Ella scoots out of the house without saying another word to me, almost as if she’s afraid I’m going to change my mind.
“So you’re spoiling her now. Sugar daddy,” Leo says, giving me a judgmental look.
“When you take someone prisoner, you have to take care of them,” I say. “And Ella deserves to have some means of getting around.”
“You’re going to follow her via her transactions, aren’t you.”
“Absolutely I am,” I say.
Leo snorts. “I thought you were getting soft, but you’re just giving her enough rope to hang herself, aren’t you.”
“I want to know what she’s going to do.”
“I can tell you what she’s going to do. She’s going to do what she was trained to do, which is make men like you and Teddy think she’s an adorable girl who just needs a chance. She’s not innocent. Not in any way. We might have killed BP, but she’s part of it. All of it.”
“What do you want to do with her, Leo?”
“I think she should be in that cage unless she’s having her pussy spanked, or fucked, or whatever we want to do to her. I think letting her walk around in the world makes us as dumb as can be. We lost Teddy. It’s time to tighten up.”
“I respect your opinion,” I say.
“I’d rather you just told me to go fuck myself,” he says. “I fucking hate it when you use your diplomat voice on me.”
He may not be happy about this turn of events, but Ella definitely is. She comes home a few hours later, not having tried to run away with my credit card at all. She goes upstairs with the small hound and when Leo, Luke, and I go to find her, we discover her asleep in the dog bed in her cage, cuddled up with the tiny dog who occasionally shifts and stretches, pushing its little feet against her while its tongue lolls out of its mouth.
“It’s such a silly creature,” Leo says. “What’s the point of it?”
“This,” Luke says. “This is what they’re bred for. To be companions. It’s doing more to fulfill its purpose on Earth than you are.”
Leo shoots him a venomous look.
“We did a good thing,” Leo says. “In taking her in and protecting her. She could have been like the others, destroyed in the raid.”
He’s not talking about just the dog.
“We did the right thing,” Luke agrees.
“Ella wants to be punished again,” I say. “She came and asked me today.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her we could forgive her. But that doesn’t mean she can forgive herself. I think we’re going to need to do one bigceremony of sorts, a punishment that will take her to the limits of what she can do mentally and physically.”
“Okay, I wasn’t behind the dog, but I am in favor of that,” Leo smirks. “Letting her walk around flipping me off has been crazy work.”
“Let her rest for now,” I say. “Let’s go talk in the kitchen.”
We go to the room in the house that is everyone’s favorite because it has the food.
Luke stands there with his arms over his chest, his muscles bulging. He looks conflicted, but he always looks that way when it comes to Ella. He doesn’t know how to come to terms with the fact that we are going to be the bad guys to one degree or another, no matter what we do.
“Luke?” I prompt him.
“I don’t know,” he says. “She needs something that most people don’t. But she’s so… messed up inside, you know? I see it. I see how she can do terrible things, even though she’s a good person.”
I can see Leo losing patience with Luke.
“She’s a little fucking monster. She laughed at me when she tied me to my bed and left me to die. She would have gotten me killed, too. She would have gotten you killed, Luke. But you lied and got to walk. You must have been really convincing.”
