Maeve Haver was more than pretty, and my dick stirred in my jeans, a feeling that had become almost unfamiliar in the months and years before she’d started stalking me.
It was true that some of the supplements and treatments I used caused ED, a side effect I’d accepted as a necessary component to my overall health and longevity. It was also true that it could be a source of frustration, especially for me.
Like being a kid in a candy store with tape over his mouth.
But I’d learned to live with it, had learned to take advantage of the times when my dick worked, which was easy enough since there was always a girl or three who didn’t dare try and deny me when the mood struck.
It was utilitarian, like eating when I was hungry or sleeping when I was tired.
But this was something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Something like longing.
The Haver girl excited me. I wanted to take a fistful of her hair in my hands, feel the silky strands in my fingers as I pulled, watch her blue eyes widen with rage when I called her a dirty whore, when I reminded her that she was nothing more than a tool to be used by those of us who really made the world go round.
I wanted to grab her tits until she yelped in pain, wanted to feel my fist connect with her silky flesh again, the way it had in the dungeon when she’d come at me for mentioning her sister.
I wanted to humiliate her, make her cry, make her beg.
My dick strained against the confines of my jeans as I imagined hitting her while I was inside her, teaching her that when push came to shove, she was just another dumb bitch put on this planet to serve men like me.
Hell, I might even give Anton and Nick a shot at her, watch them fuck her until she checked out, until she went to the faraway place women went in their minds when they realized their bodies belonged to us.
It would be good practice for what came next, when I hired her out to the rich and depraved men who would use her like a cheap rag, a finalfuck youto that egotistical asshole Bram Montgomery.
I was pulled from my thoughts by movement on the camera, and I watched as Maeve crawled toward it, then moved out of range.
I leaned forward to play with the angle on the camera, but I could only move it an inch or so in every direction.
She was still out of view, although I could hear a faint scratching from somewhere beyond the camera’s line of sight.
I leaned closer to the computer, peering at the shadowed recesses of the cell.
But it didn’t help. She was definitely out of view.
I was alone in the room, but that didn’t stop me from murmuring, “What are you doing, you dumb bitch?”
9
POE
“See anything?”I asked Bram.
He peered through the night-vision binoculars Rafe had given us along with a duffel bag full of weapons, and Kevlar, that latter of which we hadn’t bothered bringing.
I’d thought it was dark in Blackwell Falls, but the darkness of the mountains surrounding our hometown was nothing compared to the void of the countryside in Romania at night.
“No movement outside,” Bram said. “No guards either.”
“Dumb motherfucker,” Remy muttered, obviously referring to Ethan’s lack of security.
“Let me see,” I said.
Bram handed me the goggles and I adjusted the angle until I caught sight of the looming structure in the distance.
Jesus, Ethan Todd really was holed up in a bona fide castle, albeit an old and crumbling one. The towering stone structure sat in a clearing surrounded by overgrown grass, the clearing itself ringed by towering trees. From our vantage point in the woods, it was easy to imagine the place as it had once been, torchlight flickering around the castle’s now-toppled outer walls, the path leading through the forest filled with men on horsebackinstead of the black Land Rover that had been parked outside in the satellite footage Rafe had sent over.
We owed him, Nolan, and Jude big time. There was nothing we couldn’t do in Blackwell Falls, but tracking Todd across the world to a defunct castle in Romania — and getting a bird’s-eye view of that same castle — would have been next to impossible without them. They played in a different sandbox, brought different tools to bear, and those tools had been key to tracking Todd and planning Maeve’s rescue (or as Rafe called it, her “exfil”).
