With a deep breath, I opened the door and stepped inside. “That’s cold,” I shivered when the air conditioning nearly froze me to death. I shut the door behind me, locking it, and made my way down the hall, coming to the room with books. I’d have to come back here. I needed a good book, especially since I wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
I continued down the hall, sliding my hands along the wall as I tried to figure out a way back to my room. I thought about how much love Jaxon had in his heart. I knew he’d never hurt anyone he loved, and that was why when the guilty plea came through, and they sent him away to prison for ten years, I was shocked, devastated, and I felt betrayal.
He didn’t kill her, the voice in the back of my head told me for the millionth time.
What was I so afraid of?
Being left alone in despair.
If I went out on a limb and was honest with myself, I was scared to be disappointed and left in the dark again, surrounded by people who wanted to see Jaxon die for what he did. What if I gave him a chance and he ended up killing her? He said he was a killer; did that bother me?
I had so many questions.
But there was one thing I knew, undoubtedly, I loved Jaxon. I never stopped being in love with him, and that should be enough for me to believe him. I was just a kid at the time, afraid of what it meant for Jaxon to go to prison, but we were adults now. The reality of the world didn’t scare me as much now as it did then.
I was a girl who lived in a mansion, and he was a guy who hustled on the streets on the wrong side of town. We weren’t supposed to be together in the first place, but he brought me down to his wicked ways, and I became addicted to him.
A catcall rang through the air, and I clutched my towel tighter, but when I searched the livingroom, it was just the old lady, Ingrid. “I remember when I was young, and I had a body like that. These guys wouldn’t stand a chance if I looked like you. I’d fuck all of them just to say I did. Oh, to be young again.” A nostalgic grin crinkled her lips as she thought back to the time when she was my age. I bet she had so many stories. I’d love to hear them; if I ever got past the twinge of discomfort, she made me feel. She said what she wanted, and I wasn’t sure what to think of her.
“Where are the guys?” I asked and opened the fridge to grab a beer before going back to my room and showering.
“Jaxon told them to get lost before you came inside. Did you tap that fine ass of his?”
“Ingrid!” I hissed, giggling from her crass words.
“You did, didn’t you? Good for you, Rabbit.”
I did many years ago. And if it was better now than it was then, I would probably die if we ever had sex again. The kiss was enough to leave me weak in the knees for a few days. His lips were aged like fine wine, and I wanted to drink him down and get drunk. “Why do you call me that?” I twisted off the top and tossed the cap in the blue recycling bin he had under the lip of the counter.
“Because it looks like you’re about to bolt at any second. You’re a skittish little thing, but cute. It makes sense to me.”
“Right,” I said, not understanding why she thought I’d leave, I hadn’t made one single attempt to.
Holy shit.
I hadn’t tried to actually leave. I threw a fit, sure, but I could have tried harder.
You don’t want to leave.
The thought had me pausing mid-tilt of the bottle before I sipped the beverage. I was learning a lot of truths today, and they were causing me to get a headache. I reached into the fridge for another beer, so I had one to drink while I took a bath. I needed to unwind before I decided to throw myself at Jaxon.
My days were numbered.
The countdown began the moment I saw him standing up in that church. He was always the kind of man that broke the rules, and I was always the kind of girl to follow them until Jaxon invaded my life and taught me that rules were made to be broken.
Rules were meant to be erased and changed.
My love for him, I treated it like a rule, but it was the exception. No matter what he did, no matter the rules he broke, no matter the people he has killed, my love for him was the one thing that stayed constant.
It should scare me, loving a man so lawless, so fearless, willing to do whatever it took if it meant he was on top.
Him on top was where I liked him.
Why bother counting down? My time was up.
Chapter Fifteen
Jaxon
“We have a job,” Sebastian said, throwing a file at all of us as we sat around in the living room. We didn’t come up with our mad plans in a secret room. We laid it all out in the open where we were comfortable.
My mind wasn’t on work, though. It was on Quinn and how fucking good she felt in my arms again. My focus was clouded, but work was how we made money and how we donated it. I needed to get my head in the game. If we wanted, we never had to work again. Selling those diamonds set us up for life, and now we didn’t work as often, but we were criminals at heart, so we kept on.
At least we were the good kind of criminals.
“What do you have for us, Sebastian?” I asked, flicking the file open to see the faces of two men. I recognized one. He served fifteen years for rape and attempted murder. “I know him. He was in the same prison as us, a different block. He got out?” I asked, flipping through the pages of the hefty file. Page after page of arrest reports from the time he was thirteen.
“Yep, released a few days ago, and guess what?” He clicked a button, and an image popped up on the TV. “Bank robbery in his hometown. Two million stolen.”
“Why do you think it's him? Bank robbery isn’t his MO. He likes to rape women; this isn’t him.” I closed the file and tossed it onto the floor.
“I thought so too, until I saw this.” He clicked onto the next screen and a picture of him holding down a woman, holding a gun to her head and her shirt torn filled the screen.
All of us grumbled and looked away. I hated seeing shit like that.
