“Tell me about your family,” I say.
She gives a little shrug. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
She gives another little shrug, dismissing her pain before she even begins to express it. “I grew up in foster care. Back and forth between a few different places. Some of them were nice. Some of them weren’t.”
So she’s not being blackmailed to keep her family safe. The hair on the back of my neck is performing a slow rise. The tears that seemed so very uncontrollable a moment ago are now completely gone. Could be because she’s used to having to stuff down feelings.
“You don’t have any siblings, or what about close friends?”
More shrugs follow. “I’m not really a social person,” she says. “I just try to survive. You know? Get through the day.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “I get it.”
This is such a complicated situation. She’s done wrong, but she has also been wronged so deeply and for so long I don’t think she’d know what right was if she fell over it. Fucked-up thingsmake fucked-up people. I know that. But some things are more fucked up than others.
“And then you met him? Pete?”
“Yes,” she says. “He said he could help me. And he did. He paid for stuff, and all I had to do was do some jobs for him sometimes. I got a degree, and I got a job… I’m going to be so fired from that by now.”
“Why?”
“Because your brothers have been holding me hostage for days, and I can’t call into work fucking kidnapped,” she says, allowing a little barbed tone to escape.
I keep forgetting we are not the good guys. There are no good men in this story. There are just bad men doing bad things in various gradients of gray.
I know she hasn’t been allowed to have her own feelings in forever. I know she’s been used, leveraged, and blackmailed. Holding her responsible for Teddy isn’t really fair. I know better, and Teddy should have too.
Harsh call, maybe, but we know who we are. We know what kind of enemies our family has. The reason we’re all single is because it’s fucking impossible to date without that person having designs on our wealth, or worse, being a honeypot for one of a dozen international governments or secret cabals. You really can’t move for them sometimes.
Ella was once a normal girl caught in an abnormal situation, I tell myself. She got caught up in forces far beyond her control and all she’s trying to do is survive. At this point, she has to know her life is completely worthless to BP. He has shown her thathe has the ability to kill powerful men and nothing will happen. That’s the way the world really works. Justice isn’t so much blind these days as knocked out and tied up behind the garbage cans. If you go outside on a clear night, you can almost hear her scream.
Where BP has fucked up is not understanding what a pack of ruthless bastards we Levin boys really are. We are an old family, and our lineage is full of men and women who would stop at absolutely nothing for revenge. We have a queen in our bloodline who hunted down her enemies after her husband was killed and slaughtered them all with her own hands.
He is used to dealing with sheep, and we are wolves.
“I’m taking you to the family home,” I tell her. “More captivity, I’m afraid.”
“It’s okay,” she says, “I deserve it.”
I call for a car. One of ours, and we go home. The house is dark. I am sure that Aiden and Leo will be stirring, and if they’re not, I’m going to wake them up. But first…
“Come with me,” I say.
I take her to a room that I know should not exist in a civilized house. It’s a house with a good amount of rooms, many of them bedrooms, several of them stocked with more than just beds. All of which is to say, Aiden bought a person-sized cage at some point.
“I’d like you in here,” I say.
She looks unhappy, but she doesn’t want to resist too hard. I can tell she is walking a very fine internal line between the guilt telling her she deserves terrible things to happen to her, and thesimple fact that being put in a fucking cage is terrifying. As cages go, it’s relatively comfortable, though. There’s a big soft bed, because they make dog beds in adult sizes now, and the reason why they do that in mainstream pet shops could be studied, but probably won’t be. There’s also a stand within reach of the bars that has a tap, a jug of water and a cup on it, not to mention a discreetly placed composting toilet in the corner.
I wonder if it’s more frightening to realize that this is a cage in which one could live for days and days on end, or if one is going into a box in which you die if you are not let out.
“Don’t you trust me?”
I’ve never met anybody who could be trusted who would ask that question. It’s pretty much a dead giveaway that you’re about to be fucked, and not in the good way. Obviously I do not trust her. She just drugged me and had me pulled out of my house by men who work for our mortal enemy. No need to point that out so bluntly, though.
“It’s not about you,” I tell her. “In a house like this, with men like this, sometimes the cage is the safest spot. I am sure you understand.”
