It did. It made me feel expendable. Like a well-researched mark. What would happen when I was no longer useful, despite what she said about wanting me?
“Would you have done that for anyone?” I asked, my voice tight.
“Yes,” she said, her gaze never wavering. “I would have, if it meant surviving.”
Her honesty felt like a blade being shoved into my stomach. She made it worse when she let out a soft, mocking laugh at the look on my face. “Why, Killian? From the way you’re acting, you’d think you didn’t know you were being used. I’d almost think you were the virgin here.” She tilted her head, her dark eyes dancing wickedly. “Are you a little out of your depth?”
I watched her for a second longer than I should have. She was something else.
My hand slid down from her neck, over the silk of the shirt, trailing down the curve of her waist until I reached the junction of her thighs. They parted without me asking. I slid my palm between her legs, applying pressure to her center as I slidtwo fingers into her. She was soaking, a mess of velvet and heat. She was so tight, I wondered what she would feel like wrapped around me and groaned. She gasped—soft and broken—her nails digging into my shoulders.
I leaned in, my lips brushing the shell of her ear. I started moving my fingers. I waited until her back arched, until she was leaning into the friction, desperate for the peak I was building.
Then, I stopped.
I pulled my hand away, leaving her suspended and shivering. I caught her chin, forcing her to look at me, keeping my expression a mask of cool. I needed to take back a little more control from her.
“Careful how you taunt and tease me, little ghost… all the things you start won’t end the way you think they will.”
She was still panting, looking confused. I smirked and patted her hip once.
“We should get dressed,” I said. “I’ll get the clothes Cartier bought you.”
I shifted her off me, the cool air hitting the damp spots on my skin as I sat up, leaving her flushed and breathless on the mattress. I didn’t look back as I headed for the bathroom.
Chapter 24: Killian
The scent of crushed mint and damp earth clung to her skin. Chloe had spent the plane ride on the phone with her lawyer. I listened to her as she advocated for herself—times, dates, names. We'd stopped at a FedEx when we touched down and sent off a stack of signed paperwork, thicker than my wrist, back to Florida. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, it would have been hard to believe she'd pretended to be anything but capable for so long.
Now we were in Woldenberg Park, near the Mississippi River. Chloe had insisted on coming here directly off the jet; she said it was where her mother used to walk when she lived in New Orleans. I had left Cartier back in Florida to watch Arthur and his clan. I knew they would try to find Chloe, and I wanted to know the second they did.
She'd been sitting off to herself for hours, her knees pulled to her chest, running her fingers through the damp soil as if she were seeking some kind of communion with the dirt. I stayed back, sitting against a tree about ten feet away, watching the way the humidity made her dark hair curl. I heard her crying—everything in me wanted to go to her. I didn't. I let her be. Some things need to be faced without an audience.
"I thought I would die in that attic," she said suddenly. She still didn't look at me. "I used to imagine how they'd do it. How they'd kill me."
My hands curled into fists against the grass.
"I thought about just killing myself. But I couldn't. They would have found a way to get that money. The people who murdered her would have won." She finally turned to look at me, her eyes red-rimmed but dry now. "So I stayed. And I waited. And I planned. I'm going to make them pay."
I was quiet for a moment. Then I asked the question that had been sitting in my chest since the first night I saw her in that tree. "Why didn't you leave? Before me. You had years. You had a tablet. You could have reached out to someone."
She went still.
"The sheriff came to Sunday dinner," she said finally, her voice flat. "The doctors my father paid had files on me thicker than my wrist. If I ran, they'd find me. They'd sedate me. They'd put me somewhere with no windows and no Mary." She picked at a blade of grass, pulling it from the dirt. "My mother said a lawyer would come on my twenty-fifth birthday. But I didn't know his name. I didn't know if he was real—she said a lot of things back then. And even if he was... what could one man do against all of them? His entire family knew I was up there and they said nothing, it felt like me against the world.
The truth of it settled between us.
I had heard similar explanation before, I didn’t know the term for it was, but it was more insidious than Stockholm Syndrome. Chloe hadn't had any delusions about her captors; she had simply been out-calculated by a system they had better access to.
"I wasn’t just sitting there playing doll, though," she continued, snapping the blade of grass between her fingers. "I plotted. I had a Plan A, B, and C. Waiting for a dead woman'spromise was Plan A. There was a Plan B Mary helped me with—don’t ask."
"Why not ask?"
"I won’t tell you."
I frowned but let it go. "And where do I fit?"
"You were Plan C, Killian. The high-risk gamble."