“I know it’s hard to look at, but it’s him. He has a sparrow on his thumb, look,” Sebastian pointed out and zoomed in on the screen until the sparrow with red eyes stared back at all of us. “It’s him.”
I leaned forward. My elbows bending until they dig into my thigh. “Two million? It’s kind of low for what we usually go for,” I said, and a few of the guys murmured an agreement.
“I know,” Sebastian said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I wouldn’t have brought it to your attention, but he took the woman from the bank.” He sighed as he clicked another button, and a dead woman filled the screen. Her body had been dumped on the side of the road, naked, with small holes all over her body. It looked like the buzzards had gotten to her.
“Jesus Christ,” Grayson stood and started to pace. His face turned red, and he kept glancing at the picture. Grayson served eight years for rape, something he did not do, so jobs like this hit home too hard, and usually, we stayed away from them.
Usually.
“The girl in the photo, she was seventeen, set to graduate in May, going to Duke. She was a kid, guys. A kid. She needs justice.”
“We get two million out of it too,” Owen added, and the rest of us scoffed at him for being so damn rude about the situation, heartless. Owen’s mind never focused on the emotion of a case, just the cash. If the cash was worth his time, then the case was. He didn’t care who got hurt in the process.
“We aren’t keeping the two million. We are going to disperse it to women shelters around the country,” Sebastian said in a way that almost dared Owen to say something against it. Sebastian wasn’t just our I.T. guy, he managed the numbers, the money. He was the reason why we never had to do any of this again, but we worked for reasons like this.
Criminals who get out of prison and continue their rampage to ruin other people’s lives. We did the world a damn favor by getting rid of these assholes.
“Oh my god,” Quinn’s small voice startled me, and a few guys stood to block the tv a
nd the graphic photo displayed on it.
“Quinn,” I started to say, but I had no idea what to tell her.
Sebastian cleared his throat. “We were just discussing business. We can wrap this up and talk about it another time.”
“Who is that girl? Did you know her? Why is she on your tv?” Quinn rattled off question after question to me or us; I wasn’t sure. She tugged on the oversized sleeves of one of my green shirts that fell to her thighs. Her hair was wet from a shower, and she held a beer in her hand. She had on the same joggers as before, freshly washed every day for her. She paused just before entering the living room, waiting to see what we were talking about.
“I’m going to be straight forward with you,” I told her, taking a few steps in her direction. I didn’t get too close. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to. “What we do isn’t legal.”
“You killed that girl!” She pointed to the TV and jumped straight to conclusions.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, annoyed with how she never let me finish explaining myself. “No. All of us, we are innocent men who were wrongly accused of a crime we didn’t commit. After we all got out of jail, we formed a group that stole from other criminals. We donate the money we make—”
“A portion of it,” Owen added. “We have bills to pay.”
Count on him to make things worse.
“So Sebastian is always looking up jobs for us to do.” I gave Owen a side-eyed glare, wanting to punch him in the face for giving away the selfish little detail. “This girl died from an inmate that served time in the same prison as me.”
She nodded her head slowly as she thought about what I was saying. “You guys are like vigilantes of the criminal world then? You’re criminals that steal from other criminals to try and make the world a better place?”
“You make it sound like a batman movie or something.” Grayson plopped back down on the sofa and laced his hands behind his head, stretching.
“Sweet,” Heaven added with a clap of his hands. “We are superheroes.”
“Don’t go putting your capes on just yet,” Quinn said, pressing her palm against her forehead. “You still kill people?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Any loose ends.”
“Innocent people?” she asked.
“People that get in the way or threaten to expose us,” Owen said. “It’s the way of the world, sweet thing.”
“Call me sweet thing one more time and I’ll bust this bottle over your head, buddy.” Quinn took a step forward and raised the green bottle full of Stella Artois. It would be a waste of good beer.
Owen tossed his head back and laughed, pointed at her, then slapped his hand on his knee. “You…I like you. You’re funny.”
“I don’t like you. You’re annoying,” she said, narrowing her eyes and pinching her face to give him a dirty look.
Heaven chuckled next.
“Shut up, Heaven,” Owen pouted as he licked his wounds.
“And Tracy? Did you kill her too?”
Quinn asked the million-dollar question, the one I wanted her to believe with all my heart. Even if she decided to believe me, I still needed Brian’s confession on tape. It was the one thing I needed to clear my name and for her to never doubt me again.
“No, I didn’t.” My eyes burned at the thought of my sister. “I never would have touched her. She called me, crying, and screaming for her life. I heard Brian in the background, attacking her, and I got into my car and drove to their house as quickly as I could, but the phone went dead on her end, and when I got there, it was too late.”
“Brian? You said, Brian?” Quinn closed the distance between us.
“Does it matter? Would you believe me anyway if I told you that it was Brian? Why do you think he is here? I need him to confess.”
“If you needed him, then why did you need me?” she asked, staring straight ahead as she sat down. Quinn was out of it. She had a lot to process. She reminded me of a statue, frozen, and unblinking.
