatever little leverage I’d gained, I quickly lost. My assailant took the opening, spinning us right before we hit the ground. His knees pressed into my chest until I was breathless, a knife to my neck.
I stared into dark-blue eyes so similar to mine.
“You know,” I choked out. “Some siblings FaceTime.”
“You were slow.” My brother, Stone, pulled the knife back in one quick, fluid movement. “If this was a real attack, you’d be dead.” He stood up, shooting me a chastising look.
I followed, standing to my own feet.
“Good to see you too, bro.”
Most brothers bonded over Sunday dinner, but, then, most brothers didn’t spend a decade in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.
Lights turned on as we made our way into the house. I grabbed a first aid kit from under the sink, lightly dabbing antiseptic on the wound. Just beneath my rib cage. Superficial, but bloody.
Stone leaned with his back against the wall, and a convenient view of all corners of the house.
Stone was seven years older than me, having just hit his forty-first year. We were somewhat estranged, which tends to happen when your older brother goes to jail for ten years when you’re barely an adult.
When we were growing up, my brother was talkative and charming, had all the men and women at his feet. Now he barely talked, let alone smiled. When he did speak, it was in short, staccato sentences.
“You’re home late,” Stone said.
“I was with a girl,” I said—not totally a lie. I was with her digital footprint.
I focused on my wound, dabbing the blood away with a clean rag. My mind drifted back to her note. I already knew some of her kinks…were there more? What else could she be into—
“Your girl—she good?” my brother asked.
“She’s got a PhD and everything,” I said as I finished applying a compression bandage.
Something in my brother softened at the lie. “Good.”
The lie wasn’t that Shay was a good person. The lie was making it sound like she could ever be my girl. That I could ever have that normal life he’d dreamed for me.
My brother went to jail for me, took the fall after I killed our abusive piece-of-shit father. In return, he expected I live a normal life.
But, in order to keep my brother alive in jail, I’d had to make a deal with the same men my father worked for.
The Mafia waited years to approach me, and when they did, I didn’t immediately fall in line. I was fresh out of grad school, and I foolishly believed that that life was behind me. Maybe the years had softened me. Made me forget.
Then I came home to find my roommate skinned alive, hanging from our ceiling fan, a photo of my brother stapled to his face.
“Hungry?” I asked as I finished applying a compression bandage.
I took his shrug as the yes it was and pulled out an iced lemon and poppy seed loaf I’d made a day ago. Of all the recipes at my disposal, this was the least fancy. Something my mom used to make us, and his favorite.
My brother would not approve of my extracurricular activities. I was supposed to go to college, get a boring job. And after everything he’d done, all the years he’d spent in prison for me and my sister, the least I could do was pretend his plan worked.
That I didn’t end up indebted to the same people who owned our father.
Ruining bad men as a hobby to make up for the moral stain that debt left.
“You talked to Fig recently?” I asked, as I placed the loaf on the bar. He pulled up a stool and placed his wallet and keys next to the ceramic plate.
Stone shook his head, diving into the lemon loaf.
“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.
“Probably the last time we were all together.”
My brows drew as I did that math, figuring out what exactly that meant.
“You haven’t seen Fig since you got out of prison?”
It had been blisteringly hot that day.
And dry.
The air tasted like the red dust surrounding us.
Stone had been sentenced to a supermax prison out in the Utah desert. At first I didn’t understand why—everyone there had multiple life sentences—but after my roommate, I understood too well. That prison was crawling with Mafia, and Stone was surrounded.
Stone shrugged at my question.
I dragged a hand down my forehead. Something that tasted a lot like guilt burned acid into my throat. Fig was even younger than I when Stone went to jail. I glanced at the photo on my fridge, taken just a few weeks before Stone was arrested.
They were both incredibly stubborn. I could see a very real future where anything filial in our family died with that photo.
“What are you doing next week?” I asked.
Silence settled again. Stone quietly finished off a slice of the lemon loaf. Only when the stoneware dish was covered in crumbs did he speak.
“Nothing.”
I opened our group chat and sent the first message since—Jesus, three years ago. Fig had messaged the group to let us know her missed call was a butt dial.
Stone and I are in town. Lunch?
A few moments later, my sister replied.
Whatever.
Stone stared at his phone, eyes wide, face blank. “Where should we go? What does she like?”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “She always loved that one restaurant, maybe there?”
He nodded, as if to himself, then stood.
“Thanks,” he grunted, gesturing at the food, then left.
