Page 47 of The Villain

“Ido,” he growled.

I winced. “I dowhat?”

He shoved me away, and I rubbed my jaw as he stalked toward a dark SUV with tinted windows. “Iget you,” he called over his shoulder.

I absolutely refused to verbally agree, but I didn’t need to. We both knew he got me. He goteverything.

Once we were both buckled in, I turned to him. “So, where are we going?”

“Errands.”

“Like the grocery store? They have delivery apps for that, Cian. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

He rolled his eyes. “Work errands, dumbass.”

“For the restaurant?”

He stared at me for a few seconds, then he faced the windshield and put the car in drive.

Okay… So without words, then.

I suspected these errands were for the illegal side of his business. And I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that. I’d been a law-abiding citizen since I’d nearly been beaten to death a year ago. While sometimes I missed the adrenaline rush of my former life, I didn’t miss constantly looking over my shoulder, strategizing my next move, and hanging onto power by my fingernails.

Cian’s crew lived on the outskirts of a small city called Brighton, and we reached the city limits shortly around four in the afternoon. We stopped at a nondescript townhouse, where Cian told me to wait in the car while he hauled a large black duffel from the back seat and disappeared through the screen door.

I did as I was told, bored as fuck. I didn’t have a phone, and Cian had taken his with him, so I couldn’t even catch up on the news. I didn’t want to think about it too hard, but it was odd how little I missed things like having a phone. And my supposed freedom. Under Cian’s control, I felt freer than I had in a decade.

I fiddled with the radio until I found a station that wasn’t playing total crap. With nothing else to do, I watched the street outside. Two girls were riding their bikes on the sidewalk near the car, the bright streamers fluttering from their handlebars sparkling in the sun. One fell, cried for a few seconds, then got up and tried again.

Back when Dennis had told me that his girlfriend, Amara, was pregnant, I’d been ecstatic. Dennis had been the only family I’d had left, and while he had many, many flaws, he was still my brother. My blood. And that mattered to me.

Then Amara’s brother, Tav, decided Dennis was a monster. He claimed Dennis didn’t want the baby. Claimed he planned to kill Amara. So Tav killed him first.

I’d gone absolutely mental after that, convinced that Dennis would never kill the mother of his unborn baby. I made Tavpay for what he’d done, forcing him to give up his future as a mixed martial artist and fight in my underground boxing league, threatening to kill Amara and Holden if he ever went near them again.

I’d lived with those monstrous choices for five more years—until Tav met Conrad, the one person who could destroy me. They fell in love, and together they brought me down. Because Conrad was also Soto, the faceless crime lord who’d made it his mission to ruin my criminal empire.

Over the past year, I hadn’t let myself consider whether I was capable of hurting my nephew. Holden was a four-year-old who looked a whole lot like Tav and not much like Dennis. But even now, as I tried to imagine myself staring into that little boy’s eyes and doing anything to harm him or his mother, something inside me recoiled.

I turned away from the window and the girls on their bikes. I refused to think about Holden anymore.

Cian finally emerged from the townhouse a half hour later, which was twenty-nine minutes too long for my liking. He climbed back into the car, started the engine, and pulled onto the road without so much as a glance in my direction.

I crossed my arms over my chest and narrowed my eyes. “You weren’t worried I’d run?”

He looked straight ahead. “No.”

“Why not?”

He briefly glanced in his rearview mirror before answering. “Where the fuck would you go?”

I hated that he had a point. I had no money, no ID, no phone, no transportation, and no more connections. Cian had made me dependent on him, and that probably should have pissed me off more. But as I stared out the window and chewed on my ragged thumbnail, I realized that those were all just excuses I told myself.

Escape was still possible. I could figure something out. But I didn’twantto.

Iwantedto stay with Cian.

Despite all his threats, despite the way he tore me open, I craved his presence. I liked the way he treated his men. The way he ran his business. He promised to keep me until he killed me, and that was more than anyone had promised me in my entire life.