“And that’s our cue to leave. We will talk about this later. I want us to leave by Friday, no later,” Sebastian said, gathering the files.
“Let’s go play pool. Winner buys strippers next,” Heaven wiggled his brows and slapped the arms of the chair he sat in and pushed himself to his feet.
“You’re on,” Owen said. “Not the cheap strippers either. I want the kind that strips for governors and fucking presidents. The classy kind.”
“The classy kind?” Sebastian grabbed a few beers from the fridge for them as they opened two French style doors that hid a game room on the other side. “I don’t think they make classy strippers, but I’ll make sure to look under C in the phonebook for them.” Sebastian rolled his eyes and disappeared behind the doors with the rest of the guys. Heaven jumped on Grayson’s back, and Grayson flung Heaven over his shoulder, slamming him on the ground. Heaven gets his ass kicked way too often, but he never learns a lesson.
Sebastian reached for the door handles and met my eyes for a moment before closing them off from me and Quinn. I had no idea where Ingrid was, probably sleeping since it was so late. I didn’t care. I was glad to be alone with Quinn.
“So, you kill people, for ‘the greater good’ and you think Brian killed Tracy?” Her eyes turned to wells, but tears didn’t fall. She did her best to maintain control of her emotions. I loved that about her. She was fierce, strong, and never liked to show when she felt weak.
I sat down beside her, debating if I wanted to take her hand in mine, but I decided to give her space. “I don’t think Brian killed Tracy; I know he did. I wish we had this conversation ten years ago.” I rubbed my eyes when exhaustion and stress started to weigh my lids down. It was a conversation I had hoped we would have, and now the time was here, and I didn’t feel like talking. “I don’t kill for the greater good. It isn’t often we kill people that get in the way, but their life to get to kill a criminal who murders people every day. I’ll take those odds. I’ll save dozens of lives if it means sacrificing one.”
She turned her head to me, slowly, and the movement caused a tear to fall. It bypassed her cheek completely and landed on her pant leg. “That’s fucked up,” she said.
“Well, when you have a criminal record of third-degree murder, my options for work are limited. It’s either stay in crime and make money, or flip fucking burgers, but I’d rather live like a king like I deserve.”
“You’re very high and mighty for a man that just admitted he killed people.”
“I’m high and mighty on a billion-dollar throne,” I added and sat back against the couch, stretching my arm along the back.
“Wow, criminal-ing really does pay off, doesn’t it?”
“If you do it right,” I said, crossing my ankle over my knee. My fingers reached for the blonde strands of wet hair falling down her back, and I mindlessly played with the ends.
“And I am going to guess that you do it right?”
I smirked and then rubbed the cocky smile away with my free hand. “Criminals don’t even know it’s us. They have a nickname for us.”
“San Quentin Five?” she joked and then gasped, turned her eyes on me, and slapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. That was so insulting.”
I gave a light chuckle and wrapped a tendril of her hair around my finger. “It’s okay. It was a good joke. No, they call us the Underground Kings because we never fail, and since they have never been able to figure out who is targeting other criminals, they came up with ‘underground’. I don’t know; maybe I’ll talk to the guys. San Quentin Five has a ring to it,” I joked and poked her side.
She jerked to get her ticklish zone away from me and then tilted her head back until she rested it against the couch. “I don’t know why we are joking about it, but I suppose if you were going to do something criminal, this would be the way to go. What do you usually do with the money you get if you get money?” she asked.
She was asking the important questions now. “Well, we donate a lot of
it, but we keep a portion. Last month, we stole diamonds from a guy and sold them to another, donated about seventy percent of the funds, kept thirty percent, and we never need to work again, honestly.”
“Diamonds? You didn’t keep any!” Her mouth fell open, and I saw the red wet tongue that I sucked into my mouth earlier, and my cock plumped, wanting to feel the wet muscle wrap around it. “Blasphemy. If I had been here, I would have kept one.”
“Is that so?” I lowered my voice and scooted over until our thighs touched. The thought of her here on her own free will turned me on more than ever. I could see her here, helping us plan or help with us if we were wounded since she was a nurse.
“What woman wouldn’t want diamonds?” she deadpanned me.
“A woman with no taste, apparently.” I did keep a diamond. Each of us did. I picked the yellow canary diamond. It was seven carats. We could have made a million more, but something made us keep one, whether it be to build a ring or just to have one because we wanted one.
I kept one and built a ring. I always kept Quinn in mind. I could imagine it on her finger, shining in the light and glittering just like her blonde hair did in the sun.
Her hand grazed my arm, and I held my breath, feeling like we were sixteen again, waiting to see who would make the next move. I never felt so powerless, but one touch from her, and she drained me of any strength I had.
Her fingers trailed down the tattoo on my forearm, tracing the black outlines until she came to the geometric design on my hand. She intertwined our fingers, and a puff of air escaped her. The breeze of her breath warmed my arm, and it partially sounded like she didn’t know what she was doing or why she was holding my hand, but I was glad she was.
We were a work in progress, and I wouldn’t stop building until we were a masterpiece.
Cruel Temptation Page 11