The clock on the oven blinked a neon-aqua 9:30. I leaned against the counter, absently focusing on the yellow crumbs on his plate.
Is she good?
As if fate sent the cue, a notification lit up my phone.
Shay had reactivated her dating profile.
Was she matching with other men?
Of course she was. She was the hottest, most interesting person on there. My mind immediately leaped to the kind of fuckers that would respond to a profile like that.
Not like I could claim to be a good guy. The bruises on my knuckles were the least-bad thing about me.
I gripped my counter tile, sugar and flour gritty under my palm. Probably won’t take her on a first date to a fucking graveyard.
I shook my head, turned my phone off, and, after cleaning the kitchen, went to bed early. Then I spent the rest of the week trying to banish thoughts of Shay and bring myself back to a semblance of control.
I had no right to wonder about who she was matching with.
She was a grown-ass woman. If she wanted to date, I couldn’t stop her.
But, fuck, I wanted to. Wanted to delete her profile, hunt her down, and remind her of our goddamn deal. Then punish her for being so goddamn reckless.
So I went and took that energy out on bad men, on men whose wives and girlfriends had approached me terrified, and who I’d promised would never touch them again.
I went through a month’s worth of marks in a week.
I was more violent than usual. Goading them to hurt me—and they always took the bait—so I could leave them with broken fingers, ribs, and noses.
Every night, I came home bloody.
It nearly worked too. I’d almost returned to my sense of controlled calm. I broke into her house to vacuum and do the dishes only a couple of times.
See? Growth.
Then on Thursday, after I left a particularly violent abuser with a broken collarbone and nose to match the ones he’d given his wife, I lost control. With my knuckles still bloody, I opened the note labeled Kinks.
At the first word, I was instantly hard.
Odaxelagnia—biting. She liked biting.
Compliance kink—but she’d added a question mark next to it. Did that mean she wasn’t sure if she liked it?
God, the ways I could learn for certain.
Somnophilia, but like the opposite she’d added with a question mark. Shay got turned on by someone using her when she was asleep.
I dragged a bloody hand down the side of my face.
Fuck.
This was bad. I needed to close the note, go take an icy shower. Yet, as I headed toward the bathroom, I continued to scan the list.
Come play/Ingestion—is this the right word for wanting to eat it in food?
I froze just before my bathroom, eyes on those two words: eat it.
Fuck.
What kind of treats did she like? Could I bake them?
I could bake them with my come.
Against my better judgment, my eyes scanned the rest of the list. I froze, body temperature plummeting.
Hybristophilia—arousal to someone who commits crimes.
I slid into the shower, turning the temperature cold.
I pressed a hand against the tile, head hanging low.
The shower was icy on my neck, stabbing.
And still it didn’t calm the thoughts. Control and reservation didn’t come easy to me.
That was always my brother’s strength. Where he was innately coolheaded, I worked diligently to pour ice water on my instincts.
Arousal to someone who commits crimes.
Shay’s fantasies were just that, fantasy.
In my fantasies, I got more than one date.
I learned her likes and dislikes not through a screen, but after spending hours talking, the sun rising through the windows.
I’d get to memorize all the facets of her personality.
What she looked like sleeping or waking up, if her face scrunched when mad or irritated.
We’d read books on Friday night, we’d watch bad television.
We’d be boring.
Maybe in this fantasy I owned a small bakery on the ground floor of our apartment. I baked her treats before she went in to solve the universe’s mysteries. She’d read me her papers, and I’d buy a scientific thesaurus so I understood.
I flexed my fingers against the tile, watching the blood disappear in a pink spiral down the drain.
She was innocent.
And I was dangerous.
I got out of the shower, steam fogging the mirror. I could feel that instinct heating up, sliding inside me, taking over. Overriding any and all morals and reservations. One night wasn’t enough. She’d still been nervous, in her head. I wanted to be the one to make all her fantasies come to life.
This was bad.
The last time I’d let this feeling take over, my dad had ended up dead at my feet. This fire in my veins was a warning. I was being reckless.
But I fucking needed to be the one she went through that list with. Not some random asshole who didn’t even know the face she made when she wanted to say no. Who would push her too far, into a flare-up.
Shay was like drinking sunlight in a world of darkness. Even if it was just one more day—shit, one more hour—I wanted to taste more of her normal. A life I might have had if I wasn’t born a Throe.
Of the fantasy I would never get to live, where I got to be just Calder.
I swiped the fog away, meeting my own gaze in the mirror.
She’d already had one night with Void.
She’d never met Calder.